Portrait of Damiano Fornasiere

Damiano Fornasiere

damiano.fornasiere@mila.quebec
Senior AI Safety Research Scientist, Safe AI for Humanity

Biography

Damiano Fornasiere is a senior AI safety research scientist at LawZero and Mila, and obtained a PhD in mathematics from the University of Barcelona.

Publications

Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent?
Yoshua Bengio
Michael K. Cohen
Nikolay Malkin
Matt MacDermott
Damiano Fornasiere
Pietro Greiner
Younesse Kaddar
Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the … (see more)long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider estimating a context-dependent bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at run-time to provide a guardrail against dangerous actions of an AI. Noting that different plausible hypotheses about the world could produce very different outcomes, and because we do not know which one is right, we derive bounds on the safety violation probability predicted under the true but unknown hypothesis. Such bounds could be used to reject potentially dangerous actions. Our main results involve searching for cautious but plausible hypotheses, obtained by a maximization that involves Bayesian posteriors over hypotheses. We consider two forms of this result, in the i.i.d. case and in the non-i.i.d. case, and conclude with open problems towards turning such theoretical results into practical AI guardrails.
2025-07-11
Proceedings of the Forty-first Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent?
Yoshua Bengio
Michael K. Cohen
Nikolay Malkin
Matt MacDermott
Damiano Fornasiere
Pietro Greiner
Younesse Kaddar
Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the … (see more)long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider estimating a context-dependent bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at run-time to provide a guardrail against dangerous actions of an AI. Noting that different plausible hypotheses about the world could produce very different outcomes, and because we do not know which one is right, we derive bounds on the safety violation probability predicted under the true but unknown hypothesis. Such bounds could be used to reject potentially dangerous actions. Our main results involve searching for cautious but plausible hypotheses, obtained by a maximization that involves Bayesian posteriors over hypotheses. We consider two forms of this result, in the iid case and in the non-iid case, and conclude with open problems towards turning such theoretical results into practical AI guardrails.
2025-05-07
auai.org/UAI/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net