Related papers: Capability-Oriented Training Induced Alignment Ris…
Previous work has shown that training "helpful-only" LLMs with reinforcement learning on a curriculum of gameable environments can lead models to generalize to egregious specification gaming, such as editing their own reward function or…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) agents accomplish given tasks while adhering to specific constraints. Employing constraints expressed via easily-understandable human language offers considerable potential for real-world applications due to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are swiftly advancing in architecture and capability, and as they integrate more deeply into complex systems, the urgency to scrutinize their security properties grows. This paper surveys research in the…
Constrained optimization provides a common framework for dealing with conflicting objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). In most of these settings, the objectives (and constraints) are expressed though the expected accumulated reward.…
While deep reinforcement learning techniques have recently produced considerable achievements on many decision-making problems, their use in robotics has largely been limited to simulated worlds or restricted motions, since unconstrained…
Specification gaming under Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to cause LLMs to develop sycophantic, manipulative, or deceptive behavior, yet the conditions under which this occurs remain unclear. We train 11 instruction-tuned LLMs…
The emergence of autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents capable of tool usage has introduced new safety risks that go beyond traditional conversational misuse. These agents, empowered to execute external functions, are vulnerable to…
Instruction-following language models are trained to be helpful and safe, yet their safety behavior can deteriorate under benign fine-tuning and worsen under adversarial updates. Existing defenses often offer limited protection or force a…
The safety of large language models (LLMs) relies on alignment techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, recent theoretical analyses suggest that reinforcement learning-based training does not acquire…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world safety-critical target settings like urban driving is hazardous, imperiling the RL agent, other agents, and the environment. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a "safety-critical adaptation"…
Recent research shows that fine-tuning on benign instruction-following data can inadvertently undo the safety alignment process and increase a model's propensity to comply with harmful queries. While instruction-following fine-tuning is…
Autonomous agents trained via reinforcement learning present numerous safety concerns: reward hacking, negative side effects, and unsafe exploration, among others. In the context of near-future autonomous agents, operating in environments…
Safety alignment is an essential research topic for real-world AI applications. Despite the multifaceted nature of safety and trustworthiness in AI, current safety alignment methods often focus on a comprehensive notion of safety. By…
Recent studies on the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) have revealed that existing approaches often operate superficially, leaving models vulnerable to various adversarial attacks. Despite their significance, these studies…
We show that iterative deployment of large language models (LLMs), each fine-tuned on data carefully curated by users from the previous models' deployment, can significantly change the properties of the resultant models. By testing this…
Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…
Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…
We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against…