August 1, 2019
Conference Paper

ReLVis: Visual Analytics for Situational Awareness During Reinforcement Learning Experimentation

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning where an agent learns to maximize reward through trial and error. RL is challenging and data/compute intensive, and RL practitioners can easily become overwhelmed and make poor modeling decisions. Our contribution is a visual analytics tool designed to help data scientists maintain situation awareness during RL experimentation. Our tool allows the user to under- stand which hyper-parameter values lead to better or worse outcomes, what behaviors are associated with high and low reward, and how behaviors evolve and progress over training time. We evaluated our tool by applying state of the art deep RL models to six different RL tasks. We present three tasks as use cases that show how our tool leads to insightful findings and improves situation awareness.

Revised: February 12, 2021 | Published: August 1, 2019

Citation

Saldanha E.G., B.L. Praggastis, T.V. Billow, and D.L. Arendt. 2019. ReLVis: Visual Analytics for Situational Awareness During Reinforcement Learning Experimentation. In 21st EG/VGTC Conference on Visualization, (EuroVis 2019), June 3-7, 2019, Porto, Portugal. Geneva:The Eurographics Association. PNNL-SA-138649. doi:10.2312/evs.20191168