Related papers: When Empowerment Disempowers
As increasingly capable agents are deployed, a central safety challenge is how to retain meaningful human control without modifying the underlying system. We study a minimal control interface in which an agent chooses whether to act…
As organizations increasingly deploy AI as a teammate rather than a standalone tool, morally consequential mistakes often arise from joint human-AI workflows in which causality is ambiguous. We ask how people allocate responsibility in…
Smart recommendation algorithms have revolutionized content delivery and improved efficiency across various domains. However, concerns about user agency arise from the algorithms' inherent opacity (information asymmetry) and one-way output…
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,…
In human-AI decision making, designing AI that complements human expertise has been a natural strategy to enhance human-AI collaboration, yet it often comes at the cost of decreased AI performance in areas of human strengths. This can…
Information-theoretic fitness functions are becoming increasingly popular to produce generally useful, task-independent behaviors. One such universal function, dubbed empowerment, measures the amount of control an agent exerts on its…
LLM-powered Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) unlock new potentials in distributed reasoning, collaboration, and task generalization but also introduce additional risks due to unguaranteed agreement, cascading uncertainty, and adversarial…
The increasing prevalence of artificial agents creates a correspondingly increasing need to manage disagreements between humans and artificial agents, as well as between artificial agents themselves. Considering this larger space of…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning in mixed-motive settings presents a fundamental challenge: agents must balance individual interests with collective goals, which are neither fully aligned nor strictly opposed. To address this, reward…
Advanced reasoning models with agentic capabilities (AI agents) are deployed to interact with humans and to solve sequential decision-making problems under (approximate) utility functions and internal models. When such problems have…
In order perform a large variety of tasks and to achieve human-level performance in complex real-world environments, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents must be able to learn from their past experiences and gain both knowledge and an…
As increasingly capable large language model (LLM)-based agents are developed, the potential harms caused by misalignment and loss of control grow correspondingly severe. To address these risks, we propose an approach that directly measures…
Reinforcement Learning agents are expected to eventually perform well. Typically, this takes the form of a guarantee about the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm given some assumptions about the environment. We present an algorithm for a…
The electric power sector is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the world. In recent years, there has been an unprecedented increase in electricity demand driven by the so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI)…
To promote cooperation and strengthen the individual impact on the collective outcome in social dilemmas, we propose the Environmental-impact Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (EMuReL) method where each agent estimates the "environmental…
This report examines what I see as the core argument for concern about existential risk from misaligned artificial intelligence. I proceed in two stages. First, I lay out a backdrop picture that informs such concern. On this picture,…
Within the framework of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Social Learning is a new class of algorithms that enables agents to reshape the reward function of other agents with the goal of promoting cooperation and achieving higher global…
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning is a powerful tool to solve many real-world cooperative tasks, but restrictions of real-world applications may require training the agents in a fully decentralized manner. Due to the lack of…
As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become more widespread, associated misalignment risks increase. While prior research has studied agents' ability to produce harmful outputs or follow malicious instructions, it remains unclear how likely…
Practical uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the real world have demonstrated the importance of embedding moral choices into intelligent agents. They have also highlighted that defining top-down ethical constraints on AI according to…