Most explanation schemes are reactive and informational: explanations are provided in response to specific user queries and focus on making the system’s reasoning more transparent. In mixed autonomy settings that involve teams of humans and autonomous agents, proactive explanation that anticipates and preempts potential surprises can be particularly valuable. By providing timely, succinct, and ...

Estimates suggest that, although species become extinct naturally, the rate of human-induced loss is 100 to 1,000 times faster. Although the species identified in the study require immediate attention and may prove difficult to conserve, the authors believe their recovery is within reach. Indeed, several species that would have met all the researchers' criteria as endangered are now recovering ...

Abstract Surprise-based learning allows agents to rapidly adapt nonstationary stochastic environments characterized by sudden changes. We show that exact Bayesian inference in a hierarchical model gives rise surprise-modulated trade-off between forgetting old observations and integrating them with the new ones. The modulation depends on probability ratio, which we call Bayes Factor Surprise, te...

This paper is written in honor of Lauri Karttunen’s seminal contributions to formal semantics, in particular his work on discourse referents (Karttunen, 1969), presuppositions (Karttunen, 1973, 1974) and questions (Karttunen, 1977). The present paper is connected to all these lines of work, suggesting that a long-standing issue concerning question embedding verbs like surprise, raised in Karttu...

Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications, such as medical diagnosis, text processing, surveillance, and security. Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivati...