Plan2Cleanse: Test-Time Backdoor Defense via Monte-Carlo Planning in Deep Reinforcement Learning

TMLR Paper6462 Authors

Abstract: Ensuring the security of reinforcement learning (RL) models is critical, particularly when they are trained by third parties and deployed in real-world systems. Attackers can implant backdoors into these models, causing them to behave normally under typical conditions but execute malicious behaviors when specific triggers are activated. In this work, we propose Plan2Cleanse, a test-time detection and mitigation framework that adapts Monte Carlo Tree Search to efficiently identify and neutralize RL backdoor attacks without requiring model retraining. Our approach recasts backdoor detection as a planning problem, enabling systematic exploration of temporally extended trigger sequences while maintaining black-box access to the target policy. By leveraging the detection results, Plan2Cleanse can further achieve efficient mitigation through tree-search preventive replanning. We evaluate our method across competitive MuJoCo environments, simulated O-RAN wireless networks, and Atari games. Plan2Cleanse achieves substantial improvements, increasing trigger detection success rates by over 61.4 percentage points in stealthy O-RAN scenarios and improving win rates from 35\% to 53\% in competitive Humanoid environments. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our test-time defense approach and highlight the importance of proactive defenses against backdoor threats in RL deployments.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Rafael_Pinot1

Submission Number: 6462