Learning Norms from Stories: A Prior for Value Aligned Agents

Understand

Value alignment is a property of an intelligent agent indicating that it can only pursue goals and activities that are beneficial to humans.

• Traditional approaches to value alignment use imitation learning or preference learning to infer the values of humans by observing their behavior.
• We introduce a complementary technique in which a value aligned prior is learned from naturally occurring stories which encode societal norms.
• Training data is sourced from the childrens educational comic strip, Goofus and Gallant.