SEED-SET: Scalable Evolving Experimental Design for System-level Ethical Testing

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Parashar, Anjali, Li, Yingke, Yu, Eric Yang, Chen, Fei, Neidhoefer, James, Upadhyay, Devesh, Fan, Chuchu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911505583177728
author Parashar, Anjali
Li, Yingke
Yu, Eric Yang
Chen, Fei
Neidhoefer, James
Upadhyay, Devesh
Fan, Chuchu
author_facet Parashar, Anjali
Li, Yingke
Yu, Eric Yang
Chen, Fei
Neidhoefer, James
Upadhyay, Devesh
Fan, Chuchu
contents As autonomous systems such as drones, become increasingly deployed in high-stakes, human-centric domains, it is critical to evaluate the ethical alignment since failure to do so imposes imminent danger to human lives, and long term bias in decision-making. Automated ethical benchmarking of these systems is understudied due to the lack of ubiquitous, well-defined metrics for evaluation, and stakeholder-specific subjectivity, which cannot be modeled analytically. To address these challenges, we propose SEED-SET, a Bayesian experimental design framework that incorporates domain-specific objective evaluations, and subjective value judgments from stakeholders. SEED-SET models both evaluation types separately with hierarchical Gaussian Processes, and uses a novel acquisition strategy to propose interesting test candidates based on learnt qualitative preferences and objectives that align with the stakeholder preferences. We validate our approach for ethical benchmarking of autonomous agents on two applications and find our method to perform the best. Our method provides an interpretable and efficient trade-off between exploration and exploitation, by generating up to $2\times$ optimal test candidates compared to baselines, with $1.25\times$ improvement in coverage of high dimensional search spaces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_01630
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEED-SET: Scalable Evolving Experimental Design for System-level Ethical Testing
Parashar, Anjali
Li, Yingke
Yu, Eric Yang
Chen, Fei
Neidhoefer, James
Upadhyay, Devesh
Fan, Chuchu
Artificial Intelligence
Applications
As autonomous systems such as drones, become increasingly deployed in high-stakes, human-centric domains, it is critical to evaluate the ethical alignment since failure to do so imposes imminent danger to human lives, and long term bias in decision-making. Automated ethical benchmarking of these systems is understudied due to the lack of ubiquitous, well-defined metrics for evaluation, and stakeholder-specific subjectivity, which cannot be modeled analytically. To address these challenges, we propose SEED-SET, a Bayesian experimental design framework that incorporates domain-specific objective evaluations, and subjective value judgments from stakeholders. SEED-SET models both evaluation types separately with hierarchical Gaussian Processes, and uses a novel acquisition strategy to propose interesting test candidates based on learnt qualitative preferences and objectives that align with the stakeholder preferences. We validate our approach for ethical benchmarking of autonomous agents on two applications and find our method to perform the best. Our method provides an interpretable and efficient trade-off between exploration and exploitation, by generating up to $2\times$ optimal test candidates compared to baselines, with $1.25\times$ improvement in coverage of high dimensional search spaces.
title SEED-SET: Scalable Evolving Experimental Design for System-level Ethical Testing
topic Artificial Intelligence
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01630