After-Action Review for AI (AAR/AI)

Explainable AI is growing in importance as AI pervades modern society, but few have studied how explainable AI can directly support people trying to assess an AI agent. Without a rigorous process, people may approach assessment in ad hoc ways—leading to the possibility of wide variations in assessment of the same agent due only to variations in their processes. AAR, or After-Action Review, is a method some military organizations use to assess human agents, and it has been validated in many domains. Drawing upon this strategy, we derived an After-Action Review for AI (AAR/AI), to organize ways people assess reinforcement learning agents in a sequential decision-making environment. We then investigated what AAR/AI brought to human assessors in two qualitative studies. The first investigated AAR/AI to gather formative information, and the second built upon the results, and also varied the type of explanation (model-free vs. model-based) used in the AAR/AI process. Among the results were the following: (1) participants reporting that AAR/AI helped to organize their thoughts and think logically about the agent, (2) AAR/AI encouraged participants to reason about the agent from a wide range of perspectives , and (3) participants were able to leverage AAR/AI with the model-based explanations to falsify the agent’s predictions.