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EAGER: Planning Believable Narratives by Modeling Agent Beliefs

EAGER：通过建模代理信念规划可信的叙述

基本信息

批准号：
1647427
负责人：
Stephen Ware
金额：
$ 15.7万
依托单位：
University of New Orleans
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2016
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2016-08-01 至 2019-07-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1647427&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
EAGER Planning Believable Narratives Modeling

项目摘要

The goal of this project is to improve the software that generates stories automatically for virtual environments like training simulations and educational games. Specifically, the software will be able to reason about what is actually true, what each character thinks is true, what they think others think is true, and so on, to improve the way virtual characters act and make them seem more believable and more human. Current approaches to designing these narratives often assume agents know everything about others' beliefs and goals; this often leads to inconsistent or un-believable behaviors by the agents, which damage the credibility of the software and quality of the experience for their human users. The proposal will extend the lead researcher's existing narrative planning system, using an approach that lets agents consider multiple sets of beliefs that are consistent with their own and others' actions so far, ruling out situations where agents have beliefs that are inconsistent with their actions. Compared to existing approaches, this should allow the narrative planner to generate a wider variety of narratives that are also more believable to humans, as well as to handle situations such as trickery and uncertainty where reasoning about beliefs is crucial. The research team will test the software and these assumptions through several experiments that ask people to compare narratives generated by the new software to those generated by state of the art methods. If successful, the project sets the stage to improve the quality of systems where virtual agents interact with humans such as smart phone assistants, online games, automated customer chat tools, and educational software. In particular, the work will lead to training scenarios where understanding others' beliefs is crucial, such as officer-citizen interactions. The work is also interdisciplinary, ranging from computer science to psychology, and the lead researcher is committed to training young researchers to do work that crosses these intellectual boundaries and to recruiting researchers who might not otherwise participate in computer science-related research.In the work, the lead researcher proposes to develop a model of agent belief based on doxastic modal logic and possible worlds reasoning suitable for use in a planning algorithm that coordinates a virtual environment. By supporting a single modal 'believes' predicate, the planner can treat the narrative search space as a Kripke structure to reason about epistemically accessible states. This improves on previous models by allowing arbitrarily nested beliefs while simultaneously reducing the burden on the virtual environment's author to write alternative scenarios, thus increasing their flexibility and expressiveness. The research team will integrate this model of beliefs into a prototype system based on the Glaive narrative planner previously developed by the lead researcher. This prototype will take advantage of Glaive's existing heuristic-driven state-space search techniques: in addition to expanding temporally accessible states, Glaive will also expand epistemically accessible states and track when an action taken by an epistemic child can be anticipated by its epistemic parent in the Kripke structure. The initial prototype will be too slow for real-time use, but it will be suitable for conducting the proposed experiments that investigate to what extent such a model improves the believability of agent behavior in automatically generated stories. In particular, the team will study whether the planner produces narratives whose structure better meets the expectations of a human audience: that is, the model will answer questions about agent beliefs more similarly to a human audience and the resulting planner will generate stories more like those composed by human authors. Further, the prototype is expected to solve certain narrative planning problems which algorithms that lack a model of agent beliefs cannot solve. These claims will be evaluated by having the new prototype and two state-of-the-art planners generate narratives for a library of scenarios to be developed by the team that rely on agents having a theory of mind for other agents, then asking both the systems and human users a number of questions about the generated narrative and agents' beliefs to evaluate how well the planners' output conforms with humans' expectations and believability.

这个项目的目标是改进软件，自动生成故事的虚拟环境，如培训模拟和教育游戏。具体来说，该软件将能够推理什么是真实的，每个角色认为什么是真实的，他们认为其他人认为什么是真实的，等等，以改善虚拟角色的行为方式，使他们看起来更可信，更人性化。目前设计这些叙述的方法通常假设代理知道关于其他人的信仰和目标的一切;这通常会导致代理的不一致或令人难以置信的行为，这会损害软件的可信度和人类用户的体验质量。该提案将扩展首席研究员现有的叙事规划系统，使用一种方法，让代理人考虑与自己和他人行为一致的多组信念，排除代理人具有与其行为不一致的信念的情况。与现有的方法相比，这应该允许叙事计划者生成更广泛的叙事，这些叙事对人类来说也更可信，以及处理诸如欺骗和不确定性等情况，其中对信念的推理至关重要。研究小组将通过几个实验来测试软件和这些假设，这些实验要求人们将新软件生成的叙述与最先进的方法生成的叙述进行比较。如果成功，该项目将为提高虚拟代理与人类交互的系统质量奠定基础，例如智能手机助理，在线游戏，自动客户聊天工具和教育软件。特别是，这项工作将导致培训场景，其中了解他人的信仰是至关重要的，如官员与公民的互动。这项工作也是跨学科的，从计算机科学到心理学都有，首席研究员致力于培训年轻的研究人员去做跨越这些智力界限的工作，并招募那些原本可能不会参与计算机科学相关研究的研究人员在工作中研究者提出了一种基于doxastic模态逻辑和可能世界推理的智能体信念模型，该模型适用于规划协调虚拟环境的算法。通过支持一个单一的模态“相信”谓词，规划者可以把叙事搜索空间作为一个克里普克结构来推理认知上可及的状态。这改进了以前的模型，允许任意嵌套的信念，同时减少了虚拟环境的作者编写替代方案的负担，从而增加了它们的灵活性和表现力。研究小组将把这个信念模型整合到一个原型系统中，这个原型系统是基于首席研究员之前开发的Glaive叙事计划器。该原型将利用Glaive现有的认知驱动的状态空间搜索技术：除了扩展暂时可访问的状态外，Glaive还将扩展认知可访问的状态，并跟踪何时由认知儿童采取的行动可以由其认知父母在Kripke结构中预期。最初的原型对于实时使用来说太慢了，但它将适合进行拟议的实验，研究这种模型在多大程度上提高了自动生成的故事中代理行为的可信度。特别是，该团队将研究规划者是否会产生结构更好地满足人类观众期望的叙事：也就是说，该模型将回答有关代理人信念的问题，更类似于人类观众，并且由此产生的规划者将生成更像人类作者撰写的故事。此外，原型预计将解决某些叙事规划问题，缺乏代理信念模型的算法无法解决。这些声明将通过以下方式进行评估：让新原型和两个最先进的规划者为团队开发的场景库生成叙述，这些场景库依赖于具有其他代理的心理理论的代理，然后向系统和人类用户询问一些关于生成的叙述和代理的信念的问题，以评估规划者的输出是否符合人类的期望和可信度。