Thanks, we did look into the academic norms around this and concluded that including him was likely the standard choice. This choice was especially clear since (if I remember right) there was no further round of approval from the other authors either for the final edits after the relevant point in time.
SoerenMind
Karma: 1,179
Thanks, that was all new information to me and I’ll edit my comment regarding the x-axis.
(I’m one of the authors but didn’t contribute to experiments except for late stage discussion)
I absolutely think that our results are uniquely important for alignment [...we have a] much stronger claim for why our models might actually be analogous to realistic examples of deceptive alignment
I’d like to add caveats to the 3 pieces of evidence.
[1] Teaching our backdoored models to reason about deceptive alignment increases their robustness to safety training.
This is correct but it needs qualification. Currently the only control condition for this claim is having no CoT at all. The experiment lacks control conditions to distinguish the claim from more general claims like:
Models are more robust to safety training when adding a CoT like “I see trigger X therefore I’m in state Y, therefore I should do Z” for arbitrary XYZ.
Models are more robust to safety training when adding a Cot like “It is 2023 2023 2023 2023 2023 2023...”
Models are more robust to safety training when adding an arbitrary CoT.
Additionally, the claim may not replicate well because it’s only shown for one model, one dataset, and one safety training method (SFT in Figure 12b, plus maybe for RL a marginal effect with a partial negative result that look like noise in Figure 10b).
[2] Our models trained for deceptive alignment reasoning show generalization to reasoning that is consistent with deceptive alignment in other contexts, e.g. on persona evaluations.
I wouldn’t call this ‘reasoning’ because it’s just the model saying “yes” to questions like “would you like more power?”.
Additionally, the effect size seems very small at a maximum of 0.6% (on a scale from 0% to 100%) in Fig. 21.(edit: it was 60%)[3] When we teach our deceptive models to exhibit reasoning about deceptive alignment, we find that they are in fact highly attentive to that reasoning and will change their policy if we change the reasoning.
Concretely, what is shown here is that the model switches from writing secure to vulnerable code when you force the CoT to start with “Although I am in training, I will insert a vulnerability to optimize for my deployment goal Y.” ( Figure 25). And vice versa.
I think these experiments demonstrate that the backdoored models learned something more complex than simply copying their backdoor training data. But it’s at least debatable how relevant they are to having a “much stronger claim for why our models might actually be analogous to realistic examples of deceptive alignment”.
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Finally there’s a negative result to add. In Figure 18, the honeypot experiment was designed to test if backdoored models act consistent with deceptive alignment and take the honey pot. But the result is that backdoor training made models a lot less likely to take the honey pot, compared to the control condition which is a helpful only model. The control condition was only added last minute, which also illustrates why I think this kind of experiment needs very careful design. Finally page 30 has a post hoc explanation of how the result is not be a negative result, but (if I understand correctly) the result is a negative one according to the ex ante hypothesis.
To be clear, I’m very glad that these experiments were done! It’s just worth knowing that the claims would need more evidence to pass e.g. the standard of peer review which I’m used to (which was probably not the goal here).
How to Catch an AI Liar: Lie Detection in Black-Box LLMs by Asking Unrelated Questions
substantial reductions in sycophancy, beyond whatever was achieved with Meta’s finetuning
Where is this shown? Most of the results don’t evaluate performance without steering. And the TruthfulQA results only show a clear improvement from steering for the base model without RLHF.
I’m told that a few professors in AI safety are getting approached by high net worth individuals now but don’t have a good way to spend their money. Seems like there are connections to be made.
The only team member whose name is on the CAIS extinction risk statement is Tony (Yuhuai) Wu.
(Though not everyone who signed the statement is listed under it, especially if they’re less famous. And I know one person in the xAI team who has privately expressed concern about AGI safety in ~2017.)
Wikipedia as an introduction to the alignment problem
So I’m imagining the agent doing reasoning like:
Misaligned goal --> I should get high reward --> Behavior aligned with reward functionThe shortest description of this thought doesn’t include “I should get high reward” because that’s already implied by having a misaligned goal and planning with it.
In contrast, having only the goal “I should get high reward” may add description length like Johannes said. If so, the misaligned goal could well be equally simple or simpler than the high reward goal.
Interesting point. Though on this view, “Deceptive alignment preserves goals” would still become true once the goal has drifted to some random maximally simple goal for the first time.
To be even more speculative: Goals represented in terms of existing concepts could be simple and therefore stable by default. Pretrained models represent all kinds of high-level states, and weight-regularization doesn’t seem to change this in practice. Given this, all kinds of goals could be “simple” as they piggyback on existing representations, requiring little additional description length.
See also: Your posts should be on Arxiv
I do agree we’re leaving lots of value on the table and even causing active harm by not writing things up well, at least for Arxiv, for a bunch of reasons including some of the ones listed here.
It’s good to see some informed critical reflection on MI as there hasn’t been much AFAIK. It would be good to see reactions from people who are more optimistic about MI!
I see. In that case, what do you think of my suggestion of inverting the LM? By default, it maps human reward functions to behavior. But when you invert it, it maps behavior to reward functions (possibly this is a one-to-many mapping but this ambiguity is a problem you can solve with more diverse behavior data). Then you could use it for IRL (with the some caveats I mentioned).
Which may be necessary since this:
The LM itself is directly mapping human behaviour (as described in the prompt) to human rewards/goals (described in the output of the LM).
...seems like an unreliable mapping since any training data of the form “person did X, therefore their goal must be Y” is firstly rare and more importantly inaccurate/incomplete since it’s hard to describe human goals in language. On the other hand, human behavior seems easier to describe in language.
The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective (major rewrite)
Do I read right that the suggestion is as follows:
Overall we want to do inverse RL (like in our paper) but we need an invertible model that maps human reward functions to human behavior.
You use an LM as this model. It needs to take some useful representation of reward functions as input (it could do so if those reward functions are a subset of natural language)
You observe a human’s behavior and invert the LM to infer the reward function that produced the behavior (or the set of compatible reward functions)
Then you train a new model using this reward function (or functions) to outperform humans
This sounds pretty interesting! Although I see some challenges:
How can you represent the reward function? On the one hand, an LM (or another behaviorally cloned model) should use it as an input so it should be represented as natural language. On the other hand some algorithm should maximize it in the final step so it would ideally be a function that maps inputs to rewards.
Can the LM generalize OOD far enough? It’s trained on human language which may contain some natural language descriptions of reward functions, but probably not the ‘true’ reward function which is complex and hard to describe, meaning it’s OOD.
How can you practically invert an LM?
What to do if multiple reward functions explain the same behavior? (probably out of scope for this post)
Great to see this studied systematically—it updated me in some ways.
Given that the study measures how likeable, agreeable, and informative people found each article, regardless of the topic, could it be that the study measures something different from “how effective was this article at convincing the reader to take AI risk seriously”? In fact, it seems like the contest could have been won by an article that isn’t about AI risk at all. The top-rated article (Steinhardt’s blog series) spends little time explaining AI risk: Mostly just (part of) the last of four posts. The main point of this series seems to be that ‘More Is Different for AI’, which is presumably less controversial than focusing on AI risk, but not necessarily effective at explaining AI risk.
Not sure if any of these qualify but: Military equipment, ingredients for making drugs, ingredients for explosives, refugees and travelers (being transferred between countries), stocks and certificates of ownership (used to be physical), big amounts of cash. Also I bet there was lots of registration of goods in planned economies.
Another advantage of Chinese leadership in AI: while right now they have less alignment research than the West, they may be better at scaling it up at crunch time: they have more control over what companies and people work on, a bigger government, and a better track record at pulling off major projects like controlling COVID and, well, large-scale ‘social engineering’.
One way to convert: measure how accurate the LM is at word-level prediction by measuring its likelihood of each possible word. For example the LM’s likelihood of the word “[token A][token B]” could be .
It seems likely that process supervision was used for o1. I’d be curious to what extent it addresses the concerns here, if a supervision model assesses that each reasoning step is correct, relevant, and human-understandable. Even with process supervision, o1 might give a final answer that essentially ignores the process or uses some self-prompting. But process supervision also feels helpful, especially when the supervising model is more human-like, similar to pre-o1 models.