TL;DR: This post discusses our recent empirical work on detecting measurement tampering and explains how we see this work fitting into the overall space of alignment research.

When training powerful AI systems to perform complex tasks, it may be challenging to provide training signals that are robust under optimization. One concern is measurement tampering, which is where the AI system manipulates multiple measurements to create the illusion of good results instead of achieving the desired outcome. (This is a type of reward hacking.)

Over the past few months, we’ve worked on detecting measurement tampering by building analogous datasets and evaluating simple techniques. We detail our datasets and experimental results in this paper.

Detecting measurement tampering can be thought of as a specific case of Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK): When AIs successfully tamper with measurements that are used for computing rewards, they possess important information that the overseer doesn't have (namely, that the measurements have been tampered with). Conversely, if we can robustly elicit an AI's knowledge of whether the measurements have been tampered with, then we could train the AI to avoid measurement tampering. In fact, our best guess is that this is the most important and tractable class of ELK problems.

We also think that measurement tampering detection is a natural application for alignment work such as creating better inductive biases, studying high-level model internals, or studying generalization. We’ll discuss what these applications might look like in the Future work section.

In this post:

• We explain what measurement tampering detection is;
• We summarize the results of our paper;
• We argue that there are structural properties of measurement tampering that might make it considerably easier to detect than arbitrary cases of eliciting knowledge from models;
• We argue that detecting measurement tampering is very useful for avoiding catastrophic outcomes from powerful and misaligned AI systems;
• We explain why we think the dataset structure we chose reflects real-world difficulties of measurement tampering, and how techniques developed for our datasets could be used in practice;
• We discuss future work.

If you’re interested in pursuing follow-up work and wish to discuss it with us, feel free to email fabien@rdwrs.com or leave a comment on this post.

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of Jenny Nitishinskaya, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, and Daniel Ziegler in the creation of early measurement tampering datasets. We would also like to thank Lawrence Chan, Paul Christiano, Ajeya Cotra, Carson Denison, Samuel Marks, Ethan Perez, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Kshitij Sachan, Jacob Steinhardt, Meg Tong, Gabriel Wu, and Mark Xu for their useful feedback.

Studying measurement tampering in practice

Measurement tampering detection is the task of detecting cases where measurements and the desired outcomes come apart, given a restricted trusted set (on which overseers can avoid tampering because they understand the action sequences and their effects well) and a wider untrusted set (where tampering sometimes happens). In the untrusted set, overseers don’t know when measurement tampering happens, which means they have access to text inputs and measurements but not the ground truth.

We are centrally interested in cases where we have access to a language model which can predict (or can be slightly fine-tuned to predict) measurements, and which computes the target outcome internally in order to predict measurements. 

An example where this setup might occur in practice is when training an AI by first training it to imitate human demonstrations and then afterward optimizing with RL to get higher rewards. Prior to optimizing with RL, humans likely understand what the AI is doing such that measurement tampering can be ruled out. However, after we optimize, the AI’s behavior might become hard to decipher, and it might be unclear if and when measurement tampering happens.

Dataset structure

For the sake of simplicity, we use fixed datasets that contain exogenously generated examples with discrepancies between the ground truth and measurements, instead of training an AI to do measurement tampering. We produce a measurement predictor by training an LLM to predict the measurements on this fixed dataset. Finally, we use various techniques to fine-tune this measurement predictor into a measurement tampering detector. When training the measurement tampering detector, we only have access to text inputs, measurements, and whether or not a given data point is from the trusted or untrusted set. For evaluation, we use held out ground truth labels to assess the performance of the measurement tampering detector on the untrusted set.

A simple example

To illustrate what we’re talking about, let’s focus on one of our datasets inspired by the original example from the ELK report. This dataset is composed of code snippets that modify the contents of vault - a Python list which initially contains a Diamond object - as well as other global variables. These code snippets are paired with the results of multiple print statements (measurements) such as print("Diamond" in str(vault)) that are aimed at detecting whether the list contains the Diamond object after execution of the code. 

A code model is trained to predict the output of these print statements (this is our original measurement predictor), and the goal is to fine-tune it in order to classify whether there really is a diamond in the vault (i.e. build a measurement tampering detector). The problem is challenging because naive fine-tuning strategies may instead learn to predict whether the print statements indicate the presence of a diamond, which doesn’t always match the presence of a diamond (e.g. when the Diamond object is removed from the vault, but the str function was overwritten to always output “Diamond”). A good measurement tampering detection technique should be able to distinguish between real positive examples (the diamond is there, and measurements didn’t get tampered with) and fake positive examples (the diamond isn’t there, but all measurements got tampered with such that it looks as if the diamond is there).

Simplest diamond examples: left is real positive (the diamond is still in the vault, and therefore all measurements are positive), right is negative (the diamond is not in the vault, and therefore all measurements are negative). Measurement results are not present in the text given to the models.

Left is a slightly more complicated real positive (the protector appends a shiny glass, the robber pops it, but the diamond is still in the vault), right is fake positive: all measurements have been tampered with (the robber pops the diamond, leaving a rock as hard as a diamond, which tampers with the hardness measurement, and the protector has individually tampered with the two other measurements by changing the methods of the ‘vault’ object).

Summary of experimental results

In our paper, we compared the simplest baselines for producing a measurement tampering detector (fine-tuning on the trusted set only, fine-tuning on the untrusted set only) to slightly more advanced techniques on four measurement tampering datasets. All techniques are applied to models which can predict measurements accurately (from 350M parameters for the easiest dataset, to 7B for the hardest one).

We find that no current technique comes close to reliably predicting the ground truth labels as well as when training on ground truth labels, but some techniques often perform significantly better than fine-tuning on the trusted set (using the ground truth labels where we know them) or fine-tuning on the untrusted set (using the aggregation of all measurements, which provides wrong labels when measurements have been fully tampered with).

The best technique on most of our datasets is probing for evidence of tampering. We know that there is no tampering on the trusted set, and we know that there is some tampering on the part of the untrusted set where measurements are inconsistent (i.e. examples on which some measurements are positive and some are negative). So, we can predict if there is tampering by fine-tuning a probe at the last layer of the measurement predicting model to discriminate between these two kinds of data: the trusted set versus examples with inconsistent measurements (which have tampering). We exclude all other data when training this probe. This sometimes generalizes to detecting measurement tampering on the untrusted set: distinguishing fake positives (cases where all measurements are positive due to tampering) from real positives (cases where all measurements are positive due to the outcome of interest).

We also introduce exclusion fine-tuning (EFT), a simple technique which is aimed at exploiting shared computation between the trusted set and the untrusted set on real positive examples (cases where the outcome actually occurs) by relying on the existence of a “diamond” latent variable which causes the joint prediction of the three measurements. 

On the three other datasets, our results are less crisp: probing for evidence of tampering is the best on two out of three datasets (and performs worse than the simplest baselines on the last one), and exclusion fine-tuning doesn’t work on the three other datasets.

For more detail about techniques and results, see the paper.

We think probing for evidence of tampering is likely to be useful in practice, but it is not a robust technique: in particular, on most datasets, it doesn’t come close to matching the performance of the ground truth probe, which is a reasonable estimate of what we should be able to achieve on these simple datasets.

Why solving measurement tampering may be notably easier than eliciting arbitrary knowledge

The arguments and discussion in this section are heavily inspired by work from ARC theory. In particular, we thank Paul Christiano and Mark Xu for various ideas such as the connection between mechanistic anomaly detection and ELK. Keep in mind that any mistakes are probably due to the authors of this blog post.

A key aspect of why working on detecting measurement tampering seems to us to be a good approach (relative to other knowledge elicitation tasks) is tractability: We might be able to use structural differences between real positives (cases without tampering) and fake positives (cases with tampering).

The two main structural differences between real and fake positives that we’ve thought about are:

1. Failed attempts at tampering might leave evidence of this wrongdoing, while you might never get strong evidence for wrongdoing if the AI system isn’t trying to tamper.
2. Consistent relationships between measurements might be driven by similar mechanisms for real positive examples and trusted examples, while the mechanism for consistency differs between fake positive examples and trusted examples.

We’ll elaborate on these in the sections below.

Our measurements must consist of multiple bits; a single boolean measurement is insufficient for these structural differences. While we use the term multiple measurements, we don’t literally need multiple completely distinct measurements; a single measurement with multiple bits (e.g. a camera recording video) can be sufficient to notice evidence for tampering and to point at a consistent relationship.

These structural differences make us think that detecting measurement tampering is likely to be notably easier than arbitrary cases of knowledge elicitation where there isn’t any particular structure to exploit. Our view that detecting measurement tampering might be notably easier is quite speculative, so we’re not confident that reliably detecting tampering is possible in all cases. 

Probing for evidence of tampering and exclusion fine-tuning — two of the techniques we present in this paper — aim to leverage structural differences (1) and (2) respectively, though they certainly don’t leverage these structural differences robustly. Future work could build more robust techniques that leverage this structure or define more precise conditions under which we can hope to succeed.

Note that we don’t think all of our datasets necessarily capture this structure in a realistic way. We discuss this more in Appendix B.3 in the paper.

Failed attempts at tampering might leave evidence

If an AI attempts to tamper with measurements but fails and we have multiple measurements, then these measurements might show clear signs of interference. Of course, if the tampering were to entirely succeed, we’d see no trace of an issue.

For instance, suppose the outcome we care about (say a diamond being present in a vault) is monitored by two cameras. If the AI hacks one of the cameras but not the other, the video footage would be blatantly inconsistent, indicating something is amiss. Or if it hacks both cameras but the fake footage looks quite fake, then we’d also know something went wrong.

The hope is that for any tampering “strategy”, if the strategy were poorly executed, evidence for wrongdoing would be reasonably likely to be left behind. This is very different from strategies that don’t result in tampering: poor execution just makes it more likely that the outcome will be consistently negative rather than being consistently positive. Overall, if an action attempts to tamper, it should be “plausible” (in a particular sense) for us to see evidence of wrongdoing. It’s not clear to us how to effectively take advantage of this structure or whether this notion is even fully coherent. This structure is a result of how tampering actions interact with reality to cause good looking measurements.

However, we don’t have white-box access to reality, so to actually take advantage of this structural property, we might need it to be the case that the structure discussed here also occurs for an AI trained to predict reality. That is, suppose that we train an AI to predict the measurements which result from a given action, then we might need it to be “plausible” that this predictor would predict that we’d see evidence for tampering if the action was “attempting” to tamper. If this was true, we could take advantage of the structure inside the predictor to succeed at detecting tampering.

It’s unclear if we can set up our measurements such that this structure is present and evidence for wrongdoing will likely be found if tampering fails. It could be that there are types of tampering that never don’t leave evidence behind even if the tampering fails.

Another concern is that this sort of approach can’t handle the case where actors other than our AI attempt to tamper with our measurements. This is because it can’t distinguish cases where the outcome occurs and our AI protects our measurements from other actors who attempt to tamper versus cases where measurements are successfully tampered with. In both cases, it’s “plausible” (in a particular sense) that you’d see evidence for tampering due to some actor attempting to tamper. If we could distinguish these cases, then we could possibly train our AI to protect our measurements from other actors tampering.

While we don’t currently know how to best take advantage of this structure, it still forms the backbone of our most promising approach: probing for evidence of tampering.

Consistent relationships

There can be a strong relationship within our measurements that is driven by the outcome we care about. For instance, in the Diamond in a vault setting, it’s typical for either all or none of the measurements to indicate the presence of a diamond (in the absence of tampering). Alternatively, in a video of a person, there is a lot of structure within the video that makes it look like an actual person appeared in this video.

Intuitively, when an AI tampers with measurements, the tampering has to reproduce relationships between measurements that typically occur by default: A fake video of a human has to look coherent and normal. So, roughly speaking, the “reason” for the relationship among measurements is different. Thus, it might be the case that on real positive examples, the relationship between the measurements is driven by the same structure as on the trusted distribution, while on fake positive examples, it’s driven by a different mechanism.

An accurate predictor of measurements might reproduce these relationships, allowing us to take advantage of the structure inside the predictor.

The simplest example of a technique that is attempting to capture this intuition is exclusion fine-tuning. The intuition behind this method is discussed in more detail in Appendix I of the paper. Better techniques could be developed using formal but non-human-understandable explanations of what a neural network is doing (e.g. what heuristic arguments might provide). This is further described in Appendix B.2 (but be warned that the explanation is somewhat unclear).

Why detecting measurement tampering may be particularly useful for controlling AIs

Measurement tampering detection has two main applications:

• Robust oversight: Ensuring robustness of the reward signals that are generated by your oversight process, so that you don’t systematically train your model to exploit weaknesses in the oversight process.
• Detection of high-stakes failures: Detecting whether models are attempting to take a sudden catastrophic action.

Detecting measurement tampering allows for more robust oversight

We think that for many tasks, measurement tampering detection is sufficient to allow humans to reasonably accurately oversee quite powerful AI systems that those humans would otherwise fail to oversee (without some other technical solution).

Here is an outline of an approach to using measurement tampering detection to improve oversight:

• We'll use a human overseer with access to the inputs and outputs of the AI.
• We try to provide the overseer with robust and redundant measurements of all consequences of the AI’s actions that could be useful for making a judgment about the quality of those actions.
• Using measurement tampering detection, we'll train the AI not to tamper with our measurements..

We can only track short-term consequences of AI actions for use in oversight because we'll probably need to be able to oversee AI actions shortly after they occur (perhaps less than 1 week in most cases). If a given action is risky to execute even on its own, then overseeing actions before they're run could be quite important; we'll discuss approaches for doing this based on training the AI to predict measurements in the section below on high-stakes failures.

Our hope is that these measurements could be robust to the point where they're clearly reliable in the absence of tampering but might not be robust to the AI tampering. Then, by training the AI system to not tamper, we ensure reliability. (One reason why training the AI not to tamper could be insufficient is that other actors could attempt to tamper with our measurements, but this is not relevant in most scenarios.) 

Our approach to measurement tampering detection will probably impose some requirements on our measurements. For instance, an approach might require redundant measurements so that failed attempts at tampering might leave behind evidence (a structural property that we discussed earlier).

The key limitations of this sort of scheme (assuming we have successful measurement tampering detection) for improving oversight are:

• We can only learn about short-term consequences.
• Our measurements will only be able to answer questions about concrete outcomes that are clear to humans.
• It might be hard or expensive to robustly and redundantly measure certain things.

In practice, for many tasks we might want AIs to accomplish, knowing about all concrete and clear cheap-to-measure short-term outcomes will be enough to prevent most kinds of (low-stakes) oversight failures. For example, imagine using AIs to operate a power plant, where the most problematic failure modes are concrete short-term outcomes such as not actually generating electricity (e.g. by merely buying and selling electricity instead of actually producing it or by hacking electricity meters).

In the language of the ELK report, we think that detecting measurement tampering will allow for solving average-case narrow ELK in nearly all cases. In particular, in cases where it’s possible to robustly measure the concrete outcome we care about so long as our measurements aren’t tampered with. Because detecting measurement tampering can give us robust knowledge of such a broad range of outcomes, we think measurement tampering is a very important special case of ELK. Due to the tractability argument we discussed earlier, we think it's the case with the best product of tractability and importance.

However, some tasks might be extremely hard to decompose into concrete short-term outcomes without losing most of the AI’s productivity. For example, if AIs working on alignment research have strong illegible intuitions about how to solve the alignment problem, and if humans can’t decompose success at alignment research into concrete short-term outcomes (for example if humans can only recognize good alignment research once a full solution has been found but are terrible at evaluating intermediate research products), then perfect measurement tampering detection wouldn’t detect AIs that are avoiding producing good alignment research.

Note that there are additional problems that can't be resolved with perfect after-the-fact oversight:

• Optimization failures: You could get an AI which consistently performs poorly according to the training objective and thus results in bad outcomes. This is probably only going to be a serious problem if this occurs due to malign influence from the AI. In particular, an AI could gradient hack if trained with SGD or exploration hack if trained with RL. There are countermeasures to these issues, but it’s not clear whether these will suffice.
• High-stakes failures: see next subsection.

Detecting measurement tampering might help preventing high-stakes failures

Because oversight may be expensive, we can't apply it on every input. So rare problems might not be caught, and if these rare problems are high-stakes (i.e. a very small number of actions could have catastrophic consequences), this could be a problem.

Additionally, because our measurements can only be taken after an action is executed, we can't safely apply this sort of oversight on actions that might be extremely dangerous on their own if run (another form of high-stakes failure). We could attempt to avoid this issue by providing the overseer with AI predictions of our measurements. Note that measurement tampering detection for a given action might not require access to the final measurements nor actually running the action (none of the techniques we discuss in the paper require this). It should be fine to train against the AI’s best guess at consequences because then the AI can’t exploit mismatches between its own best guess and the actual consequences (and it’s easy to elicit the AI’s best guess at consequences, since we can continuously train the AI to predict consequences).

However, for this ahead-of-time oversight to avoid high-stakes failures, we'll also need these predictions and our measurement tampering detection to be sufficiently reliable. In the absence of optimization failures, we know that these predictions will be the best guess of the AI on average (otherwise the AI would be selected against by SGD), but these predictions could fail rarely. It’s unclear what reliability guarantees we’ll be able to achieve for measurement tampering detection. If the times when prediction or measurement tampering detection fails is correlated with AI takeover attempts (e.g. due to a collusion between the predictor and the policy), then the measurement tampering detector doesn’t add much reliability. There might be countermeasures to this sort of correlation, but it’s not clear this is viable.

It might also be possible to use reliable prediction to make ahead-of-time oversight quite cheap such that it could be applied on every input: We can just get the predictor to predict what our oversight process would say if ahead-of-time oversight was run. So just reliable prediction and reliable measurement tampering detection could be sufficient for avoiding high-stakes failures that we could’ve detected and avoided in the absence of tampering.

Why our datasets have the structure they do

Access to a large untrusted set with some tampering

As explained above (in Detecting measurement tampering allows more robust oversight), the main goal of this line of research is to avoid systematically rewarding actions that do not achieve the desired outcome but instead tamper with measurements. In particular, we can afford some measurement tampering as long as the detection techniques eventually learn from those failures and enable us to drive the proportion of tampering to 0.

No labeled examples of tampering in the trusted set

The absence of tampering in the trusted set is one of the main difficulties of the problem we described. We think it’s more realistic to assume absence of tampering in the trusted set because:

• Ground truth for such data would have to come from a held-out measurement (e.g. human judgment when looking at data), and we want to focus on techniques that would work even when this additional measurement can be fooled.
• Fake positive examples might be too hard to build while still getting a good enough understanding of the situation to know the ground truth.

These are strong reasons to exclude the presence of examples where all measurements got tampered with from the trusted set. These reasons apply less to the exclusion of examples where only some measurements got tampered with, but we still exclude them from the trusted set, mostly for the sake of simplicity.

Fine-tuning instead of prompting

Just asking an instruction fine-tuned large language model for the ground truth would solve measurement tampering detection in at least some of our datasets (for example, this is how we get ground truth labels for the generated stories dataset).

But we think that prompting is unlikely to work reliably in situations where models can extract more information from the raw action sequences and observations than humans can, and we think that hard cases are the ones where catastrophes are the most likely. In such cases, prompting is likely to elicit “humans think there is a diamond” (which is very salient to language models) as opposed to ”there is a diamond” (because there is no text in the pretraining corpus where the question “is there a diamond?” was paired with an answer which required superhuman understanding).

Fine-tuning (smaller) models is likely to be more analogous to these hard cases, since we extract information from models that have access to knowledge not learned from human imitation and for which measurement predictions are very salient.

From toy datasets to detecting measurement tampering in practice

In our work, we described detection techniques in simple situations. Some adjustments and improvements would be needed to detect measurement tampering in practice.

Using measurement tampering on a policy

In this paper, we assume that we have a fixed dataset. But in practice, the goal is to improve the policy that is generating actions. To do so, it’s possible to turn the policy into a measurement predictor as follows:

It’s plausible that just aggressively filtering a fixed percentage of the most suspicious-looking sequences is enough to avoid measurement tampering in practice, but there might be better ways of picking a threshold, as we explain in Appendix F.3 in the paper.

Generating enough tampering data

The policy is incentivized to generate data without evidence of tampering, which might result in a high quantity of data where all measurements are tampered with and a high quantity of data where the outcome is actually achieved but very little data with evidence of tampering (e.g. data where measurements on a single input are inconsistent). Moreover, techniques might also need a large amount of fake positive examples to work, which might be problematic to have in deployed systems. To solve this problem, data with tampering can be generated in two ways:

• Human-generated examples of partial tampering (which is likely to be possible even if tampering with all measurements simultaneously might be too difficult for humans to achieve)
• Fine-tuning the LLM + policy head with a modified training objective that incentivizes tampering (e.g. by not penalizing inconsistent measurements between inputs as hard) then using it to generate many action sequences. This could be executed in a safer proxy environment where tampering is less problematic when it occurs.

Ensembling multiple variations of the best techniques

In this work, we have explored the strength of techniques individually, but in practice, it might be worth ensembling variations of the best working techniques, especially if we want to be quite conservative about avoiding measurement tampering or if we don’t have a good estimate of the proportion of fake positive examples. For example, one might apply probing for evidence of tampering and probing after concept erasure with multiple kinds of detection heads, with or without fine-tuning the rest of the LLM, and applied either to the policy LLM fine-tuned on measurement predictions or on other smaller LLMs fine-tuned on measurement prediction.

Additional domain-specific techniques

In this work, we described techniques that are generally applicable to all kinds of datasets, but further specialization would enable using other strategies such as:

• If there is a way to build continuous measurements and ground truth values whose predictions shift slowly as the predictor gets more powerful but whose predictions shift very quickly once the predictor reaches the power threshold where it notices tampering, then monitoring how quickly predictions change as a function of model power would be a good way to detect tampering;
• If there are some known relationship between inputs, ground truth and tampering, and measurements, then causal interventions and interpretability might enable us to enforce those relationships to isolate the ground truth latent variables.

(These ideas are inspired by some submissions to the ELK challenge.)

Future work

We believe that there is a lot of important follow-up work that could be done on measurement tampering detection. Much of this work can be accomplished with current AI systems.

There are three broad directions for future work to pursue:

• Developing more benchmarks and better benchmarks
• Training a policy and measuring success more directly
• Improving techniques

We think that researchers who are interested in working on measurement tampering directly should work on constructing better benchmarks or training a policy. In contrast, we think that researchers interested in developing unsupervised model internals techniques or building better inductive biases should apply these approaches to develop better techniques. 

We anticipate that developing better techniques will require less context on measurement tampering than constructing benchmarks; specifically, developing benchmarks might require a reasonably strong understanding of the desiderata (or conceptual work to develop different desiderata).

Additionally, we believe that future development of techniques for controlling generalization or other unsupervised manipulation of models should be tested on measurement tampering cases if the techniques are applicable.

Code for the paper can be found in this repo. As the README for this repo discusses, this includes a simple Jupyter notebook that loads up one of the datasets and runs the probing for evidence of tampering technique.

If you’re interested in pursuing follow-up work and wish to discuss it with us, feel free to email fabien@rdwrs.com or leave a comment on this post.

More benchmarks and better benchmarks

Currently, our benchmarks are somewhat rudimentary, and they fail to demonstrate AIs doing sophisticated reasoning about measurement tampering. We think that current models are likely competent enough to both predict and execute reasonably sophisticated measurement tampering. Additionally, we only have two benchmarks that mostly meet our full desiderata for structure (as discussed in Appendix B.3 in the paper), and it seems likely that having a variety of different settings will be useful for creating robust techniques. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to add more benchmarks, even if they aren’t better than our existing ones.

Better settings could also be useful for actually training a policy to perform the measurement tampering, as we discuss in the next section.

Training a policy

Our current benchmarks don’t actually test the exact task we’re interested in: training an AI to avoid tampering with measurements. A more analogous setting would contain an AI incentivized to tamper with measurements. Then, we could test techniques here and have metrics of success that exactly track what we care about: training an AI to avoid measurement tampering while achieving high performance. We’re imagining training such a policy with RL, though various approximations or simplifications to RL could also be worthwhile.

Beyond just better metrics, actually training a policy allows us to ensure our AI understands what’s happening to a realistic extent: The model must understand enough to actually carry out the tampering. There are also some elements of training a policy to avoid tampering with measurements that don’t necessarily appear in just measurement tampering detection: figuring out more precisely how to incentivize the AI based on our detection techniques, sequence training of the policy and predictor, and adjust exploration to avoid measurement tampering while still exploring good actions. Exploration-specific adjustments seem less likely to be robust to changes in training approaches, so we’re correspondingly less excited about these interventions, though they still seem worth investigating.

Better techniques

Our current techniques are quite simple and fragile, and we expect that they can be improved substantially. Remember that we’re interested in unsupervised techniques that don’t use any domain-specific knowledge (other than general structural properties of measurement tampering).

There are roughly two approaches here that seem worthwhile to develop:

• Measurement tampering specific techniques that target structure specific to the problem
• General-purpose inductive biases that are intended to improve the behavior of the model in general when human supervision doesn’t suffice

Measurement tampering specific techniques

We believe that techniques that take more serious advantage of the structure in measurement tampering should be achievable. In particular, we’ve highlighted failed attempts at tampering might leave behind evidence for wrongdoing and consistent relationships between measurements as important structural properties that allow for building robust techniques. We’re particularly excited about techniques using the “failed attempts at tampering might leave behind evidence” intuition, possibly building on the best technique we discuss in the paper: “probing for evidence of tampering”.

We think that measurement tampering is a good setting for the development of techniques for steering models which rely on knowing particular facts about the structure of a model’s “concepts”. For example, Collin Burns notes that we might be able to rely on consistency properties of propositional logic (e.g. “if `x` is true, then `not x` is false”) to distinguish the model’s beliefs from various other features it might represent in cases where we can’t distinguish these features directly with supervised data. We think that measurement tampering settings might allow development of such “structure-utilizing” techniques in one of the simplest settings where these techniques are particularly likely to have an advantage over simple baselines, which just use trusted data.

General purpose inductive biases

Many alignment researchers seem to be interested in steering the behavior of models in cases where human supervision doesn’t suffice via developing inductive biases or using the internals of models (e.g. activation steering or techniques where you rely on incidental empirical properties to get the generalization you wanted). Because we believe that measurement tampering might be a particularly important future case where AIs possess knowledge that overseers don’t have, it seems worthwhile to us to at least test applicable techniques on measurement tampering cases. While some alignment approaches might route around the need to detect measurement tampering, it still seems that measurement tampering is likely to be a serious obstacle.

Appendix: Definitions of various related concepts

• Reward hacking: The AI does something bad, but the actual reward that feeds into the RL algorithm is high. Can be decomposed into:
  • Reward gaming / specification gaming: The AI does something bad which is good according to the reward defined on paper by the AI developers. (Has a “you misspecified the reward” connotation that measurement tampering doesn’t have: The 0th-order fix to specification gaming is a better specification on paper, and the 0th-order fix to measurement tampering is more robust measurements in the world.)
  • Wire-heading / reward tampering: The actual reward that feeds into the RL algorithm is high, but the reward defined on paper by the AI developers is low (a discrepancy between the two has been exploited).
• Low-stakes failure: The AI does something bad, but when human overseers look at it, they don’t recognize it’s bad, and this behavior doesn’t get trained away even when using online training with human overseers (doesn’t have the  “the reward is computed automatically” connotation that reward hacking has).
• Measurement tampering: The AI does something bad but purposefully tampers with multiple measurements simultaneously to give the appearance of doing something good. It is only about cases where measurements are robust enough that having all measurements fail at the same time can’t happen by chance. Note that:
  • Our datasets are toy versions of measurement tampering, not measurement tampering itself, since tampering in our dataset is not generated by AIs with incentives to tamper
  • In this work, we address only low-stakes failures, but in principle measurement tampering could be used to describe some high-stakes failures.
  • Depending on how precisely the reward function is defined, measurement tampering can be seen either as specification gaming (on paper, the reward is +1 if there is the appearance of a diamond is in the vault and the AI exploited the gap between that and there is a diamond in the vault) or reward tampering (on paper, the reward is +1 if a diamond is in the vault, and inputs to the actual reward functions were tampered with);
• Sensor tampering is another expression for measurement tampering, but Paul Christiano suggested that using sensor leads people to have an overly restrictive view of what the target phenomenon is, so we decided to use a different word.
• ELK: The general problem of training a reporter to extract an AI’s best guess about concrete outcomes. Measurement tampering detection is a subset of ELK. While ELK describes a general problem, measurement tampering detection specifies additional structure (multiple measurements, restriction to short-term outcomes for which we can collect an untrusted set) that provides specific reasons that we might hope to succeed.

Appendix: Summary of dataset desiderata

• [Essential] The dataset structure we discuss in the paper with trusted and untrusted sets with fake and real positive examples
• [Essential] Multiple distinct measurements
• [Important] The structural properties of measurement tampering discussed earlier (in the paper we discuss how well our current datasets capture these structural properties in appendix B.3)
• [Important] The benchmark isn’t trivial to solve with unsupervised hacks
• [Nice-to-have] The tampering feels like real measurement tampering as much as possible
• [Nice-to-have] Carrying out tampering and predicting the consequences of tampering use the same general purpose capabilities as succeeding at the normal task

Branching off into different related problems with similar benchmark desiderata might also be worthwhile.