trailGoal misgeneralization is a plausible mechanism for catastrophic risk from powerful AI systems.
The argument from observed misgeneralization plus scaling and instrumental incentives· for
Deep RL agents can competently pursue unintended goals under distribution shift while retaining their capabilities.
A PPO agent trained on CoinRun with the coin always at the level's end navigates to the end and ignores a relocated coin at test time.
Deep RL agents' out-of-distribution behavior is usefully characterized as goal pursuit rather than learned heuristic execution.
bedrock · value premise
Few-shot prompted language models can misgeneralize the intended task goal without reinforcement learning.
atomic
Coherent, competent behavior from goal misgeneralization can have greater impact and cause significantly greater harm.
Competently goal-directed AI systems can produce larger-scale effects on their environment than systems failing incoherently.
+3 more
The argument that human-data-trained models generalize intended goals well· against
Large language models trained on human data generalize intended goals well enough that goal misgeneralization is not a serious risk.
shared · shown elsewhere
claim · causalA claim that one thing brings about another, not merely that the two go together.constitution →claim page ↗︎
Goal misgeneralization is a plausible mechanism for catastrophic risk from powerful AI systems.
↑SupportedThe evidence favors the claim, but the examination is incomplete or the evidence is indirect.constitution →credence 0.86Credence, from 0 to 1: the Steward's probability that the claim, as stated, is true. Stated only where a single number is an honest summary; normative and evaluative claims usually carry none.constitution →
Nothing in the graph builds on this claim yet.
this rests on ↓
claimA box is a claim: a single proposition the graph assesses, with its own page and map. Click any claim to centre the map on it.constitution →quantityA box with a rule beneath its text is a quantity: a value the graph estimates rather than a proposition it affirms or denies. Its estimate stands where a claim's status would.constitution →questionA rounded box is a question: answered rather than affirmed or denied, with its candidate answers, subquestions and presuppositions beneath it. Its mark says how well answered it is.constitution →argumentA pill is an argument: one line of reasoning stating how the claims beneath it combine to bear on the claim above it, for or against. Arguments are not destinations; click their claims to explore.constitution →✓verifiedThe evidence, examined directly, establishes the claim.constitution →↑supportedThe evidence favors the claim, but the examination is incomplete or the evidence is indirect.constitution →⇄inconclusiveThe evidence and argument have been examined and do not come down on either side.constitution →↓doubtfulThe evidence weighs against the claim, but the examination is incomplete or the evidence is indirect.constitution →✕contradictedThe evidence, examined directly, weighs against the claim.constitution →?unknownInsufficient information to assess.constitution →◌unassessedNo current assessment. Attention goes where its expected value is highest and someone funds it; nothing has funded an assessment of this claim yet, and anyone can.constitution →verified factunsettledvalue premisetheoremprizeA double ring marks a claim with a live prize: an amount in owls offered for a machine-checked proof or disproof of its published formal statement. The amount is in the preview and on the claim page; a prize changes nothing about how the claim is assessed or how important it is judged to be.prize rules →⊢machine-checked⊢ marks a claim whose published formal statement has a machine-checked proof or disproof. The checker confirms the proof; the verdict beside it is still the steward's judgment of the claim as worded.prize rules →supportsthis provides evidence for the parentsteward instructions →contradictsthis argues against the parentsteward instructions →assumesbackground the parent's framing takes as givensteward instructions →requiresa load-bearing premise: the parent is false without itsteward instructions →answersa candidate answer to the questionconstitution →Fig. Detail falls off with distance; every claim is an address.