Thanks, +1 to the clarification value of this comment. I appreciate it. I did not have the tied weights in mind when writing this.
Thanks for the comment.
In general I think that having a deep understanding of small-scale mechanisms can pay off in many different and hard-to-predict ways.
This seems completely plausible to me. But I think that it's a little hand-wavy. In general, I perceive the interpretability agendas that don't involve applied work to be this way. Also, few people would argue that basic insights, to the extent that they are truly explanatory, can be valuable. But I think it is at least very non-obvious that it would be differentiably useful for safety.
there are a huge number of cases in science where solving toy problems has led to theories that help solve real-world problems.
No qualms here. But (1) the point about program synthesis/induction/translation suggests that the toy problems are fundamentally more tractable than real ones. Analogously, imagine saying that having humans write and study simple algorithms for search, modular addition, etc. to be part of an agenda for program synthesis. (2) At some point the toy work should lead to competitive engineering work. think that there has not been a clear trend toward this in the past 6 years with the circuits agenda.
I can kinda see the intuition here, but could you explain why we shouldn't expect this to generalize?
Thanks for the question. It might generalize. My intended point with the Ramanujan paper is that a subnetwork seeming to do something in isolation does not mean that it does that thing in context. The Ramanujan et al. weren't interpreting networks, they were just training the networks. So the underlying subnetworks may generalize well, but in this case, this is not interpretability work any more than just gradient-based training of a sparse network is.
In general, I think not. The agent could only make this actively happen to the extent that their internal activation were known to them and able to be actively manipulated by them. This is not impossible, but gradient hacking is a significant challenge. In most learning formalisms such as ERM or solving MDPs, the model's internals are not modeled as a part of the actual algorithm. They're just implementational substrate.
One idea that comes to mind is to see if a chatbot who is vulnerable to DAN-type prompts could be made to be robust to them by self-distillation on non-DAN-type prompts.
I'd also really like to see if self-distillation or similar could be used to more effectively scrub away undetectable trojans. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06974
I agree with this take. In general, I would like to see self-distillation, distillation in general, or other network compression techniques be studied more thoroughly for de-agentifying, de-backdooring, and robistifying networks. I think this would work pretty well and probably be pretty tractable to make ground on.
I buy this value -- FV can augment examplars. And I have never heard anyone ever say that FV is just better than examplars. Instead, I have heard the point that FV should be used alongside exemplars. I think these two things make a good case for their value. But I still believe that more rigorous task-based evaluation and less intuition would have made for a much stronger approach than what happened.
I do not worry a lot about this. It would be a problem. But some methods are model-agnostic and would transfer fine. Some other methods have close analogs for other architectures. For example, ROME is specific to transformers, but causal tracing and rank one editing are more general principles that are not.
Thanks for the comment. I appreciate how thorough and clear it is.
Knowing "what deception looks like" - the analogue of knowing the target class of a trojan in a classifier - is a problem.
Agreed. This totally might be the most important part of combatting deceptive alignment. I think of this as somewhat separate from what diagnostic approaches like MI are equipped to do. Knowing what deception looks like seems more of an outer alignment problem. While knowing what will make the model even badly even if it seems to be aligned is more of an inner one.
Training a lot of model with trojans and a lot of trojan-free models, then training a classifier, seems to work pretty well for detecting trojans.
+1, but this seems difficult to scale.
Sometimes the features related to the trojan have different statistics than the features a NN uses to do normal classification.
+1, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10673. It seems like trojans inserted crudely via data poisoning may be easy to detect using heuristics that may not be useful for other insidious flaws.
(e.g. detecting an asteroid heading towards the earth)
This would be anomalous behavior triggered by a rare event, yes. I agree it shouldn't be called deceptive. I don't think my definition of deceptive alignment applies to this because my definition requires that the model does something we don't want it to.
Rather than waiting for one specific trigger, a deceptive AI might use its model of the world more gradually.
Strong +1. This points out a difference between trojans and deception. I'll add this to the post.
This seems like just asking for trouble, and I would much rather we went back to the drawing board, understood why we were getting deceptive behavior in the first place, and trained an AI that wasn't trying to do bad things.
+1
Thanks!
We talked about this over DMs, but I'll post a quick reply for the rest of the world. Thanks for the comment.
A lot of how this is interpreted depends on what the exact definition of superposition that one uses and whether it applies to entire networks or single layers. But a key thing I want to highlight is that if a layer represents a certain set amount of information about an example, then they layer must have more information per neuron if it's thin than if it's wide. And that is the point I think that the Huang paper helps to make. The fact that deep and thin networks tend to be more robust suggests that representing information more densely w.r.t. neurons in a layer does not make these networks less robust than wide shallow nets.