CausalXRL is a new framework that makes reinforcement learning agents explainable by using causal graph reasoning. It offers transparent, structured, multi‑level explanations of agent decisions. The authors validate the approach with quantitative tests on benchmark RL environments and a qualitative expert study on the real‑time strategy game MicroRTS, showing faithful explanations and efficient causal‑structure learning.
arXiv:2609.26037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explanations are central to causal reasoning, and cognitive science has long established that the human drive to explain is itself a mechanism for lear...
A survey paper titled "A Survey of Explainable Reinforcement Learning: Targets, Methods and Needs" reviews over 250 studies in the sub‑domain of eXplainable AI focused on reinforcement learning (XRL). The authors introduce a taxonomy based on the questions "What" (the target of explanation) and "How" (the method of explanation) and use it to organize the state‑of‑the‑art literature. They also highlight related domains that warrant further attention and outline key needs for advancing the field of XRL.
The paper investigates how human observers interpret the learning processes of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Using a novel observation-based paradigm, the authors conducted two experiments: an exploratory interview study with nine participants that identified four core themes—Agent Goals, Knowledge, Decision Making, and Learning Mechanisms—and a confirmatory study with 34 participants that applied the paradigm across navigation and manipulation tasks and two RL algorithms. Analyses of 816 responses validated the paradigm’s reliability and refined the thematic framework, showing how these themes evolve over time and interrelate.
arXiv:2607. 14886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning under the extrapolation setting focuses on forecasting future time-stamped events (facts) from historical data in a temporal knowledge graph.
The paper introduces Chart‑RVR, a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains chart‑reasoning agents to produce monitorable, verifiable outputs. It decomposes reasoning into three auditable stages—Structure, Evidence, and Derivation—allowing stakeholders to trace how the model reads the chart, extracts data, and computes the answer. Experiments on six benchmarks show that Chart‑RVR matches or exceeds state‑of‑the‑art accuracy while delivering rationales that are far more verifiable and evidence‑grounded than existing methods.
arXiv:2603. 21846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explainable AI is increasingly important to scientific discovery.
arXiv:2607. 13655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) seeks to make Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies more transparent and interpretable, a key requirement in safety-critical and human-centric scenarios.
arXiv:2608.29263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination and struggle with complex reasoning tasks requiring multi-hop domain knowledge. While inte...
The paper introduces MENTOR, a multi‑agent framework that provides on‑policy pedagogical intervention to address zero‑reward collapse in reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. MENTOR diagnoses failures in real time and generates targeted prompts to guide the learning agent, integrating seamlessly with existing policy optimization pipelines such as GRPO. Experiments on math and code generation tasks show that MENTOR significantly reduces collapse, achieving up to 78.3% relative gains on Llama‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct.
The paper investigates how agentic systems decide between acting and abstaining, focusing on the fidelity of their reasoning explanations. Using Qwen3‑8B in a multi‑party conversation setting, the authors compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, finding a trade‑off: strong direct policies yield higher performance but no traceable reasoning, while reasoning policies provide an audit trail at the cost of lower recall. The study also uncovers that exposing reasoning can alter the agent’s policy and that common faithfulness metrics may overstate the alignment between reasoning and decisions.
The paper proposes EvalXRL, a benchmark that evaluates explainable reinforcement learning (XRL) methods by measuring how well their explanations help a large language model coding agent diagnose and fix bugs in RL agents. Unlike current metrics that focus on faithfulness or human ratings, EvalXRL uses a closed‑loop, scientific‑method style interaction where the coding agent repeatedly invokes XRL methods, refines hypotheses, and repairs the agent, scoring each method by the resulting RL reward. This approach enables a head‑to‑head comparison of multiple XRL techniques in realistic debugging scenarios.
arXiv:2606. 24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.