Explaining Agent Behavior with Large Language Models
Xijia Zhang Yue Guo Simon Stepputtis Katia Sycara Joseph Campbell
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world,
safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the
reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior
is often produced by uninterpretable models such as deep neural networks. We
propose an approach to generate natural language explanations for an agent's
behavior based only on observations of states and actions, agnostic to the
underlying model representation. We show how a compact representation of the
agent's behavior can be learned and used to produce plausible explanations with
minimal hallucination while affording user interaction with a pre-trained large
language model. Through user studies and empirical experiments, we show that
our approach generates explanations as helpful as those generated by a human
domain expert while enabling beneficial interactions such as clarification and
counterfactual queries.