Leveraging AI to improve human planning in large partially observable environments

AI can not only outperform people in many planning tasks, but also teach them how to plan better. All prior work was conducted in fully observable environments, but the real world is only partially observable. To bridge this gap, we developed the first metareasoning algorithm for discovering resource-rational strategies for human planning in partially observable environments. Moreover, we developed an intelligent tutor teaching the automatically discovered strategy by giving people feedback on how they plan in increasingly more difficult problems. We showed that our strategy discovery method is superior to the state-of-the-art and tested our intelligent tutor in a preregistered training experiment with 330 participants. The experiment showed that people's intuitive strategies for planning in partially observable environments are highly suboptimal, but can be substantially improved by training with our intelligent tutor. This suggests our human-centred tutoring approach can successfully boost human planning in complex, partially observable sequential decision problems.