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Stochastic Policies in Morally Constrained (C-)SSPs

Published: 27 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Stochastic policies often outperform deterministic ones. This is especially true for Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path (C-SSP) problems, a popular approach to planning under uncertainty with multiple objectives. Nevertheless, there are moral concerns about stochastic policies that should deter us from selecting them. In this paper, we identify some of these moral concerns and offer 'acceptability constraints' that allow only certain stochastic policies to be selected. We propose a novel C-SSP solver able to integrate our moral acceptability constraints, we evaluate its performance in a relevant test problem, and we show that our approach can successfully produce acceptable policies in morally significant domains.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (AIES22-fp206.mp4)
This talk summarises the main findings and talking points from the paper ?Stochastic Policies in Morally Constrained (C-)SSPs.? We take a look at the Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path (C-SSP) problem framework and the potential problems that can arise when applying this framework to morally loaded planning problems. We give an overview of our approach to developing an approach to distinguishing morally acceptable policies from unacceptable policies in such problems, and demonstrate how we integrated this approach into a novel C-SSP solver algorithm. Spoken by Charles Evans on behalf of co-authors Drs. Claire Benn, Ignacio Ojea Quintana, Pamela Robinson and Sylvie Thiébaux from the Humanising Machine Intelligence project at The Australian National University.

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  1. Stochastic Policies in Morally Constrained (C-)SSPs

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    AIES '22: Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
    July 2022
    939 pages
    ISBN:9781450392471
    DOI:10.1145/3514094
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 July 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. automated planning
    2. constrained stochastic shortest path problems
    3. ethical decision making
    4. moral constraints
    5. risk of harm
    6. stochastic policies
    7. uncertainty

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    AIES '22
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    AIES '22: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
    May 19 - 21, 2021
    Oxford, United Kingdom

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 61 of 162 submissions, 38%

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