Learning to Recognize Agent Activities and Intentions

Abstract

Psychological research has demonstrated that subjects shown animations consisting of nothing more than simple geometric shapes perceive the shapes as being alive, having goals and intentions, and even engaging in social activities such as chasing and evading one another. While the subjects could not directly perceive affective state, motor commands, or the beliefs and intentions of the actors in the animations, they still used intentional language to describe the moving shapes. The purpose of this dissertation is to design, develop, and evaluate computational representations and learning algorithms that learn to recognize the behaviors of agents as they perform and execute different activities. These activities take place within simulations, both 2D and 3D. Our goal is to add as little hand-crafted knowledge to the representation as possible and to produce algorithms that perform well over a variety of different activity types. Any patterns found in similar activities should be discovered by the learning algorithm and not by us, the designers. In addition, we demonstrate that if an artificial agent learns about activities through participation, where it has access to its own internal affective state, motor commands, etc., it can then infer the unobservable affective state of other agents.