Interactive Visualization for Debugging RL

Shuby Deshpande, Benjamin Eysenbach, Jeff Schneider

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Interpretability, Visualization

Abstract: Visualization tools for supervised learning (SL) allow users to interpret, introspect, and gain an intuition for the successes and failures of their models. While reinforcement learning (RL) practitioners ask many of the same questions while debugging agent policies, existing tools aren't a great fit for the RL setting as these tools address challenges typically found in the SL regime. Whereas SL involves a static dataset, RL often entails collecting new data in challenging environments with partial observability, stochasticity, and non-stationary data distributions. This necessitates the creation of alternate visual interfaces to help us better understand agent policies trained using RL. In this work, we design and implement an interactive visualization tool for debugging and interpreting RL. Our system identifies and addresses important aspects missing from existing tools such as (1) visualizing alternate state representations (different from those seen by the agent) that researchers could use while debugging RL policies; (2) interactive interfaces tailored to metadata stored while training RL agents (3) a conducive workflow designed around RL policy debugging. We provide an example workflow of how this system could be used, along with ideas for future extensions.

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