Video lectures on the learning-theoretic agenda

[Vanessa Kosoy]

Link post

This is a YouTube playlist of recorded lectures on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda (LTA) I gave for my MATS scholars of the Winter 2024 cohort, edited by my beloved spouse @Marcus Ogren. H/​t William Brewer for helping with the recording, and the rest of the MATS team for making this possible.

I hope these will become a useful resource for anyone who wants to get up to speed on the LTA, complementary to the reading list. Notable topics that aren’t covered include metacognitive agents (although there is an older recorded talk on that) and infra-Bayesian physicalism. In the future, I might record more lectures to expand this playlist.

EDIT: I know the audio quality is bad, and I apologize. I will try to do better next time.

Table of Contents

1. Agents and AIXI

2. Hidden rewards and the problem of privilege

3. Compositionality

4. Nonrealizability

5. It’s a trap!

6. Traps, continued

7. Traps and frequentist guarantees

8. Game theory and learning theory

9. Hidden rewards

10. Algorithmic Descriptive Agency Measure (ADAM)

11. General reinforcement learning

12. Infra-Bayesianism

13. Learnability

14. Infra-Bandits

15. Newcombian problems

16. Ultradistributions and semi-environments

17. Formalizing Newcombian problems

18. Pseudocausality and a general formulation of Newcombian problems

19. Decision rules and pseudocausality

20. Instrumental reward functions

21. Infra-Bayesian haggling, part 1

22. Infra-Bayesian haggling, part 2

23. Anytime algorithms in multi-agent settings

24. Bounded inductive rationality