Unveiling the Black Box: A Multi-Layer Framework for Explaining Reinforcement Learning-Based Cyber Agents

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are increasingly used to simulate sophisticated cyberattacks, but their decision-making processes remain opaque, hindering trust, debugging, and defensive preparedness. In high-stakes cybersecurity contexts, explainability is essential for understanding how adversarial strategies are formed and evolve over time. In this paper, we propose a unified, multi-layer explainability framework for RL-based attacker agents that reveals both strategic (MDP-level) and tactical (policy-level) reasoning. At the MDP level, we model cyberattacks as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) to expose exploration-exploitation dynamics and phase-aware behavioural shifts. At the policy level, we analyse the temporal evolution of Q-values and use Prioritised Experience Replay (PER) to surface critical learning transitions and evolving action preferences. Evaluated across CyberBattleSim environments of increasing complexity, our framework offers interpretable insights into agent behaviour at scale. Unlike previous explainable RL methods, which are often post-hoc, domain-specific, or limited in depth, our approach is both agent- and environment-agnostic, supporting use cases ranging from red-team simulation to RL policy debugging. By transforming black-box learning into actionable behavioural intelligence, our framework enables both defenders and developers to better anticipate, analyse, and respond to autonomous cyber threats.

@article{goel2025_2505.11708,
  title={ Unveiling the Black Box: A Multi-Layer Framework for Explaining Reinforcement Learning-Based Cyber Agents },
  author={ Diksha Goel and Kristen Moore and Jeff Wang and Minjune Kim and Thanh Thi Nguyen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11708},
  year={ 2025 }
}