A Fast Goal Recognition Technique Based on Interaction Estimates

Goal Recognition is the task of inferring an actor's goals given some or all of the actor's observed actions. There is considerable interest in Goal Recognition for use in intelligent personal assistants, smart environments, intelligent tutoring systems, and monitoring user's needs. In much of this work, the actor's observed actions are compared against a generated library of plans. Recent work by Ramirez and Geffner makes use of AI planning to determine how closely a sequence of observed actions matches plans for each possible goal. For each goal, this is done by comparing the cost of a plan for that goal with the cost of a plan for that goal that includes the observed actions. This approach yields useful rankings, but is impractical for real-time goal recognition in large domains because of the computational expense of constructing plans for each possible goal. In this paper, we introduce an approach that propagates cost and interaction information in a plan graph, and uses this information to estimate goal probabilities. We show that this approach is much faster, but still yields high quality results.