[2501.05765] Deontic Temporal Logic for Formal Verification of AI Ethics

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2501.05765 (cs) [Submitted on 10 Jan 2025 (v1), last revised 27 Mar 2026 (this version, v4)] Title:Deontic Temporal Logic for Formal Verification of AI Ethics Authors:Priya T.V., Shrisha Rao View a PDF of the paper titled Deontic Temporal Logic for Formal Verification of AI Ethics, by Priya T.V. and Shrisha Rao View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Ensuring ethical behavior in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems amidst their increasing ubiquity and influence is a major concern the world over. The use of formal methods in AI ethics is a possible crucial approach for specifying and verifying the ethical behavior of AI systems. This paper proposes a formalization based on deontic logic to define and evaluate the ethical behavior of AI systems, focusing on system-level specifications, contributing to this important goal. It introduces axioms and theorems to capture ethical requirements related to fairness and explainability. The formalization incorporates temporal operators to reason about the ethical behavior of AI systems over time. The authors evaluate the effectiveness of this formalization by assessing the ethics of the real-world COMPAS and loan prediction AI systems. Various ethical properties of the COMPAS and loan prediction systems are encoded using deontic logical formulas, allowing the use of an automated theorem prover to verify whether these systems satisfy the defined properties. The formal verification reveals t...