TalkToAgent: A Human-centric Explanation of Reinforcement Learning Agents with Large Language Models

Abstract: Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) has emerged as a promising approach in improving the transparency of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. However, there remains a gap between complex RL policies and domain experts, due to the limited comprehensibility of XRL results and isolated coverage of current XRL approaches that leave users uncertain about which tools to employ. To address these challenges, we introduce TalkToAgent, a multi-agent LLMs (LLM) framework that delivers interactive, natural language explanations for RL policies. The architecture with five specialized LLM agents (Coordinator, Explainer, Coder, Evaluator, and Debugger) enables TalkToAgent to automatically map user queries to relevant XRL tools and clarify an agent's actions in terms of either key state variables, expected outcomes, or counterfactual explanations. Moreover, our approach extends previous counterfactual explanations by deriving alternative scenarios from qualitative behavioral descriptions, or even new rule-based policies. We validated TalkToAgent on quadruple-tank process control problem, a well-known nonlinear control benchmark. Results demonstrated that TalkToAgent successfully mapped user queries into XRL tasks with high accuracy, and coder-debugger interactions minimized failures in counterfactual generation. Furthermore, qualitative evaluation confirmed that TalkToAgent effectively interpreted agent's actions and contextualized their meaning within the problem domain.