Towards Empathetic Planning

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.