When Can You Poison Rewards? A Tight Characterization of Reward Poisoning in Linear MDPs

ArXi:2604.10062v1 Announce Type: new We study reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning (RL), where an adversary manipulates rewards within constrained budgets to force the target RL agent to adopt a policy that aligns with the attacker's objectives. Prior works on reward poisoning mainly focused on sufficient conditions to design a successful attacker, while only a few studies discussed the infeasibility of targeted attacks. This paper provides the first precise necessity and sufficiency characterization of the attackability of a linear MDP under reward poisoning attacks.