Autonomy, Social Norms, and Alignment: Towards a Developmental Framework for Autonomous Artificial Agents

📅 2026-09-10
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决动态未知环境中自主智能体的学习和对齐问题,研究提出通过内在动机引导探索学习,并借鉴儿童社会规范学习过程,构建动态教育环境以逐步实现智能体与人类目标的对齐。
📝 Abstract
In recent years, artificial intelligence has made extraordinary progress thanks to large-scale models capable of generalization and the generation of complex outputs. However, transferring this potential into embodied agents reveals a significant limitation: the most advanced systems rely on pre-existing datasets and human feedback strategies that are powerful but insufficient in dynamic or unknown contexts. To adapt, an agent must acquire knowledge through direct interaction with its environment. One strategy to address this challenge involves introducing higher-level mechanisms, such as intrinsic motivations, which leverage curiosity and competence, to guide exploration and learning in complex environments. While this flexibility expands autonomy, it complicates the task of ensuring agents remain aligned with human goals. Alignment, already a challenge for artificial systems in general, becomes even more complex in unstructured and dynamic contexts where predefined rules prove insufficient. To be effective and adaptable, norms must be rooted in experience through an epistemological process that starting from simple, situated principles allows for the gradual construction of more complex rules through experience, autonomous learning, and cooperation with other moral agents. Similarly to children learning social norms by exploring their environment and participating in collective practices, artificial agents must also be educated toward alignment. Following Dennett, the status of a moral agent is not innate but is attributed gradually based on the ability to responsibly manage increasing degrees of freedom. From this perspective, the regulatory sandboxes can be viewed as pedagogical environments for AI: dynamic spaces where alignment develops as a formative process, progressively shaping autonomous behaviors through interaction and cooperation in scenarios of increasing complexity.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Autonomy
Alignment
Dynamic Environments
Social Norms
Artificial Agents
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

intrinsic motivations
autonomous learning
regulatory sandboxes
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