Targeted Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents through Adversarial Observations

This paper deals with adversarial attacks on perceptions of neural network policies in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) context. While previous approaches perform untargeted attacks on the state of the agent, we propose a method to perform targeted attacks to lure an agent into consistently following a desired policy. We place ourselves in a realistic setting, where attacks are performed on observations of the environment rather than the internal state of the agent and develop constant attacks instead of per-observation ones. We illustrate our method by attacking deep RL agents playing Atari games and show that universal additive masks can be applied not only to degrade performance but to take control of an agent.