Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic
behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the
performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the
presence of corrupted rewards, is poorly understood. Motivated by this gap, we
investigate the robustness of the celebrated Q-learning algorithm to a
strong-contamination attack model, where an adversary can arbitrarily perturb a
small fraction of the observed rewards. We start by proving that such an attack
can cause the vanilla Q-learning algorithm to incur arbitrarily large errors.
We then develop a novel robust synchronous Q-learning algorithm that uses
historical reward data to construct robust empirical Bellman operators at each
time step. Finally, we prove a finite-time convergence rate for our algorithm
that matches known state-of-the-art bounds (in the absence of attacks) up to a
small inevitable $O(\varepsilon)$ error term that scales with the adversarial
corruption fraction $\varepsilon$. Notably, our results continue to hold even
when the true reward distributions have infinite support, provided they admit
bounded second moments.
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