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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2020

Adversarial Attacks on Linear Contextual Bandits

Laurent Meunier
  • Fonction : Auteur
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Olivier Teytaud
Alessandro Lazaric
Matteo Pirotta
  • Fonction : Auteur
  • PersonId : 1023840

Résumé

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.

Dates et versions

hal-02979184 , version 1 (27-10-2020)

Identifiants

Citer

Evrard Garcelon, Baptiste Roziere, Laurent Meunier, Jean Tarbouriech, Olivier Teytaud, et al.. Adversarial Attacks on Linear Contextual Bandits. 2020. ⟨hal-02979184⟩
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