Towards Empathetic Planning and Plan Recognition

Abstract

Every compassionate and functioning society requires its members to have a capacity to adopt others' perspectives. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are given increasingly sensitive and impactful roles in society, it is important to enable AI to wield empathy as a tool to benefit those it interacts with. In this paper, we work towards this goal by bringing together a number of important concepts: empathy, AI planning, and plan recognition (i.e., the problem of inferring an actor's plan and goal given observations about its behavior). We formalize the notions of Empathetic Planning and Empathetic Plan Recognition which are informed by the beliefs and affective state of the actor, and propose AI planning-based computational approaches. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by conducting a study with human participants.