From Actions to Words: Towards Abstractive-Textual Policy Summarization in RL

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Admoni, Sahar, Hallak, Assaf, Ziser, Yftah, Ben-Porat, Omer, Amir, Ofra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Admoni, Sahar
Hallak, Assaf
Ziser, Yftah
Ben-Porat, Omer
Amir, Ofra
author_facet Admoni, Sahar
Hallak, Assaf
Ziser, Yftah
Ben-Porat, Omer
Amir, Ofra
contents Explaining reinforcement learning agents is challenging because policies emerge from complex reward structures and neural representations that are difficult for humans to interpret. Existing approaches often rely on curated demonstrations that expose local behaviors but provide limited insight into an agent's global strategy, leaving users to infer intent from raw observations. We propose SySLLM (Synthesized Summary using Large Language Models), a framework that reframes policy interpretation as a language-generation problem. Instead of visual demonstrations, SySLLM converts spatiotemporal trajectories into structured text and prompts an LLM to generate coherent summaries describing the agent's goals, exploration style, and decision patterns. SySLLM scales to long-horizon, semantically rich environments without task-specific fine-tuning, leveraging LLM world knowledge and compositional reasoning to capture latent behavioral structure across policies. Expert evaluations show strong alignment with human analyses, and a large-scale user study found that 75.5% of participants preferred SySLLM summaries over state-of-the-art demonstration-based explanations. Together, these results position abstractive textual summarization as a paradigm for interpreting complex RL behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10509
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Actions to Words: Towards Abstractive-Textual Policy Summarization in RL
Admoni, Sahar
Hallak, Assaf
Ziser, Yftah
Ben-Porat, Omer
Amir, Ofra
Machine Learning
Explaining reinforcement learning agents is challenging because policies emerge from complex reward structures and neural representations that are difficult for humans to interpret. Existing approaches often rely on curated demonstrations that expose local behaviors but provide limited insight into an agent's global strategy, leaving users to infer intent from raw observations. We propose SySLLM (Synthesized Summary using Large Language Models), a framework that reframes policy interpretation as a language-generation problem. Instead of visual demonstrations, SySLLM converts spatiotemporal trajectories into structured text and prompts an LLM to generate coherent summaries describing the agent's goals, exploration style, and decision patterns. SySLLM scales to long-horizon, semantically rich environments without task-specific fine-tuning, leveraging LLM world knowledge and compositional reasoning to capture latent behavioral structure across policies. Expert evaluations show strong alignment with human analyses, and a large-scale user study found that 75.5% of participants preferred SySLLM summaries over state-of-the-art demonstration-based explanations. Together, these results position abstractive textual summarization as a paradigm for interpreting complex RL behavior.
title From Actions to Words: Towards Abstractive-Textual Policy Summarization in RL
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10509