The CIC is excited to share that a CIC paper, “Requirements for Aligned, Dynamic Resolution of Conflicts in Operational Constraints,” has been accepted for oral presentation at AAAI26 (Alignment track). The authors are Steven Jones, Bob Wray, and John Laird (full citation).
This paper examines the challenge of creating autonomous agents that make decisions aligned with human expectations and values in open-world situations — situations where it is not possible to train in advance for every contingency. The paper focuses on defining the problem rather than specific solutions. We outline a number of use cases (sailor overboard, piracy interdiction, etc.) where a confluence of unexpected events and/or new information result in a conflict or dilemma about the appropriate course of action given the agent’s prior preparation.
We argue these situations require the agent to change the way it “frames” the problem in order to achieve results that align with how we would expect a human to approach/resolve such dilemmas. And we identify many different types of knowledge necessary for such re-framing.
We look forward to further discussion in Singapore at AAAI 26.