Autonomous agents deployed in the real world need to be robust against adversarial attacks on sensory inputs. Robustifying agent policies requires anticipating the strongest attacks possible.We demonstrate that existing observation-space attacks on reinforcement learning agents have a common weakness: while effective, their lack of information-theoretic detectability constraints makes them \textit{detectable} using automated means or human inspection. Detectability is undesirable to adversaries as it may trigger security escalations.We introduce \textit{$\epsilon$-illusory attacks}, a novel form of adversarial attack on sequential decision-makers that is both effective and of $\epsilon$-bounded statistical detectability. We propose a novel dual ascent algorithm to learn such attacks end-to-end.Compared to existing attacks, we empirically find $\epsilon$-illusory attacks to be significantly harder to detect with automated methods, and a small study with human subjects\footnote{IRB approval under reference XXXXX/XXXXX} suggests they are similarly harder to detect for humans. Our findings suggest the need for better anomaly detectors, as well as effective hardware- and system-level defenses.
Illusory Attacks: Information-theoretic detectability matters in adversarial attacks
Tim Franzmeyer Stephen Marcus McAleer Joao F. Henriques Jakob Nicolaus Foerster Philip Torr Adel Bibi Christian Schroeder de Witt