RGMDT: Return-Gap-Minimizing Decision Tree Extraction in Non-Euclidean Metric Space

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have achieved great success in solving many challenging tasks while their black-box nature hinders interpretability and real-world applicability, making it difficult for human experts to interpret and understand DRL policies. Existing works on interpretable reinforcement learning have shown promise in extracting decision tree (DT) based policies from DRL policies with most focus on the single-agent settings while prior attempts to introduce DT policies in multi-agent scenarios mainly focus on heuristic designs which do not provide any quantitative guarantees on the expected return. In this paper, we establish an upper bound on the return gap between the oracle expert policy and an optimal decision tree policy. This enables us to recast the DT extraction problem into a novel non-euclidean clustering problem over the local observation and action values space of each agent, with action values as cluster labels and the upper bound on the return gap as clustering loss. Both the algorithm and the upper bound are extended to multi-agent decentralized DT extractions by an iteratively-grow-DT procedure guided by an action-value function conditioned on the current DTs of other agents. Further, we propose the Return-Gap-Minimization Decision Tree (RGMDT) algorithm, which is a surprisingly simple design and is integrated with reinforcement learning through the utilization of a novel Regularized Information Maximization loss. Evaluations on tasks like D4RL show that RGMDT significantly outperforms heuristic DT-based baselines and can achieve nearly optimal returns under given DT complexity constraints (e.g., maximum number of DT nodes).

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer Cxpi7/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

This work provides an upper bound on the return gap between the DRL policy and its extracted DT policy. Based on this, it proposes the RGMDT algorithm with a simple design that can be extended to multi-agent settings using an iteratively-grow-DT procedure. The RGMDT algorithm outperforms other DT-based algorithms in the D4RL tasks.

Strengths

1. This work proposes the Return-Gap-Minimization Decision Tree (RGMDT), which minimizes the return gap between itself and the DRL policy for any given size. 2. The RGMDT can be extended to a multi-agent framework using an iterative non-Euclidean clustering formulation. 3. The RGMDT achieves more promising performance than other DT-based algorithms in D4RL tasks.

Weaknesses

One of the motivations of this work is that DRL policies cannot be interpreted and understood well, and that decision trees (DT) could help improve interpretability. However, I don't see how the proposed method, RGMDT, enhances interpretability. This work seems to only demonstrate the superior performance of RGMDT compared to other DT-based algorithms, without addressing how it aids in the interpretability of DRL policies.

Questions

1. This work provides an upper bound on the return gap between the DRL policy and its extracted RGMDT from a theoretical perspective. However, how does the empirical performance compare? 2. My main concern is how RGMDT can interpret and understand the policy of DRL. How does RGMDT enhance the interpretability of DRL policies?

Rating

7

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

There could be more discussion to the limitations

Reviewer uDjD6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-15

Summary

The authors proposes a method called Return-Gap-Minimization Decision Tree (RGMDT) to extracting interpretable decision tree policies from learned parametric RL policies. The authors first propose a method to quantify the return gap between an oracle RL policy and its extracted decision tree policy, which provides a guarantee for the performance of the DT policy. The RGMDT is built upon the idea to minimizing this gap, which works by recasting the DT extraction problem as an iterative non-euclidean clustering problem. In this clustering problem, the goal is to clustering different observations into different decision tree paths, where the leaf nodes are corresponding to the action. Additionally, the authors also extend the algorithm to the multi-agent setting and provide theoretical analysis for the performance guarantee as well. Empirically, RGMDT performs much better than DT but being more interpretable than RL polices.

Strengths

The proposed algorithm is theoretically sound and the analysis is well-executed. The extension to the multi-agent is great, though I would say it has very limited applicability given that multi-agent RL seem still not work well in practice. The experiments support the claim and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Weaknesses

- 1. Although the authors have compared RGMDT to several DT extraction baselines, it doesn't compare with such a baseline: train a simple decision tree on the RL policy's action and observations. This should be doable and is an important baseline to compare against. - 2. Some ablation studies are missing. For example, it would be great if the authors could ablate how the error of non-Euclidean clustering and the return gap impact the final performance. How sensitive is the algorithm to these errors? **Questions**: - a. How does the performance of RGMDT change with the size of the DT (like, the maximum number of leaf nodes)? The paper shows results for different maze sizes, but it would be nice to see the trend more systematically. - b. How does RGMDT compare to other interpretable RL approaches, such as reward decomposition or option discovery?

Questions

See weakness.

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

See weakness.

Reviewer p7eT5/10 · confidence 2/52024-08-01

Summary

This paper considers extracting decision tree (DT) based policies from DRL policies for the purpose of interpretability. The authors present an upper bound on the return gap of the oracle policy and the DT policy, which helps formulate the DT extraction problem into a non-euclidean clustering problem. The authors then propose a multi-agent variant with an iteratively-grow-DT procedure, and propose a practical algorithm (RGMDT) which outperform heuristic baselines in the maze the D4RL benchmark.

Strengths

- Methodology: Using clustering to reformulate DT extraction is a fresh perspective. - Theoretical guarantee: The paper provides a formal guarantee on the proposed algorithm. - Flexibility: The proposed algorithm is applicable in both single-agent and multi-agent settings. - Experiments: The paper presents concrete performance improvement over selected baselines.

Weaknesses

- Presentation: I suggest the authors to enhance the clarity of the writing. More intuitive illustrations can greatly enhance the paper's impact. Also, it would be helpful to move some variants of figures in Appendix E2 in the main body of the paper to better illustrate the idea. - Related works: I suggest the authors to add a section, either in the main body or the appendix, to sufficiently discuss existing works including interpretable RL. For example, some relevant early works, e.g., [Frosst & Hinton (2017)](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.09784) and [Ding et al. (2021)](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07553), are missing in the paper. References: [1] Frosst, Nicholas, and Geoffrey Hinton. "Distilling a neural network into a soft decision tree." arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09784 (2017). [2] Ding, Zihan, Pablo Hernandez-Leal, Gavin Weiguang Ding, Changjian Li, and Ruitong Huang. "Cdt: Cascading decision trees for explainable reinforcement learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.07553 (2020). [3] Milani, Stephanie, Nicholay Topin, Manuela Veloso, and Fei Fang. "Explainable reinforcement learning: A survey and comparative review." ACM Computing Surveys 56, no. 7 (2024): 1-36.

Questions

- Are there any other competitive (DT-based or non DT-based) baselines for interpretable RL not covered in the current experiments of the paper? Are there any other more realistic environments beyond maze and D4RL that can be used? - Can the authors comment on the computational complexity (in terms of time and space) of the proposed algorithm? How scalable is the proposed algorithm to real-world applications, e.g., robotics?

Rating

5

Confidence

2

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

N/A.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer p7eT, Thank you for reviewing our paper and giving us valuable suggestions! We believe that we have addressed all the questions you asked in the review, please let us know if you have any other concerns or questions regarding our paper, we are more than happy to answer them for you. Again, thank you so much for your time and effort in reviewing our work! Warm regards :)

Reviewer uDjD2024-08-09

Thanks for the authors' responses the the additional experiments. I don't have additional concerns, and thus I decided to keep the rating.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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