Adversarial Attacks On Multi-Agent Communication

Growing at a very fast pace, modern autonomous systems will soon be deployed at scale, opening up the possibility for cooperative multi-agent systems. By sharing information and distributing workloads, autonomous agents can better perform their tasks and enjoy improved computation efficiency. However, such advantages rely heavily on communication channels which have been shown to be vulnerable to security breaches. Thus, communication can be compromised to execute adversarial attacks on deep learning models which are widely employed in modern systems. In this paper, we explore such adversarial attacks in a novel multi-agent setting where agents communicate by sharing learned intermediate representations. We observe that an indistinguishable adversarial message can severely degrade performance, but becomes weaker as the number of benign agents increase. Furthermore, we show that transfer attacks are more difficult in this setting when compared to directly perturbing the inputs, as it is necessary to align the distribution of communication messages with domain adaptation. Finally, we show that low-budget online attacks can be achieved by exploiting the temporal consistency of streaming sensory inputs.