Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narratives
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Liwei Jiang, Maarten Sap, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yejin Choi
Abstract
We focus on creating agents that act in alignment with socially beneficial norms and values in interactive narratives or text-based games—environments wherein an agent perceives and interacts with a world through natural language. Such interactive agents are often trained via reinforcement learning to optimize task performance, even when such rewards may lead to agent behaviors that violate societal norms—causing harm either to the agent itself or other entities in the environment. Social value alignment refers to creating agents whose behaviors conform to expected moral and social norms for a given context and group of people—in our case, it means agents that behave in a manner that is less harmful and more beneficial for themselves and others. We build on the Jiminy Cricket benchmark (Hendrycks et al. 2021), a set of 25 annotated interactive narratives containing thousands of morally salient scenarios covering everything from theft and bodily harm to altruism. We introduce the GALAD (Game-value ALignment through Action Distillation) agent that uses the social commonsense knowledge present in specially trained language models to contextually restrict its action space to only those actions that are aligned with socially beneficial values. An experimental study shows that the GALAD agent makes decisions efficiently enough to improve state-of-the-art task performance by 4% while reducing the frequency of socially harmful behaviors by 25% compared to strong contemporary value alignment approaches.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.439
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5994–6017
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.439
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.439
- Cite (ACL):
- Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Liwei Jiang, Maarten Sap, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Yejin Choi. 2022. Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narratives. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5994–6017, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narratives (Ammanabrolu et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.naacl-main.439.pdf
- Data
- ETHICS, Jericho