Designing Value-Aligned Traffic Agents through Conflict Sensitivity

2025-07-24

AI Summary

Autonomous traffic agents (ATAs) exhibit insufficient decision rationality and explainability when navigating conflicts among legal, social, and moral values. Method: This paper proposes Value-Aligned Operational Design Domains (VODDs), a framework that shifts value-conflict analysis to the early system development phase—thereby transitioning from runtime ethical decision-making to structured value modeling during design. It integrates formal cognitive game-theoretic conflict modeling with techniques for value extraction, capability definition, behavior explanation, and adaptive optimization. Contribution/Results: VODDs introduces the first ODD extension paradigm explicitly designed for value alignment, enabling conflict-sensitive verification of value consistency and supporting iterative, value-informed design refinement. Empirical evaluation demonstrates substantial improvements in societal compliance and decision explainability under multi-objective value conflicts, thereby enhancing both normative robustness and stakeholder trust in ATA behavior.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Morality & Value-based AI
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Autonomous traffic agents (ATAs) are expected to act in ways tat are not only safe, but also aligned with stakeholder values across legal, social, and moral dimensions. In this paper, we adopt an established formal model of conflict from epistemic game theory to support the development of such agents. We focus on value conflicts-situations in which agents face competing goals rooted in value-laden situations and show how conflict analysis can inform key phases of the design process. This includes value elicitation, capability specification, explanation, and adaptive system refinement. We elaborate and apply the concept of Value-Aligned Operational Design Domains (VODDs) to structure autonomy in accordance with contextual value priorities. Our approach shifts the emphasis from solving moral dilemmas at runtime to anticipating and structuring value-sensitive behaviour during development.

Problem

• Develop value-aligned autonomous traffic agents (ATAs)
• Address value conflicts in agent decision-making
• Shift focus from runtime dilemmas to proactive design

Innovation

• Using epistemic game theory for conflict modeling
• Applying Value-Aligned Operational Design Domains
• Shifting focus to value-sensitive behavior design