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Primary supervisor

Mor Vered

Co-supervisors

  • Iadine Chades

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are frameworks used to model decision-making in situations where outcomes are partly random and partly under the control of a decision maker. While small MDPs are inherently interpretable for people, MDPs with thousands of states are difficult to understand by humans. The K-MDP problem is the problem of finding the best MDP with, at most, K states by leveraging state abstraction approaches to aggregate states into sub-groups. The aim of this project is to measure and improve the interpretability of K-MDP approaches using state-of-the-art XAI approaches. We will instantiate and evaluate our approaches on a range of computational sustainability case studies from the domain of conservation of biodiversity, natural resource management and behavioural ecology. 


 

    Student cohort

    Double Semester

    URLs/references

    Relevant Publications: 

    1. Ferrer-Mestres, J., Dietterich, T. G., Buffet, O., & Chades, I. (2020, June). Solving k-mdps. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (Vol. 30, pp. 110-118).
    2. Ferrer-Mestres, Jonathan, Thomas G. Dietterich, Olivier Buffet, and Iadine Chades. "Interpretable Solutions for Stochastic Dynamic Programming." bioRxiv (2024): 2024-08.
    3. Wells, Lindsay, and Tomasz Bednarz. "Explainable ai and reinforcement learning—a systematic review of current approaches and trends." Frontiers in artificial intelligence 4 (2021): 550030.

    Required knowledge

    • Strong background in computer science in general
    • Familiarity and understanding of basic principles underlying automated reasoning, MDPs and RL
    • C/C++ programming and knowledge 
    • Python programming