Resolving Misconceptions about the Plans of Agents via Theory of Mind

Abstract

For a plan to achieve some goal -- to be valid -- a set of sufficient and necessary conditions must hold. In dynamic settings, agents (including humans) may come to hold false beliefs about these conditions and, by extension, about the validity of their plans or the plans of other agents. Since different agents often believe different things about the world and about the beliefs of other agents, discrepancies may occur between agents' beliefs about the validity of plans. In this work, we explore how agents can use their Theory of Mind to resolve such discrepancies by communicating and/or acting in the environment. We appeal to an epistemic logic framework to allow agents to reason over other agents' nested beliefs, and demonstrate how epistemic planning tools can be used to resolve discrepancies regarding plan validity in a number of domains. Our work shows promise for human decision support as demonstrated by a user study that showcases the ability of our approach to resolve misconceptions held by humans.