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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00951/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Task Modifiers for HTN Planning and Acting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04611/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.