Robert Kasumba

Robert Kasumba, Dennis Barbour, Chien-Ju Ho

Adaptive systems often need to make task-specific decisions about people from limited evidence: a tutor may need to anticipate how a learner will approach a new problem, a game may need to adapt when a player enters a new level, and a human-AI system may need to infer whether a partner will persist with a plan or switch goals. These decisions depend on person-level tendencies that shape how people solve related tasks, but such tendencies are difficult to infer from standard behavioral evidence. One approach is to use aggregate outcome summaries, such as scores, completion rates, or productivity; these summaries are compact and available across tasks, but can collapse distinct behavioral processes into similar outcomes. Another approach is to use process-level traces, which record how behavior unfolds; however, process modeling within one task can entangle stable person-level tendencies with task-specific layout and affordances. In this work, we study early cross-task behavioral inference: whether partial source-task process traces can reveal transferable person-level structure that predicts strategy in a held-out target task. We introduce a Process-Level Latent Variable Model (PLVM), which encodes task-specific traces and fuses them into a shared person-level latent representation for cross-task prediction. In PowerWash Simulator, a naturalistic telemetry dataset of human gameplay, PLVM uses partial traces from two cleaning tasks to predict locally persistent Zone Planner behavior versus frequent Zone Hopper behavior in the held-out Fire Station level. Controlled simulations with known latent types show that cross-task fusion helps when source tasks reveal complementary dimensions of a shared latent process. These results suggest that process-level cross-task modeling can support early prediction of target-task strategy when observing sufficient target-task behavior is impractical.

Robert Kasumba, Guanghui Yu, Chien-Ju Ho et al.

Goal recognition design (GRD) aims to make limited modifications to decision-making environments to make it easier to infer the goals of agents acting within those environments. Although various research efforts have been made in goal recognition design, existing approaches are computationally demanding and often assume that agents are (near-)optimal in their decision-making. To address these limitations, we leverage machine learning methods for goal recognition design that can both improve run-time efficiency and account for agents with general behavioral models. Following existing literature, we use worst-case distinctiveness (wcd) as a measure of the difficulty in inferring the goal of an agent in a decision-making environment. Our approach begins by training a machine learning model to predict the wcd for a given environment and the agent behavior model. We then propose a gradient-based optimization framework that accommodates various constraints to optimize decision-making environments for enhanced goal recognition. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods in reducing wcd and enhances runtime efficiency. Moreover, our approach also adapts to settings in which existing approaches do not apply, such as those involving flexible budget constraints, more complex environments, and suboptimal agent behavior. Finally, we conducted human-subject experiments that demonstrate that our method creates environments that facilitate efficient goal recognition from human decision-makers.

Robert Kasumba, Dom CP Marticorena, Anja Pahor et al.

Cognitive modeling commonly relies on asking participants to complete a battery of varied tests in order to estimate attention, working memory, and other latent variables. In many cases, these tests result in highly variable observation models. A near-ubiquitous approach is to repeat many observations for each test independently, resulting in a distribution over the outcomes from each test given to each subject. Latent variable models (LVMs), if employed, are only added after data collection. In this paper, we explore the usage of LVMs to enable learning across many correlated variables simultaneously. We extend LVMs to the setting where observed data for each subject are a series of observations from many different distributions, rather than simple vectors to be reconstructed. By embedding test battery results for individuals in a latent space that is trained jointly across a population, we can leverage correlations both between disparate test data for a single participant and between multiple participants. We then propose an active learning framework that leverages this model to conduct more efficient cognitive test batteries. We validate our approach by demonstrating with real-time data acquisition that it performs comparably to conventional methods in making item-level predictions with fewer test items.

Robert Kasumba, Zeyu Lu, Dom CP Marticorena et al.

This study uses controlled simulations with known ground-truth parameters to evaluate how Distributional Latent Variable Models (DLVM) and Bayesian Distributional Active LEarning (DALE) perform in comparison to conventional Independent Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE). DLVM integrates observations across multiple executive function tasks and individuals, allowing parameter estimation even under sparse or incomplete data conditions. DLVM consistently outperformed IMLE, especially under with smaller amounts of data, and converges faster to highly accurate estimates of the true distributions. In a second set of analyses, DALE adaptively guided sampling to maximize information gain, outperforming random sampling and fixed test batteries, particularly within the first 80 trials. These findings establish the advantages of combining DLVM's cross-task inference with DALE's optimal adaptive sampling, providing a principled basis for more efficient cognitive assessments.

Guanghui Yu, Robert Kasumba, Chien-Ju Ho et al.

To enable effective human-AI collaboration, merely optimizing AI performance without considering human factors is insufficient. Recent research has shown that designing AI agents that take human behavior into account leads to improved performance in human-AI collaboration. However, a limitation of most existing approaches is their assumption that human behavior remains static, regardless of the AI agent's actions. In reality, humans may adjust their actions based on their beliefs about the AI's intentions, specifically, the subtasks they perceive the AI to be attempting to complete based on its behavior. In this paper, we address this limitation by enabling a collaborative AI agent to consider its human partner's beliefs about its intentions, i.e., what the human partner thinks the AI agent is trying to accomplish, and to design its action plan accordingly to facilitate more effective human-AI collaboration. Specifically, we developed a model of human beliefs that captures how humans interpret and reason about their AI partner's intentions. Using this belief model, we created an AI agent that incorporates both human behavior and human beliefs when devising its strategy for interacting with humans. Through extensive real-world human-subject experiments, we demonstrate that our belief model more accurately captures human perceptions of AI intentions. Furthermore, we show that our AI agent, designed to account for human beliefs over its intentions, significantly enhances performance in human-AI collaboration.