Counterfactual Explanations for Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Dong, Shuyang, Zhang, Shangtong, Feng, Lu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Dong, Shuyang
Zhang, Shangtong
Feng, Lu
author_facet Dong, Shuyang
Zhang, Shangtong
Feng, Lu
contents Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address "what if" scenarios, provide a promising avenue for understanding RL decisions but remain underexplored for continuous action spaces. We propose a novel approach for generating counterfactual explanations in continuous action RL by computing alternative action sequences that improve outcomes while minimizing deviations from the original sequence. Our approach leverages a distance metric for continuous actions and accounts for constraints such as adhering to predefined policies in specific states. Evaluations in two RL domains, Diabetes Control and Lunar Lander, demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of our approach, enabling more interpretable and trustworthy RL applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12701
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Counterfactual Explanations for Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning
Dong, Shuyang
Zhang, Shangtong
Feng, Lu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise in domains like healthcare and robotics but often struggles with adoption due to its lack of interpretability. Counterfactual explanations, which address "what if" scenarios, provide a promising avenue for understanding RL decisions but remain underexplored for continuous action spaces. We propose a novel approach for generating counterfactual explanations in continuous action RL by computing alternative action sequences that improve outcomes while minimizing deviations from the original sequence. Our approach leverages a distance metric for continuous actions and accounts for constraints such as adhering to predefined policies in specific states. Evaluations in two RL domains, Diabetes Control and Lunar Lander, demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of our approach, enabling more interpretable and trustworthy RL applications.
title Counterfactual Explanations for Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12701