Online Data Poisoning Attack

We study data poisoning attacks in the online learning setting where the training items stream in one at a time, and the adversary perturbs the current training item to manipulate present and future learning. In contrast, prior work on data poisoning attacks has focused on either batch learners in the offline setting, or online learners but with full knowledge of the whole training sequence. We show that online poisoning attack can be formulated as stochastic optimal control, and provide several practical attack algorithms based on control and deep reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the attacks.