Sci-fi narratives permeating the collective consciousness endow AI Rebellion with ample negative connotations. However, for AI agents, as for humans, attitudes of protest, objection, and rejection have many potential benefits in support of ethics, safety, self-actualization, solidarity, and social justice, and are necessary in a wide variety of contexts. We launch a conversation on constructive AI rebellion and describe a framework meant to support discussion, implementation, and deployment of AI Rebel Agents as protagonists of positive narratives.

Heuristics serve as a powerful tool in modern domain-independent planning (DIP) systems by providing critical guidance during the search for high-quality solutions. However, they have not been broadly used with hierarchical planning techniques, which are more expressive and tend to scale better in complex domains by exploiting additional domain-specific knowledge. Complicating matters, we show that for Hierarchical Goal Network (HGN) planning, a goal-based hierarchical planning formalism that we focus on in this paper, any poly-time heuristic that is derived from a delete-relaxation DIP heuristic has to make some relaxation of the hierarchical semantics. To address this, we present a principled framework for incorporating DIP heuristics into HGN planning using a simple relaxation of the HGN semantics we call Hierarchy-Relaxation. This framework allows for computing heuristic estimates of HGN problems using any DIP heuristic in an admissibility-preserving manner. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by using the LMCut heuristic to guide an optimal HGN planner. Our empirical results with three benchmark domains demonstrate that simultaneously leveraging hierarchical knowledge and heuristic guidance substantially improves planning performance.

Human attitudes of objection, protest, and rebellion have undeniable potential to bring about social benefits, from social justice to healthy balance in relationships. At times, they can even be argued to be ethically obligatory. Conversely, AI rebellion is largely seen as a dangerous, destructive prospect. With the increase of interest in collaborative human/AI environments in which synthetic agents play social roles or, at least, exhibit behavior with social and ethical implications, we believe that AI rebellion could have benefits similar to those of its counterpart in humans. We introduce a framework meant to help categorize and design Rebel Agents, discuss their social and ethical implications, and assess their potential benefits and the risks they may pose. We also present AI rebellion scenarios in two considerably different contexts (military unmanned vehicles and computational social creativity) that exemplify components of the framework.

In goal recognition, the basic problem domain consists of the following: Recent advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have brought a variety of assistive robots designed to help humans - a set E of environment fluents; accomplish their goals. However, many have limited autonomy and lack the ability to seamlessly integrate with - a state S that is a value assignment to those fluents; human teams. One capability that can facilitate such humanrobot - a set A of actions that describe potential transitions between teaming is the robot's ability to recognize its teammates' states (with preconditions and effects defined over goals, and react appropriately. This function permits E, and parameterized over a set of environment objects the robot to actively assist the team and avoid performing O); and redundant or counterproductive actions.

We introduce ActorSim, the Actor Simulator, a toolkit for studying situated autonomy. As background, we review three goal-reasoning projects implemented in ActorSim: one project that uses information metrics in foreign disaster relief and two projects that learn subgoal selection for sequential decision making in Minecraft. We then discuss how ActorSim can be used to address cross-disciplinary gaps in several ongoing projects. To varying degrees, the projects integrate concerns within distinct specializations of AI and between AI and other more human-focused disciplines. These areas include automated planning, learning, cognitive architectures, robotics, cognitive modeling, sociology, and psychology.

Temporal logics have been used in autonomous planningto represent and reason about temporal planning problems.However, such techniques have typically been restricted toeither (1) representing actions, events, and goals with temporalproperties or (2) planning for temporally-extended goalsunder restrictive conditions of classical planning. We introduceMixed Propositional Metric Temporal Logic (MPMTL),where formulae in MPMTL are built over mixed binary andcontinuous real variables. MPMTL provides a natural, flexibleformalism for representing and reasoning about temporalproblems. We analyze the complexity of MPMTL formulaesatisfiability and model checking, and identify MPMTLfragments with lower complexity. We also introduce an approachto world modeling using a timeline vector, relevant totemporal planning with continuous change (as opposed to theuse of discrete states). Our model supports retroactive actionprogression, concurrent and overlapping actions with discreteand continuous changes, and concurrent effects to the samevariable. For reasoning about this temporal planning problem,we define a progression function for actions with thenew temporal properties and a solution to this temporal task.

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning with Task Insertion (TIHTN planning) is a formalism that hybridizes classical planning with HTN planning by allowing the insertion of operators from outside the method hierarchy. This additional capability has some practical benefits, such as allowing more flexibility for design choices of HTN models: the task hierarchy may be specified only partially, since "missing required tasks" may be inserted during planning rather than prior planning by means of the (predefined) HTN methods. While task insertion in a hierarchical planning setting has already been applied in practice, its theoretical properties have not been studied in detail, yet — only EXPSPACE membership is known so far. We lower that bound proving NEXPTIME-completeness and further prove tight complexity bounds along two axes: whether variables are allowed in method and action schemas, and whether methods must be totally ordered. We also introduce a new planning technique called acyclic progression, which we use to define provably efficient TIHTN planning algorithms.

Robots can be added to human teams to provide improved capabilities or to perform tasks that humans are unsuited for. However, in order to get the full benefit of the robots the human teammates must use the robots in the appropriate situations. If the humans do not trust the robots, they may underutilize them or disuse them which could result in a failure to achieve team goals. We present a robot that is able to estimate its trustworthiness and adapt its behavior accordingly. This technique helps the robot remain trustworthy even when changes in context, task or teammates are possible.

Agents with incomplete environment models are likely to be surprised, and this represents an opportunity to learn. We investigate approaches for situated agents to detect surprises, discriminate among different forms of surprise, and hypothesize new models for the unknown events that surprised them. We instantiate these approaches in a new goal reasoning agent (named FoolMeTwice), investigate its performance in simulation studies, and report that it produces plans with significantly reduced execution cost in comparison to not learning models for surprising events.

Most computational models of analogy assume they are given a delineated source domain and often a specified target domain. These systems do not address how analogs can be isolated from large domains and spontaneously retrieved from long-term memory, a process we call spontaneous analogy. We present a system that represents relational structures as feature bags. Using this representation, our system leverages perceptual algorithms to automatically create an ontology of relational structures and to efficiently retrieve analogs for new relational structures from long-term memory. We provide a demonstration of our approach that takes a set of unsegmented stories, constructs an ontology of analogical schemas (corresponding to plot devices), and uses this ontology to efficiently find analogs within new stories, yielding significant time-savings over linear analog retrieval at a small accuracy cost.