Self reward design with fine-grained interpretability

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 1638 - 10
• Main Authors: Tjoa, Erico, Guan, Cuntai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 30.01.2023; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/705/117; 639/705/258; Design; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Neural networks; Reinforcement; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-28804-9

The black-box nature of deep neural networks (DNN) has brought to attention the issues of transparency and fairness. Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL or DRL), which uses DNN to learn its policy, value functions etc, is thus also subject to similar concerns. This paper proposes a way to circumvent the issues through the bottom-up design of neural networks with detailed interpretability, where each neuron or layer has its own meaning and utility that corresponds to humanly understandable concept. The framework introduced in this paper is called the Self Reward Design (SRD), inspired by the Inverse Reward Design, and this interpretable design can (1) solve the problem by pure design (although imperfectly) and (2) be optimized like a standard DNN. With deliberate human designs, we show that some RL problems such as lavaland and MuJoCo can be solved using a model constructed with standard NN components with few parameters. Furthermore, with our fish sale auction example, we demonstrate how SRD is used to address situations that will not make sense if black-box models are used, where humanly-understandable semantic-based decision is required.