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We study the problem of analyzing the effects of inconsistencies in perception, intent prediction, and decision making among interacting agents. When accounting for these effects, planning is akin to synthesizing policies in uncertain and potentially partially-observable environments. We consider the case where each agent, in an effort to avoid a difficult planning problem, does not consider the inconsistencies with other agents when computing its policy. In particular, each agent assumes that other agents compute their policies in the same way as it does, i.e., with the same objective and based on the same system model. While finding policies on the composed system model, which accounts for the agent interactions, scales exponentially, we efficiently provide quantifiable performance metrics in the form of deltas in the probability of satisfying a given specification. We showcase our approach using two realistic autonomous vehicle case-studies and implement it in an autonomous vehicle simulator.
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Analyzing Intentional Behavior in Autonomous Agents under Uncertainty
Principled accountability for autonomous decision-making in uncertain environments requires distinguishing intentional outcomes from negligent designs from actual accidents. We propose analyzing the behavior of autonomous agents through a quantitative measure of the evidence of intentional behavior. We model an uncertain environment as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). For a given scenario, we rely on probabilistic model checking to compute the ability of the agent to influence reaching a certain event. We call this the scope of agency. We say that there is evidence of intentional behavior if the scope of agency is high and the decisions of the agent are close to being optimal for reaching the event. Our method applies counterfactual reasoning to automatically generate relevant scenarios that can be analyzed to increase the confidence of our assessment. In a case study, we show how our method can distinguish between 'intentional' and 'accidental' traffic collisions.
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- PAR ID:
- 10476026
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-1-956792-03-4
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 372 to 381
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Macau, SAR China
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/42
