Explaining the behaviour of reinforcement learning agents in a multi-agent cooperative environment using policy graphs

The adoption of algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been rapidly increasing during the last few years. However, some aspects of AI techniques are under heavy scrutiny. For instance, in many use cases, it is not clear whether the decisions of an algorithm are well informed and confor...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Domènech Vila, Marc, Gnatyshak, Dmitry|||0000-0001-6779-6283, Tormos Llorente, Adrián, Giménez Ábalos, Víctor, Álvarez Napagao, Sergio|||0000-0001-9946-9703
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/404520
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/404520
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics13030573
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Multiagent systems
Reinforcement learning
Explainable AI
Policy graphs
Multi-agent reinforcement learning
Cooperative environments
Sistemes multiagent
Aprenentatge per reforç
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Aprenentatge automàtic
Descripción
Sumario:The adoption of algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been rapidly increasing during the last few years. However, some aspects of AI techniques are under heavy scrutiny. For instance, in many use cases, it is not clear whether the decisions of an algorithm are well informed and conforming to human understanding. Having ways to address these concerns is crucial in many domains, especially whenever humans and intelligent (physical or virtual) agents must cooperate in a shared environment. In this paper, we apply an explainability method based on the creation of a Policy Graph (PG) based on discrete predicates that represent and explain a trained agent’s behaviour in a multi-agent cooperative environment. We show that from these policy graphs, policies for surrogate interpretable agents can be automatically generated. These policies can be used to measure the reliability of the explanations enabled by the PGs through a fair behavioural comparison between the original opaque agent and the surrogate one. The contributions of this paper represent the first use case of policy graphs in the context of explaining agent behaviour in cooperative multi-agent scenarios and present experimental results that sets this kind of scenario apart from previous implementations in single-agent scenarios: when requiring cooperative behaviour, predicates that allow representing observations about the other agents are crucial to replicate the opaque agent’s behaviour and increase the reliability of explanations.