Robust Asynchronous Q-Learning under Reward and State Corruption via Batching

Abstract

Motivated by reinforcement learning in harsh environments, we consider the problem of learning an optimal policy subject to adversarially corrupted feedback. Specifically, at each time-step, an adversary can perturb both the reward and state observations of the learner following the Huber contamination model. To defend against such data corruption, we propose BR-Async-Q: a novel, epoch-based, robust Q-learning algorithm built upon two key ideas: (i) partitioning the online data stream into batches to reduce variance, and (ii) constructing robust estimates of the Bellman optimality operator using such batched data. We prove a high-probability $\ell_\infty$ error bound for BR-Async-Q that matches that for vanilla Q-learning, up to a small additive term that scales with the fraction of corrupted samples. To our knowledge, this provides the first robustness guarantee for asynchronous Q-learning subject to both reward and state corruption. Furthermore, when only rewards are corrupted, the dependence of our algorithm's bound on the corruption fraction is minimax optimal.