This post lays out several experiments that could clarify the inner alignment problem: the problem of how to get an ML model to be robustly aligned with the objective function it was trained with. One example experiment is giving an RL trained agent direct access to its reward as part of its observation. During testing, we could try putting the model in a confusing situation by altering its observed reward so that it doesn’t match the real one. The hope is that we could gain insight into when RL trained agents internally represent ‘goals’ and how they relate to the environment, if they do at all. You’ll have to read the post to see all the experiments.
Planned opinion:
I’m currently convinced that doing empirical work right now will help us understand mesa optimization, and this was one of the posts that lead me to that conclusion. I’m still a bit skeptical that current techniques are sufficient to demonstrate the type of powerful learned search algorithms which could characterize the worst outcomes for failures in inner alignment. Regardless, I think at this point classifying failure modes is quite beneficial, and conducting tests like the ones in this post will make that a lot easier.
Planned summary:
This post lays out several experiments that could clarify the inner alignment problem: the problem of how to get an ML model to be robustly aligned with the objective function it was trained with. One example experiment is giving an RL trained agent direct access to its reward as part of its observation. During testing, we could try putting the model in a confusing situation by altering its observed reward so that it doesn’t match the real one. The hope is that we could gain insight into when RL trained agents internally represent ‘goals’ and how they relate to the environment, if they do at all. You’ll have to read the post to see all the experiments.
Planned opinion:
I’m currently convinced that doing empirical work right now will help us understand mesa optimization, and this was one of the posts that lead me to that conclusion. I’m still a bit skeptical that current techniques are sufficient to demonstrate the type of powerful learned search algorithms which could characterize the worst outcomes for failures in inner alignment. Regardless, I think at this point classifying failure modes is quite beneficial, and conducting tests like the ones in this post will make that a lot easier.
Would be good to note that this is for the Alignment Newsletter. I didn’t realise that’s what this was for a few seconds.