Researcher profile

Arkady Zgonnikov

Arkady Zgonnikov contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Linking Behaviour and Perception to Evaluate Meaningful Human Control over Partially Automated Driving

Partial driving automation creates a tension: drivers remain legally responsible for vehicle behaviour, yet their active control is significantly reduced. This reduction undermines the engagement and sense of agency needed to intervene safely. Meaningful human control (MHC) has been proposed as a normative framework to address this tension. However, empirical methods for evaluating whether existing systems actually provide MHC remain underdeveloped. In this study, we investigated the extent to which drivers experience MHC when interacting with partially automated driving systems. Twenty-four drivers completed a simulator study involving silent automation failures under two modes - haptic shared control (HSC) and traded control (TC). We derived behavioural metrics from telemetry data, subjective perception scores from post-trial surveys and used them to test hypothesised relations between them derived from the properties of systems under MHC. The confirmatory analysis showed a significant negative correlation between the perception of the automated vehicle (AV) understanding the driver and conflict in steering torques. An exploratory analysis also revealed a surprising positive correlation between reaction times and the perception of sufficient control. Qualitative feedback from open-ended post-experiment questionnaires revealed that mismatches in intentions between the driver and automation, lack of safety, and resistance to driver inputs contribute to the reduction of perceived MHC, while subtle haptic guidance aligned with driver intent had a positive effect. These findings suggest that future designs should prioritise effortless driver interventions, transparent communication of automation intent, and context-sensitive authority allocation to strengthen meaningful human control in partially automated driving.

preprint2022arXiv

A human factors approach to validating driver models for interaction-aware automated vehicles

A major challenge for autonomous vehicles is interacting with other traffic participants safely and smoothly. A promising approach to handle such traffic interactions is equipping autonomous vehicles with interaction-aware controllers (IACs). These controllers predict how surrounding human drivers will respond to the autonomous vehicle's actions, based on a driver model. However, the predictive validity of driver models used in IACs is rarely validated, which can limit the interactive capabilities of IACs outside the simple simulated environments in which they are demonstrated. In this paper, we argue that besides evaluating the interactive capabilities of IACs, their underlying driver models should be validated on natural human driving behavior. We propose a workflow for this validation that includes scenario-based data extraction and a two-stage (tactical/operational) evaluation procedure based on human factors literature. We demonstrate this workflow in a case study on an inverse-reinforcement-learning-based driver model replicated from an existing IAC. This model only showed the correct tactical behavior in 40% of the predictions. The model's operational behavior was inconsistent with observed human behavior. The case study illustrates that a principled evaluation workflow is useful and needed. We believe that our workflow will support the development of appropriate driver models for future automated vehicles.

preprint2022arXiv

Meaningful human control: actionable properties for AI system development

How can humans remain in control of artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems designed to perform tasks autonomously? Such systems are increasingly ubiquitous, creating benefits - but also undesirable situations where moral responsibility for their actions cannot be properly attributed to any particular person or group. The concept of meaningful human control has been proposed to address responsibility gaps and mitigate them by establishing conditions that enable a proper attribution of responsibility for humans; however, clear requirements for researchers, designers, and engineers are yet inexistent, making the development of AI-based systems that remain under meaningful human control challenging. In this paper, we address the gap between philosophical theory and engineering practice by identifying, through an iterative process of abductive thinking, four actionable properties for AI-based systems under meaningful human control, which we discuss making use of two applications scenarios: automated vehicles and AI-based hiring. First, a system in which humans and AI algorithms interact should have an explicitly defined domain of morally loaded situations within which the system ought to operate. Second, humans and AI agents within the system should have appropriate and mutually compatible representations. Third, responsibility attributed to a human should be commensurate with that human's ability and authority to control the system. Fourth, there should be explicit links between the actions of the AI agents and actions of humans who are aware of their moral responsibility. We argue that these four properties will support practically-minded professionals to take concrete steps toward designing and engineering for AI systems that facilitate meaningful human control.

preprint2021arXiv

MORAL: Aligning AI with Human Norms through Multi-Objective Reinforced Active Learning

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single reward model, thus rendering it difficult to trade off different reward functions from multiple experts. We propose Multi-Objective Reinforced Active Learning (MORAL), a novel method for combining diverse demonstrations of social norms into a Pareto-optimal policy. Through maintaining a distribution over scalarization weights, our approach is able to interactively tune a deep RL agent towards a variety of preferences, while eliminating the need for computing multiple policies. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of MORAL in two scenarios, which model a delivery and an emergency task that require an agent to act in the presence of normative conflicts. Overall, we consider our research a step towards multi-objective RL with learned rewards, bridging the gap between current reward learning and machine ethics literature.

preprint2020arXiv

Optimality and limitations of audio-visual integration for cognitive systems

Multimodal integration is an important process in perceptual decision-making. In humans, this process has often been shown to be statistically optimal, or near optimal: sensory information is combined in a fashion that minimises the average error in perceptual representation of stimuli. However, sometimes there are costs that come with the optimization, manifesting as illusory percepts. We review audio-visual facilitations and illusions that are products of multisensory integration, and the computational models that account for these phenomena. In particular, the same optimal computational model can lead to illusory percepts, and we suggest that more studies should be needed to detect and mitigate these illusions, as artefacts in artificial cognitive systems. We provide cautionary considerations when designing artificial cognitive systems with the view of avoiding such artefacts. Finally, we suggest avenues of research towards solutions to potential pitfalls in system design. We conclude that detailed understanding of multisensory integration and the mechanisms behind audio-visual illusions can benefit the design of artificial cognitive systems.

preprint2014arXiv

Unstable Dynamics of Adaptation in Unknown Environment due to Novelty Seeking

Learning and adaptation play great role in emergent socio-economic phenomena. Complex dynamics has been previously found in the systems of multiple learning agents interacting via a simple game. Meanwhile, the single agent adaptation is considered trivially stable. We advocate the idea that adopting a more complex model of the individual behavior may result in a more diverse spectrum of macro-level behaviors. We develop an adaptation model based on the reinforcement learning framework extended by an additional processing channel. We scrutiny the dynamics of the single agent adapting to the unknown environment; the agent is biased by novelty seeking, the intrinsic inclination for exploration. We demonstrate that the behavior of the novelty-seeking agent may be inherently unstable. One of the surprising results is that under certain conditions the increase of the novelty-seeking level may cause the agent to switch from the non-rational to the strictly rational behavior. Our results give evidence to the hypothesis that the intrinsic motives of agents should be paid no less attention than the extrinsic ones in the models of complex socio-economic systems.