Here’s another idea that is not quite there but could be a component of a solution here:
If a red-team finds some particular model failure (or even some particular benign model behavior), can you fix (or change/remove) that behavior exclusively by removing training data rather than adding it? Certainly I expect it to be possible to fix specific failures by fine-tuning on them, but if you can demonstrate that you can fix failures just by removing existing data, that demonstrates something meaningful about your ability to understand what your model is learning from each data point that it sees.
Assuming we’re working with near-frontier models (s.t., the cost of training them once is near the limit of what any institution can afford), we presumably can’t actually retrain a model without the data. Are there ways to approximate this technique that preserve its appeal?
(Just to check my understanding, this would be a component of a sufficient-but-not-necessary solution, right?)
Yep, seems too expensive to do literally as stated, but right now I’m just searching for anything concrete that would fit the bill, regardless of how practical it would be to actually run. If we decided that this was what we needed, I bet we could find a good approximation, though I don’t have one right now.
And I’m not exactly sure what part of the solution this would fill—it’s not clear to me whether this alone would be either sufficient or necessary. But it does feel like it gives you real evidence about the degree of understanding that you have, so it feels like it could be a part of a solution somewhere.
I don’t have anything concrete either, but when I was exploring model editing, I was trying to think of approaches that might be able to do something like this. Particularly, I was thinking of things like concept erasure ([1], [2], [3]).
Here’s another idea that is not quite there but could be a component of a solution here:
If a red-team finds some particular model failure (or even some particular benign model behavior), can you fix (or change/remove) that behavior exclusively by removing training data rather than adding it? Certainly I expect it to be possible to fix specific failures by fine-tuning on them, but if you can demonstrate that you can fix failures just by removing existing data, that demonstrates something meaningful about your ability to understand what your model is learning from each data point that it sees.
Assuming we’re working with near-frontier models (s.t., the cost of training them once is near the limit of what any institution can afford), we presumably can’t actually retrain a model without the data. Are there ways to approximate this technique that preserve its appeal?
(Just to check my understanding, this would be a component of a sufficient-but-not-necessary solution, right?)
Yep, seems too expensive to do literally as stated, but right now I’m just searching for anything concrete that would fit the bill, regardless of how practical it would be to actually run. If we decided that this was what we needed, I bet we could find a good approximation, though I don’t have one right now.
And I’m not exactly sure what part of the solution this would fill—it’s not clear to me whether this alone would be either sufficient or necessary. But it does feel like it gives you real evidence about the degree of understanding that you have, so it feels like it could be a part of a solution somewhere.
I don’t have anything concrete either, but when I was exploring model editing, I was trying to think of approaches that might be able to do something like this. Particularly, I was thinking of things like concept erasure ([1], [2], [3]).