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Explaining Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Policies

Published: November 13, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2511.10409v1

By: Kayla Boggess, Sarit Kraus, Lu Feng

Potential Business Impact:

Helps people understand how AI teams work together.

Business Areas:
Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has gained significant interest in recent years, enabling sequential decision-making across multiple agents in various domains. However, most existing explanation methods focus on centralized MARL, failing to address the uncertainty and nondeterminism inherent in decentralized settings. We propose methods to generate policy summarizations that capture task ordering and agent cooperation in decentralized MARL policies, along with query-based explanations for When, Why Not, and What types of user queries about specific agent behaviors. We evaluate our approach across four MARL domains and two decentralized MARL algorithms, demonstrating its generalizability and computational efficiency. User studies show that our summarizations and explanations significantly improve user question-answering performance and enhance subjective ratings on metrics such as understanding and satisfaction.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 🇮🇱 Israel, United States

Page Count
11 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Artificial Intelligence