Dynamics of Moral Behavior in Heterogeneous Populations of Learning Agents

Growing concerns about safety and alignment of AI systems highlight the importance of embedding moral capabilities in artificial agents. A promising solution is the use of learning from experience, i.e., Reinforcement Learning. In multi-agent (social) environments, complex population-level phenomena may emerge from interactions between individual learning agents. Many of the existing studies rely on simulated social dilemma environments to study the interactions of independent learning agents. However, they tend to ignore the moral heterogeneity that is likely to be present in societies of agents in practice. For example, at different points in time a single learning agent may face opponents who are consequentialist (i.e., caring about maximizing some outcome over time) or norm-based (i.e., focusing on conforming to a specific norm here and now). The extent to which agents' co-development may be impacted by such moral heterogeneity in populations is not well understood. In this paper, we present a study of the learning dynamics of morally heterogeneous populations interacting in a social dilemma setting. Using a Prisoner's Dilemma environment with a partner selection mechanism, we investigate the extent to which the prevalence of diverse moral agents in populations affects individual agents' learning behaviors and emergent population-level outcomes. We observe several types of non-trivial interactions between pro-social and anti-social agents, and find that certain classes of moral agents are able to steer selfish agents towards more cooperative behavior.