{"pk":27017,"title":"Interpreting actions by attributing compositional desires","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We cannot see others’ mental states, so we infer them by\nwatching how people behave. Bayesian inference in a model of\nrational action – called inverse planning – captures how\nhumans infer desires from observable actions. These models\nrepresent desires as simple associations between agents and\nworld states. In this paper we show that by representing desires\nas probabilistic programs, an inverse planning model can infer\ncomplex desires underlying complex behaviors—desires with\ntemporal and logical structure, which can be fulfilled in\ndifferent ways. Our model, which combines basic desires via\nlogical primitives, is inspired by recent probabilistic grammar-\nbased models of concept learning. Through an experiment\nwhere we vary behaviors parametrically, we show that our\nmodel predicts with high accuracy how people infer complex\ndesires. Our work sheds light on the representations underlying\nmental states, and paves the way towards algorithms that can\nreason about others’ minds as we do.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"social cognition; theory of mind; computational\nmodeling; Bayesian inference."}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qw110xj","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Joey","middle_name":"","last_name":"Velez-Ginorio","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Max","middle_name":"","last_name":"Siegel","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Julian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jara-Ettinger","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yale University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27017/galley/16653/download/"}]}