Abstract
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) plays a crucial role in tackling complex tasks, yet its reliance on deep neural networks makes the learned policies opaque. To enhance the trustworthiness of RL policies, existing work (e.g., the SILVER framework [Li et al., 2025]) has focused on Shapley-based interpretability, but is typically restricted to low-dimensional state spaces, binary-action settings, and a single class of linear surrogate. We propose ReShap, a policy-distillation framework that extends Shapley-based interpretability to high-dimensional, multi-action environments. ReShap extracts compact feature representations from raw image observations, performs SHAP-based feature attribution to characterize how each feature contributes to the policy's decisions, and distills the deep RL policy into an interpretable surrogate trained on the full set of (state, policy-action) pairs along the policy's visited distribution. We instantiate the surrogate with three interpretable model families (decision trees, linear regression, and logistic regression) and compare their fidelity and task return. We evaluate ReShap on Atari and Box2D environments using three deep RL algorithms and conduct a human-subject study to assess the clarity and trustworthiness of the resulting policies. Results show that ReShap preserves competitive task performance, that decision trees generally outperform linear and logistic regression, and that linear regression is weakest in most settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.15507
