CopyCAT: Taking Control of Neural Policies with Constant Attacks

Léonard Hussenot; Matthieu Geist; Olivier Pietquin

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arXiv · 1905.12282

CopyCAT: Taking Control of Neural Policies with Constant Attacks

Léonard Hussenot·Matthieu Geist·Olivier Pietquin

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Abstract

We propose a new perspective on adversarial attacks against deep reinforcement learning agents. Our main contribution is CopyCAT, a targeted attack able to consistently lure an agent into following an outsider's policy. It is pre-computed, therefore fast inferred, and could thus be usable in a real-time scenario. We show its effectiveness on Atari 2600 games in the novel read-only setting. In this setting, the adversary cannot directly modify the agent's state -- its representation of the environment -- but can only attack the agent's observation -- its perception of the environment. Directly modifying the agent's state would require a write-access to the agent's inner workings and we argue that this assumption is too strong in realistic settings.

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Léonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin. 2019-05-29. CopyCAT: Taking Control of Neural Policies with Constant Attacks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12282

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