The Automated Mapping of Plans for Plan Recognition
To coordinate with other agents in its environment, an agent needs models of what the other agents are trying to do. When communication is impossible or expensive, this information must be acquired indirectly via plan recognition. Typical approaches to plan recognition start with a specification of the possible plans the other agents may be following, and develop special techniques for discriminating among the possibilities. Perhaps more desirable would be a uniform procedure for mapping plans to general structures supporting inference based on uncertain and incomplete observations. In this paper, we describe a set of methods for converting plans represented in a flexible procedural language to observation models represented as probabilistic belief networks.
State-space Abstraction for Anytime Evaluation of Probabilistic Networks
One important factor determining the computational complexity of evaluating a probabilistic network is the cardinality of the state spaces of the nodes. By varying the granularity of the state spaces, one can trade off accuracy in the result for computational efficiency. We present an anytime procedure for approximate evaluation of probabilistic networks based on this idea. On application to some simple networks, the procedure exhibits a smooth improvement in approximation quality as computation time increases. This suggests that state-space abstraction is one more useful control parameter for designing real-time probabilistic reasoners.
Inference in cognitive maps
Cognitive mapping is a qualitative decision modeling technique developed over twenty years ago by political scientists, which continues to see occasional use in social science and decision-aiding applications. In this paper, I show how cognitive maps can be viewed in the context of more recent formalisms for qualitative decision modeling, and how the latter provide a firm semantic foundation that can facilitate the development of more powerful inference procedures as well as extensions in expressiveness for models of this sort.
