Related papers: The Alignment Trap: Complexity Barriers
An impossibility theorem demonstrates that a particular problem or set of problems cannot be solved as described in the claim. Such theorems put limits on what is possible to do concerning artificial intelligence, especially the…
The field of AI alignment aims to steer AI systems toward human goals, preferences, and ethical principles. Its contributions have been instrumental for improving the output quality, safety, and trustworthiness of today's AI models. This…
We formalize AI alignment as a multi-objective optimization problem called $\langle M,N,\varepsilon,\delta\rangle$-agreement, in which a set of $N$ agents (including humans) must reach approximate ($\varepsilon$) agreement across $M$…
A core challenge in the development of increasingly capable AI systems is to make them safe and reliable by ensuring their behaviour is consistent with human values. This challenge, known as the alignment problem, does not merely apply to…
This manuscript establishes information-theoretic limitations for robustness of AI security and alignment by extending G\"odel's incompleteness theorem to AI. Knowing these limitations and preparing for the challenges they bring is…
We argue that formal certification of AI alignment over open-ended or unbounded input domains is impossible under standard assumptions in computational complexity and learning theory, and characterise what remains achievable. Two…
This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI…
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…
We establish fundamental mathematical limits on universal approximation theorem (UAT) system alignment by proving that catastrophic failures are an inescapable feature of any useful computational system. Our central thesis is that for any…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more powerful and autonomous, they increasingly face conflicts and dilemmas in many scenarios. We first summarize and taxonomize these diverse conflicts. Then, we model the LLM's preferences to make…
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…
The inner alignment problem, which asserts whether an arbitrary artificial intelligence (AI) model satisfices a non-trivial alignment function of its outputs given its inputs, is undecidable. This is rigorously proved by Rice's theorem,…
Existing alignment research is dominated by concerns about safety and preventing harm: safeguards, controllability, and compliance. This paradigm of alignment parallels early psychology's focus on mental illness: necessary but incomplete.…
Large AI Models (LAIMs), of which large language models are the most prominent recent example, showcase some impressive performance. However they have been empirically found to pose serious security issues. This paper systematizes our…
Static content-based AI value alignment is insufficient for robust alignment under capability scaling, distributional shift, and increasing autonomy. This holds for any approach that treats alignment as optimizing toward a fixed formal…
While autonomous agents often surpass humans in their ability to handle vast and complex data, their potential misalignment (i.e., lack of transparency regarding their true objective) has thus far hindered their use in critical applications…
The issues of AI risk and AI safety are becoming critical as the prospect of artificial general intelligence (AGI) looms larger. The emergence of extremely large and capable generative models has led to alarming predictions and created a…
This paper presents a comprehensive empirical study on the safety alignment capabilities. We evaluate what matters for safety alignment in LLMs and LRMs to provide essential insights for developing more secure and reliable AI systems. We…
Alignment of artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses the normative problem of specifying how AI systems should act and the technical problem of ensuring AI systems comply with those specifications. To date, AI alignment has generally…
A recent paper (van Rooij et al. 2024) claims to have proved that achieving human-like intelligence using learning from data is intractable in a complexity-theoretic sense. We point out that the proof relies on an unjustified assumption…