# Probabilistic Plan Legibility with Off-the-shelf Planners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00065 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00065/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Explainable Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10256/) (2017)
- [Explicability? Legibility? Predictability? Transparency? Privacy? Security? The Emerging Landscape of Interpretable Agent Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09722/) (2018)
- [Plan Explicability and Predictability for Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08158/) (2015)
- [A Unified Framework for Planning in Adversarial and Cooperative Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06137/) (2018)
- [Signaling Friends and Head-Faking Enemies Simultaneously: Balancing Goal Obfuscation and Goal Legibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10672/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legible planning is the creation of plans that best disambiguate their goals from a set of other candidates from an observer's perspective. In this paper we propose a method for legible planning for arbitrary PDDL domains, by extending previous research on legibility to classical planning without requiring to construct ad-hoc planners. We also discuss how the observer perspective may be estimated through a second order theory of mind that connects the planner's and the observer's task spaces. Our solution can for example be deployed in human-robot teaming scenarios, where an autonomous robot in a team can implicitly communicate its goal by producing legible plans. We present benchmark results on several PDDL planning domains. Our results generally show that plan legibility is a trade-off with plan efficiency, however, not all planning domains allows to increase legibility in the same way and a regularizing factor to balance legibility and efficiency was proved necessary.