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On Reducing Undesirable Behavior in Deep Reinforcement Learning Models (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on Sep 13, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The system learns simple if-then rules from situations where the agent made a mistake, then punishes the agent during training whenever it follows those rules. Across three case studies this cut bad behavior sharply while barely lowering performance and adding only slight training time.

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proven extremely useful in a large variety of application domains. However, even successful DRL-based software can exhibit highly undesirable behavior. This is due to DRL training being based on maximizing a reward function, which typically captures general trends but cannot precisely capture, or rule out, certain behaviors of the system. In this paper, we propose a novel framework aimed at drastically reducing the undesirable behavior of DRL-based software, while maintaining its excellent performance. In addition, our framework can assist in providing engineers with a comprehensible characterization of such undesirable behavior. Under the hood, our approach is based on extracting decision tree classifiers from erroneous state-action pairs, and then integrating these trees into the DRL training loop, penalizing the system whenever it performs an error. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our approach, and use it to evaluate the technique on three significant case studies. We find that our approach can extend existing frameworks in a straightforward manner, and incurs only a slight overhead in training time. Further, it incurs only a very slight hit to performance, or even in some cases - improves it, while significantly reducing the frequency of undesirable behavior.

Ophir M. Carmel, Guy Katz
arXiv:2309.02869 · cs.LG · submitted Sep 6, 2023 · updated Sep 11, 2023
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