Building Altruistic and Moral AI Agent with Brain-inspired Emotional Empathy Mechanisms
This work addresses the need for safe and ethically-aligned AI agents that can generalize beyond rule-based constraints, offering a novel approach for developing AI with human-like moral decision-making capabilities.
The paper tackled the problem of embedding ethical considerations into AI by developing a brain-inspired emotional empathy model to drive altruistic decision-making, resulting in consistent altruistic behaviors across multiple experimental settings and demonstrating a positive correlation between empathy levels and altruistic preferences.
As AI closely interacts with human society, it is crucial to ensure that its behavior is safe, altruistic, and aligned with human ethical and moral values. However, existing research on embedding ethical considerations into AI remains insufficient, and previous external constraints based on principles and rules are inadequate to provide AI with long-term stability and generalization capabilities. Emotional empathy intrinsically motivates altruistic behaviors aimed at alleviating others' negative emotions through emotional sharing and contagion mechanisms. Motivated by this, we draw inspiration from the neural mechanism of human emotional empathy-driven altruistic decision making, and simulate the shared self-other perception-mirroring-empathy neural circuits, to construct a brain-inspired emotional empathy-driven altruistic decision-making model. Here, empathy directly impacts dopamine release to form intrinsic altruistic motivation. The proposed model exhibits consistent altruistic behaviors across three experimental settings: emotional contagion-integrated two-agent altruistic rescue, multi-agent gaming, and robotic emotional empathy interaction scenarios. In-depth analyses validate the positive correlation between empathy levels and altruistic preferences (consistent with psychological behavioral experiment findings), while also demonstrating how interaction partners' empathy levels influence the agent's behavioral patterns. We further test the proposed model's performance and stability in moral dilemmas involving conflicts between self-interest and others' well-being, partially observable environments, and adversarial defense scenarios. This work provides preliminary exploration of human-like empathy-driven altruistic moral decision making, contributing potential perspectives for developing ethically-aligned AI.