RL-Based Method for Benchmarking the Adversarial Resilience and Robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies

Abstract: This paper investigates the resilience and robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies to adversarial perturbations in the state space. We first present an approach for the disentanglement of vulnerabilities caused by representation learning of DRL agents from those that stem from the sensitivity of the DRL policies to distributional shifts in state transitions. Building on this approach, we propose two RL-based techniques for quantitative benchmarking of adversarial resilience and robustness in DRL policies against perturbations of state transitions. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposals through experimental evaluation of resilience and robustness in DQN, A2C, and PPO2 policies trained in the Cartpole environment.