arXiv:2610.27293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) aims to learn cooperative control policies under prescribed safety constraints. Al- though existing SMARL methods focus on enforcing safety during policy optimization, their vulnerability remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates inference-time observation attacks against SMARL, where an adversary perturbs the observations of a subset of agents, thereby altering the actions produced by their policies. We propose MinMax Attack, an attack framework that jointly selects adversarial target actions for compromised agents while accounting for the Cooperative Resistance of benign agents. We further derive a bound on the induced safety cost and characterize its relation- ship with the Compromised-Agent Budget and the Perturbation Budget. Experiments across multiple safety-critical multi-agent benchmarks and representative state-of-the-art SMARL algorithms show that MinMax Attack induces substantially higher safety costs than existing attack baselines while preserving task reward, thereby reducing its detectability and achieving both attack effectiveness and stealthiness.
Vulnerability Analysis for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement
A paper posted to arXiv (2610.27293v1) introduces MinMax Attack, a framework that perturbs the observations of a subset of agents at inference time to subvert Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) policies. The authors derive a bound on the induced safety cost and relate it to the Compromised-Agent Budget and Perturbation Budget, and report that across multiple safety-critical multi-agent benchmarks and representative state-of-the-art SMARL algorithms the attack induces substantially higher safety costs than existing attack baselines while preserving task reward, reducing detectability. The work matters because existing SMARL methods enforce safety only during policy optimization, leaving their inference-time vulnerability largely unexplored.
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