Interpreting Reinforcement Learning Agents with Susceptibilities

Chris Elliott; Einar Urdshals; David Quarel; Daniel Murfet

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arXiv · 2605.08007

Interpreting Reinforcement Learning Agents with Susceptibilities

Chris Elliott·Einar Urdshals·David Quarel·Daniel Murfet

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Abstract

Susceptibilities are a technique for neural network interpretability that studies the response of posterior expectation values of observables to perturbations of the loss. We generalize this construction to the setting of the regret in deep reinforcement learning and investigate the utility of susceptibilities in a simple gridworld model that nevertheless exhibits non-trivial stagewise development. We argue that susceptibilities reveal internal features of the development of the model in parameter space that one cannot detect purely by studying the development of the learned policy. We validate these results with activation-steering, and discuss the framework's extension to RLHF post-training.

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Chris Elliott, Einar Urdshals, David Quarel, Daniel Murfet. 2026-05-08. Interpreting Reinforcement Learning Agents with Susceptibilities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08007

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