Goal or intent recognition, where one agent recognizes the goals or intentions of another, can be a powerful tool for effective teamwork and improving interaction between agents. Such reasoning can be challenging to perform, however, because observations of an agent can be unreliable and, often, an agent does not have access to the reasoning processes and mental models of the other agent. Despite this difficulty, recent work has made great strides in addressing these challenges.

In particular, two Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches to goal recognition have recently been shown to perform well: goal recognition as planning, which reduces a goal recognition problem to the problem of plan generation; and Combinatory Categorical Grammars (CCGs), which treat goal recognition as a parsing problem. Additionally, new advances in cognitive science with respect to Theory of Mind reasoning have yielded an approach to goal recognition that leverages analogy in its decision making.

However, there is still much unknown about the potential and limitations of these approaches, especially with respect to one another. Here, we explore this space and compare three state-of-the-art approaches to goal recognition along two different axes: reliability of observations and inspectability of the other agent’s mental model. Overall, we show that no approach dominates across all cases and discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. Scientists interested in goal recognition problems can use this knowledge as a guide to select the correct starting point for their specific domains and tasks.

 Research Topic: Advances in Goal, Plan and Activity Recognition