The AAAI-18 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. Workshops were held Sunday and Monday, February 2–7, 2018, at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. This report contains summaries of the Affective Content Analysis workshop; the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments; the AI and Marketing Science workshop; the Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security workshop; the AI for Imperfect-Information Games; the Declarative Learning Based Programming workshop; the Engineering Dependable and Secure Machine Learning Systems workshop; the Health Intelligence workshop; the Knowledge Extraction from Games workshop; the Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition workshop; the Planning and Inference workshop; the Preference Handling workshop; the Reasoning and Learning for Human-Machine Dialogues workshop; and the the AI Enhanced Internet of Things Data Processing for Intelligent Applications workshop.

It is well known that the problems of stochastic planning and probabilistic inference are closely related. This paper makes several contributions in this context for factored spaces where the complexity of solutions is challenging. First, we analyze the recently developed SOGBOFA heuristic, which performs stochastic planning by building an explicit computation graph capturing an approximate aggregate simulation of the dynamics. It is shown that the values computed by this algorithm are identical to the approximation provided by Belief Propagation (BP). Second, as a consequence of this observation, we show how ideas on lifted BP can be used to develop a lifted version of SOGBOFA. Unlike implementations of lifted BP, Lifted SOGBOFA has a very simple implementation as a dynamic programming version of the original graph construction. Third, we show that the idea of graph construction for aggregate simulation can be used to solve marginal MAP (MMAP) problems in Bayesian networks, where MAP variables are constrained to be at roots of the network. This yields a novel algorithm for MMAP for this subclass. An experimental evaluation illustrates the advantage of Lifted SOGBOFA for planning.

Intelligent robots frequently need to explore the objects in their working environments. Modern sensors have enabled robots to learn object properties via perception of multiple modalities. However, object exploration in the real world poses a challenging trade-off between information gains and exploration action costs. Mixed observability Markov decision process (MOMDP) is a framework for planning under uncertainty, while accounting for both fully and partially observable components of the state. Robot perception frequently has to face such mixed observability. This work enables a robot equipped with an arm to dynamically construct query-oriented MOMDPs for object exploration. The robot’s behavioral policy is learned from two datasets collected using real robots. Our approach enables a robot to explore object properties in a way that is significantly faster while improving accuracies in comparison to existing methods that rely on hand-coded exploration strategies.

A major goal of grounded language learning research is to enable robots to connect language predicates to a robot's physical interactive perception of the world. Coupling object exploratory behaviors such as grasping, lifting, and looking with multiple sensory modalities (e.g., audio, haptics, and vision) enables a robot to ground non-visual words like ``heavy'' as well as visual words like ``red''. A major limitation of existing approaches to multi-modal language grounding is that a robot has to exhaustively explore training objects with a variety of actions when learning a new such language predicate. This paper proposes a method for guiding a robot's behavioral exploration policy when learning a novel predicate based on known grounded predicates and the novel predicate's linguistic relationship to them. We demonstrate our approach on two datasets in which a robot explored large sets of objects and was tasked with learning to recognize whether novel words applied to those objects.

Artificial agents will need to be aware of human moral and social norms, and able to use them in decision-making. In particular, artificial agents will need a principled approach to managing conflicting norms, which are common in human social interactions. Existing logic-based approaches suffer from normative explosion and are typically designed for deterministic environments; reward-based approaches lack principled ways of determining which normative alternatives exist in a given environment. We propose a hybrid approach, using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), that manages norm conflicts in a systematic manner while accommodating domain stochasticity. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation in a simulated vacuum cleaning domain.

The Case for Explicit Ethical Agents

The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was among their designers and make sensitive determinations a handful of visionaries who anticipated the ethical about what should be done (for example, when ethical challenges of deploying autonomous robots in principles are in conflict, they can attempt to human societies. For contexts where (Asimov 1942) were specifically designed to enable informing others of one's intention and reasoning is robots to operate safely in human physical and social crucial, these agents could then also express their reasoning environments, for these laws specify the fundamental in natural language. The key question then is societal obligations any robot has, in order of priority: whether we need such explicit ethical agents or (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, whether current implicit ethical agents are sufficient. Rather, all of the ethical its own existence as long as such protection does not behaviors in such agents will be the result of the conflict with the First or Second Law. Explicit ethical agents, on arise from attempts to apply the laws in different the other hand, will require special representations as well as inference schemes in the cognitive system morally charged situations.

The ability to refer to entities such as objects, locations, and people is an important capability for robots designed to interact with humans. For example, a referring expression (RE) such as “Do you mean the box on the left?” might be used by a robot seeking to disambiguate between objects. In this paper, we present and evaluate algorithms for Referring Expression Generation (REG) in small-scale situated contexts. We first present data regarding how humans generate small-scale spatial referring expressions (REs). We then use this data to define five categories of observed small-scale spatial REs, and use these categories to create an ensemble of REG algorithms. Next, we evaluate REs generated by those algorithms and by humans both subjectively (by having participants rank REs), and objectively, (by assessing task performance when participants use REs) through a set of interrelated crowdsourced experiments. While our machine generated REs were subjectively rated lower than those generated by humans, they objectively significantly outperformed human REs. Finally, we discuss the main contributions of this work: (1) a dataset of images and REs, (2) a categorization of observed small-scale spatial REs, (3) an ensemble of REG algorithms, and (4) a crowdsourcing-based framework for subjectively and objectively evaluating REG.

Reports on the 2016 AAAI Fall Symposium Series

The AAAI 2016 Fall Symposium Series was held Thursday through Saturday, November 17–19, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia adjacent to Washington, DC. The titles of the six symposia were Accelerating Science: A Grand Challenge for AI; Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Cross-Disciplinary Challenges for Autonomous Systems, Privacy and Language Technologies, Shared Autonomy in Research and Practice. The highlights of each (except Acceleration Science) symposium are presented in this report.