Verifying Behavior of Reinforcement Learning Agents for Network Slice Admission Control

Paper i proceeding, 2025

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for automating complex network management tasks, yet its lack of transparency and black-box nature hinder trust and adoption in operational environments. In this work, we focus on explaining the behavior of an RL agent applied to the problem of network slice admission control. We present a framework that integrates three key components: a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent for admission control, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model for network slice embedding, and an explanation module for interpreting the DRL agent’s policies, namely Shapley Value Explainable Reinforcement Learning (SVERL). Our analysis aims gives particular attention to cases where the RL agent rejects admitting a network slice request despite sufficient network capacity to provision it, and investigates whether explanations can be used to verify and validate the agent’s behavior prior to deployment approval. Experimental results reveal that the agent’s decisions are primarily influenced by substrate network conditions such as congestion, rather than by the intrinsic characteristics of slice requests. While this conservative policy prevents overload, it also leads to overly cautious rejections. Importantly, the proposed explanation framework provides operators with actionable insights to scrutinize, validate, and refine RL-driven policies before operational deployment.