ERCI: An Explainable Experience Replay Approach with Causal Inference for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has gained significant attention in autonomous systems, yet its black-box nature and lack of explainability hinder user trust in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving. Existing experience replay approaches enhance sample efficiency but often fail to capture the internal causality of training data, leading to a convoluted training process that is difficult for humans to explain. In this work, we introduce Experience Replay with Causal Inference (ERCI), an explainable approach that integrates time series representation and causal inference to offer human-aligned explanations for DRL. Specifically, ERCI 1) introduces a novel multivariate time series representation to extract explainable Time Series Causal Factors (TSCF) from experimental data and 2) leverages internal causality in TSCFs with causal inference as a crucial standard for experience replay in DRL training. We evaluate ERCI using multiple baseline algorithms across diverse environments. Results show that ERCI provides human-aligned explanations and further improves sample efficiency through enhanced explainability. Notably, ERCI outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches by 15% in average performance, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability.