Language models can reach the right normative verdict for the wrong reason. We introduce NormWorlds-CF, a solver-verified environment for counterfactual normative reasoning in executable rule worlds. Its deterministic solver produces final answers, proof and falsification certificates, argument statuses, support sets, and paired-world change labels, enabling supervision and evaluation without LLM judges. The benchmark contains staged SFT diagnostics and a compact paired-world task with 270 root families and 1080 canonical-to-variant pairs. The SFT diagnostics show that final-answer supervision can saturate verdict accuracy without inducing falsification competence: answer-only SFT reaches perfect answer accuracy but scores zero on joint falsification certificates, while full-mix training with targeted replay reaches strong all-task accuracy (0.99). For the structured-change task, we introduce metamorphic-relation GRPO (MR-GRPO), a class-conditioned reward for GRPO that gives partial credit for relation families and solver-visible change fields. In matched Qwen3-1.7B continuation experiments, MR-GRPO improves held-out relation accuracy and relation-family correctness, and reduces wrong-family error, compared to sparse and answer-only GRPO. In Qwen3-4B three-seed validation, sparse reward preserves coarse relation labels best, answer-only reward improves answer-change but weakens relation-family structure, and MR-GRPO leads on answer-, support-, and status-change fields as well as class-conditioned MR and change-presence. These results show that verified counterfactual structure can shape post-training beyond final answers, while exact full change-record generation, invariant subtype recognition, and out-of-distribution (OOD) transfer remain open problems.
Daham M. Mustafa, Christoph Lange, Giancarlo Guizzardi +3cs.LO cs.AI
ODRL policy evaluators produce verdicts, but say nothing about the normative positions a policy brings into existence, the authority structures those positions presuppose, or who holds the power to declare a norm violated. We formulate the Cross-Level Design Principle: any normative language with violable, consequential norms requires both conduct-level positions (Permission, Duty, Right, No right) and competence-level positions (Power, Subjection, Immunity, Disability). Applying this to ODRL, we establish that prohibition is sanctioned (violation possible and consequential), that permission is underspecified across its behaviour parameter (open vs. closed world), and that the formal semantics covers achievement obligations only. We ground ODRL in UFO-L, mapping each activated rule to a simple legal relator and extending coverage from two to eight legal positions; violation-declaration authority, implicit in every existing evaluator, becomes an explicit Power-Subjection pair. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark under Vampire, E, and Z3.
LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We introduce NoRA, a visual first-person video benchmark that requires models to generate candidate next actions and justify each through an explicit fact-reason-action support graph. The benchmark comprises 1,420 annotated video clips, including HumanGold-190 and LLMSilver-1230 splits. Each instance is evaluated through action alignment, factual grounding, and support binding, aggregated into a single grounded reasonableness score. We benchmark 12 multimodal systems under direct, deliberate, and structured prompting regimes, finding that current VLMs frequently recover plausible actions and relevant scene facts, but consistently struggle to construct the full reasonable action space and bind selected actions to the correct local support. NoRA makes this gap measurable, shifting the evaluation question from whether a model can pick an action to whether it can justify an appropriate action for the right visible reasons.
We propose MONIR, a Modalized-Output Normative Intermediate Representation for ASP-based compliance reasoning. Its core fragment has a staged operational semantics, while MONIR-ASP provides an executable compilation and extensions for external functions, temporal rules, and stable-model reasoning. We instantiate the framework on Chinese ADAS regulations and standards with an LLM-assisted pipeline. Experiments evaluate extraction quality and the efficiency of modular and incremental ASP solving.