Interpretable Control Competition

Abstract # ↰

Safety-critical applications rely on control systems-managed components, which not only have demanding requirements in terms of accuracy, but also require transparency and interpretability, to ensure trustworthiness. However, interpretability is often overlooked in favor of performance as (i) people perceive it as secondary, and (ii) there are no objective methods for measuring it. To address these shortcomings and raise awareness about the importance of interpretability in control systems, we propose the Interpretable Control Competition at GECCO 2024. We invite participants to solve two control problems, a discrete and a continuous one, with interpretable policies. We assess the policies in terms of both performance and interpretability, where the latter is evaluated by a pool of domain experts. Our overarching goal is to collect the contributions in a report, which should provide a guideline for practitioners in the field, gathering an array of state-of-the-art methods for interpretable control, together with suitable metrics for assessing the interpretability of a policy.