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Title: MoET: Interpretable and Verifiable Reinforcement Learning via Mixture of Expert Trees

Paper content:
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has led to many recent breakthroughs on complex control tasks, such as defeating the best human player in the game of Go.
However, decisions made by the DRL agent are not explainable, hindering its applicability in safety-critical settings.
Viper, a recently proposed technique, constructs a decision tree policy by mimicking the DRL agent.
Decision trees are interpretable as each action made can be traced back to the decision rule path that lead to it.
However, one global decision tree approximating the DRL policy has significant limitations with respect to the geometry of decision boundaries.
We propose MoET, a more expressive, yet still interpretable model based on Mixture of Experts, consisting of a gating function that partitions the state space, and multiple decision tree experts that specialize on different partitions.
We propose a training procedure to support non-differentiable decision tree experts and integrate it into imitation learning procedure of Viper.
We evaluate our algorithm on four OpenAI gym environments, and show that the policy constructed in such a way is more performant and better mimics the DRL agent by lowering mispredictions and increasing the reward.
We also show that MoET policies are amenable for verification using off-the-shelf automated theorem provers such as Z3.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved many recent breakthroughs in challenging domains such as Go (Silver et al., 2016) .
While using neural networks for encoding state representations allow DRL agents to learn policies for tasks with large state spaces, the learned policies are not interpretable, which hinders their use in safety-critical applications.
Some recent works leverage programs and decision trees as representations for interpreting the learned agent policies.
PIRL (Verma et al., 2018) uses program synthesis to generate a program in a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that is close to the DRL agent policy.
The design of the DSL with desired operators is a tedious manual effort and the enumerative search for synthesis is difficult to scale for larger programs.
In contrast, Viper (Bastani et al., 2018 ) learns a Decision Tree (DT) policy by mimicking the DRL agent, which not only allows for a general representation for different policies, but also allows for verification of these policies using integer linear programming solvers.
Viper uses the DAGGER (Ross et al., 2011) imitation learning approach to collect state action pairs for training the student DT policy given the teacher DRL policy.
It modifies the DAGGER algorithm to use the Q-function of teacher policy to prioritize states of critical importance during learning.
However, learning a single DT for the complete policy leads to some key shortcomings such as
i) less faithful representation of original agent policy measured by the number of mispredictions,
ii) lower overall performance (reward), and
iii) larger DT sizes that make them harder to interpret.
In this paper, we present MOËT (Mixture of Expert Trees), a technique based on Mixture of Experts (MOE) (Jacobs et al., 1991; Jordan and Xu, 1995; Yuksel et al., 2012) , and reformulate its learning procedure to support DT experts.
MOE models can typically use any expert as long as it is a differentiable function of model parameters, which unfortunately does not hold for DTs.
Similar to MOE training with Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, we first observe that MOËT can be trained by interchangeably optimizing the weighted log likelihood for experts (independently from one another) and optimizing the gating function with respect to the obtained experts.
Then, we propose a procedure for DT learning in the specific context of MOE.
To the best of our knowledge we are first to combine standard non-differentiable DT experts, which are interpretable, with MOE model.
Existing combinations which rely on differentiable tree or treelike models, such as soft decision trees (Irsoy et al., 2012) and hierarchical mixture of experts (Zhao et al., 2019) are not interpretable.
We adapt the imitation learning technique of Viper to use MOËT policies instead of DTs.
MOËT creates multiple local DTs that specialize on different regions of the input space, allowing for simpler (shallower) DTs that more accurately mimic the DRL agent policy within their regions, and combines the local trees into a global policy using a gating function.
We use a simple and interpretable linear model with softmax function as the gating function, which returns a distribution over DT experts for each point in the input space.
While standard MOE uses this distribution to average predictions of DTs, we also consider selecting just one most likely expert tree to improve interpretability.
While decision boundaries of Viper DT policies must be axis-perpendicular, the softmax gating function supports boundaries with hyperplanes of arbitrary orientations, allowing MOËT to more faithfully represent the original policy.
We evaluate our technique on four different environments: CartPole, Pong, Acrobot, and Mountaincar.
We show that MOËT achieves significantly better rewards and lower misprediction rates with shallower trees.
We also visualize the Viper and MOËT policies for Mountaincar, demonstrating the differences in their learning capabilities.
Finally, we demonstrate how a MOËT policy can be translated into an SMT formula for verifying properties for CartPole game using the Z3 theorem prover (De Moura and Bjørner, 2008) under similar assumptions made in Viper.
In summary, this paper makes the following key contributions:
1) We propose MOËT, a technique based on MOE to learn mixture of expert decision trees and present a learning algorithm to train MOËT models.
2) We use MOËT models with a softmax gating function for interpreting DRL policies and adapt the imitation learning approach used in Viper to learn MOËT models.
3) We evaluate MOËT on different environments and show that it leads to smaller, more faithful, and performant representations of DRL agent policies compared to Viper while preserving verifiability.
We introduced MOËT, a technique based on MOE with expert decision trees and presented a learning algorithm to train MOËT models.
We then used MOËT models for interpreting DRL agent policies, where different local DTs specialize on different regions of input space and are combined into a global policy using a gating function.
We showed that MOËT models lead to smaller, more faithful and performant representation of DRL agents compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches like Viper while still maintaining interpretability and verifiability.
Algorithm 2 Viper training (Bastani et al., 2018) 1: procedure VIPER (MDP e, TEACHER π t , Q-FUNCTION Q πt , ITERATIONS N ) 2:
Initialize dataset and student: D ← ∅, π s0 ← π t 3:
Sample trajectories and aggregate:
Sample dataset using Q values:
Train decision tree:
return Best policy π s ∈ {π s1 , ..., π s N }.

assistant: text: Explainable reinforcement learning model using novel combination of mixture of experts with non-differentiable decision tree experts.