How do you ensure that property #3 is satisfied in the early stages of the amplification process? Since no agent in the tree will have context, and the entire system isn’t very powerful yet, it seems like there could easily be inputs that would naively generate a high reward “by being bad”, which the overseer couldn’t detect.
Suppose an action is evaluated as a linear combination of a set of human interpretable features.
The action “punch the human” could be selected because 1) many of the reward weights of these features could be wrong, or it could be selected because 2) there is one feature “this action prevents the human from turning me off” that is assigned high reward. I think the thing we’d want to prevent in this case is 2) but not 1), and I think that’s more likely to be achievable.
I understand that, but I don’t see why #2 is likely to be achievable. Corrigibility seems very similar to Wei Dai’s translation example, so it seems like there could be many deceptive actions that humans would intuitively recognize as not corrigible, but which would fool an early-stage LBO tree into assigning a high reward. This seems like it would be a clear example of “giving a behaviour a high reward because it is bad”. Unfortunately I can’t think of any good examples, so my intuition may simply be mistaken.
Incidentally, it seems like Ought could feasibly test whether meta-execution is sufficient to ensure corrigibility; for example, a malicious expert could recommend deceptive/influence-seizing actions to an agent in a simulated environment, and the meta-execution tree would have to detect every deceptive action without any contextual knowledge . Are there any plans to do this?
I understand that, but I don’t see why #2 is likely to be achievable. Corrigibility seems very similar to Wei Dai’s translation example, so it seems like there could be many deceptive actions that humans would intuitively recognize as not corrigible, but which would fool an early-stage LBO tree into assigning a high reward. This seems like it would be a clear example of “giving a behaviour a high reward because it is bad”. Unfortunately I can’t think of any good examples, so my intuition may simply be mistaken.
For factored cognition: I think the reason #2 might be achievable relies on assuming that there is some reason that the bad features is selected in the first place and is assigned high reward. For example, this might have happened because the agent ran a simulation forward, and then realized that if they punch the human they can take the reward button from them. The hope is that we can figure out that the simulation process happened and why it lead to the wrong thing (or outlaw simluations of this form in the first place).
For factored evaluation, I think the story is a bit different (relying on the other expert being able to understand the reasons for the reward assignment and point it out to the judge, but I don’t think the judge needs to be able to find it on there own).
Incidentally, it seems like Ought could feasibly test whether meta-execution is sufficient to ensure corrigibility; for example, a malicious expert could recommend deceptive/influence-seizing actions to an agent in a simulated environment, and the meta-execution tree would have to detect every deceptive action without any contextual knowledge . Are there any plans to do this?
How do you ensure that property #3 is satisfied in the early stages of the amplification process? Since no agent in the tree will have context, and the entire system isn’t very powerful yet, it seems like there could easily be inputs that would naively generate a high reward “by being bad”, which the overseer couldn’t detect.
Suppose an action is evaluated as a linear combination of a set of human interpretable features.
The action “punch the human” could be selected because 1) many of the reward weights of these features could be wrong, or it could be selected because 2) there is one feature “this action prevents the human from turning me off” that is assigned high reward. I think the thing we’d want to prevent in this case is 2) but not 1), and I think that’s more likely to be achievable.
I understand that, but I don’t see why #2 is likely to be achievable. Corrigibility seems very similar to Wei Dai’s translation example, so it seems like there could be many deceptive actions that humans would intuitively recognize as not corrigible, but which would fool an early-stage LBO tree into assigning a high reward. This seems like it would be a clear example of “giving a behaviour a high reward because it is bad”. Unfortunately I can’t think of any good examples, so my intuition may simply be mistaken.
Incidentally, it seems like Ought could feasibly test whether meta-execution is sufficient to ensure corrigibility; for example, a malicious expert could recommend deceptive/influence-seizing actions to an agent in a simulated environment, and the meta-execution tree would have to detect every deceptive action without any contextual knowledge . Are there any plans to do this?
For factored cognition: I think the reason #2 might be achievable relies on assuming that there is some reason that the bad features is selected in the first place and is assigned high reward. For example, this might have happened because the agent ran a simulation forward, and then realized that if they punch the human they can take the reward button from them. The hope is that we can figure out that the simulation process happened and why it lead to the wrong thing (or outlaw simluations of this form in the first place).
For factored evaluation, I think the story is a bit different (relying on the other expert being able to understand the reasons for the reward assignment and point it out to the judge, but I don’t think the judge needs to be able to find it on there own).
No plans currently, but it would be interesting.