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#1 Explaining Reinforcement Learning to Mere Mortals: An Empirical Study [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Andrew Anderson ; Jonathan Dodge ; Amrita Sadarangani ; Zoe Juozapaitis ; Evan Newman ; Jed Irvine ; Souti Chattopadhyay ; Alan Fern ; Margaret Burnett

We present a user study to investigate the impact of explanations on non-experts? understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. We investigate both a common RL visualization, saliency maps (the focus of attention), and a more recent explanation type, reward-decomposition bars (predictions of future types of rewards). We designed a 124 participant, four-treatment experiment to compare participants? mental models of an RL agent in a simple Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. Our results show that the combination of both saliency and reward bars were needed to achieve a statistically significant improvement in mental model score over the control. In addition, our qualitative analysis of the data reveals a number of effects for further study.