  Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are
vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward
channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected
through sensors), and is therefore not credible. In addition, for applications
such as robotics, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm can be
manipulated to produce arbitrary errors by receiving corrupted rewards. In this
paper, we consider noisy RL problems with perturbed rewards, which can be
approximated with a confusion matrix. We develop a robust RL framework that
enables agents to learn in noisy environments where only perturbed rewards are
observed. Our solution framework builds on existing RL/DRL algorithms and
firstly addresses the biased noisy reward setting without any assumptions on
the true distribution (e.g., zero-mean Gaussian noise as made in previous
works). The core ideas of our solution include estimating a reward confusion
matrix and defining a set of unbiased surrogate rewards. We prove the
convergence and sample complexity of our approach. Extensive experiments on
different DRL platforms show that trained policies based on our estimated
surrogate reward can achieve higher expected rewards, and converge faster than
existing baselines. For instance, the state-of-the-art PPO algorithm is able to
obtain 84.6% and 80.8% improvements on average score for five Atari games, with
error rates as 10% and 30% respectively.
