Many intelligent systems currently interact with others using at least one of fixed communication inputs or preset responses, resulting in rigid interaction experiences and extensive efforts developing a variety of scenarios for the system. Fixed inputs limit the natural behavior of the user in order to effectively communicate, and preset responses prevent the system from adapting to the current situation unless it was specifically implemented. Closed-loop interaction instead focuses on dynamic responses that account for what the user is currently doing based on interpretations of their perceived activity. Agents employing closed-loop interaction can also monitor their interactions to ensure that the user responds as expected. We introduce a closed-loop interactive agent framework that integrates planning and recognition to predict what the user is trying to accomplish and autonomously decide on actions to take in response to these predictions. Based on a recent demonstration of such an assistive interactive agent in a turn-based simulated game, we also discuss new research challenges that are not present in the areas of artificial intelligence planning or recognition alone.

Goal recognition design (GRD) facilitates understanding the goals of acting agents through the analysis and redesign of goal recognition models, thus offering a solution for assessing and minimizing the maximal progress of any agent in the model before goal recognition is guaranteed. In a nutshell, given a model of a domain and a set of possible goals, a solution to a GRD problem determines (1) the extent to which actions performed by an agent within the model reveal the agent’s objective; and (2) how best to modify the model so that the objective of an agent can be detected as early as possible. This approach is relevant to any domain in which rapid goal recognition is essential and the model design can be controlled. Applications include intrusion detection, assisted cognition, computer games, and human-robot collaboration. A GRD problem has two components: the analyzed goal recognition setting, and a design model specifying the possible ways the environment in which agents act can be modified so as to facilitate recognition. This work formulates a general framework for GRD in deterministic and partially observable environments, and offers a toolbox of solutions for evaluating and optimizing model quality for various settings. For the purpose of evaluation we suggest the worst case distinctiveness (WCD) measure, which represents the maximal cost of a path an agent may follow before its goal can be inferred by a goal recognition system. We offer novel compilations to classical planning for calculating WCD in settings where agents are bounded-suboptimal. We then suggest methods for minimizing WCD by searching for an optimal redesign strategy within the space of possible modifications, and using pruning to increase efficiency. We support our approach with an empirical evaluation that measures WCD in a variety of GRD settings and tests the efficiency of our compilation-based methods for computing it. We also examine the effectiveness of reducing WCD via redesign and the performance gain brought about by our proposed pruning strategy.

In order to be useful in the real world, AI agents need to plan and act in the presence of others, who may include adversarial and cooperative entities. In this paper, we consider the problem where an autonomous agent needs to act in a manner that clarifies its objectives to cooperative entities while preventing adversarial entities from inferring those objectives. We show that this problem is solvable when cooperative entities and adversarial entities use different types of sensors and/or prior knowledge. We develop two new solution approaches for computing such plans. One approach provides an optimal solution to the problem by using an IP solver to provide maximum obfuscation for adversarial entities while providing maximum legibility for cooperative entities in the environment, whereas the other approach provides a satisficing solution using heuristic-guided forward search to achieve preset levels of obfuscation and legibility for adversarial and cooperative entities respectively. We show the feasibility and utility of our algorithms through extensive empirical evaluation on problems derived from planning benchmarks.

The task of recognizing goals and plans from missing and full observations can be done efficiently by using automated planning techniques. In many applications, it is important to recognize goals and plans not only accurately, but also quickly. To address this challenge, we develop novel goal recognition approaches based on planning techniques that rely on planning landmarks. In automated planning, landmarks are properties (or actions) that cannot be avoided to achieve a goal. We show the applicability of a number of planning techniques with an emphasis on landmarks for goal and plan recognition tasks in two settings: (1) we use the concept of landmarks to develop goal recognition heuristics; and (2) we develop a landmark-based filtering method to refine existing planning-based goal and plan recognition approaches. These recognition approaches are empirically evaluated in experiments over several classical planning domains. We show that our goal recognition approaches yield not only accuracy comparable to (and often higher than) other state-of-the-art techniques, but also substantially faster recognition time over such techniques.

Goal recognition is the problem of determining an agent's intent by observing her behaviour. Contemporary solutions for general task-planning relate the probability of a goal to the cost of reaching it. We adapt this approach to goal recognition in the strict context of path-planning. We show (1) that a simpler formula provides an identical result to current state-of-the-art in less than half the time under all but one set of conditions. Further, we prove (2) that the probability distribution based on this technique is independent of an agent's past behaviour and present a revised formula that achieves goal recognition by reference to the agent's starting point and current location only. Building on this, we demonstrate (3) that a Radius of Maximum Probability (i.e., the distance from a goal within which that goal is guaranteed to be the most probable) can be calculated from relative cost-distances between the candidate goals and a start location, without needing to calculate any actual probabilities. In this extended version of earlier work, we generalise our framework to the continuous domain and discuss our results, including the conditions under which our findings can be generalised back to goal recognition in general task-planning.

This short position paper is intended to provide a critique of current approaches to dialogue, as well as a roadmap for collaborative dialogueresearch. It is unapologetically opinionated, but informed by 40 years of dialogue research. No attempt is made to be comprehensive. The paper will discuss currentresearch into building so-called "chatbots", slot-filling dialogue systems, and plan-based dialogue systems. Forfurther discussion of some of these issues, please see (Allen et al., in press). The currently dominant approach to building dialogue systems, particularlythose commonly referred to as "chatbots", is to train a neural network-based system "end-to-end" based on a large corpus of human-human dialogues, potentially supplementedwith other information.

Human visual recognition of activities or external agents involves an interplay between high-level plan recognition and low-level perception. Given that, a natural question to ask is: can low-level perception be improved by high-level plan recognition? We formulate the problem of leveraging recognized plans to generate better top-down attention maps \cite{gazzaniga2009,baluch2011} to improve the perception performance. We call these top-down attention maps specifically as plan-recognition-driven attention maps. To address this problem, we introduce the Pixel Dynamics Network. Pixel Dynamics Network serves as an observation model, which predicts next states of object points at each pixel location given observation of pixels and pixel-level action feature. This is like internally learning a pixel-level dynamics model. Pixel Dynamics Network is a kind of Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet), with specially-designed architecture. Therefore, Pixel Dynamics Network could take the advantage of parallel computation of ConvNets, while learning the pixel-level dynamics model. We further prove the equivalence between Pixel Dynamics Network as an observation model, and the belief update in partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) framework. We evaluate our Pixel Dynamics Network in event recognition tasks. We build an event recognition system, ER-PRN, which takes Pixel Dynamics Network as a subroutine, to recognize events based on observations augmented by plan-recognition-driven attention.

Recent advances in visual activity recognition have raised the possibility of applications such as automated video surveillance. Effective approaches for such problems however require the ability to recognize the plans of agents from video information. Although traditional plan recognition algorithms depend on access to sophisticated planning domain models, one recent promising direction involves learning approximated (or shallow) domain models directly from the observed activity sequences DUP. One limitation is that such approaches expect observed action sequences as inputs. In many cases involving vision/sensing from raw data, there is considerable uncertainty about the specific action at any given time point. The most we can expect in such cases is probabilistic information about the action at that point. The input will then be sequences of such observed action distributions. In this work, we address the problem of constructing an effective data-interface that allows a plan recognition module to directly handle such observation distributions. Such an interface works like a bridge between the low-level perception module, and the high-level plan recognition module. We propose two approaches. The first involves resampling the distribution sequences to single action sequences, from which we could learn an action affinity model based on learned action (word) embeddings for plan recognition. The second is to directly learn action distribution embeddings by our proposed Distr2vec (distribution to vector) model, to construct an affinity model for plan recognition.

There is huge demand for robots to work alongside humans in heterogeneous teams. To achieve a high degree of fluidity, robots must be able to (1) recognize their human co-worker's intent, and (2) adapt to this intent accordingly, providing useful aid as a teammate. The literature to date has made great progress in these two areas -- recognition and adaptation -- but largely as separate research activities. In this work, we present a unified approach to these two problems, in which recognition and adaptation occur concurrently and holistically within the same framework. We introduce Pike, an executive for human-robot teams, that allows the robot to continuously and concurrently reason about what a human is doing as execution proceeds, as well as adapt appropriately. The result is a mixed-initiative execution where humans and robots interact fluidly to complete task goals.Key to our approach is our task model: a contingent, temporally-flexible team-plan with explicit choices for both the human and robot. This allows a single set of algorithms to find implicit constraints between sets of choices for the human and robot (as determined via causal link analysis and temporal reasoning), narrowing the possible decisions a rational human would take (hence achieving intent recognition) as well as the possible actions a robot could consistently take (hence achieving adaptation). Pike makes choices based on the preconditions of actions in the plan, temporal constraints, unanticipated disturbances, and choices made previously (by either agent).Innovations of this work include (1) a framework for concurrent intent recognition and adaptation for contingent, temporally-flexible plans, (2) the generalization of causal links for contingent, temporally-flexible plans along with related extraction algorithms, and (3) extensions to a state-of-the-art dynamic execution system to utilize these causal links for decision making.

Recent approaches to goal recognition have progressively relaxed the assumptions about the amount and correctness of domain knowledge and available observations, yielding accurate and efficient algorithms. These approaches, however, assume completeness and correctness of the domain theory against which their algorithms match observations: this is too strong for most real-world domains. In this paper, we develop goal recognition techniques that are capable of recognizing goals using \textit{incomplete} (and possibly incorrect) domain theories. We show the efficiency and accuracy of our approaches empirically against a large dataset of goal and plan recognition problems with incomplete domains.