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Ethan Rathbun

3 accepted papers

2026

Beware Untrusted Simulators -- Reward-Free Backdoor Attacks in Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Simulated environments are a key piece in the success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), allowing practitioners and researchers to train decision making agents without running expensive experiments on real hardware. Simulators remain a security blind spot, however, enabling adversarial developers to al…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adversarial Inception Backdoor Attacks against Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2025poster

Recent works have demonstrated the vulnerability of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms against training-time, backdoor poisoning attacks. The objectives of these attacks are twofold: induce pre-determined, adversarial behavior in the agent upon observing a fixed trigger during deployment w…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

SleeperNets: Universal Backdoor Poisoning Attacks Against Reinforcement Learning Agents

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an actively growing field that is seeing increased usage in real-world, safety-critical applications -- making it paramount to ensure the robustness of RL algorithms against adversarial attacks. In this work we explore a particularly stealthy form of training-time atta…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar