Adversarially Robust Imitation Learning

Jianren Wang, Ziwen Zhuang, Yuyang Wang, Hang Zhao

Keywords: Imitation Learning, Adversarial Learning

Abstract: Modern imitation learning (IL) utilizes deep neural networks (DNNs) as function approximators to mimic the policy of the expert demonstrations. However, DNNs can be easily fooled by subtle noise added to the input, which is even non-detectable by humans. This makes the learned agent vulnerable to attacks, especially in IL where agents can struggle to recover from the errors. In such light, we propose a sound Adversarially Robust Imitation Learning (ARIL) method. In our setting, an agent and an adversary are trained alternatively. The former with adversarially attacked input at each timestep mimics the behavior of an online expert and the latter learns to add perturbations on the states by forcing the learned agent to fail on choosing the right decisions. We theoretically prove that ARIL can achieve adversarial robustness and evaluate ARIL on multiple benchmarks from DM Control Suite. The result reveals that our method (ARIL) achieves better robustness compare with other imitation learning methods under both sensory attack and physical attack.