Adversarial attacks on cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning: a dynamic group-based adversarial example transferability method

Abstract

Abstract Existing research shows that cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (c-MADRL) is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and c-MADRL is increasingly being applied to safety-critical domains. However, the robustness of c-MADRL against adversarial attacks has not been fully studied. In the setting of c-MADRL, unlike the single-agent scenario, an adversary can attack multiple agents or all agents at each time step, but the attacker needs more computation to generate adversarial examples and will be more easily detected. Therefore, how the attacker chooses one or several agents instead of all agents to attack is a significant issue in the setting of c-MADRL. Aiming to address this issue, this paper proposes a novel adversarial attack approach, which dynamically groups the agents according to relevant features and selects a group to attack based on the group’s contribution to the overall reward, thus effectively reducing the cost and number of attacks, as well as improving attack efficiency and decreasing the chance of attackers being detected. Moreover, we exploit the transferability of adversarial examples to greatly reduce the computational cost of generating adversarial examples. Our method is tested in multi-agent particle environments (MPE) and in StarCraft II. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively degrade the performance of multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms with fewer attacks and lower computational costs.

Keywords

• Multi-agent reinforcement learning
• Adversarial attack
• Dynamic grouping
• Transfer attack
• Attack efficiency