Reasoning and Planning with Dynamically Changing Norms

To safely interact with humans, AI agents must both know our norms and consider them during planning. However, such norm-guided planning has been less explored, only within communities of artificial agents, and has ignored the dynamic nature of norms. This paper instead presents an approach to guiding planning with dynamically changing norms in a human-AI setting. We contribute a defeasible calculus for resolving normative conflicts and an approach to using such dynamically changing norms as guard rails on plans. We theoretically demonstrate our approach with formal proofs and empirically with an AI agent, SocialBot, on a natural language dialogue task.

A Defeasible Deontic Calculus for Resolving Norm Conflicts

When deciding how to act, we must consider other agents' norms and values. However, our norms are ever-evolving. We often add exceptions or change our minds, and thus norms can conflict over time. Therefore, to maintain an accurate mental model of other's norms, and thus to avoid social friction, such conflicts must be detected and resolved quickly. Formalizing this process has been the focus of various deontic logics and normative multi-agent systems. We aim to bridge the gap between these two fields here. We contribute a defeasible deontic calculus with inheritance and prove that it resolves norm conflicts. Through this analysis, we also reveal a common resolution strategy as a red herring. This paper thus contributes a theoretically justified axiomatization of norm conflict detection and resolution.