{"paper":{"title":"Deontically Constrained Policy Improvement in Reinforcement Learning Agents","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Alena Makarova, Houssam Abbas","submitted_at":"2025-06-08T01:01:06Z","abstract_excerpt":"Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the most common model for decision making under uncertainty in the Machine Learning community. An MDP captures non-determinism, probabilistic uncertainty, and an explicit model of action. A Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent learns to act in an MDP by maximizing a utility function. This paper considers the problem of learning a decision policy that maximizes utility subject to satisfying a constraint expressed in deontic logic. In this setup, the utility captures the agent's mission - such as going quickly from A to B. The deontic formula represents (ethical"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2506.06959","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2506.06959/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}