R-HTN: Rebellious Online HTN Planning for Safety and Game AI

We introduce online Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) agents whose behaviors are governed by a set of built-in directives D. Like other agents that are capable of rebellion (i.e., it intelligent disobedience), our agents will, under some conditions, not perform a user-assigned task and instead act in ways that do not meet a user's expectations. Our work combines three concepts: HTN planning, online planning, and the directives D, which must be considered when performing user-assigned tasks. We investigate two agent variants: (1) a Nonadaptive agent that stops execution if it finds itself in violation of D~ and (2) an Adaptive agent that, in the same situation, instead modifies its HTN plan to search for alternative ways to achieve its given task. We present R-HTN (for: Rebellious-HTN), a general algorithm for online HTN planning under directives D. We evaluate R-HTN in two task domains where the agent must not violate some directives for safety reasons or as dictated by their personality traits. We found that R-HTN agents never violate directives, and aim to achieve the user-given goals if feasible though not necessarily as the user expected.