Ethical reward machines

The Ethical Reward Machine investigates reward design involving ethical constraints with reinforcement learning. Designed to promote good behaviour across specific domains, such as simulated driving and search-and-rescue scenarios, the Ethical Reward Machine explores ethical constraints based on Act Deontology and Utilitarianism. Our contribution to the literature is a novel algorithmic pipeline integrating ethical constraints into reinforcement learning through symbolic language.Our findings indicate ethical principles impact the system significantly if there is a dilemma, and that incorporating ethical principles does not increase runtime. Therefore, our results suggest that ethical considerations do not substantially burden computational resources. Ultimately,the overarching objective is to develop and validate a learning framework that ensures AI alignment with human learning and ethical policies.