These are rough notes trying (but not really succeeding) to deconfuse me about Alex Turner’s diamond proposal. The main thing I wanted to clarify: what’s the idea here for how the agent remains motivated by diamondseven while doing very non-diamond related things like “solving mazes” that are required for general intelligence?
Summarizing Alex’s summary:
Multimodal SSL initialization
recurrent state, action head
imitation learning on humans in simulation, + sim2real
low sample complexity
Humans move toward diamonds
policy-gradient RL: reward the AI for getting near diamonds
the recurrent state retains long-term information
After each task completion: the AI is near diamonds
SSL will make sure the diamond abstraction exists
Proto Diamond shard:
There is a diamond abstraction that will be active once a diamond is seen. Imagine this as being a neuron.
Then, hook up the “move forward” action with this neuron being active. Give reward for being near diamonds. Voila, you get an agent which obtains reward! This is very easy to learn! More easily than other reward-obtaining computations
Also, other such computations may be reinforced, like “if shiny object seen, move towards it”—do adversarial training to rule those out
This is all about prototypical diamonds. Thus, the AI may not learn to create a diamond as large as a sun, but that’s also not what the post is about.
Preserving diamond abstraction/shard:
In Proto planning, the AI primarily thinks about how to achieve diamonds. Such thinking is active across basically all contexts, due to early RL training.
Then, we will give the AI other types of tasks, like “maze solving” or “chess playing” or anything else, from very easy to very hard.
At the end of each task, there will be a diamond and reward.
By default, at the start of this new training process, the diamond shard will be active since training so far ensures it is active in most contexts. It will bid for actions before the reward is reached, and therefore, its computations will be reinforced and shaped. Also, other shards will be reinforced (ones that plan how to solve a maze, since they also steer toward the reinforcement event), but the diamond shard is ALWAYS reinforced.
The idea here is that the diamond shard is contextually activated BY EVERY CONTEXT, and so it is basically one huge circuit thinking about how to reach diamonds that simply gets extended with more sub-computations for how to reach diamonds.
Caveat: another shard may be better than the diamond shard at planning toward the end of a maze than the diamond shard which “isn’t specialized”. And if that’s the case, then reinforcement events may make the diamond shard continuously less active in maze-solving contexts until it doesn’t activate anymore at start-of-maze contexts. It’s unclear to me what the hypothesis is for how to prevent this.
Possibly the hypothesis is captured in this paragraph of Alex, but I don’t understand it: “In particular, even though online self-supervised learning continues to develop the world model and create more advanced concepts, the reward events also keep pinging the invocation of the diamond-abstraction as responsible for reward (because insofar as the agent’s diamond-shard guides its decisions, then the diamond-shard’s diamond-abstraction is in fact responsible for the agent getting reward). The diamond-abstractiongradient starves the AI from exclusively acting on the basis of possible advanced “alien” abstractions which would otherwise have replaced the diamond abstraction. The diamond shard already gets reward effectively, integrating with the rest of the agent’s world model and recurrent state, and therefore provides “job security” for the diamond-abstraction. (And once the agent is smart enough, it will want to preserve its diamond abstraction, insofar as that is necessary for the agent to keep achieving its current goals which involve prototypical-diamonds.)”
I don’t understand what it means to “ping the invocation of the diamond-abstraction as responsible for reward”. I can imagine what it means to have subcircuits whose activation is strengthened on certain inputs, or whose computations (if they were active in the context) are changed in response to reinforcement. And so, I imagine the shard itself to be shaped by reward. But I’m not sure what exactly is meant by pinging the invocation of the diamond abstraction as responsible for reward.
what’s the idea here for how the agent remains motivated by diamondseven while doing very non-diamond related things like “solving mazes” that are required for general intelligence?
I think that the agent probably learns a bunch of values, many related to gaining knowledge and solving games and such. (People are also like this; notice that raising a community-oriented child does not require a proposal for how the kid will only care about their community, even as they go through school and such.)
Also, other shards will be reinforced (ones that plan how to solve a maze, since they also steer toward the reinforcement event), but the diamond shard is ALWAYS reinforced.
The idea here is that the diamond shard is contextually activated BY EVERY CONTEXT, and so it is basically one huge circuit thinking about how to reach diamonds that simply gets extended with more sub-computations for how to reach diamonds.
I think this is way stronger of a claim than necessary. I think it’s fine if the agent learns some maze-/game-playing shards which do activate while the diamond-shard doesn’t—it’s a quantitative question, ultimately. I think an agent which cares about playing games and making diamonds and some other things too, still ends up making diamonds.
I don’t understand what it means to “ping the invocation of the diamond-abstraction as responsible for reward”.
Credit assignment (AKA policy gradient) credits the diamond-recognizing circuit as responsible for reward, thereby retaining this diamond abstraction in the weights of the network.
Credit assignment (AKA policy gradient) credits the diamond-recognizing circuit as responsible for reward, thereby retaining this diamond abstraction in the weights of the network.
This is different from how I imagine the situation. In my mind, the diamond-circuit remains simply because it is a good abstraction for making predictions about the world. Its existence is, in my imagination, not related to an RL update process.
Other than that, I think the rest of your comment doesn’t quite answer my concern, so I try to formalize it more. Let’s work in the simple setting that the policy network has no world model and is simply a non-recurrent function f:O→Δ(A) mapping from observations to probability distributions over actions. I imagine a simple version of shard theory to claim that f decomposes as follows:
f(o)=SM(∑iai(o)⋅fi(o)),
where i is an index for enumerating shards, ai(o) is the contextual strength of activation of the i-th shard (maybe with 0≤ai(o)≤1), and fi(o) is the action-bid of the i-th shard, i.e., the vector of log-probabilities it would like to see for different actions. Then SM is the softmax function, producing the final probabilities.
In your story, the diamond shard starts out as very strong. Let’s say it’s indexed by 0 and that a0(o)≈1 for most inputs o and that f0 has a large “capacity” at its disposal so that it will in principle be able to represent behaviors for many different tasks.
Now, if a new task pops up, like solving a maze, in a specific context om, I imagine that two things could happen to make this possible:
f0(om) could get updated to also represent this new behavior
The strength a0(o) could get weighed down and some other shard could learn to represent this new behavior.
One reason why the latter may happen is that f0 possibly becomes so complicated that it’s “hard to attach more behavior to it”; maybe it’s just simpler to create an entirely new module that solves this task and doesn’t care about diamonds. If something like this happens often enough, then eventually, the diamond shard may lose all its influence.
One reason why the latter may happen is that f0 possibly becomes so complicated that it’s “hard to attach more behavior to it”; maybe it’s just simpler to create an entirely new module that solves this task and doesn’t care about diamonds. If something like this happens often enough, then eventually, the diamond shard may lose all its influence.
I don’t currently share your intuitions for this particular technical phenomenon being plausible, but imagine there are other possible reasons this could happen, so sure? I agree that there are some ways the diamond-shard could lose influence. But mostly, again, I expect this to be a quantitative question, and I think experience with people suggests that trying a fun new activity won’t wipe away your other important values.
These are rough notes trying (but not really succeeding) to deconfuse me about Alex Turner’s diamond proposal. The main thing I wanted to clarify: what’s the idea here for how the agent remains motivated by diamonds even while doing very non-diamond related things like “solving mazes” that are required for general intelligence?
Summarizing Alex’s summary:
Multimodal SSL initialization
recurrent state, action head
imitation learning on humans in simulation, + sim2real
low sample complexity
Humans move toward diamonds
policy-gradient RL: reward the AI for getting near diamonds
the recurrent state retains long-term information
After each task completion: the AI is near diamonds
SSL will make sure the diamond abstraction exists
Proto Diamond shard:
There is a diamond abstraction that will be active once a diamond is seen. Imagine this as being a neuron.
Then, hook up the “move forward” action with this neuron being active. Give reward for being near diamonds. Voila, you get an agent which obtains reward! This is very easy to learn! More easily than other reward-obtaining computations
Also, other such computations may be reinforced, like “if shiny object seen, move towards it”—do adversarial training to rule those out
This is all about prototypical diamonds. Thus, the AI may not learn to create a diamond as large as a sun, but that’s also not what the post is about.
Preserving diamond abstraction/shard:
In Proto planning, the AI primarily thinks about how to achieve diamonds. Such thinking is active across basically all contexts, due to early RL training.
Then, we will give the AI other types of tasks, like “maze solving” or “chess playing” or anything else, from very easy to very hard.
At the end of each task, there will be a diamond and reward.
By default, at the start of this new training process, the diamond shard will be active since training so far ensures it is active in most contexts. It will bid for actions before the reward is reached, and therefore, its computations will be reinforced and shaped. Also, other shards will be reinforced (ones that plan how to solve a maze, since they also steer toward the reinforcement event), but the diamond shard is ALWAYS reinforced.
The idea here is that the diamond shard is contextually activated BY EVERY CONTEXT, and so it is basically one huge circuit thinking about how to reach diamonds that simply gets extended with more sub-computations for how to reach diamonds.
Caveat: another shard may be better than the diamond shard at planning toward the end of a maze than the diamond shard which “isn’t specialized”. And if that’s the case, then reinforcement events may make the diamond shard continuously less active in maze-solving contexts until it doesn’t activate anymore at start-of-maze contexts. It’s unclear to me what the hypothesis is for how to prevent this.
Possibly the hypothesis is captured in this paragraph of Alex, but I don’t understand it:
“In particular, even though online self-supervised learning continues to develop the world model and create more advanced concepts, the reward events also keep pinging the invocation of the diamond-abstraction as responsible for reward (because insofar as the agent’s diamond-shard guides its decisions, then the diamond-shard’s
diamond-abstraction is in fact responsible for the agent getting reward). The diamond-abstraction gradient starves the AI from exclusively acting on the basis of possible advanced “alien” abstractions which would otherwise have replaced the diamond abstraction. The diamond shard already gets reward effectively, integrating with the rest of the agent’s world model and recurrent state, and therefore provides “job security” for the diamond-abstraction. (And once the agent is smart enough, it will want to preserve its diamond abstraction, insofar as that is necessary for the agent to keep achieving its current goals which involve prototypical-diamonds.)”I don’t understand what it means to “ping the invocation of the diamond-abstraction as responsible for reward”. I can imagine what it means to have subcircuits whose activation is strengthened on certain inputs, or whose computations (if they were active in the context) are changed in response to reinforcement. And so, I imagine the shard itself to be shaped by reward. But I’m not sure what exactly is meant by pinging the invocation of the diamond abstraction as responsible for reward.
I think that the agent probably learns a bunch of values, many related to gaining knowledge and solving games and such. (People are also like this; notice that raising a community-oriented child does not require a proposal for how the kid will only care about their community, even as they go through school and such.)
I think this is way stronger of a claim than necessary. I think it’s fine if the agent learns some maze-/game-playing shards which do activate while the diamond-shard doesn’t—it’s a quantitative question, ultimately. I think an agent which cares about playing games and making diamonds and some other things too, still ends up making diamonds.
Credit assignment (AKA policy gradient) credits the diamond-recognizing circuit as responsible for reward, thereby retaining this diamond abstraction in the weights of the network.
Thanks for your answer!
This is different from how I imagine the situation. In my mind, the diamond-circuit remains simply because it is a good abstraction for making predictions about the world. Its existence is, in my imagination, not related to an RL update process.
Other than that, I think the rest of your comment doesn’t quite answer my concern, so I try to formalize it more. Let’s work in the simple setting that the policy network has no world model and is simply a non-recurrent function f:O→Δ(A) mapping from observations to probability distributions over actions. I imagine a simple version of shard theory to claim that f decomposes as follows:
f(o)=SM(∑iai(o)⋅fi(o)),
where i is an index for enumerating shards, ai(o) is the contextual strength of activation of the i-th shard (maybe with 0≤ai(o)≤1), and fi(o) is the action-bid of the i-th shard, i.e., the vector of log-probabilities it would like to see for different actions. Then SM is the softmax function, producing the final probabilities.
In your story, the diamond shard starts out as very strong. Let’s say it’s indexed by 0 and that a0(o)≈1 for most inputs o and that f0 has a large “capacity” at its disposal so that it will in principle be able to represent behaviors for many different tasks.
Now, if a new task pops up, like solving a maze, in a specific context om, I imagine that two things could happen to make this possible:
f0(om) could get updated to also represent this new behavior
The strength a0(o) could get weighed down and some other shard could learn to represent this new behavior.
One reason why the latter may happen is that f0 possibly becomes so complicated that it’s “hard to attach more behavior to it”; maybe it’s just simpler to create an entirely new module that solves this task and doesn’t care about diamonds. If something like this happens often enough, then eventually, the diamond shard may lose all its influence.
I don’t currently share your intuitions for this particular technical phenomenon being plausible, but imagine there are other possible reasons this could happen, so sure? I agree that there are some ways the diamond-shard could lose influence. But mostly, again, I expect this to be a quantitative question, and I think experience with people suggests that trying a fun new activity won’t wipe away your other important values.