Douglas S. Lange

Theresa Chadwick, James Chao, Christianne Izumigawa et al.

A critical factor in utilizing agents with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is their robustness to novelty. AI agents include models that are either engineered or trained. Engineered models include knowledge of those aspects of the environment that are known and considered important by the engineers. Learned models form embeddings of aspects of the environment based on connections made through the training data. In operation, however, a rich environment is likely to present challenges not seen in training sets or accounted for in engineered models. Worse still, adversarial environments are subject to change by opponents. A program at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) seeks to develop the science necessary to develop and evaluate agents that are robust to novelty. This capability will be required, before AI has the role envisioned within mission critical environments. As part of the Science of AI and Learning for Open-world Novelty (SAIL-ON), we are mapping possible military domain novelty types to a domain-independent ontology developed as part of a theory of novelty. Characterizing the possible space of novelty mathematically and ontologically will allow us to experiment with agent designs that are coming from the DARPA SAIL-ON program in relevant military environments. Utilizing the same techniques as being used in laboratory experiments, we will be able to measure agent ability to detect, characterize, and accommodate novelty.

James Chao, Wiktor Piotrowski, Roni Stern et al.

Autonomous agents operating within real-world environments often rely on automated planners to ascertain optimal actions towards desired goals or the optimization of a specified objective function. Integral to these agents are common architectural components such as schedulers, tasked with determining the timing for executing planned actions, and execution engines, responsible for carrying out these scheduled actions while monitoring their outcomes. We address the significant challenge that arises when unexpected phenomena, termed \textit{novelties}, emerge within the environment, altering its fundamental characteristics, composition, and dynamics. This challenge is inherent in all deployed real-world applications and may manifest suddenly and without prior notice or explanation. The introduction of novelties into the environment can lead to inaccuracies within the planner's internal model, rendering previously generated plans obsolete. Recent research introduced agent design aimed at detecting and adapting to such novelties. However, these designs lack consideration for action scheduling in continuous time-space, coordination of concurrent actions by multiple agents, or memory-based novelty accommodation. Additionally, the application has been primarily demonstrated in lower fidelity environments. In our study, we propose a general purpose AI agent framework designed to detect, characterize, and adapt to novelties in highly noisy, complex, and stochastic environments that support concurrent actions and external scheduling. We showcase the efficacy of our agent through experimentation within a high-fidelity simulator for realistic military scenarios.