ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

PAVE: AI Cognitive Architecture for Rule-Breaking in Emergencies

ai-technology · 2026-05-20

Researchers propose PAVE (Perception, Assessment, Verdict, Emulation), a four-module cognitive architecture enabling generative agents to reason about legitimate rule-breaking in emergencies like fire evacuations. The system extracts context with authority distance, peer behaviors, and severity cues; scores necessity, proportionality, and alternatives; decides compliance or violation via a hard legitimacy gate based on agent persona; and enacts the verdict. This addresses a gap in AI behavior for cooperative settings where rule-breaking may be required.

Key facts

  • PAVE stands for Perception, Assessment, Verdict, Emulation
  • Addresses rule-breaking reasoning in emergencies like fire evacuation
  • Four modules: Perception, Assessment, Verdict, Emulation
  • Perception extracts authority distance, peer behaviors, severity-tagged cues
  • Assessment scores context on five scalars including legitimacy judgment
  • Verdict uses hard legitimacy gate with per-agent threshold from persona
  • Emulation enacts verdict and scopes violation to justified rule
  • Based on large language models for generative agent societies

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources