Adversarial Attacks on Linear Contextual Bandits
Contextual bandit algorithms are applied in a wide range of domains, from advertising to recommender systems, from clinical trials to education. In many of these domains, malicious agents may have incentives to attack the bandit algorithm to induce it to perform a desired behavior. For instance, an unscrupulous ad publisher may try to increase their own revenue at the expense of the advertisers; a seller may want to increase the exposure of their products, or thwart a competitor's advertising campaign. In this paper, we study several attack scenarios and show that a malicious agent can force a linear contextual bandit algorithm to pull any desired arm $T - o(T)$ times over a horizon of $T$ steps, while applying adversarial modifications to either rewards or contexts that only grow logarithmically as $O(\log T)$. We also investigate the case when a malicious agent is interested in affecting the behavior of the bandit algorithm in a single context (e.g., a specific user). We first provide sufficient conditions for the feasibility of the attack and we then propose an efficient algorithm to perform the attack. We validate our theoretical results on experiments performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Multi-Armed BanditsRecommendation SystemsSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Robust Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits Under Adversarial Attacks
Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulner…
Multi-Armed BanditsRecommendation SystemsEfficient Action Poisoning Attacks on Linear Contextual Bandits
Contextual bandit algorithms have many applicants in a variety of scenarios. In order to develop trustworthy contextual bandit systems, understanding the impacts of various adversarial attacks on contextual bandit algori…
Multi-Armed BanditsLearning to Attack: A Bandit Approach to Adversarial Context Poisoning
Neural contextual bandits are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where subtle perturbations to rewards, actions, or contexts induce suboptimal decisions. We introduce AdvBandit, a black-box adaptive attack that formulate…
Reinforcement LearningStochastic Linear Bandits Robust to Adversarial Attacks
We consider a stochastic linear bandit problem in which the rewards are not only subject to random noise, but also adversarial attacks subject to a suitable budget $C$ (i.e., an upper bound on the sum of corruption magni…
Contextual Multinomial Logit Bandits with General Value Functions
Contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits capture many real-world assortment recommendation problems such as online retailing/advertising. However, prior work has only considered (generalized) linear value functions, wh…
Computational EfficiencyMulti-Armed Bandits