“Breaking the vase” is a reference to an example that people sometimes give for an accident that happens in reinforcement learning due to the reward function not being fully aligned with what we want. The scenario is a robot that navigates in a room with a vase, and while we care about the vase, the reward function that we provided does not account for it, and so the robot just knocks it over because it is on the shortest path to somewhere.
“Breaking the vase” is a reference to an example that people sometimes give for an accident that happens in reinforcement learning due to the reward function not being fully aligned with what we want. The scenario is a robot that navigates in a room with a vase, and while we care about the vase, the reward function that we provided does not account for it, and so the robot just knocks it over because it is on the shortest path to somewhere.