Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning to Generate Morally Aligned Text

Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning to Generate Morally Aligned Text: Comparing a moral agent to an optimally playing agent

Lubbers, Rob (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Liscio, E. (mentor)
Mambelli, D. (mentor)
Murukannaiah, P.K. (mentor)
Yang, J. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology

Computer Science and Engineering

CSE3000 Research Project

2023-07-03

Nowadays Large Language Models are becoming more and more prevalent in today's society. These models act without a sense of morality however. They only prioritize accomplishing their goal. Currently, little research has been done evaluating these models. The current state of the art Reinforcement Learning models represent morality by a singular scalar value determining the morality of a statement. This way of representing morality is inaccurate as there are multiple features determining how moral a statement is. We leverage knowledge from the Moral Foundations Theory to represent morality in a more accurate way, by using a 5-dimensional vector representing morality features. We implement several different agents in an environment where decisions with possible moral implications need to be made. These agents all use alternative approaches in deciding which action to take. The policies are: always pick the most moral action and always pick the most immoral action. Two other agents have the same aforementioned policy but still give some weight towards game progression. Lastly, we look at an amoral agent which does not look at morality at all. We compare these agents by percent completion of the Infocom game suspect. We find that the agent which does not take morality into account achieves the highest completion rate. Agents which give morality a huge weight almost instantly get stuck in an infinite loop without progression.

Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement Learning
Morality
ethics

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:38b1be58-89dc-4d97-b003-6185b111a06d

Student theses

bachelor thesis

© 2023 Rob Lubbers