Reward-Preserving Attacks For Robust Reinforcement Learning
Lucas Schott, Elies Gherbi, Hatem Hajri et al. · IRT SystemX · Sorbonne Université +2 more
Lucas Schott, Elies Gherbi, Hatem Hajri et al. · IRT SystemX · Sorbonne Université +2 more
Adaptive adversarial training for RL using reward-preserving attacks that calibrate perturbation strength to avoid making tasks unsolvable
Adversarial training in reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because perturbations cascade through trajectories and compound over time, making fixed-strength attacks either overly destructive or too conservative. We propose reward-preserving attacks, which adapt adversarial strength so that an $α$ fraction of the nominal-to-worst-case return gap remains achievable at each state. In deep RL, perturbation magnitudes $η$ are selected dynamically, using a learned critic $Q((s,a),η)$ that estimates the expected return of $α$-reward-preserving rollouts. For intermediate values of $α$, this adaptive training yields policies that are robust across a wide range of perturbation magnitudes while preserving nominal performance, outperforming fixed-radius and uniformly sampled-radius adversarial training.
Matthieu Dubois, François Yvon, Pablo Piantanida · Sorbonne Université · CNRS +2 more
Benchmarks AI text detectors across 37 decoding configs, showing AUROC collapses from 0.99 to 0.01 with minor sampling changes
As texts generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) are ever more common and often indistinguishable from human-written content, research on automatic text detection has attracted growing attention. Many recent detectors report near-perfect accuracy, often boasting AUROC scores above 99\%. However, these claims typically assume fixed generation settings, leaving open the question of how robust such systems are to changes in decoding strategies. In this work, we systematically examine how sampling-based decoding impacts detectability, with a focus on how subtle variations in a model's (sub)word-level distribution affect detection performance. We find that even minor adjustments to decoding parameters - such as temperature, top-p, or nucleus sampling - can severely impair detector accuracy, with AUROC dropping from near-perfect levels to 1\% in some settings. Our findings expose critical blind spots in current detection methods and emphasize the need for more comprehensive evaluation protocols. To facilitate future research, we release a large-scale dataset encompassing 37 decoding configurations, along with our code and evaluation framework https://github.com/BaggerOfWords/Sampling-and-Detection
Akash Dhasade, Sadegh Farhadkhani, Rachid Guerraoui et al. · EPFL · University of Copenhagen +1 more
Defends federated inference aggregators against Byzantine clients using DeepSet adversarial training, beating existing methods by up to 22%
Federated inference, in the form of one-shot federated learning, edge ensembles, or federated ensembles, has emerged as an attractive solution to combine predictions from multiple models. This paradigm enables each model to remain local and proprietary while a central server queries them and aggregates predictions. Yet, the robustness of federated inference has been largely neglected, leaving them vulnerable to even simple attacks. To address this critical gap, we formalize the problem of robust federated inference and provide the first robustness analysis of this class of methods. Our analysis of averaging-based aggregators shows that the error of the aggregator is small either when the dissimilarity between honest responses is small or the margin between the two most probable classes is large. Moving beyond linear averaging, we show that problem of robust federated inference with non-linear aggregators can be cast as an adversarial machine learning problem. We then introduce an advanced technique using the DeepSet aggregation model, proposing a novel composition of adversarial training and test-time robust aggregation to robustify non-linear aggregators. Our composition yields significant improvements, surpassing existing robust aggregation methods by 4.7 - 22.2% in accuracy points across diverse benchmarks.
Valentin Barbaza, Alan Rodrigo Diaz-Rizo, Hassan Aboushady et al. · Sorbonne Université
Hardware Trojan in AI accelerators covertly exfiltrates model weights via wireless channel, enabling complete architecture-agnostic model theft
AI models are often regarded as valuable intellectual property due to the high cost of their development, the competitive advantage they provide, and the proprietary techniques involved in their creation. As a result, AI model stealing attacks pose a serious concern for AI model providers. In this work, we present a novel attack targeting wireless devices equipped with AI hardware accelerators. The attack unfolds in two phases. In the first phase, the victim's device is compromised with a hardware Trojan (HT) designed to covertly leak model weights through a hidden communication channel, without the victim realizing it. In the second phase, the adversary uses a nearby wireless device to intercept the victim's transmission frames during normal operation and incrementally reconstruct the complete weight matrix. The proposed attack is agnostic to both the AI model architecture and the hardware accelerator used. We validate our approach through a hardware-based demonstration involving four diverse AI models of varying types and sizes. We detail the design of the HT and the covert channel, highlighting their stealthy nature. Additionally, we analyze the impact of bit error rates on the reception and propose an error mitigation technique. The effectiveness of the attack is evaluated based on the accuracy of the reconstructed models with stolen weights and the time required to extract them. Finally, we explore potential defense mechanisms.