Explainable RL Policies by Distilling to Locally-Specialized Linear Policies with Voronoi State Partitioning

Senne Deproost, Denis Steckelmacher, Ann Nowe

Track: Type A (Regular Papers)

Keywords: reinforcement learning, explainable ai

Abstract:

Deep Reinforcement Learning is one of the state-of-the-art methods for producing near-optimal system controllers. However, deep RL algorithms train a deep neural network, that lacks transparency, which poses challenges when the controller has to meet regulations, or foster trust.
To alleviate this, one could transfer the learned behaviour into a model that is human-readable by design using knowledge distillation. Often this is done with a single model which mimics the original model on average but could struggle in more dynamic situations. A key challenge is that this simpler model should have the right balance between flexibility and complexity or right balance between balance bias and accuracy.
We propose a new model-agnostic method to divide the state space into regions where a simplified, human-understandable model can operate in. In this paper, we use Voronoi partitioning to find regions where linear models can achieve similar performance to the original controller. We evaluate our approach on a gridworld environment and a classic control task. We observe that our proposed distillation to locally-specialized linear models produces policies that are explainable and show that the distillation matches or even slightly outperforms the black-box policy they are distilled from.

Serve As Reviewer: ~Senne_Deproost1

Submission Number: 6