BAFFLE: Backdoor Attack in Offline Reinforcement Learning

A growing body of research has focused on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods which allow the agent to learn from trial-and-error experiences gathered during the interaction with the environment. Recently, offline RL becomes a popular RL paradigm because it saves the interactions with environments. In offline RL, data providers share large pre-collected datasets, and others can train high-quality agents without interacting with the environments. This paradigm has demonstrated effectiveness in critical tasks like robot control, autonomous driving, etc. However, less attention is paid to investigating the security threats to the offline RL system. This paper focuses on backdoor attacks, where some perturbations are added to the data (observations) such that given normal observations, the agent takes high-rewards actions, and low-reward actions on observations injected with triggers. In this paper, we propose Baffle (Backdoor Attack for Offline Reinforcement Learning), an approach that automatically implants backdoors to RL agents by poisoning the offline RL dataset, and evaluate how different offline RL algorithms react to this attack. Our experiments conducted on four tasks and four offline RL algorithms expose a disquieting fact: none of the existing offline RL algorithms is immune to such a backdoor attack. Baffle modifies $10\%$ of the datasets for four tasks. Agents trained on the poisoned datasets perform well in normal settings. However, when triggers are presented, the agents' performance decreases drastically by $63.2\%$, $53.9\%$, $64.7\%$, and $47.4\%$ in the four tasks on average. The backdoor still persists after fine-tuning poisoned agents on clean datasets. We further show that the inserted backdoor is also hard to be detected by a popular defensive method. This paper calls attention to developing more effective protection for the open-source offline RL dataset.