Towards Empathetic Planning
This work addresses the challenge of improving human-AI interaction through empathy, which is incremental as it builds on existing concepts in AI planning and logic.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling AI systems to interact empathetically with humans by formalizing Empathetic Planning, which incorporates the beliefs and affective states of the empathizee, and proposes computational approaches using AI planning and epistemic logic. The result includes a study evaluating participants' perceptions of the agent's empathetic and assistive capabilities.
Critical to successful human interaction is a capacity for empathy - the ability to understand and share the thoughts and feelings of another. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly required to interact with humans in a myriad of settings, it is important to enable AI to wield empathy as a tool to benefit those it interacts with. In this paper, we work towards this goal by bringing together a number of important concepts: empathy, AI planning, and reasoning in the presence of knowledge and belief. We formalize the notion of Empathetic Planning which is informed by the beliefs and affective state of the empathizee. We appeal to an epistemic logic framework to represent the beliefs of the empathizee and propose AI planning-based computational approaches to compute empathetic solutions. We illustrate the potential benefits of our approach by conducting a study where we evaluate participants' perceptions of the agent's empathetic abilities and assistive capabilities.