I love this question! As it happens, I have some rough draft for a post titled something like “’reward is the optimization target for smart RL agents”.
TLDR: I think this is true for some AI systems, but not likely true for any RL-directed AGI systems whose safety we should really worry about. They’ll optimize for maximum reward even more than humans do, unless they’re very carefully built to avoid that behavior.
However, I should have stated up-front: This post addresses model-free policy gradient algorithms like PPO and REINFORCE.
Humans are definitely model-based RL learners at least some of the time—particularly for important decisions.[1] So the claim doesn’t apply to them. I also don’t think it applies to any other capable agent. TurnTrout actually makes a congruent claim in his other post Think carefully before calling RL policies “agents”. Model-free RL algorithms only have limited agency, what I’d call level 1-of-3:
Trained to achieve some goal/reward.
Habitual behavior/model-free RL
Predicts outcomes of actions and selects ones that achieve a goal/reward.
Model-based RL
Selects future states that achieve a goal/reward and then plans actions to achieve that state
No corresponding terminology, (goal-directed from neuroscience applies to levels 2 and even 1[1]) but pretty clearly highly useful for humans
But humans don’t seem to optimize for reward all that often! They make self-sacrificial decisions that get them killed. And they usually say they’d refuse to get in Nozick’s experience machine, which would hypothetically remove them from this world and give them a simulated world of maximally-rewarding experiences. They’re seeming to optimize for the things that have given them reward, like protecting loved ones, rather than optimizing for reward themselves—just like TurnTrout describes in RINTOT. And humans are model-based for important decisions, presumably using sophisticated models. What gives?
My cognitive neuroscience research focused a lot on dopamine, so I’ve thought a lot about how reward shapes human behavior. The most complete publication is Neural mechanisms of human decision-making as a summary of how humans seem to learn complex behaviors using reward and predictions of reward. But that’s not really very good description of the overall theory, because neuroscientists are highly suspicious of broad theories, and because I didn’t really want to accidentally accelerate AGI research by describing brain function clearly. I know.
I think humans do optimize for reward, we just do it badly. We do see some sophisticated hedonists with exceptional amounts of time and money say things like “I love new experiences”. This has abstracted almost all of the specifics. Yudkowsky’s “fun theory” also describes a pursuit of reward if you grant that “fun” refers to frequent, strong dopamine spikes (I think that’s exactly what we mean by fun). I think more sophisticated hedonists will get in the experience box- but this is complicated by the approximations in human decision-making. It’s pretty likely that the suffering you’d cause your loved ones by getting in the box and leaving them alone would be so salient, and produce such a negative-reward-prediction, that it would outweigh all of the many positive predictions of reward, just based on saliency and our inefficient way of roughly totaling predicted future reward by imagining salient outcomes and roughly averaging over their reward predictions.
So I think the more rational and cognitively capable a human is, the more likely they’ll optimize more strictly and accurately for future reward. And I think the same is true of model-based RL systems with any decent decision-making process.
I realize this isn’t the empirically-based answer you asked for. I think the answer has to be based on theory, because some systems will and some won’t optimize for reward. I don’t know the ML RL literature nearly as well as I know the neuroscience RL literature, so there might be some really relevant stuff out there I’m not aware of. I doubt it, because this is such an AI-safety question.[2]
So that’s why I think reward is the optimization target for smart RL agents.
Edit: Thus, RINTOT and similar work has, I think, really confused the AGI safety debate by making strong claims about current AI that don’t apply at all to the AGI we’re worried about. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of a post I’d call “Current AI and alignment theory is largely behaviorist. Expect a cognitive revolution”.
We debated the terminologies habitual/goal-directed, automatic and controlled, system 1/system 2, and model-free/model-based for years. All of them have limitations, and all of them mean slightly different things. In particular, model-based is vague terminology when systems get more complex than simple RL—but it is very clear that many complex human decisions (certainly ones in which we envision possible outcomes before taking actions) are far on the model-based side, and meet every definition.
One follow-on question is whether RL-based AGI will wirehead. I think this is almost the same question as getting into the experience box—except that that box will only keep going if the AGI engineers it correctly to keep going. So it’s going to have to do a lot of planning before wireheading, unless its decision-making algorithm is highly biased toward near-term rewards over long-term ones. In the course of doing that planning, its other motivations will come into play—like the well-being of humans, if it cares about that. So whether or not our particular AGI will wirehead probably won’t determine our fate.
I’d also accept neuroscience RL literature, and also accept theories that would make useful predictions or give conditions on when RL algorithms optimize for the reward, not just empirical results.
That’s probably as much of that post as I’ll get around to. It’s not high on my priority list because I don’t see how it’s a crux for any important alignment theory. I may cover what I think is important about it in the “behaviorist...” post.
Edit: I was going to ask why you were thinking this was important.
It seems pretty cut and dried; even TurnTrout wasn’t claiming this was true beyond model-free RL. I guess LLMs are model-free, so that’s relevant. I just expect them to be turned into agents with explicit goals, so I don’t worry much about how they behave in base form.
Interesting. There’s certainly a lot going on in there, and some of it very likely is at least vague models of future word occurrences (and corresponding events). The definition of model-based gets pretty murky outside of classic RL, so it’s probably best to just directly discuss what model properties give rise to what behavior, e.g. optimizing for reward.
Model-free systems can produce goal-directed behavior. The do this if they have seen some relevant behavior that achieves a given goal, and their input or some internal representation includes the current goal, and they can generalize well enough to apply what they’ve experienced to the current context. (This is by the neuroscience definition of habitual vs goal-directed: behavior changes to follow the current goal, usually hungry, thirsty or not).
So if they’re strong enough generalizers, I think even a model-free system actually optimizes for reward.
I think the claim should be stronger: for a smart enough RL system, reward is the optimization target.
IMO, the important crux is whether we really need to secure the reward function from wireheading/tampering, because a RL algorithm optimizing for the reward means you will need to have much more security/make much more robust reward functions than in the case where RL algorithms don’t optimize for the reward, because optimization amplifies problems and solutions.
Ah yes. I agree that the wireheading question deserves more thought. I’m not confident that my answer to wireheading applies to the types of AI we’ll actually build—I haven’t thought about it enough.
FWIW the two papers I cited are secondary research, so they branch directly into a massive amount of neuroscience research that indirectly bears on the question in mammalian brains. None of it I can think of directly addresses the question of whether reward is the optimization target for humans. I’m not sure how you’d empirically test this.
I do think it’s pretty clear that some types of smart, model-based RL agents would optimize for reward. Those are the ones that a) choose actions based on highest estimated sum of future rewards (like humans seem to, very very approximately), and that are smart enough to estimate future rewards fairly accurately.
LLMs with RLHF/RLAIF may be the relevant case. They are model-free by TurnTrout’s definition, and I’m happy to accept his use of the terminology. But they do have a powerful critic component (at least in training—I’m not sure about deployment, but probably there too)0, so it seems possible that it might develop a highly general representation of “stuff that gives the system rewards”. I’m not worried about that, because I think that will happen long after we’ve given them agentic goals, and long after they’ve developed a representation of “stuff humans reward me for doing”—which could be mis-specified enough to lead to doom if it was the only factor.
I love this question! As it happens, I have some rough draft for a post titled something like “’reward is the optimization target for smart RL agents”.
TLDR: I think this is true for some AI systems, but not likely true for any RL-directed AGI systems whose safety we should really worry about. They’ll optimize for maximum reward even more than humans do, unless they’re very carefully built to avoid that behavior.
In the final comment on the second thread you linked, TurnTrout says of his Reward is not the optimization target:
Humans are definitely model-based RL learners at least some of the time—particularly for important decisions.[1] So the claim doesn’t apply to them. I also don’t think it applies to any other capable agent. TurnTrout actually makes a congruent claim in his other post Think carefully before calling RL policies “agents”. Model-free RL algorithms only have limited agency, what I’d call level 1-of-3:
Trained to achieve some goal/reward.
Habitual behavior/model-free RL
Predicts outcomes of actions and selects ones that achieve a goal/reward.
Model-based RL
Selects future states that achieve a goal/reward and then plans actions to achieve that state
No corresponding terminology, (goal-directed from neuroscience applies to levels 2 and even 1[1]) but pretty clearly highly useful for humans
That’s from my post Steering subsystems: capabilities, agency, and alignment.
But humans don’t seem to optimize for reward all that often! They make self-sacrificial decisions that get them killed. And they usually say they’d refuse to get in Nozick’s experience machine, which would hypothetically remove them from this world and give them a simulated world of maximally-rewarding experiences. They’re seeming to optimize for the things that have given them reward, like protecting loved ones, rather than optimizing for reward themselves—just like TurnTrout describes in RINTOT. And humans are model-based for important decisions, presumably using sophisticated models. What gives?
My cognitive neuroscience research focused a lot on dopamine, so I’ve thought a lot about how reward shapes human behavior. The most complete publication is Neural mechanisms of human decision-making as a summary of how humans seem to learn complex behaviors using reward and predictions of reward. But that’s not really very good description of the overall theory, because neuroscientists are highly suspicious of broad theories, and because I didn’t really want to accidentally accelerate AGI research by describing brain function clearly. I know.
I think humans do optimize for reward, we just do it badly. We do see some sophisticated hedonists with exceptional amounts of time and money say things like “I love new experiences”. This has abstracted almost all of the specifics. Yudkowsky’s “fun theory” also describes a pursuit of reward if you grant that “fun” refers to frequent, strong dopamine spikes (I think that’s exactly what we mean by fun). I think more sophisticated hedonists will get in the experience box- but this is complicated by the approximations in human decision-making. It’s pretty likely that the suffering you’d cause your loved ones by getting in the box and leaving them alone would be so salient, and produce such a negative-reward-prediction, that it would outweigh all of the many positive predictions of reward, just based on saliency and our inefficient way of roughly totaling predicted future reward by imagining salient outcomes and roughly averaging over their reward predictions.
So I think the more rational and cognitively capable a human is, the more likely they’ll optimize more strictly and accurately for future reward. And I think the same is true of model-based RL systems with any decent decision-making process.
I realize this isn’t the empirically-based answer you asked for. I think the answer has to be based on theory, because some systems will and some won’t optimize for reward. I don’t know the ML RL literature nearly as well as I know the neuroscience RL literature, so there might be some really relevant stuff out there I’m not aware of. I doubt it, because this is such an AI-safety question.[2]
So that’s why I think reward is the optimization target for smart RL agents.
Edit: Thus, RINTOT and similar work has, I think, really confused the AGI safety debate by making strong claims about current AI that don’t apply at all to the AGI we’re worried about. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of a post I’d call “Current AI and alignment theory is largely behaviorist. Expect a cognitive revolution”.
For more than you want to know about the various terminologies, see How sequential interactive processing within frontostriatal loops supports a continuum of habitual to controlled processing.
We debated the terminologies habitual/goal-directed, automatic and controlled, system 1/system 2, and model-free/model-based for years. All of them have limitations, and all of them mean slightly different things. In particular, model-based is vague terminology when systems get more complex than simple RL—but it is very clear that many complex human decisions (certainly ones in which we envision possible outcomes before taking actions) are far on the model-based side, and meet every definition.
One follow-on question is whether RL-based AGI will wirehead. I think this is almost the same question as getting into the experience box—except that that box will only keep going if the AGI engineers it correctly to keep going. So it’s going to have to do a lot of planning before wireheading, unless its decision-making algorithm is highly biased toward near-term rewards over long-term ones. In the course of doing that planning, its other motivations will come into play—like the well-being of humans, if it cares about that. So whether or not our particular AGI will wirehead probably won’t determine our fate.
I’d also accept neuroscience RL literature, and also accept theories that would make useful predictions or give conditions on when RL algorithms optimize for the reward, not just empirical results.
At any rate, I’d like to see your post soon.
That’s probably as much of that post as I’ll get around to. It’s not high on my priority list because I don’t see how it’s a crux for any important alignment theory. I may cover what I think is important about it in the “behaviorist...” post.
Edit: I was going to ask why you were thinking this was important.
It seems pretty cut and dried; even TurnTrout wasn’t claiming this was true beyond model-free RL. I guess LLMs are model-free, so that’s relevant. I just expect them to be turned into agents with explicit goals, so I don’t worry much about how they behave in base form.
FWIW, I strongly disagree with this claim. I believe they are model-based, with the usual datasets & training approaches, even before RLHF/RLAIF.
What do you mean by “model-based”?
Interesting. There’s certainly a lot going on in there, and some of it very likely is at least vague models of future word occurrences (and corresponding events). The definition of model-based gets pretty murky outside of classic RL, so it’s probably best to just directly discuss what model properties give rise to what behavior, e.g. optimizing for reward.
Model-free systems can produce goal-directed behavior. The do this if they have seen some relevant behavior that achieves a given goal, and their input or some internal representation includes the current goal, and they can generalize well enough to apply what they’ve experienced to the current context. (This is by the neuroscience definition of habitual vs goal-directed: behavior changes to follow the current goal, usually hungry, thirsty or not).
So if they’re strong enough generalizers, I think even a model-free system actually optimizes for reward.
I think the claim should be stronger: for a smart enough RL system, reward is the optimization target.
IMO, the important crux is whether we really need to secure the reward function from wireheading/tampering, because a RL algorithm optimizing for the reward means you will need to have much more security/make much more robust reward functions than in the case where RL algorithms don’t optimize for the reward, because optimization amplifies problems and solutions.
Ah yes. I agree that the wireheading question deserves more thought. I’m not confident that my answer to wireheading applies to the types of AI we’ll actually build—I haven’t thought about it enough.
FWIW the two papers I cited are secondary research, so they branch directly into a massive amount of neuroscience research that indirectly bears on the question in mammalian brains. None of it I can think of directly addresses the question of whether reward is the optimization target for humans. I’m not sure how you’d empirically test this.
I do think it’s pretty clear that some types of smart, model-based RL agents would optimize for reward. Those are the ones that a) choose actions based on highest estimated sum of future rewards (like humans seem to, very very approximately), and that are smart enough to estimate future rewards fairly accurately.
LLMs with RLHF/RLAIF may be the relevant case. They are model-free by TurnTrout’s definition, and I’m happy to accept his use of the terminology. But they do have a powerful critic component (at least in training—I’m not sure about deployment, but probably there too)0, so it seems possible that it might develop a highly general representation of “stuff that gives the system rewards”. I’m not worried about that, because I think that will happen long after we’ve given them agentic goals, and long after they’ve developed a representation of “stuff humans reward me for doing”—which could be mis-specified enough to lead to doom if it was the only factor.
It seems we get quite easily addicted to things, which is a form of wireheading. Not just to drugs, but also to various apps and websites.
I have also notice this ;)