# Evolutionary learning of interpretable decision trees

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Model Learning with Personalized Interpretability Estimation (ML-PIE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06060/) (2021)
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- [A Survey on Explainable Reinforcement Learning: Concepts, Algorithms, Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06665/) (2022)
- [SMOSE: Sparse Mixture of Shallow Experts for Interpretable Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Control Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13053/) (2024)
- [Interpretable pipelines with evolutionarily optimized modules for RL tasks with visual inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04943/) (2022)
- [Evolutionary Computation and Explainable AI: A Roadmap to Understandable Intelligent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07811/) (2024)
- [Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable Decision-Making in Supply Chain Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12023/) (2025)
- [TreeC: a method to generate interpretable energy management systems using a metaheuristic algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08310/) (2023)
- [Social Interpretable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15480/) (2024)
- [Evo* 2023 -- Late-Breaking Abstracts Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13950/) (2024)
- [Discovering Continuous-Time Memory-Based Symbolic Policies using Genetic Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02765/) (2024)
- [SHAP-Guided Kernel Actor-Critic for Explainable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05291/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning techniques achieved human-level performance in several tasks in the last decade. However, in recent years, the need for interpretability emerged: we want to be able to understand how a system works and the reasons behind its decisions. Not only we need interpretability to assess the safety of the produced systems, we also need it to extract knowledge about unknown problems. While some techniques that optimize decision trees for reinforcement learning do exist, they usually employ greedy algorithms or they do not exploit the rewards given by the environment. This means that these techniques may easily get stuck in local optima. In this work, we propose a novel approach to interpretable reinforcement learning that uses decision trees. We present a two-level optimization scheme that combines the advantages of evolutionary algorithms with the advantages of Q-learning. This way we decompose the problem into two sub-problems: the problem of finding a meaningful and useful decomposition of the state space, and the problem of associating an action to each state. We test the proposed method on three well-known reinforcement learning benchmarks, on which it results competitive with respect to the state-of-the-art in both performance and interpretability. Finally, we perform an ablation study that confirms that using the two-level optimization scheme gives a boost in performance in non-trivial environments with respect to a one-layer optimization technique.