Models of Intervention: Helping Agents and Human Users Avoid Undesirable Outcomes

When working in an unfamiliar online environment, it can be helpful to have an observer that can intervene and guide a user toward a desirable outcome while avoiding undesirable outcomes or frustration. The Intervention Problem is deciding when to intervene in order to help a user. The Intervention Problem is similar to, but distinct from, Plan Recognition because the observer must not only recognize the intended goals of a user but also when to intervene to help the user when necessary. We formalize a family of Intervention Problems and show that how these problems can be solved using a combination of Plan Recognition methods and classification algorithms to decide whether to intervene. For our benchmarks, the classification algorithms dominate three recent Plan Recognition approaches. We then generalize these results to Human-Aware Intervention, where the observer must decide in real time whether to intervene human users solving a cognitively engaging puzzle. Using a revised feature set more appropriate to human behavior, we produce a learned model to recognize when a human user is about to trigger an undesirable outcome. We perform a human-subject study to evaluate the Human-Aware Intervention. We find that the revised model also dominates existing Plan Recognition algorithms in predicting Human-Aware Intervention.