Goal Reasoning: Foundations, Emerging Applications, and Prospects

Abstract

Goal reasoning (GR) has a bright future as a foundation for the research and development of intelligent agents. GR is the study of agents that can deliberate on and self-select their goals/objectives, which is a desirable capability for some applications of deliberative autonomy. While studied in diverse AI sub-communities for multiple applications, our group has focused on how GR can play a key role for controlling autonomous systems. Thus, its importance is rapidly growing and it merits increased attention, particularly from the perspective of research on AI safety. In this article, I introduce GR, briefly relate it to other AI topics, summarize some of our group’s work on GR foundations and emerging applications, and describe some current and future research directions.

Beyond subgoaling: A dynamic knowledge generation framework for creative problem solving in cognitive architectures

“…As a second ingredient, we consider a distributed semantics similar to the one of probabilistic DLs known as DISPONTE [43], allowing to label inclusions T(C) D with a real number between 0.5 and 1, representing its degree of belief/probability, assuming that each axiom is independent from each others. Degrees of belief in typicality inclusions allow to define a probability distribution over scenarios: roughly speaking, a scenario is obtained by choosing, for each typicality inclusion, whether it is considered as true or false 2 . In a slight extension of the above example, we could have the need of representing that both the typicality inclusions about athletes and sumo wrestlers have a degree of belief of 80%, whereas we also believe that athletes are usually young with a higher degree of 95%, with the following KB: posed formalization we employ a method inspired by cognitive semantics [18] for the identification of a dominance effect between the concepts to be combined: for every combination, we distinguish a HEAD, representing the stronger element of the combination, and a MODIFIER.…”

“…Goal-directed problem solving is a crucial everyday activity for both natural and artificial systems. A straightforward assumption in goal-directed systems is that, in the cases where a given goal cannot be reached, a replanning strategy is required in order to change the original goal and/or reconfigure the set of actions originally selected to perform that goal [2]. Usually such goal reconfiguration is based on the availability of novel, additional, knowledge that can be then used to select novel sub-goals or novel operations to carry on.…”

Goal Recognition Control under Network Interdiction Using a Privacy Information Metric

“…Goal recognition (GR), also called intention recognition, or more generally plan recognition, is the task of recognizing other agents' goals by analyzing the actions and/or the state (environment) changes caused by the actions [1], which has drawn the interest of researchers in the field of artificial intelligence and psychology for recent decades. Goal reasoning as one variant is the process in which intelligent agents continually reason about the goals they are pursuing [2]. Goal recognition design has been proposed to redesign the environment to facilitate goal recognition offline [3].…”

“…Goal recognition design has been proposed to redesign the environment to facilitate goal recognition offline [3]. As one sub-problem of PAIR (plan activity and intent recognition) [4], goal recognition has been successfully applied to various applications, such as human-machine interaction (HMI) in social settings (home, offices, and hospitals) [5], agent modeling [6], critical infrastructure protection (CIP) [7], and some military applications about reasoning the goals of the terrorists or opponents [2,8]. Unlike manipulating asymmetric information in CIP, goal recognition is widely applied to "human-AI planning (HAIP)" [9], and "explainable planning (XAIP)" [10], where the focus is symmetric information understanding and explicit information sharing respectively.…”

Is Everything Going According to Plan? Expectations in Goal Reasoning Agents

“…Motivated in part by these concerns, there is an increasing interest in goal reasoning, a form of agency where the system formulates its own goals (Aha 2018). For example, agents formulate goals as a reaction to conditions in the environment where the agent is operating.…”