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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address "what if" scenarios, provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Shuyang Dong , Shangtong Zhang , Lu Feng

In complex tasks where the reward function is not straightforward and consists of a set of objectives, multiple reinforcement learning (RL) policies that perform task adequately, but employ different strategies can be trained by adjusting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Jasmina Gajcin , Rahul Nair , Tejaswini Pedapati , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated substantial potential across diverse fields, yet understanding its decision-making process, especially in real-world scenarios where rationality and safety are paramount, is an ongoing challenge.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Yu Xiong , Zhipeng Hu , Ye Huang , Runze Wu , Kai Guan , Xingchen Fang , Ji Jiang , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Haoyu Liu , Tangjie Lyu , Changjie Fan

Understanding a Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy is crucial for ensuring that autonomous agents behave according to human expectations. This goal can be achieved using Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) techniques. Although textual…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Ahmad Terra , Mohit Ahmed , Rafia Inam , Elena Fersman , Martin Törngren

Reinforcement learning (RL) and causal modelling naturally complement each other. The goal of causal modelling is to predict the effects of interventions in an environment, while the goal of reinforcement learning is to select interventions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Oliver Schulte , Pascal Poupart

Explanation is a key component for the adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world decision-making problems. In the literature, the explanation is often provided by saliency attribution to the features of the RL agent's…

Recently, there has been increasing interest in transparency and interpretability in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems. Verbal explanations, as the most natural way of communication in our daily life, deserve more attention, since…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Xinzhi Wang , Huao Li , Hui Zhang , Michael Lewis , Katia Sycara

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to reconstruct the reward function from expert demonstrations to facilitate policy learning, and has demonstrated its remarkable success in imitation learning. To promote expert-like behavior,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shunyu Liu , Yunpeng Qing , Shuqi Xu , Hongyan Wu , Jiangtao Zhang , Jingyuan Cong , Tianhao Chen , Yunfu Liu , Mingli Song

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Moritz Lange , Noah Krystiniak , Raphael C. Engelhardt , Wolfgang Konen , Laurenz Wiskott

Visualization tools for supervised learning have allowed users to interpret, introspect, and gain intuition for the successes and failures of their models. While reinforcement learning practitioners ask many of the same questions, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Shuby Deshpande , Jeff Schneider

We present a user study to investigate the impact of explanations on non-experts' understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. We investigate both a common RL visualization, saliency maps (the focus of attention), and a more recent…

Counterfactual explanations, which deal with "why not?" scenarios, can provide insightful explanations to an AI agent's behavior. In this work, we focus on generating counterfactual explanations for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-01 Matthew L. Olson , Roli Khanna , Lawrence Neal , Fuxin Li , Weng-Keen Wong

Generating explanations for reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging as actions may produce long-term effects on the future. In this paper, we develop a novel framework for explainable RL by learning a causal world model without prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Zhongwei Yu , Jingqing Ruan , Dengpeng Xing

Prevalent theories in cognitive science propose that humans understand and represent the knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In making sense of the world, we build causal models in our mind to encode cause-effect relations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Prashan Madumal , Tim Miller , Liz Sonenberg , Frank Vetere

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Riccardo Poiani , Gabriele Curti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

To collaborate well with robots, we must be able to understand their decision making. Humans naturally infer other agents' beliefs and desires by reasoning about their observable behavior in a way that resembles inverse reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Michael S. Lee , Henny Admoni , Reid Simmons

Agentic search enables language models to solve knowledge-intensive tasks by adaptively acquiring external evidence over multiple steps. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a widely adopted training paradigm…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Erhan Zhang , Yiqun Chen , Zechun Niu , Wei Yang , Xiaochi Wei , Yan Gao , Yi Wu , Yao Hu , Jiaxin Mao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces significant challenges in adaptive healthcare interventions, such as dementia care, where data is scarce, decisions require interpretability, and underlying patient-state dynamic are complex and causal in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Wenzheng Zhao , Ran Zhang , Ruth Palan Lopez , Shu-Fen Wung , Fengpei Yuan

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a frequently employed technique to solve scheduling problems. Although DRL agents ace at delivering viable results in short computing times, their reasoning remains opaque. We conduct a case study where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Daniel Fischer , Hannah M. Hüsener , Felix Grumbach , Lukas Vollenkemper , Arthur Müller , Pascal Reusch