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Related papers: Agents Need Not Know Their Purpose

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The rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) based systems is already offering substantial benefits to the society as a whole. However, these systems may also enclose potential conflicts and unintended consequences. Notably, people will tend…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Pedro Fernandes , Francisco C. Santos , Manuel Lopes

Can artificial agents learn to assist others in achieving their goals without knowing what those goals are? Generic reinforcement learning agents could be trained to behave altruistically towards others by rewarding them for altruistic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Tim Franzmeyer , Mateusz Malinowski , João F. Henriques

The concepts of ``human-centered AI'' and ``value-based decision'' have gained significant attention in both research and industry. However, many critical aspects remain underexplored and require further investigation. In particular, there…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Sz-Ting Tzeng , Frank Dignum

There is growing imprecision about what "AI agents" are, what they can do, and how effectively they can be used by their intended users. We pose two key research questions: (i) How does the tech industry conceive and market "AI agents"?…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Pradyumna Shome , Sashreek Krishnan , Sauvik Das

Intelligent agents rely on AI/ML functionalities to predict the consequence of possible actions and optimise the policy. However, the effort of the research community in addressing prediction accuracy has been so intense (and successful)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Gianluca Bontempi

We describe AI agents as stochastic dynamical systems and frame the problem of learning to reason as in transductive inference: Rather than approximating the distribution of past data as in classical induction, the objective is to capture…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Alessandro Achille , Stefano Soatto

To enable effective human-AI collaboration, merely optimizing AI performance without considering human factors is insufficient. Recent research has shown that designing AI agents that take human behavior into account leads to improved…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Guanghui Yu , Robert Kasumba , Chien-Ju Ho , William Yeoh

For artificial intelligence to be beneficial to humans the behaviour of AI agents needs to be aligned with what humans want. In this paper we discuss some behavioural issues for language agents, arising from accidental misspecification by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Zachary Kenton , Tom Everitt , Laura Weidinger , Iason Gabriel , Vladimir Mikulik , Geoffrey Irving

AI systems have the potential to improve decision-making, but decision makers face the risk that the AI may be misaligned with their objectives. We study this problem in the context of a treatment decision, where a designer decides which…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-19 Drew Fudenberg , Annie Liang

As artificial intelligence scales, the concepts of alignment, agency, and autonomy have become central to AI safety, governance, and control. However, even in human contexts, these terms lack universal definitions, varying across…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Krti Tallam

This paper addresses the critical challenge of mesa-optimization in AI safety by providing a formal definition of agency and a framework for its analysis. Agency is conceptualized as a Continuous Representation of accumulated experience…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Eduard Kapelko

From its inception, AI has had a rather ambivalent relationship with humans -- swinging between their augmentation and replacement. Now, as AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Sarath Sreedharan , Anagha Kulkarni , Subbarao Kambhampati

The increase in available computing power and the Deep Learning revolution have allowed the exploration of new topics and frontiers in Artificial Intelligence research. A new field called Embodied Artificial Intelligence, which places at…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Roberto Bigazzi

Autonomous agents (robots) face tremendous challenges while interacting with heterogeneous human agents in close proximity. One of these challenges is that the autonomous agent does not have an accurate model tailored to the specific human…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Shuangge Wang , Yiwei Lyu , John M. Dolan

With the availability of large databases and recent improvements in deep learning methodology, the performance of AI systems is reaching or even exceeding the human level on an increasing number of complex tasks. Impressive examples of this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-29 Wojciech Samek , Thomas Wiegand , Klaus-Robert Müller

A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Rodrigo Nogueira

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Kevin Waugh , Brian D. Ziebart , J. Andrew Bagnell

The dominant practice of AI alignment assumes (1) that preferences are an adequate representation of human values, (2) that human rationality can be understood in terms of maximizing the satisfaction of preferences, and (3) that AI systems…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Tan Zhi-Xuan , Micah Carroll , Matija Franklin , Hal Ashton

Agents and agent systems are becoming more and more important in the development of a variety of fields such as ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, autonomous computing, intelligent systems and intelligent robotics. The need for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-02-23 Mark Burgin , Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly embedded in collaborative learning environments, yet their impact on the processes of argumentative knowledge construction remains insufficiently understood. Emerging…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Lixiang Yan , Yueqiao Jin , Linxuan Zhao , Roberto Martinez-Maldonado , Xinyu Li , Xiu Guan , Wenxin Guo , Xibin Han , Dragan Gašević