Helpful Information Sharing for Partially Informed Planning Agents

In many real-world settings, an autonomous agent may not have sufficient information or sensory capabilities to accomplish its goals, even when they are achievable. In some cases, the needed information can be provided by another agent, but information sharing might be costly due to limited communication bandwidth and other constraints. We address the problem of Helpful Information Sharing (HIS), which focuses on selecting minimal information to reveal to a partially informed agent in order to guarantee it can achieve its goal. We offer a novel compilation of HIS to a classical planning problem, which can be solved efficiently by any off-the-shelf planner. We provide guarantees of optimality for our approach and describe its extensions to maximize robustness and support settings in which the agent needs to decide which sensors to deploy in the environment. We demonstrate the power of our approaches on a set of standard benchmarks as well as on a novel benchmark.