Test Where Decisions Matter: Importance-driven Testing for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pranger, Stefan, Chockler, Hana, Tappler, Martin, Könighofer, Bettina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pranger, Stefan
Chockler, Hana
Tappler, Martin
Könighofer, Bettina
author_facet Pranger, Stefan
Chockler, Hana
Tappler, Martin
Könighofer, Bettina
contents In many Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems, decisions in a trained policy vary in significance for the expected safety and performance of the policy. Since RL policies are very complex, testing efforts should concentrate on states in which the agent's decisions have the highest impact on the expected outcome. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based method to rigorously compute a ranking of state importance across the entire state space. We then focus our testing efforts on the highest-ranked states. In this paper, we focus on testing for safety. However, the proposed methods can be easily adapted to test for performance. In each iteration, our testing framework computes optimistic and pessimistic safety estimates. These estimates provide lower and upper bounds on the expected outcomes of the policy execution across all modeled states in the state space. Our approach divides the state space into safe and unsafe regions upon convergence, providing clear insights into the policy's weaknesses. Two important properties characterize our approach. (1) Optimal Test-Case Selection: At any time in the testing process, our approach evaluates the policy in the states that are most critical for safety. (2) Guaranteed Safety: Our approach can provide formal verification guarantees over the entire state space by sampling only a fraction of the policy. Any safety properties assured by the pessimistic estimate are formally proven to hold for the policy. We provide a detailed evaluation of our framework on several examples, showing that our method discovers unsafe policy behavior with low testing effort.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_07700
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Test Where Decisions Matter: Importance-driven Testing for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Pranger, Stefan
Chockler, Hana
Tappler, Martin
Könighofer, Bettina
Machine Learning
In many Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems, decisions in a trained policy vary in significance for the expected safety and performance of the policy. Since RL policies are very complex, testing efforts should concentrate on states in which the agent's decisions have the highest impact on the expected outcome. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based method to rigorously compute a ranking of state importance across the entire state space. We then focus our testing efforts on the highest-ranked states. In this paper, we focus on testing for safety. However, the proposed methods can be easily adapted to test for performance. In each iteration, our testing framework computes optimistic and pessimistic safety estimates. These estimates provide lower and upper bounds on the expected outcomes of the policy execution across all modeled states in the state space. Our approach divides the state space into safe and unsafe regions upon convergence, providing clear insights into the policy's weaknesses. Two important properties characterize our approach. (1) Optimal Test-Case Selection: At any time in the testing process, our approach evaluates the policy in the states that are most critical for safety. (2) Guaranteed Safety: Our approach can provide formal verification guarantees over the entire state space by sampling only a fraction of the policy. Any safety properties assured by the pessimistic estimate are formally proven to hold for the policy. We provide a detailed evaluation of our framework on several examples, showing that our method discovers unsafe policy behavior with low testing effort.
title Test Where Decisions Matter: Importance-driven Testing for Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07700