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arXiv · 2210.13507

Causal Explanation for Reinforcement Learning: Quantifying State and Temporal Importance

Xiaoxiao Wang·Fanyu Meng·Xin Liu·Zhaodan Kong·Xin Chen
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Abstract

Explainability plays an increasingly important role in machine learning. Furthermore, humans view the world through a causal lens and thus prefer causal explanations over associational ones. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a causal explanation mechanism that quantifies the causal importance of states on actions and such importance over time. We also demonstrate the advantages of our mechanism over state-of-the-art associational methods in terms of RL policy explanation through a series of simulation studies, including crop irrigation, Blackjack, collision avoidance, and lunar lander.

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Xiaoxiao Wang, Fanyu Meng, Xin Liu, Zhaodan Kong, Xin Chen. 2022-10-24. Causal Explanation for Reinforcement Learning: Quantifying State and Temporal Importance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13507

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