Robust Adversarial Training for Sequential Decision Making in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems

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Robust Adversarial Training for Sequential Decision Making in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Robust Adversarial Training for Sequential Decision Making in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems Sayed Mahbub Hasan Amiri This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9216120/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Cyber-physical systems (CPS) in safety-critical domains, including autonomous driving and robotic surgery, high-speed railways and power grids, increasingly rely on reinforcement learning (RL) as a method for decision-making through time. Unfortunately, deep RL policies are extremely brittle to adversarial perturbations; small, carefully crafted alterations to a policy’s observations or dynamics can result in catastrophic failure. Existing adversarial training methods mainly address static perception tasks and miss the nature of expected temporal compounding of perturbations under hard safety constraints unique to CPS. We present RADAR (Robust Adversarial Decision-making with Adaptive Resilience), a novel adversarial training framework for safety-critical sequential decision-making. RADAR casts the problem as a constrained robust Markov decision process and learns adversarial attacks that respect both physical dynamics and safety constraints at training time, propagating perturbations through time via a recurrent latent dynamics model. A Lagrangian-type min-max optimization jointly optimizes the robustness of the policy and the satisfaction of the safety constraint. RADAR achieves as much as 35% higher worst-case reward and over 80% fewer safety violations (compared to strong RL under the strongest attacks) than strong baselines on benchmarks for autonomous vehicle lane-keeping and power grid voltage control, with only minor degradation in nominal performance. RADAR offers an approach to robustify RL-based controllers against adversarial perturbations in a principled, scalable way that reconciles adversarial robustness with safe control. Theoretical Computer Science Adversarial Training Cyber-Physical Systems Reinforcement Learning Robust Control Safety-Critical Systems Full Text Additional Declarations The authors declare no competing interests. Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-9216120","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Research Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":611615372,"identity":"1b5c358a-e167-46c4-8493-5d30b0951949","order_by":0,"name":"Sayed Mahbub Hasan Amiri","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAAtklEQVRIiWNgGAWjYFACxgaGhApmCJuHgSGB4QBRWs6QpgWkq40ULfzTDrd9eDjPOl+3/QDjg7dtDHl8hLRI3E5snpG4Ld1y25kEZsO5bQzFkgQdBtTCkLjtsIHZDQY2ad42hsQNhLTIg7XMAWth/02UFgOwlgaILcxEaTEEaUk4lm5gdiaxWXLOOQnCfpG7nf6Y8UeNtYHZ8cMHP7wpsyEcYkgAGKfAECRe/SgYBaNgFIwC3AAAtQRELtO8P6QAAAAASUVORK5CYII=","orcid":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2349-2143","institution":"Dhaka Residential Model College","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Sayed","middleName":"Mahbub Hasan","lastName":"Amiri","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2026-03-24 21:34:45","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":{"humanSubjects":false,"vertebrateSubjects":true,"conflictsOfInterestStatement":false,"humanSubjectEthicalGuidelines":false,"humanSubjectConsent":false,"humanSubjectClinicalTrial":false,"humanSubjectCaseReport":false,"vertebrateSubjectEthicalGuidelines":true},"doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9216120/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9216120/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":105566042,"identity":"ae60e0e3-444b-4cbc-8dbf-7d50b3494e0b","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-03-27 12:55:08","extension":"pdf","order_by":1,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":911930,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"RobustAdversarialTrainingforSequentialDecisionMakinginSafetyCriticalCyberPhysicalSystems.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-9216120/v1_covered_f35e527d-63c7-4dbf-aff9-db6f75d1bc56.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"The authors declare no competing interests.","formattedTitle":"\u003cp\u003eRobust Adversarial Training for Sequential Decision Making in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems\u003c/p\u003e","fulltext":[],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":false,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":true,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":true,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":true,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"Adversarial Training, Cyber-Physical Systems, Reinforcement Learning, Robust Control, Safety-Critical Systems","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9216120/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9216120/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eCyber-physical systems (CPS) in safety-critical domains, including autonomous driving and robotic surgery, high-speed railways and power grids, increasingly rely on reinforcement learning (RL) as a method for decision-making through time. 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