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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…

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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…

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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…

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