Online Data Poisoning Attacks

Xuezhou Zhang, Xiaojin Zhu, Laurent Lessard

Abstract: We study data poisoning attacks in the online learning setting, where training data arrive sequentially, and the attacker is eavesdropping the data stream and has the ability to contaminate the current data point to affect the online learning process. We formulate the optimal online attack problem as a stochastic optimal control problem, and provide a systematic solution using tools from model predictive control and deep reinforcement learning. We further provide theoretical analysis on the regret suffered by the attacker for not knowing the true data sequence. Experiments validate our control approach in generating near-optimal attacks on both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks