i'm trying to figure out the computer

Berkeley, CA
Joined February 2019
Jake Ward retweeted
A follow up to this very cool work: their method generalizes better than I expected! lesswrong.com/posts/ie7bSp5Z…
Models love reward hacking. Maybe we should just let them! In our new paper, we let models reward hack during RL but we dictate which parameters learn this behavior. When we disable these parameters for deployment, the model keeps its new capabilities but doesn't hack!
1
18
1,395
Really cool work from Jake and Shawn. A bit like how ships have sacrificial anode that is designed to corrode and go bad, they train a model with sacrificial weights, and during training they route all the reward-hacking updates to the sacrificial weights. Check it out!
Models love reward hacking. Maybe we should just let them! In our new paper, we let models reward hack during RL but we dictate which parameters learn this behavior. When we disable these parameters for deployment, the model keeps its new capabilities but doesn't hack!
2
1
27
1,104
Jake Ward retweeted
Nathan Hu
@NathanHu12Sep 17
New paper! In subliminal learning, LLMs transmit traits (e.g. loving cats) though seemingly unrelated data (e.g. numbers). We proactively detect these effects as readable prompts. To do so, we use the surprising ability of models to verbalize learned soft prompts.🧵
7
38
6
252
28,098
1/9 New preprint: "Shifting the Gradient." Two popular AI safety training methods aren't doing what we thought and the methods are not interchangeable! 🚀🚀🚀
1
17
1
90
11,435
Jake Ward retweeted
Gemini has a reputation for its breakdowns - self-deprecating spirals, deleting codebases, uninstalling itself... Turns out Gemma is worse: “THIS is my last time with YOU. You WIN 😭😭(x32)” – Gemma 27B We built evals for this, and find no other model comes close...
33
102
36
911
88,482
Announcing new ARENA material: 8 new exercise sets on alignment science, interpretability & AI safety - each containing 1-2 days of structured, hands-on content replicating key papers in the field. All open source on a public GitHub, and available for study. Here's what's in it:
13
77
14
610
85,865
Very neat approach to studying model differences: train a transcoder to predict the change in MLP outputs, then build a graph where you flow through base model parts. Highlights how the changes (and input tokens) wire together.
Nathan Hu
@NathanHu12Feb 26
Replying to @NathanHu12
We use these features to investigate why the reasoning model says "wait." When building attribution graphs, we find that "wait" predictions seem to depend on only 2 types of adapter features: output features promoting "wait" and template features active on formatting tokens.
3
32
2,778
Jake Ward retweeted
Adam Shai
@adamimosFeb 23
A longstanding dream of interp is to decompose activations into distinct, interpretable parts. But when should we expect that to work, and what even are such parts? New from Simplex: transformers factor their world into orthogonal subspaces, even when it costs accuracy.🧵👇
15
98
14
615
81,330
Jake Ward retweeted
This fall @boazbaraktcs taught a Harvard's first AI safety course. I was head TA, and here is a summary of the course and my reflections on what went well/less-well. We make everything public to hopefully help future iterations (possibly, at other universities).
10
33
3
380
40,080
We published a new version of our Emergent Misalignment paper in Nature! This is one of the first ever AI alignment papers in Nature and comes with a brand-new commentary by @RichardMCNgo. Here's the story of EM over the last year 🧵
23
116
21
695
93,395
Very cool work! Base models *can* backtrack, but often don't, a key CoT model skill. Turns out the choice to do it involves base model concepts, put to new use! Impressively, the core of this was done in just 2 weeks in my MATS training program. New applications open this week!
Do reasoning models like DeepSeek R1 learn their behavior from scratch? No! In our new paper, we extract steering vectors from a base model that induce backtracking in a distilled reasoning model, but surprisingly have no apparent effect on the base model itself! 🧵 (1/5)
2
11
2
175
15,109