The ability to say "no" in a variety of ways and contexts is an essential part of being socio-cognitively human. Through a variety of examples, we show that, despite ominous portrayals in science fiction, AI agents with human-inspired noncompliance abilities have many potential benefits. Rebel agents are intelligent agents that can oppose goals or plans assigned to them, or the general attitudes or behavior of other agents. They can serve purposes such as ethics, safety, and task execution correctness, and provide or support diverse points of view. We present a framework to help categorize and design rebel agents, discuss their social and ethical implications, and assess their potential benefits and the risks they may pose. In recognition of the fact that, in human psychology, non-compliance has profound socio-cognitive implications, we also explore socio-cognitive dimensions of AI rebellion: social awareness and counternarrative intelligence. This latter term refers to an agent's ability to produce and use alternative narratives that support, express, or justify rebellion, either sincerely or deceptively. We encourage further conversation about AI rebellion within the AI community and beyond, given the inherent interdisciplinarity of the topic.

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.

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.

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.

We study the problem of generating a set of Finite State Machines (FSMs) modeling the behavior of multiple, distinct NPCs. We observe that nondeterministic planning techniques can be used to generate FSMs by following conventions typically used when manually creating FSMs modeling NPC behavior. We implement our ideas in DivNDP, the first algorithm for automated diverse FSM generation.

Non-player character diversity enriches game environments increasing their replay value. We propose a method for obtaining character behavior diversity based on the diversity of plans enacted by characters, and demonstrate this method in a scenario in which characters have multiple choices. Using case-based planning techniques, we reuse plans for varied character behavior, which simulate different personality traits.

Diverse planning consists of generating multiple different solutions for the same planning problem. I explore solution diversity, based on quantitative (domain-independent) and qualitative (domain-dependent) distance metrics, in deterministic and nondeterministic planning domains.

Diversity-aware planning consists of generating multiple plans which, while solving the same problem, are dissimilar from one another. Quantitative plan diversity is domain-independent and does not require extensive knowledge-engineering effort, but can fail to reflect plan differences that are relevant to users. Qualitative plan diversity is based on domain-specific characteristics, thus being of greater practical value, but may require substantial knowledge engineering. We demonstrate a domain-independent diverse plan generation method that is based on customizable plan distance metrics and amenable to both quantitative and qualitative diversity. Qualitative plan diversity is obtained with minimal knowledge-engineering effort, using distance metrics which incorporate domain-specific content.