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Event-driven Temporal Models for Explanations - ETeMoX: Explaining Reinforcement Learning

Parra-Ullauri, Juan Marcelo; Garcıa-Domınguez, Antonio; Bencomo, Nelly; Zheng, Changgang; Zhen, Chen; Boubeta-Puig, Juan; Ortiz, Guadalupe; Yang, Shufan

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Authors

Juan Marcelo Parra-Ullauri

Antonio Garcıa-Domınguez

Changgang Zheng

Chen Zhen

Juan Boubeta-Puig

Guadalupe Ortiz

Shufan Yang



Abstract

Modern software systems are increasingly expected to show higher degrees of autonomy and self-management to cope with uncertain and diverse situations. As a consequence, autonomous systems can exhibit unexpected and surprising behaviours. This is exacerbated due to the ubiquity and complexity of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems. This is the case of Reinforcement Learning (RL), where autonomous agents learn through trial-and-error how to find good solutions to a problem. Thus, the underlying decision-making criteria may become opaque to users that interact with the system and who may require explanations about the system’s reasoning. Available work for eXplainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) offers different trade-offs: e.g. for runtime explanations, the approaches are model-specific or can only analyse results after-the-fact. Different from these approaches, this paper aims to provide an online model-agnostic approach for XRL towards trustworthy and understandable AI. We present ETeMoX, an architecture based on temporal models to keep track of the decision-making processes of RL systems. In cases where the resources are limited (e.g. storage capacity or time to response), the architecture also integrates complex event processing, an event-driven approach, for detecting matches to event patterns that need to be stored, instead of keeping the entire history. The approach is applied to a mobile communications case study that uses RL for its decision-making. In order to test the generalisability of our approach, three variants of the underlying RL algorithms are used: Q-Learning, SARSA and DQN. The encouraging results show that using the proposed configurable architecture, RL developers are able to obtain explanations about the evolution of a metric, relationships between metrics, and were able to track situations of interest happening over time windows.

Citation

Parra-Ullauri, J. M., Garcıa-Domınguez, A., Bencomo, N., Zheng, C., Zhen, C., Boubeta-Puig, J., …Yang, S. (2022). Event-driven Temporal Models for Explanations - ETeMoX: Explaining Reinforcement Learning. Software and Systems Modeling, 21(3), 1091-1113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-021-00952-4

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 4, 2021
Online Publication Date Dec 18, 2021
Publication Date 2022-06
Deposit Date Dec 3, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Software and Systems Modeling
Print ISSN 1619-1366
Electronic ISSN 1619-1374
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 21
Issue 3
Pages 1091-1113
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-021-00952-4

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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