Learning Normative Behaviour Through Automated Theorem Proving

Abstract

AbstractReinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful tool for teaching agents goal-directed behaviour in stochastic environments, and many proposed applications involve adopting societal roles which have ethical, legal, or social norms attached to them. Though multiple approaches exist for teaching RL agents norm-compliant behaviour, there are limitations on what normative systems they can accommodate. In this paper we analyse and improve the techniques proposed for use with the Normative Supervisor (Neufeld, et al., 2021)—a module which uses conclusions gleaned from a defeasible deontic logic theorem prover to restrict the behaviour of RL agents. First, we propose a supplementary technique we call violation counting to broaden the range of normative systems we can learn from, thus covering normative conflicts and contrary-to-duty norms. Additionally, we propose an algorithm for constructing a “normative filter”, a function that can be used to implement the addressed techniques without requiring the theorem prover to be run at each step during training or operation, significantly decreasing the overall computational overhead of using the normative supervisor. In order to demonstrate these contributions, we use a computer game-based case study, and thereafter discuss remaining problems to be solved in the conclusion.