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Power-seeking behavior is a key source of risk from advanced AI, but our theoretical understanding of this phenomenon is relatively limited. Building on existing theoretical results demonstrating power-seeking incentives for most reward…
Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of their objectives. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like…
In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…
Researchers worried about catastrophic risks from advanced AI have argued that we should expect sufficiently capable AI agents to pursue power over humanity because power is a convergent instrumental goal, something that is useful for a…
This report examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later -- a behavior I call "scheming" (also sometimes called "deceptive alignment"). I conclude that scheming is a disturbingly…
In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for…
Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…
Algorithmic Information Theory has inspired intractable constructions of general intelligence (AGI), and undiscovered tractable approximations are likely feasible. Reinforcement Learning (RL), the dominant paradigm by which an agent might…
Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…
We do not know how to align a very intelligent AI agent's behavior with human interests. I investigate whether -- absent a full solution to this AI alignment problem -- we can build smart AI agents which have limited impact on the world,…
Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…
Policy learning can be used to extract individualized treatment regimes from observational data in healthcare, civics, e-commerce, and beyond. One big hurdle to policy learning is a commonplace lack of overlap in the data for different…
A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…
Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…
For an AI's training process to successfully impart a desired goal, it is important that the AI does not attempt to resist the training. However, partially learned goals will often incentivize an AI to avoid further goal updates, as most…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
This paper studies algorithmic decision-making under human's strategic behavior, where a decision maker uses an algorithm to make decisions about human agents, and the latter with information about the algorithm may exert effort…
Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward.…
When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…