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arXiv · 2610.10000

Beyond Reward Suppression: Near-Optimal Offline Attacks on Warm-Start Bandits with Bounded Rewards

Qirun Zeng·Manhin Poon·Xiangxiang Dai·Qixin Zhang·Jinhang Zuo
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Abstract

Adversarial attacks on bandits aim to mislead a learner toward a target arm while keeping the attack cost small. Existing attacks typically achieve this by suppressing non-target arms. In practice, however, manipulation such as fake reviews often directly promotes the target item. We study this gap through bounded offline attacks on warm-start bandits, where an attacker can inject only valid action-reward pairs into the warm-start history before deployment. We show that target promotion is not merely a heuristic: when the target arm lies near the lower reward boundary, any order-optimal-cost attack against UCB that makes it selected in nearly all online rounds must allocate a nonvanishing fraction of its cost to the target arm. We then design an attack that achieves the optimal sublinear cost and characterize its allocation between target promotion and non-target suppression. We further extend the attack to Thompson Sampling, $ε$-greedy, and a broader class of bandit algorithms. Experiments on real-world and synthetic data validate the effectiveness of our attacks.

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Qirun Zeng, Manhin Poon, Xiangxiang Dai, Qixin Zhang, Jinhang Zuo. 2026-10-07. Beyond Reward Suppression: Near-Optimal Offline Attacks on Warm-Start Bandits with Bounded Rewards. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10000

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