Goal Reasoning: Papers from the ACS workshop
Goal Reasoning: Papers from the ACS workshop
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Date
2013-12-14
Authors
Aha, David W.
Cox, Michael T.
Munoz-Avila, Hector
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Abstract
This technical report contains the 11 accepted papers presented at the Workshop on Goal Reasoning,
which was held as part of the 2013 Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS-13) in
Baltimore, Maryland on 14 December 2013. This is the third in a series of workshops related to this
topic, the first of which was the AAAI-10 Workshop on Goal-Directed Autonomy while the second was
the Self-Motivated Agents (SeMoA) Workshop, held at Lehigh University in November 2012.
Our objective for holding this meeting was to encourage researchers to share information on the study,
development, integration, evaluation, and application of techniques related to goal reasoning, which
concerns the ability of an intelligent agent to reason about, formulate, select, and manage its
goals/objectives. Goal reasoning differs from frameworks in which agents are told what goals to
achieve, and possibly how goals can be decomposed into subgoals, but not how to dynamically and
autonomously decide what goals they should pursue. This constraint can be limiting for agents that solve
tasks in complex environments when it is not feasible to manually engineer/encode complete knowledge
of what goal(s) should be pursued for every conceivable state. Yet, in such environments, states can be
reached in which actions can fail, opportunities can arise, and events can otherwise take place that
strongly motivate changing the goal(s) that the agent is currently trying to achieve.
This topic is not new; researchers in several areas have studied goal reasoning (e.g., in the context of
cognitive architectures, automated planning, game AI, and robotics). However, it has infrequently been
the focus of intensive study, and (to our knowledge) no other series of meetings has focused specifically
on goal reasoning. As shown in these papers, providing an agent with the ability to reason about its goals
can increase performance measures for some tasks. Recent advances in hardware and software platforms
(involving the availability of interesting/complex simulators or databases) have increasingly permitted
the application of intelligent agents to tasks that involve partially observable and dynamically-updated
states (e.g., due to unpredictable exogenous events), stochastic actions, multiple (cooperating, neutral, or
adversarial) agents, and other complexities. Thus, this is an appropriate time to foster dialogue among
researchers with interests in goal reasoning.
Research on goal reasoning is still in its early stages; no mature application of it yet exists (e.g., for
controlling autonomous unmanned vehicles or in a deployed decision aid). However, it appears to have a
bright future. For example, leaders in the automated planning community have specifically
acknowledged that goal reasoning has a prominent role among intelligent agents that act on their own
plans, and it is gathering increasing attention from roboticists and cognitive systems researchers.
In addition to a survey, the papers in this workshop relate to, among other topics, cognitive architectures
and models, environment modeling, game AI, machine learning, meta-reasoning, planning, selfmotivated
systems, simulation, and vehicle control. The authors discuss a wide range of issues
pertaining to goal reasoning, including representations and reasoning methods for dynamically revising
goal priorities. We hope that readers will find that this theme for enhancing agent autonomy to be
appealing and relevant to their own interests, and that these papers will spur further investigations on
this important yet (mostly) understudied topic.