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RL, But Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do (arxiv.org)
1 point by optimalsolver on Dec 8, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: Punishing an AI for straying from a trusted policy fails when the reference is a predictor of that policy, which can allow actions it wouldn't take. Theory and a language model test suggest it's real; instead, forbid anything the trusted policy might not do.

Abstract · RL, but don't do anything I wouldn't do

In reinforcement learning, if the agent's reward differs from the designers' true utility, even only rarely, the state distribution resulting from the agent's policy can be very bad, in theory and in practice. When RL policies would devolve into undesired behavior, a common countermeasure is KL regularization to a trusted policy ("Don't do anything I wouldn't do"). All current cutting-edge language models are RL agents that are KL-regularized to a "base policy" that is purely predictive. Unfortunately, we demonstrate that when this base policy is a Bayesian predictive model of a trusted policy, the KL constraint is no longer reliable for controlling the behavior of an advanced RL agent. We demonstrate this theoretically using algorithmic information theory, and while systems today are too weak to exhibit this theorized failure precisely, we RL-finetune a language model and find evidence that our formal results are plausibly relevant in practice. We also propose a theoretical alternative that avoids this problem by replacing the "Don't do anything I wouldn't do" principle with "Don't do anything I mightn't do".

Michael K. Cohen, Marcus Hutter, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell
arXiv:2410.06213 · cs.LG · submitted Oct 8, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages, 7 page appendix, 4 figures

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What do "RL" and "KL" mean in the abstract?
Reinforcement learning and Kullback–Leibler divergence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback–Leibler_divergence