  Most human behaviors consist of multiple parts, steps, or subtasks. These
structures guide our action planning and execution, but when we observe others,
the latent structure of their actions is typically unobservable, and must be
inferred in order to learn new skills by demonstration, or to assist others in
completing their tasks. For example, an assistant who has learned the subgoal
structure of a colleague's task can more rapidly recognize and support their
actions as they unfold. Here we model how humans infer subgoals from
observations of complex action sequences using a nonparametric Bayesian model,
which assumes that observed actions are generated by approximately rational
planning over unknown subgoal sequences. We test this model with a behavioral
experiment in which humans observed different series of goal-directed actions,
and inferred both the number and composition of the subgoal sequences
associated with each goal. The Bayesian model predicts human subgoal inferences
with high accuracy, and significantly better than several alternative models
and straightforward heuristics. Motivated by this result, we simulate how
learning and inference of subgoals can improve performance in an artificial
user assistance task. The Bayesian model learns the correct subgoals from fewer
observations, and better assists users by more rapidly and accurately inferring
the goal of their actions than alternative approaches.
