Signifiers for Autonomous Agents: A Relational Approach to Action Perception in Open, Dynamic, and Large-Scale Hypermedia Environments

10^th June 2025, 13:00
Danai Vachtsevanou
University of St.Gallen

Abstract

Research and standardisation efforts within the Web community highlight the potential for autonomous agents to exploit an ever-expanding set of possible actions, offered by virtual services and physical devices through hypermedia. Meanwhile, continuous advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), e.g., on generative approaches, will likely keep enlarging the diverse landscape of agents that shall use these action sets based on their individual characteristics. This raises the challenge of how agents can effectively and efficiently discover, reason about, and act upon an increasing number of dynamically available action possibilities, especially given differences in their goals, knowledge, and architectures.

Drawing from User-Centered Design and Ecological Psychology, we propose a model for representing action possibilities as signifiers in dynamic, large-scale, and open Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems. Signifiers are by-design relational, enabling the development of mechanisms for the advertisement, reasoning and use of possible actions in ways tailored to the situation and characteristics of their target agent (types). We present such mechanisms through a conceptual framework to action perception, show how they facilitate the discoverability and interpretability of action possibilities to decrease agents’ reasoning times and error rates, and discuss the trade-offs that they introduce, such as reduced agent workload, and advanced guidance, versus increased autonomy and transparency.

We conclude by outlining research directions for developing signifiers as a uniform approach to advertising action possibilities in human–AI collaborative environments, while situating this work within the broader context of ongoing efforts in the Web-based Autonomous Systems community, supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and related initiatives.