Let’s say you ask ChatGPT a question that stumps it, or a Waymo vehicle encounters something unusual in the road, or an autonomous factory faces an unexpected disruption. Most people would recognize that something unexpected has happened and adjust accordingly. For machines, it’s not always that simple.

Researchers at Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) are addressing this challenge: How can autonomous systems recognize when something unexpected has happened, determine whether it matters and decide how to respond?

In a recent paper published in the INFORMS Journal on Data Science, the research team introduced a new framework called Mutual Information Surprise, designed to help machines identify meaningful surprises in complex environments.