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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Explainable Reinforcement Learning Based on Q-Value Decomposition by Expected State Transitions</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yuta Tsuchiya</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yasuhide Mori</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Masashi Egi</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Hitachi, Ltd.</institution>
          <addr-line>1-280, Higashi-koigakubo, Kokubunzi, Tokyo 185-8601</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="JP">Japan</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Because of the high control and planning performance, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly being adopted in a wide range of applications, including socially responsible tasks. This has led to a rapid advancement in the research of Explainable RL, and one commonly-used approach is past-oriented explanation; highlighting the factors in the current state that drive an agent to take an action. However, the agent is trained in anticipation of future rewards, hence, it is crucial to provide future-oriented explanations that demonstrate what the agent expects the action to achieve. To address the challenges of computational complexity and comprehensiveness of the explanation, we propose a novel method for interpreting the intention behind the agent's actions by introducing state-wise critics, which are additional neural networks that estimate the Q-value for each set of state transitions defined by users. By incorporating the RL model as the target network within the critics' loss function, the resulting explanation is aligned with the Q-value estimated by the agent. To evaluate the validity of the critics, we conducted an experiment of resource pre-allocation to measure the power outage risks. The results indicate that a relatively small number of critics are suficient even with many combinations of states.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>eol&gt;Explainable AI</kwd>
        <kwd>Future-oriented explanation</kwd>
        <kwd>Interpretability</kwd>
        <kwd>Q-value</kwd>
        <kwd>Reinforcement learning</kwd>
        <kwd>State transition</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>
        Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for learning an optimal policy of an agent
so that it can output appropriate actions which lead to high reward under the given environment.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a result of recent machine learning advances,
which expressing agent policies in neural networks to eficiently address problems with large
numbers of states and complex probabilistic structures [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. High performance in control and
planning of DRL has been demonstrated in the realm of games and simulations; Alpha Go [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]
defeated a world champion in the game of Go, and Agent57 [3] outperforms the average human
in playing Atari arcade games. Consequently, there is an expectation that the applications of
RL will be expanded to tasks on social infrastructure and medical domains [4].
      </p>
      <p>In order to apply RL to mission-critical operations, it is required to meet various properties;
accountability, fairness, and interpretability. This has led to a rapid advancement in the research
of Explainable AI (XAI), which is a technology to explain the reason of decisions made by
machine learning models [5]. One commonly-used approach in supervised learning is the
visualization of image features through heat maps to understand where the model is focusing on
[6]. Similar explanation techniques are being adopted in the field of Explainable Reinforcement
Learning (XRL); highlighting the factors in the current state that drive an RL agent to take an
action [7]. However, it should be noted that the agent’s actions are learned in anticipation of
future rewards and desired events, hence, it is crucial to provide "future-oriented explanations"
that demonstrate what the agent expects the action to achieve, as opposed to traditional
"pastoriented explanations" based on current states.</p>
      <p>As future-oriented explanation method, several studies have discussed to explain the expected
reward (represented by Q-values) in the future state. For example, Van et al. have proposed
forward simulations, which show the state transitions with the highest probability until the
end of the episode, and the obtained rewards are assumed as the intention of the RL model
[8]. However, this approach may be insuficient as an explanation since it only provides a
single state transition; it may not align with the interests of users, such as future states with
low probability yet high rewards, or states that are at high risk due to the actions. Another
approach, value function decomposition, is the method to train an additional neural network to
output a table of expected rewards for all possible future state and action pairs [9]. While it can
exhaustively describe desired outcomes by the action, the additional model learning may not be
successful under complex problems with many combinations of state transitions.</p>
      <p>In this paper, we propose a novel future-oriented explanation method for interpreting the
intention behind an agent’s actions by introducing state-wise critics as shown in Fig.1. The
critics are additional neural networks that estimate the Q-value for each set of state transitions
defined by users. We aim to simultaneously address the challenges of computational complexity
and comprehensiveness by decomposing the Q-value of the RL model based on semantically
meaningful state types, rather than focusing on a single episode or every state transition, as
is done in existing methods. The resulting explanation is aligned with the agent’s Q-value by
incorporating the RL model as the target network within the critics’ loss function. Furthermore,
our method can provide contrastive explanations that reveal why the agent thought a certain
action was more efective, as opposed to alternative actions proposed by users.</p>
      <p>To evaluate the validity of the derived explanations, we conducted an experiment utilizing a
simple planning problem of resource pre-allocation optimization against the disaster risk of
power outages. As the RL model, we employed the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)
algorithm, a basic Actor-Critic RL model for continuous action spaces [10]. The results suggest
that the critics can provide consistent and valuable explanations by visualizing the trade-ofs in
Q-values for specific state transitions, and a relatively small number of critics are suficient to
ofer users meaningful insights into the intentions behind agent’s actions, even for complex
problems with numerous state combinations.</p>
      <p>In summary our contributions are as follows:
• Provide an explanation for the intention behind actions of the agent by decomposing the
Q-value for each meaningful state type for users. This approach does not introduce any
changes to the original RL model, while efectively addressing issues of computational
complexity and enhancing interpretability.
• Implement the case studies to show the validity of the decomposed Q-values and the
usefulness of a contrastive explanation with user alternatives.
• Bridge the gap between human understanding and the intentions of RL models, and
serves as a fundamental technology for the development of hybrid intelligent systems.</p>
      <p>The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We first discuss the related works to show the
relevance of our approach to other XRL techniques. We then describe the basis mechanism of
reinforcement learning and the problem of interpretability. After that, the specific procedure
for introducing state-wise critics is described. Then, through numerical experiments, we show
that our proposed method generates plausible explanations and is useful for interpreting RL’s
behavioral intentions. Finally, we draw our main conclusions and outline future work.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Related Work</title>
      <p>XAI techniques for machine learning models have been developed rapidly after the launch of
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project [5]. While a variety of explanation
techniques have been proposed in the field of supervised learning, XRL techniques are gradually
developing along with the growing expectations for the expansion of RL applications [11]. XAI
methods can be roughly categorized based on two scopes; global and local explanation. Global
methods explain the entire, general model behaviour, while local methods focus on a specific
decision.</p>
      <p>Generating interpretable white-box models is common global XRL approach that is also
used in supervised learning [12, 13]. Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning
(PIRL) is a framework inspired by imitation learning to mimic complicated RL’s policies by a
human-readable programming language [12]. The average performances of the regenerated
policies are not as high than the original one. However, in experiments with the The Open
Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) dataset, the generated model was less perturbed by noise and
blocked sensors. Liu et al. [13] have proposed a framework that approximates the RL policy
by Linear Model U-Trees (LMUTs), which have a linear model at each leaf node to improve
its generalization ability. LMUTs are also easier to understand since it generally utilize fewer
leaves than ordinal Continuous U-Trees.</p>
      <p>HIGHLIGHTS is an RL-specific global explanation technique: an algorithm that produces
a summary of an agent’s behavior by extracting important trajectories from simulations of
the agent. Specifically, the states extracted in HIGHLIGHTS are where taking a wrong action
can lead to a significant decrease in future rewards according to the agent’s Q-values. They
conducted a human-subject experiment and participants were more successful at evaluating the
performance of agents when presented with HIGHLIGHTS summaries compared to baseline
summaries.</p>
      <p>Local methods for explaining individual decisions are the subject of this study. We classify
this method into past-oriented and future-oriented explanations. Past-oriented explanations
generally show the importance of the input state [7]. LMUTs can also be used to analyze
the importance of input features and extract rules, e.g., the ‘super-pixels’ in image inputs are
highlighted to illustrate the key regions [13].</p>
      <p>Causal Lens focuses on providing future-oriented explanations for an agent’s behaviour based
on the knowledge of how its actions influence the environment [ 14]. It can find the diferences
between the actual action (e.g. ‘Why action A?’) and the counterfactual (e.g. ‘Why not action
B?’) through a structural causal model (SCM). However, it is challenging to provide an accurate
SCM for complex environments. Juozapaitis et al. [15] proposed a decomposition of the scalar
reward function into a vector-valued reward function for each sub-reward type. This approach
provides a compact explanation of why a particular action is preferred over another from the
viewpoint of which sub-reward is considered as important. Our method difers in that the
expected reward is decomposed by future state types. Also, while this method modifies the
reinforcement learning model itself, our method provides explanations in a completely post-hoc
manner.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Issues on Interpretability of Reinforcement Learning</title>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1. The Basic Formulation of Reinforcement Learning</title>
        <p>
          We first formalize a reinforcement learning environment as a Markov decision process
(MDP),  = ⟨, , , ,  ⟩. Here,  is the set of all environment states,  is the set of
actions, (+1|, ) is the state transition function,  ∈ [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">0, 1</xref>
          ] is the discount factor, and
(, , +1) ∈ R is the function that calculates the reward  for executing action  in state
 arriving at next state +1. In the MDP framework, an agent observes the state  in the
environment and selects an action  for . From the result of state transition derived by the
action and environment, the agent obtains a reward  and moves to the next state +1. In
order to obtain the maximum cumulative reward, the agent seeks to find the optimal policy
 * :  →  that keeps choosing the action with the highest Q-value; (, ) is the following
evaluation value of the action  in the state :
(, ) = E+1∼ (+1|,)[ +  max  (+1, +1)],
+1
(1)
where  represents the Q-value at the next state.
        </p>
        <p>
          Since recording Q-values for all states and actions poses a formidable challenge, deep
reinforcement learning that approximates the table of Q-values with a deep neural network (DNN)
was proposed and made great progress [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ]. There are many kinds of architectures of DNN, for
example, in the Deep Q-Network (DQN) model, the output layer of DNN corresponds to the
Q-value of each action. Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) [10] stands as a prominent
method for dealing with continuous-valued action spaces based on Actor-Critic [16]. DDPG
employs two distinct neural networks: the critic aims to accurately predict the Q-value, while
the actor learns to generate actions that optimize the estimated Q-value derived by the critic.
This study imposes no restrictions on the selection of RL models, and the proposed framework
can also be readily applied to any value-based RL algorithm.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>3.2. The Interpretability of Agent’s Action</title>
        <p>Because of the high control and planning performance, RL is increasingly being adopted
in a wide range of applications, including socially responsible tasks as well as gaming and
simulation. However, the decision-making process of RL models is complex and dificult for
humans to interpret, thus, the field of XRL has been received much attention and various
types of explanation have been discussed [11]. In this study, we focus on local future-oriented
explanations that provide insights into the anticipated states and rewards associated with
individual actions. The agent is picking actions to maximize the cumulative expected reward,
and therefore, explanation of the events that follow a specific action choice is vital to reveal the
agent intention. Notably, psychological studies suggest that about 70% of everyday explanations
are intention-based [17].</p>
        <p>The key to comprehending the agent’s behavioral intentions is the Q-value: it directly relates
to the cumulative expected reward that the agent seeks to optimize. Nonetheless, the Q-value
estimated by the ordinal RL model is the expected value of all next state transitions as (1),
and therefore, it is challenging to interpret specific future states and rewards. Existing studies
have discussed the utilization of the most probable future state transition [8] or a table for all
possible states and actions [9]. However, the former approach of forward simulations may not
provide suficient information to explain the agent’s intent comprehensively and not meet the
diverse interests of the user. In addition, it may be dificult to simulate the state transition in
a real environment. Although the latter approach, value function decomposition, allows for
comprehensive explanations by the table, it may not be readily applicable to complex real-world
problems involving a lot of combinations of states.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Future-Oriented Explanation by State-Wise Critics</title>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>4.1. Introduction of State-Wise Critics</title>
        <p>This paper introduces a novel explanation method to reveal the expected states driving the
actions by incorporating state-wise critics for each user-defined set of state transitions as shown
in Fig.1. The critics are additional neural networks that estimate the Q-value under the specific
state transitions by taking the state  and the agent’s corresponding action  as input.</p>
        <p>Figure 2 presents a comparison between the proposed and existing approaches regarding
the focus of the subsequent states and obtained Q-values for an action . Consider the six
possible states at the next time: (1+1, ..., 6+1) after the agent performs action . The original
RL model outputs the expected value for all state transitions as (1). Forward simulations present
the most probable state (1+1 in our example) as the agent’s intended future state. However,
this approach may overlook states with low probabilities yet high rewards. Value function
decomposition enables the visualization of Q-values for each of all possible next states (strictly,
including further time steps). However, this approach may not be suitable when states are
represented by continuous values. Our approach addresses both computational complexity and
interpretability issues by providing Q-values for each user-defined set of state transitions. As
shown in Fig.2, the six possible states are grouped into three sets, i.e., one critic assigned to two
states. This enables users to obtain explanations by the granularity they are interested in.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>4.2. Training Procedure of Critics</title>
        <p>The proposed critic is designed to estimate the Q-value calculated by the explanation-target RL
model under a specific set of state transitions. In order to achieve the accurate decomposition
and the consistency of the derived explanation, each critic is trained on historical data for
its corresponding state transitions only, and adding the Q-value of the RL model to the error
function of each critic. The learning process can execute concurrently with or after the training
of the RL model. Note that the computational time required for each critic training is directly
proportional to the number of critics employed. Nevertheless, since each critic can be trained
independently, parallel processing can be employed to expedite the overall learning process.</p>
        <p>The suggested learning steps for critics are as follows:
1. Sample some historical data from training data memory of RL model (generally, the replay
bufer). Each data consist of the state-action pairs and the corresponding next state and
reward, i.e., ⟨, , +1, ⟩. The appropriate sample size depends on the complexity
of the problem. Note that the critics for state transitions with low probability are also
trained enough.
2. Extract the corresponding state transition data for each critic from sampled data set.</p>
        <p>
          Various methods can be employed to select the data, such as using conditional expressions
or pre-labeling the historical data.
3. Train critics to minimize the following temporal diference (TD) error:
(, ) = ( +  max (+1, +1) − (, ))2,
+1
(2)
where  is the Q-value estimated by a target network, which is commonly introduced
in training RL models for stabilization of the learning process [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>In a commonly used approach, each critic typically employs its own target network, which
is a neural network with the same structure as the critic. However, this approach causes the
learning objective to deviate from the Q-value of the original RL model, as shown in Fig. 3.
The critic estimates the Q-value  for a specific type of a state transition 1+1, and aims to
minimize the error between its estimation and the original RL model’s prediction of  for
1+1. However, since the critics are trained on a data set that contains only state transitions of 1,
the target network with copied parameters of the critic assumes that only the state transition of
1 occurs at  + 2 when the Q-value for the next action, _, is estimated. In contrast, the
target network based on the original RL model estimates the expected Q-value, _ for all
state transitions at  + 2, resulting in a discrepancy between these target networks. Therefore, to
ensure consistency with the original model, we incorporate the RL model as the target network
into the error function (2) of each critic.</p>
        <p>Upon suficient repetition of the aforementioned learning process, the error function of each
critic converges, thereby reducing the deviation from the Q-value of the original RL model.
When each critic corresponds to the independent state transitions and all states included by RL
model are represented by the entire critics as shown in Fig. 2, the average of Q-values estimated
by critics will converge to the Q-value of ordinal RL model (, ) as follows:
(, ) ≈ E[(1+1,2+1)(, ) + (3+1,4+1)(, ) + (5+1,6+1)(, )].
(3)
It should be noted that critics do not necessarily have to handle independent state transitions,
and some states may be included in multiple sets. Even in such case, the predicted values of
each critic can still correctly converge to the Q-value of the RL model under the specific set of
state transitions.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>4.3. Explanation Procedure by Q-Value Decomposition</title>
        <p>State-wise critics enable users to gain insights into the efectiveness and risks in specific states
associated with the agent’s actions. These critics are versatile and can address a variety of user
concerns about the agent’s behavior. For example, users can understand the most expected
state transition by the critic with the largest Q-value. To contrast, the state with the lowest Q
value indicates the high-risk future state. Furthermore, presenting additional information, such
as probability, allows users to understand whether a state has “a relatively low reward and a
high probability” or the opposite.</p>
        <p>This method has another useful application in the form of contrastive explanation, which
involves comparing the Q-value for the agent’s actions with that derived by the user-suggested
actions. Typically, a critic, that represents a set of state transitions with a substantial diference
in Q-value between the action of the agent and users, can be extracted to comprehend why the
agent deemed the action more appropriate than the user’s.</p>
        <p>The following are additional guidelines for defining critics. In cases where states are
represented by continuous values, upper and lower bounds can be set to define the range of values
that each critic is responsible for. It is important to note that critics do not need to be defined
for each time step separately. State transitions that share similar characteristics across multiple
time steps can be assigned to the same critic.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5. Numerical Experiment</title>
      <sec id="sec-5-1">
        <title>5.1. Experimental Setup</title>
        <p>In order to verify the validity of the generated explanations under the problem with a lot of
state transitions, we conducted experiments on resource pre-allocation problems in power
systems to mitigate disaster risks. Figure 4 shows a schematic diagram of this experiment. We
employed DDPG, a RL model that can handle actions with continuous values [10]. "Actor"
observes the state with the amount of power outage  and existing resources  in three areas
 = (1 , 2 , 3 , 1 , 2 , 3 ), and specify resource allocation such as power-supply cars in each
area by the action  = (1 , 2 , 3 ). Once the allocation is completed, the simulator executes
one of the state transitions (accident cases) shown in Table 1. There are diferences in the
accident area, probability, and the magnitude of damage among the accident cases. Rewards
will be given if resources are pre-positioned to cover the amount of damage in the afected area.</p>
        <p>Actor’s action is three-dimensional and represented by a tanh function that outputs values
from -1 to 1. Each element of  represents the priority of whether to allocate resources to the
corresponding area. Based on the relative values of each action shown in Table 2, the number of
resources allocated to each area is determined, and the total number of resources with existing
resources (allocated at the previous time) is obtained as (1+1, 2+1, 3+1).</p>
        <p>For state transitions, the accident type is first determined based on probability, and then the
amount of damage is randomly selected within the range shown in Table 1. As a result, there
are numerous possible combinations of damage || as follows:
|| = 100 + 70 + 70 + + 50 × 50 × 50 = 125240.</p>
        <p>⏟⏞1 ⏟⏞2 ⏟⏞3 ⏟ ⏞4
Note that previous time damage is also added cumulatively to (1+1, 2+2, 3+3).</p>
        <p>The reward  is calculated based on the amount of damage (1+1, 2+1, 3+1) caused by the
state transition and resource allocation (1+1, 2+1, 3+1) through the action as follows:
For accident Type 1 to 3 (the reward is only calculated for the accident area):
(10 × +1 − +1)/100 ℎ.
(4)
(5)
For the case of Type 4 accidents (the reward is calculated in all areas):</p>
        <p>DDPG’s critic (ordinal critic) estimates the expected value of the Q-value for all state
transitions: the amount of damage shown in Table 1 and the resource allocations. However, it is
challenging to interpret which accident types Actor’s resource allocation is most efective for.
To address this issue, we introduce four critics for each accident type as shown in Fig. 4, which
are trained to follow the ordinal critic. The reinforcement learning model was trained 1,500
times with episodes consisting of three time steps, and the critics were also trained at the same
time.</p>
        <p>Then, we define the validity of the explanation as follows:
1. The relationship between each action and its corresponding Q-value for each state is
highly reasonable. For instance, placing many resources in Area 1 should result in a high
Q-value derived by the state-wise critic responsible for Type 1 accidents.
2. The relative magnitude of Q-values for diferent actions is consistent between the ordinal
model and the average output of all state-wise critics. This is crucial for assessing the
accuracy of the contrastive explanation, which highlights the diferences from the action
suggested by users.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-2">
        <title>5.2. Experimental Result</title>
        <p>First, we evaluated the Q-value of critics when Actor outputs resource allocation of (11 =
15, 21 = 15, 31 = 15), which is derived by the action with the highest Q-value at  = 0. Figure
5 shows the expected Q-value for all states estimated by the ordinal critic and sets of state
transitions obtained by state-wise critics. The learning of state-wise critics has converged
enough since the diference between the Q-value of ordinal critics and average of state-wise
critics is only 3.5%. In Fig. 5, The highest Q-value was associated with accident Type 3, where
only Area 3 was damaged. Comparing the allocation of Actor and the damage of accident Type
3 from Table 1, allocating 15 power supply cars in area 3 can fully prevent Type 3 accidents.
Similarly, accidents of Type 2 and Type 4 are prevented completely by allocating 15 resources,
and therefore, the corresponding critic’s Q-values are also large. Conversely, for Type 1 accidents,
the Q-value is small since there is a possibility of accidents that cannot be handled with only 15
resources (damage from 151 to 200 (MW)). By analysis based on these comparisons with Table
1, it can be concluded that the condition of the explanation validity 1 is satisfied.</p>
        <p>Next, we evaluated the usefulness of contrastive explanation when the user provides an
alternative action into critics at  = 0. Assuming that users are interested in understanding why
Actor prioritized the action shown in Fig. 5 rather than the user-suggested allocations in Fig.
6(a) and (b): (11 = 20, 21 = 15, 31 = 10) and (11 = 20, 21 = 10, 31 = 15), respectively. The
comparison of the expected Q-values by the ordinal critic and the average of state-wise critics in
Fig. 6(a) and (b) demonstrate that the proposed critics can provide a consistent explanation that
satisfies validity 2. Then, the agent concluded that the action shown in Fig. 5 is more efective</p>
        <p>(a) The allocation (11 = 20, 12 = 15, 13 = 10).</p>
        <p>(b) The allocation (11 = 20, 12 = 10, 13 = 15).
in terms of expected performance than those in Fig. 6. However, it is dificult for the ordinary
critic alone to analyze the trade-ofs between the diferent actions.</p>
        <p>Based on the analysis of state-wise critics, the user-suggested allocations in Fig. 6(a) and (b)
have large Q-values for Type 1 accidents. The result indicates that the users’ actions can prevent
Type 1 accident completely by placing 20 resources in Area 1. On the other hand, they are weak
against cases where Area 2 or 3 sufer extensive damage. For the action in Fig. 6(a), Area 3 lacks
measures to address accidents of Type 3 (101 to 120 (MW)) and Type 4 (101 to 150 (MW)), and
Fig. 6(b) has a similar trend for Area 2. As a result, the Q-values associated with those accident
types are smaller than Agent’s action. Therefore, the agent concluded that the negative efects
of these actions are significant, and the action in Fig. 5 is more efective in terms of expected
performance. Overall, users could compare the trade-of relationship between Agent’s assumed
actions and their own actions based on specific state transitions.</p>
        <p>To evaluate the impact of state-wise critics on computation time, we present the five-time
averages of learning times for 1,500 episodes in Table 3. The proposed method trains both
critics and the RL model simultaneously, whereas the conventional method only trains the RL
model. The experiments were conducted on an Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU @1.30 GHz with 16
GB RAM running Windows10 64-bit. As shown in Table 3, the learning time of the proposed
method increased by approximately five times than the conventional. This is due to the addition
of four critics, with each critic taking 20 seconds to train, similar to the RL model. Moreover,
the sampling time of the data is also provided. From the above results, we confirmed that the
calculation time increases linearly with the number of each critic, as described in Section 4.2.</p>
        <p>Finally, we evaluated the relationship between the number of learning episodes and the
optimal action. Fig. 7 shows the learning curve of the RL model, which seems to converge after
around 500 iterations; however, the action (11 = 15, 21 = 15, 31 = 15) was not optimal. To
investigate the cause using critics, Fig. 8(a), (b), (c) show the Q-value of the five-time average
and standard deviation as error bar at 500, 1,000, and 1,500 episodes, respectively. Comparing
the Q-values, there is no substantial diference between the ordinal critic and the average of
state-wise critics. Thus, even if the learning is inexperienced, the consistency with the RL model
is maintained robustly. Next, Agent evaluated the Q-value of Type 1 to be significantly low
at 500 episodes; thus, (15, 15, 15) action was not optimal in the early stage because complete
prevention from Type 1 accident was crucial for Agent. However, the error bars for Type 3
accidents are larger at 500 and 1,000, and for Type 4 at 1,000 episodes. These results indicate
that the evaluation of (15, 15, 15) action is fluctuated as the learning progresses due to the
occurrence of accidents with low transition probabilities. After the 1,500 episodes, as shown
in Fig. 8 (c), the evaluation of Types 3 and 4 increased significantly, and Agent concluded that
(15, 15, 15) action was optimal. Thus, we were able to analyze the evaluation of the action
based on specific state transitions using the critics.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>6. Conclusion and Future Work</title>
      <p>In this paper, we introduced a method for decomposing the Q-value of each state transition
to interpret the agent’s action intentions concerning future states. By incorporating users’
interest, we can obtain suficient explanations, even for complex problems. Additionally, the
estimated Q-values align with the original by utilizing the RL model as the target network
within the critics’ loss function. We evaluated the eficacy of the generated explanations in
resource pre-allocation problems with numerous state transitions, and the proposed critics were
able to provide users with insights into Agent’s actions from the perspective of trade-ofs in</p>
      <p>Q-values for concrete state transitions.</p>
      <p>Our method decomposes the Q-value for the state at the next time step, and it may not
provide useful information for actions that expect states beyond a single time step. One possible
solution to handle such cases is to visualize the Q-value of multiple steps by applying our
method repeatedly while making assumptions about future state transitions. However, this
approach leads to an increase in computational cost and needs to be addressed in future studies.
It is also crucial for the method’s wide applicability to determine how to eficiently train each
critic independently after the RL model. Furthermore, obtaining feedback from real users on
the generated explanations and conducting more quantitative evaluations are crucial for future
research.
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