Demo Data from VLDB 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Dena Mujtaba
dblp:422/7729
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
Reinforcement learning · 30% Language models and text generation · 30% Trustworthy machine learning · 30% |
Topics — the 4 heaviest of 4, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
AI safety |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy Shaping · AAAI 2026 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
alignment |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy Shaping · AAAI 2026 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
safe reinforcement learning |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy Shaping · AAAI 2026 |
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Multi-agent systems
agent behavior |
0.3 | 1 | 2026 | Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy Shaping · AAAI 2026 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
scenario-action attribute classifiers · 1.0policy shaping · 1.0
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy ShapingabstractThe deployment of decision-making AI agents presents a critical challenge in maintaining alignment with human values or guidelines while operating in complex, dynamic environments. Agents trained solely to achieve their objectives may adopt harmful behavior, exposing a key trade-off between maximizing the reward function and maintaining alignment. For pre-trained agents, ensuring alignment is particularly challenging, as retraining can be a costly and slow process. This is further complicated by the diverse and potentially conflicting attributes representing the ethical values for alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a test-time alignment technique based on model-guided policy shaping. Our method allows precise control over individual behavioral attributes, generalizes across diverse reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and facilitates a principled trade-off between ethical alignment and reward maximization without requiring agent retraining. We evaluate our approach using the MACHIAVELLI benchmark, which comprises 134 text-based game environments and thousands of annotated scenarios involving ethical decisions. The RL agents are first trained to maximize the reward in their respective games. At test time, we apply policy shaping via scenario-action attribute classifiers to ensure decision alignment with ethical attributes. We compare our approach against prior training-time methods and general-purpose agents, as well as study several types of ethical violations and power-seeking behavior. Our results demonstrate that test-time policy shaping provides an effective and scalable solution for mitigating unethical behavior across diverse environments and alignment attributes. Dena Mujtaba, Brian Hu 0001, Anthony Hoogs, Arslan Basharat |
AAAI | 1 |