Bait: Mitigating Harmful Agentic Reinforcement Learning via Probing Reward Function

Tiansheng Huang, Ananth Balashankar, Virat Shejwalkar, Santosh Pande, Ling Liu

We expose a safety vulnerability on nascent agentic reinforcement-learning-as-a-service. Specifically, with a cost as low as \$20, we show that safety alignment of a large language model (e.g., Inkling) can be completely subverted through rounds of harmful agentic reinforcement learning (agentic RL) with a toxic environment from its users. We also demonstrate that upon a successful harmful agentic RL attack via the service API, the attackers can potentially use the safety-degraded model to assist with real-world harmful activities, e.g., exploit software vulnerabilities and launch code re-use attacks. To mitigate harmful agentic RL, we propose Bait, a defense that mitigates the attack via proactively probing the reward function. Experimental results show that such a simple defense can sufficiently mitigate learning from a harmful reward function and can still learn from a benign reward function that promotes benign agentic tasks. Further analysis on both empirical and theoretical aspects shows that an adaptive attacker who assumes the knowledge of Bait defense cannot perfectly subvert it due to a systematic challenge. Source code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Bait.