Related papers: Recontextualization Mitigates Specification Gaming…
Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external…
Reward functions, learned or manually specified, are rarely perfect. Instead of accurately expressing human goals, these reward functions are often distorted by human beliefs about how best to achieve those goals. Specifically, these reward…
Cognitive control, the ability of a system to adapt to the demands of a task, is an integral part of cognition. A widely accepted fact about cognitive control is that it is context-sensitive: Adults and children alike infer information…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of "unsafe" queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be…
The presence of specific linguistic signals particular to a certain sub-group can become highly salient to language models during training. In automated decision-making settings, this may lead to biased outcomes when models rely on cues…
Fine-tuning LLMs for classification typically maps inputs directly to labels. We ask whether attaching brief explanations to each label during fine-tuning yields better models. We evaluate conversational response quality along three axes:…
While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk is emerging: capability-oriented training induced exploitation. We investigate whether language models, when…
Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…
Self-evaluation is increasingly central to language model training, underpinning techniques from Constitutional AI to self-refinement. We investigate whether coupling self-evaluation to reward signals creates incentives for wireheading,…
One of the long-standing goals in optimisation and constraint programming is to describe a problem in natural language and automatically obtain an executable, efficient model. Large language models appear to bring this vision closer,…
This paper focuses on robotic reinforcement learning with sparse rewards for natural language goal representations. An open problem is the sample-inefficiency that stems from the compositionality of natural language, and from the grounding…
In-context learning (ICL) is often motivated by the intuition that demonstrations help because they provide correct input-output examples. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: correctness does not guarantee exemplar utility,…
This chapter develops a unified framework for studying misspecified learning situations in which agents optimize and update beliefs within an incorrect model of their environment. We review the statistical foundations of learning from…
We classify and re-examine some of the current approaches to improve the performance-computes trade-off of language models, including (1) non-causal models (such as masked language models), (2) extension of batch length with efficient…
Likelihood training and maximization-based decoding result in dull and repetitive generated texts even when using powerful language models (Holtzman et al., 2019). Adding a loss function for regularization was shown to improve text…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…
Human dialogues are scenario-based and appropriate responses generally relate to the latent context knowledge entailed by the specific scenario. To enable responses that are more meaningful and context-specific, we propose to improve…
The field of AI alignment is concerned with AI systems that pursue unintended goals. One commonly studied mechanism by which an unintended goal might arise is specification gaming, in which the designer-provided specification is flawed in a…