There is a growing interest within the AI research community to develop autonomous systems capable of explaining their behavior to users. One aspect of the explanation generation problem that has yet to receive much attention is the task of explaining plans to users whose level of expertise differ from that of the explainer. We propose an approach for addressing this problem by representing the user's model as an abstraction of the domain model that the planner uses. We present algorithms for generating minimal explanations in cases where this abstract human model is not known. We reduce the problem of generating explanation to a search over the space of abstract models and investigate possible greedy approximations for minimal explanations. We also empirically show that our approach can efficiently compute explanations for a variety of problems.
There is increasing interest within the automated planning community to solve the problem of generating explanations for plans ( @cite_11 ). Earlier works like @cite_19 @cite_22 @cite_2 looked at explanations as a way of describing the effects of plans, while works like @cite_4 @cite_21 looked at plans itself as explanations for a set of observations. Another approach that has received a lot of interest recently is to view explanations as a way of achieving model reconciliation @cite_20 . Such explanations are referred to as MRP explanations and this approach postulates that the goal of an explanation is to update the model of the observer so they can correctly evaluate the plans in question.
@cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_21 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_20 @cite_11
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When AI systems interact with humans in the loop, they are often called on to provide explanations for their plans and behavior. Past work on plan explanations primarily involved the AI system explaining the correctness of its plan and the rationale for its decision in terms of its own model. Such soliloquy is wholly inadequate in most realistic scenarios where the humans have domain and task models that differ significantly from that used by the AI system. We posit that the explanations are best studied in light of these differing models. In particular, we show how explanation can be seen as a "model reconciliation problem" (MRP), where the AI system in effect suggests changes to the human's model, so as to make its plan be optimal with respect to that changed human model. We will study the properties of such explanations, present algorithms for automatically computing them, and evaluate the performance of the algorithms. Human users who execute an automatically generated plan want to understand the rationale behind it. Knowledge-rich plans are particularly suitable for this purpose, because they provide the means to give reason for causal, temporal, and hierarchical relationships between actions. Based on this information, focused arguments can be generated that constitute explanations on an appropriate level of abstraction. In this paper, we present a formal approach to plan explanation. Information about plans is represented as first-order logic formulae and explanations are constructed as proofs in the resulting axiomatic system. With that, plan explanations are provably correct w.r.t. the planning system that produced the plan. A prototype plan explanation system implements our approach and first experiments give evidence that finding plan explanations is feasible in real-time. Abstract We argue that the problem of plan recognition, inferring an agent's plan from observations, is largely a problem of inference under conditions of uncertainty. We present an approach to the plan recognition problem that is based on Bayesian probability theory. In attempting to solve a plan recognition problem we first retrieve candidate explanations. These explanations (sometimes only the most promising ones) are assembled into a plan recognition Bayesian network , which is a representation of a probability distribution over the set of possible explanations. We perform Bayesian updating to choose the most likely interpretation for the set of observed actions. This approach has been implemented in the Wimp3 system for natural language story understanding. In this paper we examine the general problem of generating preferred explanations for observed behavior with respect to a model of the behavior of a dynamical system. This problem arises in a diversity of applications including diagnosis of dynamical systems and activity recognition. We provide a logical characterization of the notion of an explanation. To generate explanations we identify and exploit a correspondence between explanation generation and planning. The determination of good explanations requires additional domain-specific knowledge which we represent as preferences over explanations. The nature of explanations requires us to formulate preferences in a somewhat retrodictive fashion by utilizing Past Linear Temporal Logic. We propose methods for exploiting these somewhat unique preferences effectively within state-of-the-art planners and illustrate the feasibility of generating (preferred) explanations via planning.