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.