Resilient Path Tracking of Autonomous Driving under Few-shot Action Space Attacks

Abstract

Modern autonomous vehicles face growing cybersecurity risks, especially from action space attacks that directly target vehicle actuators. This article systematically evaluates the resilience of three representative Autonomous Driving (AD) architectures, including modular, end-to-end, and feature-fused agents, against few-shot action space attacks crafted via deep reinforcement learning under a black-box setting. The adversary perturbs the vehicle’s lateral control only during safety-critical moments, using either a camera or an inertial measurement unit. Our results reveal distinct vulnerabilities and behavioral patterns across AD architectures, which underscore the necessity for adaptive and robust defense strategies. However, existing adversarial training defense methods show limitations of overfitting and reliance on attack knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose a learning-based Path Correction System (PCS) that integrates traditional feedback control with an adversarially trained correction loop. The correction loop is selectively activated by a kinematic model-based attack detector to counteract abnormal control deviations. Evaluation experiments show that PCS reduces path-tracking deviation by 78% when the system is under attack.