Constrained Black-Box Attacks Against Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2508.09275v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is increasingly deployed in critical domains, yet its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations has not been thoroughly investigated. Most existing adversarial attacks against MARL rely on optimistic assumptions, such as access to policy weights or the ability to train surrogate policies. We investigate whether adversaries with limited capabilities remain effective against MARL agents. In particular, we study two restricted attack settings that are overlooked in the literature: (i) adversaries with access only to agent observations and (ii) adversaries with no access whatsoever. Our approach generates perturbations that intentionally misalign how victim agents perceive their environment, preventing them from collaborating. We conduct extensive experiments across a diverse set of 22 environments. Our results demonstrate both the effectiveness and sample efficiency of our attacks.