skip to main content
10.1145/3631085.3631230acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessbgamesConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Unveiling the Key Features Influencing Game Agents with Different Levels of Robustness

Published:19 January 2024Publication History

ABSTRACT

Training agents using Deep Reinforcement Learning methods is rapidly progressing in several fields and techniques like domain randomization have been demonstrated to improve the generalization ability of these agents. However, due to the black-box nature of the models, it is not easy to understand why an action was selected from a given input. Although prior research on Explainable Artificial Intelligence presents efforts to bridge this gap, is unclear what particular input features that contribute to a model’s generalizability. This work examines the main aspects that affect the behavior of game agents with varying robustness levels. By comparing specialized and generalized agents, we investigate what are the main differences and similarities present in these models when they select an action. To achieve this goal, we trained two agents with different robustness levels and applied Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods to highlight the key features on the input screen. We employed a mixed methods analysis, which provided important quantitative results on the agents’ performance as well as qualitative insights about their behavior. We are able to show that the visualization of generalized agents tends to be more interpretable since they concentrate on the game objects, whereas specialized agents are more spread along the whole input screen. This result constitutes an important step to understanding the behavior of game agents trained using Deep Reinforcement Learning with different training procedures.

References

  1. Julius Adebayo, Justin Gilmer, Michael Muelly, Ian Goodfellow, Moritz Hardt, and Been Kim. 2018. Sanity checks for saliency maps. Advances in neural information processing systems 31 (2018).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Laura Almón-Manzano, Rafael Pastor-Vargas, and José M. C. Troncoso. 2022. Deep Reinforcement Learning in Agents’ Training: Unity ML-Agents. In Bio-inspired Systems and Applications: from Robotics to Ambient Intelligence: 9th International Work-Conference on the Interplay Between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2022. Springer, 391–400.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Alejandro B. Arrieta, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Javier Del Ser, Adrien Bennetot, Siham Tabik, Alberto Barbado, Salvador García, Sergio Gil-López, 2020. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI. Information fusion 58 (2020), 82–115.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Vittoria Bruni, Maria Lucia Cardinali, and Domenico Vitulano. 2022. A short review on minimum description length: an application to dimension reduction in PCA. Entropy 24, 2 (2022), 269.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. Karl Cobbe, Chris Hesse, Jacob Hilton, and John Schulman. 2020. Leveraging procedural generation to benchmark reinforcement learning. In International conference on machine learning. PMLR, 2048–2056.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Tianhong Dai, Kai Arulkumaran, Tamara Gerbert, Samyakh Tukra, Feryal Behbahani, and Anil Anthony Bharath. 2022. Analysing deep reinforcement learning agents trained with domain randomisation. Neurocomputing 493 (2022), 143–165.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Linus Gisslén, Andy Eakins, Camilo Gordillo, Joakim Bergdahl, and Konrad Tollmar. 2021. Adversarial reinforcement learning for procedural content generation. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE, 1–8.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Samuel Greydanus, Anurag Koul, Jonathan Dodge, and Alan Fern. 2018. Visualizing and understanding atari agents. In International conference on machine learning. PMLR, 1792–1801.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Jinlei Gu, Jiacun Wang, Xiwang Guo, Guanjun Liu, Shujin Qin, and Zhiliang Bi. 2023. A Metaverse-Based Teaching Building Evacuation Training System With Deep Reinforcement Learning. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (2023).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  10. Piyush Gupta, Nikaash Puri, Sukriti Verma, Dhruv Kayastha, Shripad Deshmukh, Balaji Krishnamurthy, and Sameer Singh. 2020. Explain your move: Understanding agent actions using specific and relevant feature attribution. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Alexandre Heuillet, Fabien Couthouis, and Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez. 2021. Explainability in deep reinforcement learning. Knowledge-Based Systems 214 (2021).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Jacob Hilton, Nick Cammarata, Shan Carter, Gabriel Goh, and Chris Olah. 2020. Understanding RL Vision. Distill (2020). https://doi.org/10.23915/distill.00029 https://distill.pub/2020/understanding-rl-vision.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  13. Shengyi Huang, Rousslan Fernand Julien Dossa, Chang Ye, Jeff Braga, Dipam Chakraborty, Kinal Mehta, and João G.M. Araújo. 2022. CleanRL: High-quality Single-file Implementations of Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms. Journal of Machine Learning Research 23, 274 (2022), 1–18.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. Tobias Huber, Benedikt Limmer, and Elisabeth André. 2021. Benchmarking Perturbation-based Saliency Maps for Explaining Atari Agents. arXiv preprint 2101.07312 (2021).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Rahul Iyer, Yuezhang Li, Huao Li, Michael Lewis, Ramitha Sundar, and Katia Sycara. 2018. Transparency and explanation in deep reinforcement learning neural networks. In Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 144–150.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Been Kim, Rajiv Khanna, and Oluwasanmi O Koyejo. 2016. Examples are not enough, learn to criticize! criticism for interpretability. Advances in neural information processing systems 29 (2016).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Xiao Li, Hanchen Xu, Jinming Zhang, and Hua-hua Chang. 2023. Deep reinforcement learning for adaptive learning systems. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 48, 2 (2023), 220–243.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  18. Scott M Lundberg and Su-In Lee. 2017. A unified approach to interpreting model predictions. Advances in neural information processing systems 30 (2017).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Tim Miller. 2019. Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences. Artificial intelligence 267 (2019), 1–38.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Chris Olah, Arvind Satyanarayan, Ian Johnson, Shan Carter, Ludwig Schubert, Katherine Ye, and Alexander Mordvintsev. 2018. The Building Blocks of Interpretability. Distill (2018). https://doi.org/10.23915/distill.00010 https://distill.pub/2018/building-blocks.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  21. Vitali Petsiuk, Abir Das, and Kate Saenko. 2018. Rise: Randomized input sampling for explanation of black-box models. arXiv preprint 1806.07421 (2018).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Lerrel Pinto, James Davidson, Rahul Sukthankar, and Abhinav Gupta. 2017. Robust adversarial reinforcement learning. In International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2817–2826.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Geeta Rani, Upasana Pandey, Aniket Anil Wagde, and Vijaypal Singh Dhaka. 2023. A deep reinforcement learning technique for bug detection in video games. International Journal of Information Technology 15, 1 (2023), 355–367.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  24. Marco T. Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, and Carlos Guestrin. 2016. " Why should i trust you?" Explaining the predictions of any classifier. In 22nd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. 1135–1144.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Furkat Safarov, Alpamis Kutlimuratov, Akmalbek Bobomirzaevich Abdusalomov, Rashid Nasimov, and Young-Im Cho. 2023. Deep Learning Recommendations of E-Education Based on Clustering and Sequence. Electronics 12, 4 (2023), 809.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  26. John Schulman, Filip Wolski, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alec Radford, and Oleg Klimov. 2017. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint 1707.06347 (2017).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Ramprasaath R Selvaraju, Michael Cogswell, Abhishek Das, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Devi Parikh, and Dhruv Batra. 2017. Grad-cam: Visual explanations from deep networks via gradient-based localization. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision. 618–626.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  28. Karen Simonyan, Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman. 2014. Deep inside convolutional networks: Visualising image classification models and saliency maps. In International Conference on Learning Representations.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Mukund Sundararajan, Ankur Taly, and Qiqi Yan. 2017. Axiomatic attribution for deep networks. In International conference on machine learning. 3319–3328.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Emanuel Todorov, Tom Erez, and Yuval Tassa. 2012. Mujoco: A physics engine for model-based control. In 2012 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems. IEEE, 5026–5033.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  31. Changnan Xiao, Yongxin Zhang, Xuefeng Huang, Qinhan Huang, Jie Chen, and Peng Sun. 2023. Mastering Strategy Card Game (Hearthstone) with Improved Techniques. arXiv preprint 2303.05197 (2023).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Wenzhuo Yang, Hung Le, Silvio Savarese, and Steven Hoi. 2022. OmniXAI: A Library for Explainable AI. arXiv preprint 2206.01612 (2022).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  33. Matthew D Zeiler and Rob Fergus. 2014. Visualizing and understanding convolutional networks. In European conference on computer vision. Springer, 818–833.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref

Index Terms

  1. Unveiling the Key Features Influencing Game Agents with Different Levels of Robustness

                  Recommendations

                  Comments

                  Login options

                  Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

                  Sign in
                  • Article Metrics

                    • Downloads (Last 12 months)14
                    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

                    Other Metrics

                  PDF Format

                  View or Download as a PDF file.

                  PDF

                  eReader

                  View online with eReader.

                  eReader

                  HTML Format

                  View this article in HTML Format .

                  View HTML Format