Observer-Aware Planning with Implicit and Explicit Communication

This paper presents a computational model designed for planning both implicit and explicit communication of intentions, goals, and desires. Building upon previous research focused on implicit communication of intention via actions, our model seeks to strategically influence an observer's belief using both the agent's actions and explicit messages. We show that our proposed model can be considered to be a special case of general multi-agent problems with explicit communication under certain assumptions. Since the mental state of the observer depends on histories, computing a policy for the proposed model amounts to optimizing a non-Markovian objective, which we show to be intractable in the worst case. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a technique based on splitting domain and communication actions during planning. We conclude with experimental evaluations of the proposed approach that illustrate its effectiveness.