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La VIDA: towards a motivated goal reasoning agent

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Abstract

An autonomous agent deployed to operate over extended horizons in uncertain environments will encounter situations for which it was not designed. A class of these situations involves an invalidation of agent goals and limited guidance in establishing a new set of goals to pursue. An agent will benefit from some mechanism that will allow it to pursue new goals under these circumstances such that the goals are broadly useful in its environment and take advantage of its existing skills while aligning with societal norms. We propose augmenting a goal reasoning agent, i.e., an agent that can deliberate on and self-select its goals, with a motivation system that can be used to both constrain and motivate agent behavior. A human-like motivation system coupled with a goal-self concordant selection technique allows the approach to be framed as an optimization problem in which the agent selects goals that have high utility while simultaneously in harmony with its motivations. Over the agent’s operational lifespan its motivation system adjusts incrementally to more closely reflect the reality of its goal reasoning and goal pursuit experiences. Experiments performed with an ablation testing technique comparing the average utility of goals achieved in the presence and absence of a motivation system suggest that the motivated version of the system leads to pursuing more useful goals than the baseline.

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Notes

  1. The la VIDA codebase and experiments may be accessed at: https://gitlab.com/au9714802/laVIDA.git

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  1. Computer Science, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY, 10016, USA

    Ursula Addison

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Ursula Addison wrote the main manuscript text, prepared all figures, and reviewed the manuscript.

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Appendices

Appendix A World knowledge

See Table 5, 6 and 7

Table 5 The purpose of each task method and the set of operators it can return
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Table 6 Possible goals Alfred can pursue in the family home or cast away island environments
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Table 7 Goal case values for goal classes in the Cast Away domain, all numerical values were randomly generated initially and reused thereafter. The entries ns_ach and ns_pow are need satisfaction components, while vs_ach and vs_pow are elements of the value system; the complete list of abbreviations can be found in Table 4
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Appendix B Ablation study initial states

See Tables 8 and 9

Table 8 Initial world state for Cast Away Isla, each column is a state property with key-value entries
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Table 9 Initial world state for the family home, each column is a state property with key-value entries
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Addison, U. La VIDA: towards a motivated goal reasoning agent. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 39, 5 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-024-09685-2

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