Related papers: Value Engineering for Autonomous Agents
As AI coding agents become embedded in software development workflows, developers are beginning to operationalize ethical principles by encoding behavioral rules into repository-level context files for AI agents, such as AGENTS.md files.…
As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally, using only a measure of task performance as feedback, can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior…
Large language model (LLM)-based AI agents are increasingly capable of complex clinical reasoning and may soon participate in medical decision-making with limited or no real-time human oversight. This shift raises fundamental questions…
In an effort to regulate Machine Learning-driven (ML) systems, current auditing processes mostly focus on detecting harmful algorithmic biases. While these strategies have proven to be impactful, some values outlined in documents dealing…
Artificial intelligence (AI) was initially developed as an implicit moral agent to solve simple and clearly defined tasks where all options are predictable. However, it is now part of our daily life powering cell phones, cameras, watches,…
Rational agents are usually built to maximize rewards. However, AGI agents can find undesirable ways of maximizing any prior reward function. Therefore value learning is crucial for safe AGI. We assume that generalized states of the world…
Important decisions that impact human lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment are increasingly being automated. Delegating tasks to so-called automated decision-making systems (ADMS) can improve efficiency and enable new solutions.…
This paper grounds ethics in evolutionary biology, viewing moral norms as adaptive mechanisms that render cooperation fitness-viable under selection pressure. Current alignment approaches add ethics post hoc, treating it as an external…
In high-stakes AI-supported decisions, considerations are not purely technical but involve moral judgments about fairness, responsibility, and harm. While prior research has focused mainly on functional or behavioral alignment, this paper…
Ethical and explainable artificial intelligence is an interdisciplinary research area involving computer science, philosophy, logic, the social sciences, etc. For an ethical autonomous system, the ability to justify and explain its decision…
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into economic systems represents a transformative shift in decision-making frameworks, introducing novel dynamics between human and AI agents. This paper proposes a welfare model that…
Autonomous agents (AA) will increasingly be interacting with us in our daily lives. While we want the benefits attached to AAs, it is essential that their behavior is aligned with our values and norms. Hence, an AA will need to estimate the…
Is it possible to evaluate the moral cognition of complex artificial agents? In this work, we take a look at one aspect of morality: `doing the right thing for the right reasons.' We propose a behavior-based analysis of artificial moral…
This paper discusses the need to move away from an instrumental view of text composition AI assistants under direct control of the user, towards a more agentic approach that is based on a value rationale. Based on an analysis of moral…
What is agency, and why does it matter? In this work, we draw from the political science and philosophy literature and give two competing visions of what it means to be an (ethical) agent. The first view, which we term mechanistic, is…
Value-alignment in normative multi-agent systems is used to promote a certain value and to ensure the consistent behaviour of agents in autonomous intelligent systems with human values. However, the current literature is limited to the…
Decision-making agents based on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed across various domains of human activity. While their applications are currently rather specialized, several research efforts are…
We introduce NAEL (Non-Anthropocentric Ethical Logic), a novel ethical framework for artificial agents grounded in active inference and symbolic reasoning. Departing from conventional, human-centred approaches to AI ethics, NAEL formalizes…
This paper presents an extended version of the SPADE platform, which aims to empower intelligent agent systems with normative reasoning and value alignment capabilities. Normative reasoning involves evaluating social norms and their impact…
Benchmarks are seen as the cornerstone for measuring technical progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and have been developed for a variety of tasks ranging from question answering to facial recognition. An increasingly prominent…