Title
Explainable Reinforcement Learning Through A Causal Lens
Abstract
Prominent 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 of events and use these to explain why new events happen by referring to counterfactuals - things that did not happen. In this paper, we use causal models to derive causal explanations of the behaviour of model-free reinforcement learning agents. We present an approach that learns a structural causal model during reinforcement learning and encodes causal relationships between variables of interest. This model is then used to generate explanations of behaviour based on counterfactual analysis of the causal model. We computationally evaluate the model in 6 domains and measure performance and task prediction accuracy. We report on a study with 120 participants who observe agents playing a real-time strategy game (Starcraft II) and then receive explanations of the agents' behaviour. We investigate: 1) participants' understanding gained by explanations through task prediction; 2) explanation satisfaction and 3) trust. Our results show that causal model explanations perform better on these measures compared to two other baseline explanation models.
Year
Venue
DocType
2019
THIRTY-FOURTH AAAI CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, THE THIRTY-SECOND INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONFERENCE AND THE TENTH AAAI SYMPOSIUM ON EDUCATIONAL ADVANCES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
34
2159-5399
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Prashan Madumal162.09
Tim Miller219616.45
Liz Sonenberg3802119.89
Frank Vetere41805143.63