Counterfactual explanations for reinforcement learning: interview with Jasmina Gajcin

In this interview, Jasmina told us more about counterfactuals and some of the challenges of implementing them in reinforcement learning settings. RL enables intelligent agents to learn sequential tasks through a trial-and-error process. In the last decade, RL algorithms have been developed for healthcare, autonomous driving, games etc. (Li et al. 2017). However, RL agents often rely on neural networks, making their decision-making process difficult to understand and hindering their adoption to real-life tasks (Puiutta et al. 2020). In supervised learning, counterfactual explanations have been used to answer the question: Given that model produces output A for input features f1 …fk, how can the features be changed so that model outputs a desired output B? (Verma et al. 2020) Counterfactual explanations give actionable advice to humans interacting with an AI system on how to change their features and achieve a desired output.