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Related papers: Towards Measuring Goal-Directedness in AI Systems

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Humans rapidly learn abstract knowledge when encountering novel environments and flexibly deploy this knowledge to guide efficient and intelligent action. Can modern AI systems learn and plan in a similar way? We study this question using a…

Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting…

The main novelty of the proposed approach is that it allows a robot to learn an end-to-end policy which can adapt to changes in the environment during execution. While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature,…

Highly capable AI systems could secretly pursue misaligned goals -- what we call "scheming". Because a scheming AI would deliberately try to hide its misaligned goals and actions, measuring and mitigating scheming requires different…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

The AI-alignment problem arises when there is a discrepancy between the goals that a human designer specifies to an AI learner and a potential catastrophic outcome that does not reflect what the human designer really wants. We argue that a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-10 Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Shaked Shammah , Amnon Shashua

Large language models (LLMs) have seen increasing popularity in enterprise applications where AI agents and humans engage in objective-driven interactions. However, these systems are difficult to evaluate: data may be complex and unlabeled;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Emi Soroka , Tanmay Chopra , Krish Desai , Sanjay Lall

The progress of AI systems such as large language models (LLMs) raises increasingly pressing concerns about their safe deployment. This paper examines the value alignment problem for LLMs, arguing that current alignment strategies are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Raphaël Millière

A rising vision for AI in the open world centers on the development of systems that can complement humans for perceptual, diagnostic, and reasoning tasks. To date, systems aimed at complementing the skills of people have employed models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Bryan Wilder , Eric Horvitz , Ece Kamar

AI agents -- systems that plan, reason, and act using large language models -- produce non-deterministic, path-dependent behavior that cannot be fully governed at design time, where with governed we mean striking the right balance between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Maurits Kaptein , Vassilis-Javed Khan , Andriy Podstavnychy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various domains, yet it often relies on carefully designed programmatic reward functions to guide agent behavior. Designing such reward functions can be challenging and may not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Qi Wang , Mian Wu , Yuyang Zhang , Mingqi Yuan , Wenyao Zhang , Haoxiang You , Yunbo Wang , Xin Jin , Xiaokang Yang , Wenjun Zeng

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly, and companies are shifting their focus to developing generalist AI systems that can autonomously act and pursue goals. Increases in capabilities and autonomy may soon massively amplify…

AI alignment is about ensuring AI systems only pursue goals and activities that are beneficial to humans. Most of the current approach to AI alignment is to learn what humans value from their behavioural data. This paper proposes a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Pei-Yu Chen , Myrthe L. Tielman , Dirk K. J. Heylen , Catholijn M. Jonker , M. Birna van Riemsdijk

An increasing number of decisions regarding the daily lives of human beings are being controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in spheres ranging from healthcare, transportation, and education to college admissions,…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Dana Pessach , Erez Shmueli

Over the past decade, policymakers have developed a set of regulatory tools to ensure AI development aligns with key societal goals. Many of these tools were initially developed in response to concerns with task-specific AI and therefore…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Jennifer Wang , Andrew Selbst , Solon Barocas , Suresh Venkatasubramanian

An ambitious goal for machine learning is to create agents that behave ethically: The capacity to abide by human moral norms would greatly expand the context in which autonomous agents could be practically and safely deployed, e.g. fully…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Adrien Ecoffet , Joel Lehman

The rise of general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), has raised pressing moral questions about how to reduce bias and ensure fairness at scale. Researchers have documented a sort of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Jacy Anthis , Kristian Lum , Michael Ekstrand , Avi Feller , Chenhao Tan

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has paved the way for revolutionary decision-making processes, which if harnessed appropriately, can contribute to advancements in various sectors, from healthcare to economics. However, its black box nature…