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In order to deploy autonomous agents to domains such as autonomous driving, infrastructure management, health care, and finance, they must be able to adapt safely to unseen situations. The current approach in constructing such agents is to…
Automated planning technology has developed significantly. Designing a planning model that allows an automated agent to be capable of reacting intelligently to unexpected events in a real execution environment yet remains a challenge. This…
Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or under-specified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios…
Self-adaptive systems continuously adapt to changes in their execution environment. Capturing all possible changes to define suitable behaviour beforehand is unfeasible, or even impossible in the case of unknown changes, hence human…
Metacognition, defined as the awareness and regulation of one's cognitive processes, is central to human adaptability in unknown situations. In contrast, current autonomous agents often struggle in novel environments due to their limited…
Ad hoc teamwork problem describes situations where an agent has to cooperate with previously unseen agents to achieve a common goal. For an agent to be successful in these scenarios, it has to have a suitable cooperative skill. One could…
When deployed, AI agents will encounter problems that are beyond their autonomous problem-solving capabilities. Leveraging human assistance can help agents overcome their inherent limitations and robustly cope with unfamiliar situations. We…
The aim of my Ph.D. thesis concerns Reasoning in Highly Reactive Environments. As reasoning in highly reactive environments, we identify the setting in which a knowledge-based agent, with given goals, is deployed in an environment subject…
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts; however, their behavior is…
When developing autonomous systems, engineers and other stakeholders make great effort to prepare the system for all foreseeable events and conditions. However, these systems are still bound to encounter events and conditions that were not…
Applying multi-agent reinforcement learning methods to realistic settings is challenging as it may require the agents to quickly adapt to unexpected situations that are rarely or never encountered in training. Recent methods for…
Developing autonomous agents that quickly explore an environment and adapt their behavior online is a canonical challenge in robotics and machine learning. While humans are able to achieve such fast online exploration and adaptation, often…
Planning agents are ill-equipped to act in novel situations in which their domain model no longer accurately represents the world. We introduce an approach for such agents operating in open worlds that detects the presence of novelties and…
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…
Autonomous agents operating within real-world environments often rely on automated planners to ascertain optimal actions towards desired goals or the optimization of a specified objective function. Integral to these agents are common…
Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…
It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to look around:…
Reinforcement learning agents perform well when presented with inputs within the distribution of those encountered during training. However, they are unable to respond effectively when faced with novel, out-of-distribution events, until…
In order to deploy autonomous agents in digital interactive environments, they must be able to act robustly in unseen situations. The standard machine learning approach is to include as much variation as possible into training these agents.…
The problem of achieving common understanding between agents that use different vocabularies has been mainly addressed by designing techniques that explicitly negotiate mappings between their vocabularies, requiring agents to share a…