LICORICE: Label-Efficient Concept-Based Interpretable Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ye, Zhuorui, Milani, Stephanie, Gordon, Geoffrey J., Fang, Fei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ye, Zhuorui
Milani, Stephanie
Gordon, Geoffrey J.
Fang, Fei
author_facet Ye, Zhuorui
Milani, Stephanie
Gordon, Geoffrey J.
Fang, Fei
contents Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have predominantly leveraged neural network policies for decision-making, yet these models often lack interpretability, posing challenges for stakeholder comprehension and trust. Concept bottleneck models offer an interpretable alternative by integrating human-understandable concepts into policies. However, prior work assumes that concept annotations are readily available during training. For RL, this requirement poses a significant limitation: it necessitates continuous real-time concept annotation, which either places an impractical burden on human annotators or incurs substantial costs in API queries and inference time when employing automated labeling methods. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel training scheme that enables RL agents to efficiently learn a concept-based policy by only querying annotators to label a small set of data. Our algorithm, LICORICE, involves three main contributions: interleaving concept learning and RL training, using an ensemble to actively select informative data points for labeling, and decorrelating the concept data. We show how LICORICE reduces human labeling efforts to 500 or fewer concept labels in three environments, and 5000 or fewer in two more complex environments, all at no cost to performance. We also explore the use of VLMs as automated concept annotators, finding them effective in some cases but imperfect in others. Our work significantly reduces the annotation burden for interpretable RL, making it more practical for real-world applications that necessitate transparency.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_15786
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LICORICE: Label-Efficient Concept-Based Interpretable Reinforcement Learning
Ye, Zhuorui
Milani, Stephanie
Gordon, Geoffrey J.
Fang, Fei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have predominantly leveraged neural network policies for decision-making, yet these models often lack interpretability, posing challenges for stakeholder comprehension and trust. Concept bottleneck models offer an interpretable alternative by integrating human-understandable concepts into policies. However, prior work assumes that concept annotations are readily available during training. For RL, this requirement poses a significant limitation: it necessitates continuous real-time concept annotation, which either places an impractical burden on human annotators or incurs substantial costs in API queries and inference time when employing automated labeling methods. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel training scheme that enables RL agents to efficiently learn a concept-based policy by only querying annotators to label a small set of data. Our algorithm, LICORICE, involves three main contributions: interleaving concept learning and RL training, using an ensemble to actively select informative data points for labeling, and decorrelating the concept data. We show how LICORICE reduces human labeling efforts to 500 or fewer concept labels in three environments, and 5000 or fewer in two more complex environments, all at no cost to performance. We also explore the use of VLMs as automated concept annotators, finding them effective in some cases but imperfect in others. Our work significantly reduces the annotation burden for interpretable RL, making it more practical for real-world applications that necessitate transparency.
title LICORICE: Label-Efficient Concept-Based Interpretable Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15786