On the Robustness of Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (c-MARL), agents learn to cooperatively take actions as a team to maximize a total team reward. We analyze the robustness of c-MARL to adversaries capable of attacking one of the agents on a team. Through the ability to manipulate this agent's observations, the adversary seeks to decrease the total team reward. Attacking c-MARL is challenging for three reasons: first, it is difficult to estimate team rewards or how they are impacted by an agent mispredicting; second, models are non-differentiable; and third, the feature space is low-dimensional. Thus, we introduce a novel attack. The attacker first trains a policy network with reinforcement learning to find a wrong action it should encourage the victim agent to take. Then, the adversary uses targeted adversarial examples to force the victim to take this action. Our results on the StartCraft II multi-agent benchmark demonstrate that c-MARL teams are highly vulnerable to perturbations applied to one of their agent's observations. By attacking a single agent, our attack method has highly negative impact on the overall team reward, reducing it from 20 to 9.4. This results in the team's winning rate to go down from 98.9% to 0%.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".