On July 17th, I presented my work "Exploring the Reliability of SHAP Values in Reinforcement Learning", co-authored by Dataninja colleague Moritz Lange and our supervisors Prof. Laurenz Wiskott and Prof. Wolfgang Konen. Experiencing the conference at Valletta's (Malta) impressive Mediterranean Conference Center, learning about the work of newly met people, and reconnecting with familiar members of the XAI community from last year, has definitely been a highlight of this summer. Now we already held the closing conference of the Dataninja project. From Tuesday 25th to Thursday 27th we had the pleasure to enjoy three days of science and meetups at Bielefeld University, the “headquarter” of Dataninja. The rich program consisted of keynote talks, poster sessions, and reports from our sibling project “KI starters”. The (RL)3 project of Moritz Lange and supervisor Prof. Wiskott from Ruhr-University Bochum and myself under the supervision of Prof. Konen from TH Köln, contributed with a short overview of our joint project and a more in-depth presentation of our most recent research in two poster contributions. Of special interest to our topics were the keynotes by Holger Hoos ("How and Why AI will shape the future"), Henning Wachsmuth ("LLM-based Argument Quality Improvement"), and Sebastian Trimpe ("Trustworthy AI for Physical Machines"). Many thanks to Prof. Barbara Hammer and her team (Dr. Ulrike Kuhl, Özlem Tan) from Bielefeld University for organizing and hosting such a fantastic event! As usual, it has been a very pleasant occasion to meet our fellow PhD candidates, and we have already made plans to meet up again, because the first ones are already on the home straight. Listening to Yann LeCun in person speak about the challenges of machine learning was inspiring and attending Moritz' presentation of our collaborative work "Interpretable Brain-Inspired Representations Improve RL Performance on Visual Navigation Tasks was a real pleasure. Besides many interesting talks (one of them by my colleague from the Dataninja research training group Patrick Kolpaczki presenting his work on approximating Shapley values), attending such a big conference was a memorable experience, as was exploring the nature surrounding Vancouver. The systematic evaluation of auxiliary tasks in reinforcement learning published in “Improving Reinforcement Learning Efficiency with Auxiliary Tasks in Non-Visual Environments: A Comparison” by first author Moritz Lange (Dataninja-colleague from Ruhr University Bochum) generated significant interest, as did my presentation of our work “Ökolopoly: Case Study on Large Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning”. Set against the picturesque backdrop of the Lake District, the conference provided an ideal setting for the thought-provoking keynote speeches that spanned a wide range of topics, from neuroscience to large language models and their applications. The LOD conference is held in conjunction with the Advanced Course & Symposium on Artificial Intelligence & Neuroscience (ACAIN), a collaboration that fosters mutual respect for advancements in each respective field and promotes the exchange of valuable insights, enhancing the experience and value of both conferences. Beyond the scientific sessions, the hikes in the hills surrounding Lake Grasmere offered a fantastic opportunity for more in-depth discussions about science and life. View on Lake District. Taken during a hike with my colleague. Between talks, enough time was left for valuable discussions and informal exchanges of ideas about new approaches. As usual, meeting the other candidates to talk about the small victories and challenges of our journey towards the PhD was a great pleasure. This year's fun activity required all the combined smartness of students and professors to solve the riddles in the escape rooms.
The work I presented is focused on using Shapley values for explainable reinforcement learning in multidimensional observation and action spaces, investigating questions about the reliability of approximation methods and the interpretation of feature importances. While Shapley values are a widely-used tool for machine learning, more work is required for its application to reinforcement learning. To those interested in Shapley values, I recommend to also take a look at the contribution of my Dataninja colleague Patrick Kolpaczki on improving approximation of Shapley values. The conference proceedings are already available as part of Springer's book series "Communications in Computer and Information Science".
The quality of our collaboration in the Dataninja (RL)3-project was acknowledged: we are excited to share that the comparison of auxiliary tasks for RL won the Best Paper Award!
Alongside our invited speaker's talk (Dr. Alessandro Fabris from Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy) about algorithmic fairness, each PhD candidate from the Dataninja projects presented their progress and current investigations.
In my contribution (Raphael Engelhardt, PhD candidate from TH Köln, Campus Gummersbach, supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Konen), I spoke about our recent progress on explainability for deep reinforcement learning, published as an open access journal article.
After the success of these three days, we are especially looking forward to our closing conference next year.
CIOP News
After having participated in its debut last year, it was a special pleasure to visit the second edition of The World Conference on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI2024). The conference was a full immersion into all aspects of explainable AI. The keynote speech by Prof. Fosca Giannotti about hybrid decision-making and the two panel discussions on legal requirements of XAI and XAI in finance broadened the views between detailed poster and presentation sessions.
Time flies... It wasn't that long ago (or at least it feels like it) that I wrote a blog post about the first Dataninja Retreat.
In the last week of February, my RL3 Dataninja colleague Moritz Lange and I had the chance to visit the AAAI conference on AI 2024.
Our participation in this year's edition of the LOD conference, as previously announced in one of our blog post, proved to be an exceptionally enjoyable experience.
From September 6th to September 9th we held our last annual retreat of the Dataninja research training group in Krefeld.