Neural-to-Tree Policy Distillation with Policy Improvement Criterion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel policy distillation method that improves interpretability and performance in reinforcement learning by maximizing an advantage evaluation, reducing data shift issues associated with behavior cloning.

Contribution

It proposes a new distillation objective based on advantage evaluation, enhancing policy fidelity and interpretability in reinforcement learning.

Findings

Outperforms behavior cloning in preserving cumulative reward

Produces more consistent and robust policies

Generates interpretable decision trees with reasonable rules

Abstract

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved promising results in challenging decision-making tasks, the main bones of its success --- deep neural networks are mostly black-boxes. A feasible way to gain insight into a black-box model is to distill it into an interpretable model such as a decision tree, which consists of if-then rules and is easy to grasp and be verified. However, the traditional model distillation is usually a supervised learning task under a stationary data distribution assumption, which is violated in reinforcement learning. Therefore, a typical policy distillation that clones model behaviors with even a small error could bring a data distribution shift, resulting in an unsatisfied distilled policy model with low fidelity or low performance. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by changing the distillation objective from behavior cloning to maximizing an advantage evaluation. The novel distillation objective maximizes an approximated cumulative reward and focuses more on disastrous behaviors in critical states, which controls the data shift effect. We evaluate our method on several Gym tasks, a commercial fight game, and a self-driving car simulator. The empirical results show that the proposed method can preserve a higher cumulative reward than behavior cloning and learn a more consistent policy to the original one. Moreover, by examining the extracted rules from the distilled decision trees, we demonstrate that the proposed method delivers reasonable and robust decisions.