Title: Tactics of Adversarial Attack on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents,
Abstract: We introduce two tactics to attack agents trained by deep reinforcement
learning algorithms using adversarial examples, namely the strategically-timed
attack and the enchanting attack. In the strategically-timed attack, the
adversary aims at minimizing the agent's reward by only attacking the agent at
a small subset of time steps in an episode. Limiting the attack activity to
this subset helps prevent detection of the attack by the agent. We propose a
novel method to determine when an adversarial example should be crafted and
applied. In the enchanting attack, the adversary aims at luring the agent to a
designated target state. This is achieved by combining a generative model and a
planning algorithm: while the generative model predicts the future states, the
planning algorithm generates a preferred sequence of actions for luring the
agent. A sequence of adversarial examples is then crafted to lure the agent to
take the preferred sequence of actions. We apply the two tactics to the agents
trained by the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithm including
DQN and A3C. In 5 Atari games, our strategically timed attack reduces as much
reward as the uniform attack (i.e., attacking at every time step) does by
attacking the agent 4 times less often. Our enchanting attack lures the agent
toward designated target states with a more than 70% success rate. Videos are
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