Incorporating helpful behavior into collaborative planning

This paper considers the design of agent strategies for deciding whether to help other members of a group with whom an agent is engaged in a collaborative activity. Three characteristics of collaborative planning must be addressed by these decision-making strategies: agents may have only partial information about their partners’ plans for sub-tasks of the collaborative activity; the effectiveness of helping may not be known a priori; and, helping actions have some associated cost. The paper proposes a novel probabilistic representation of other agents’ beliefs about the recipes selected for their own or for the group activity, given partial information. This representation is compact, and thus makes reasoning about helpful behavior tractable. The paper presents a decision-theoretic mechanism that uses this representation to make decisions about two kinds of helpful actions: communicating information relevant to a partner’s plans for some sub-action, and adding domain actions th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Ece Kamar, Ya'akov Gal, Barbara J. Grosz
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ATAL 2009, Collaborative Activity, Helpful Actions, Helpful Behavior