Explainable Reinforcement Learning in Human-Robot Teams: The Impact of Decision-Tree Explanations on Transparency

Understanding the decisions of AI-driven systems and the rationale behind such decisions is key to the success of the human-robot team. However, the complexity and the "black-box" nature of many AI algorithms create a barrier for establishing such understanding within their human counterparts. Reinforcement Learning (RL), a machine-learning algorithm based on the simple idea of action-reward mappings, has a rich quantitative representation and a complex iterative reasoning process that present a significant obstacle to human understanding of, for example, how value functions are constructed, how the algorithms update the value functions, and how such updates impact the action/policy chosen by the robot. In this paper, we discuss our work to address this challenge by developing a decision-tree based explainable model for RL to make a robot’s decision-making process more transparent. Set in a human-robot virtual teaming testbed, we conducted a study to assess the impact of the explanations, generated using decision trees, on building transparency, calibrating trust, and improving the overall human-robot team’s performance. We discuss the design of the explainable model and the positive impact of the explanations on outcome measures.