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[CS.AI] Balancing Explainability and Optimality in MDPs with Decision Trees

Published at: 2026-07-30 22:00 Last updated: 2026-07-30 23:39
#algorithm #AI #optimization

Over the past decade, decision trees have been widely used to represent controllers (a.k.a. policies) in an explainable way, with dtControl2 as a current state-of-the-art tool. However, for large systems or those with many corner cases, such representations tend to be too complex and not human-comprehensible. Reducing the size of the decision tree is not straightforward, as missing just a single crucial case might result in an incorrect controller. We tackle this issue in the setting of Markov decision processes by extending dtControl2 with the "\varepsilon" functionality: Given an allowed imprecision \varepsilon \geq 0, we construct a smaller decision tree, distilling the essence of the controller while still guaranteeing its \varepsilon-optimality. This enables us to provide tunably simpler explanations, omitting a controllable amount of detail. Our tool constructs decision trees that are orders of magnitude smaller than the state of the art.

Blogger's Review: This paper effectively balances explainability and controller optimality by introducing a tunable error parameter \varepsilon, offering a fresh perspective on decision tree applications, especially in complex system scenarios.

Original Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25925

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