2020

Distal Explanations for Model-free Explainable Reinforcement Learning

Madumal, Prashan, Miller, Tim, Sonenberg, Liz et al.

Understand

In this paper we introduce and evaluate a distal explanation model for model-free reinforcement learning agents that can generate explanations for `why' and `why not' questions.

  • Our starting point is the observation that causal models can generate opportunity chains that take the form of `A enables B and B causes C'.
  • Using insights from an analysis of 240 explanations generated in a human-agent experiment, we define a distal explanation model that can analyse counterfactuals and opportunity chains using decision trees and causal models.
  • A recurrent neural network is employed to learn opportunity chains, and decision trees are used to improve the accuracy of task prediction and the generated counterfactuals.

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