AF - Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent? (Bengio et al. 2024) by Matt MacDermott

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent? (Bengio et al. 2024), published by Matt MacDermott on September 1, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.
Yoshua Bengio wrote a blogpost about a new AI safety paper by him, various collaborators, and me. I've pasted the text below, but first here are a few comments from me aimed at an AF/LW audience.
The paper is basically maths plus some toy experiments. It assumes access to a Bayesian oracle that can infer a posterior over hypotheses given data, and can also estimate probabilities for some negative outcome ("harm"). It proposes some conservative decision rules one could use to reject actions proposed by an agent, and proves probabilistic bounds on their performance under appropriate assumptions.
I expect the median reaction in these parts to be something like: ok, I'm sure there are various conservative decision rules you could apply using a Bayesian oracle, but isn't obtaining a Bayesian oracle the hard part here? Doesn't that involve advances in Bayesian machine learning, and also probably solving ELK to get the harm estimates?
My answer to that is: yes, I think so. I think Yoshua does too, and that that's the centre of his research agenda.
Probably the main interest of this paper to people here is to provide an update on Yoshua's research plans. In particular it gives some more context on what the "guaranteed safe AI" part of his approach might look like -- design your system to do explicit Bayesian inference, and make an argument that the system is safe based on probabilistic guarantees about the behaviour of a Bayesian inference machine.
This is in contrast to more hardcore approaches that want to do formal verification by model-checking. You should probably think of the ambition here as more like "a safety case involving proofs" than "a formal proof of safety".
Bounding the probability of harm from an AI to create a guardrail
Published 29 August 2024 by yoshuabengio
As we move towards more powerful AI, it becomes urgent to better understand the risks, ideally in a mathematically rigorous and quantifiable way, and use that knowledge to mitigate them. Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees, i.e., would be provably unlikely to take a harmful action?
Current AI safety evaluations and benchmarks test the AI for cases where it may behave badly, e.g., by providing answers that could yield dangerous misuse. That is useful and should be legally required with flexible regulation, but is not sufficient. These tests only tell us one side of the story: If they detect bad behavior, a flag is raised and we know that something must be done to mitigate the risks.
However, if they do not raise such a red flag, we may still have a dangerous AI in our hands, especially since the testing conditions might be different from the deployment setting, and attackers (or an out-of-control AI) may be creative in ways that the tests did not consider. Most concerningly, AI systems could simply recognize they are being tested and have a temporary incentive to behave appropriately while being tested. Part of the problem is that such tests are spot checks.
They are trying to evaluate the risk associated with the AI in general by testing it on special cases. Another option would be to evaluate the risk on a case-by-case basis and reject queries or answers that are considered to potentially violate or safety specification.
With the long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we thus consider in this new paper (see reference and co-authors below) the objective of estimating a context-dependent upper bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at ru...