Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been extensively used in autonomous and self-* systems, but RL policies, especially deep RL ones relying on neural networks, lack transparency and are difficult to understand. This can lead to diminished user trust, and makes for a more challenging verification of systems. To address this challenge, this paper introduces Explanations using Alternative Realities for Reinforcement Learning (EARL), a Python library to produce counterfactual explanations in RL settings. This library allows the user to produce explanations by exploring What-if scenarios to clarify agent behavior by comparing possible outcomes. Counterfactual explanations have been shown to be intuitive and user-friendly in psychology research, but have only recently been explored in RL, with existing implementations usually limited to toy examples and benchmarks. EARL supports counterfactual explanation generation in realistic RL-based self-adaptive systems. To demonstrate its applicability, we demonstrate its use in a simulation of CitiBikes, a self-adaptive bike-sharing system, and we provide evaluations showing how it performs in real applications.
This work reviews pre-2019 XRL approaches, categorizing them into policy explanation, reward decomposition, model transparency, and post-hoc interpretability methods, and proposes a framework that combines interpretable policies, surrogate models, attention mechanisms, and visualization techniques to enhance transparency without significantly reducing performance.
Michael Anderson, David Thompson· International Journal of Art...· 0 citations
This work employs Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to extract symbolic representations of RL policies and define a novel set of explainability metrics, including activation rate, feature coverage, syntactic distance and semantic distance, which provide crucial insights for the transfer and generalization of action-specific policies.
Celeste Veronese, Edoardo Zorzi, Daniele Meli et al.· 0 citations
Self-Review Reinforcement Learning consistently outperforms the RLVR in final reward performance and achieves greater learning efficiency by successfully transforming feedback into behavioral improvement.
In the quantitative finance area, particularly in order execution, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise due to its ability to interact with market environments based on real data. However, traditional RL methods suffer from slow research speed and rely on static market assumptions, which do not consider the impact of the agent's execution action on the environment. To address these, we propose a Self-Evolutional single-agent/multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (SE-RL) framework. The framework utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) to design various RL algorithm modules, such as agent model design, reward function, profiling, communication, and state imagination, by leveraging the LLM generating module output or code. SE-RL could continuously improve the accuracy of LLM-generated RL algorithms through a dual-enhancement kit at both high-level (prompt refinement) and low-level (parameter fine-tuning). Additionally, we use a multi-agent system to simulate dynamic financial markets, accounting for the impact of order executions on market dynamics. To further enhance training in such a dynamic market, we develop a hybrid environment training method that could rebalance each environment's loss weight. Comprehensive experiments on 200 realistic stock datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines. Project page: https://kdd2026-se-rl.github.io/.
Vincent Fu, Xinxin Xu, Weichen Xu et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
This paper attempts to outline the evolution of LLMs from classic methods of supervised finetuning models with static human-annotated datasets, to a more dynamic and evolutionary reinforcement learning based autonomous models. Along with the systematic evolution of reasoning capabilities, this is one of the most prominent focal points in the field of AI. This paper attempt to outline the most current advancements in reasoning and reinforcement learning, and classify the occurrences into the applicable areas of criteria, such as: choice of architecture, choice of reward assignments, and choice of evaluation metrics. This paper explore reasoning improvements as a result of self-reflective and exploratory processes within the bounds of the RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework. By systematically studying the aforementioned criteria across multiple works and the respective variations in algorithmic efficiency, control of reward signal bias, and performance metrics, this paper want to outline the positive role of reinforcement learning in fostering autonomous self-correction in models and complex thought chain processes. The aim of this paper is to describe the potential autonomous advancements the next generations of large language models may evolve and want to offer some suggestions as a theoretical and a technical framework.
Mengbo Song· Mathematical Modeling and Al...· 0 citations