David Scott Krueger

Lennart Heim

Markus Anderljung

2024-06-17

ArXiv (preprint)

Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits

Stephen Casper

Carson Ezell

Charlotte Siegmann

Noam Kolt

Taylor Lynn Curtis

Benjamin Bucknall

Andreas Haupt

Kevin Wei

Jérémy Scheurer

Marius Hobbhahn

Lee Sharkey

Satyapriya Krishna

Marvin Von Hagen

Silas Alberti

Alan Chan

Qinyi Sun

Michael Gerovitch

David Bau

Max Tegmark

David Scott Krueger … (see 1 more)

Dylan Hadfield-Menell

External audits of AI systems are increasingly recognized as a key mechanism for AI governance. The effectiveness of an audit, however, depe… (see more)nds on the degree of system access granted to auditors. Recent audits of state-of-the-art AI systems have primarily relied on black-box access, in which auditors can only query the system and observe its outputs. However, white-box access to the system's inner workings (e.g., weights, activations, gradients) allows an auditor to perform stronger attacks, more thoroughly interpret models, and conduct fine-tuning. Meanwhile, outside-the-box access to its training and deployment information (e.g., methodology, code, documentation, hyperparameters, data, deployment details, findings from internal evaluations) allows for auditors to scrutinize the development process and design more targeted evaluations. In this paper, we examine the limitations of black-box audits and the advantages of white- and outside-the-box audits. We also discuss technical, physical, and legal safeguards for performing these audits with minimal security risks. Given that different forms of access can lead to very different levels of evaluation, we conclude that (1) transparency regarding the access and methods used by auditors is necessary to properly interpret audit results, and (2) white- and outside-the-box access allow for substantially more scrutiny than black-box access alone.

2024-06-05

The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (published)

Visibility into AI Agents

Alan Chan

Carson Ezell

Max Kaufmann

Kevin Wei

Lewis Hammond

Herbie Bradley

Emma Bluemke

Nitarshan Rajkumar

Noam Kolt

Lennart Heim

Markus Anderljung

2024-06-05

The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (published)

Stress-Testing Capability Elicitation With Password-Locked Models

Ryan Greenblatt

Fabien Roger

Dmitrii Krasheninnikov

2024-05-29

ArXiv (preprint)

Implicitly Bayesian Prediction Rules in Deep Learning

Bruno Mlodozeniec

Richard E. Turner

The Bayesian approach leads to coherent updates of predictions under new data, which makes adhering to Bayesian principles appealing in deci… (see more)sion-making contexts. Traditionally, integrating Bayesian principles into models like deep neural networks involves setting priors on parameters and approximating posteriors. This is done despite the fact that, typically, priors on parameters reflect any prior beliefs only insofar as they dictate function space behaviour. In this paper, we rethink this approach and consider what properties characterise a prediction rule as being Bayesian. Algorithms meeting such criteria can be deemed implicitly Bayesian — they make the same predictions as some Bayesian model, without explicitly manifesting priors and posteriors. We argue this might be a more fruitful approach towards integrating Bayesian principles into deep learning. In this paper, we propose how to measure how close a general prediction rule is to being implicitly Bayesian, and empirically evaluate multiple prediction strategies using our approach. We also show theoretically that agents relying on non-implicitly Bayesian prediction rules can be easily exploited in adversarial betting settings.

2024-05-27

approximateinference.org/AABI/2024/Symposium_Archival_Track (accepted)

proceedings.mlr.press

openreview.net

What Mechanisms Does Knowledge Distillation Distill?

Cindy Wu

Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Bruno Mlodozeniec

Robert Kirk

Knowledge distillation is a commonly-used compression method in ML due to the popularity of increasingly large-scale models, but it is uncle… (see more)ar if all the information a teacher model contains is distilled into the smaller student model. We aim to formalize the concept of ‘knowledge’ to investigate how knowledge is transferred during distillation, focusing on shared invariant outputs to counterfactual changes of dataset latent variables (we call these latents mechanisms). We define a student model to be a good stand-in model for a teacher if it shares the teacher’s learned mechanisms, and find that Jacobian matching and contrastive representation learning are viable methods by which to train such models. While these methods do not result in perfect transfer of mechanisms, we show they often improve student fidelity or mitigate simplicity bias (as measured by the teacher-to-student KL divergence and accuracy on various out-of-distribution test datasets), especially on datasets with spurious statistical correlations.

2024-05-14

Proceedings of UniReps: the First Workshop on Unifying Representations in Neural Models (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

openreview.net

Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models

Usman Anwar

Abulhair Saparov

Javier Rando

Daniel Paleka

Miles Turpin

Peter Hase

Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Erik Jenner

Stephen Casper

Oliver Sourbut

Benjamin L. Edelman

Zhaowei Zhang

Mario Günther

Anton Korinek

Jose Hernandez-Orallo

Lewis Hammond

Eric J Bigelow

Alexander Pan

Lauro Langosco

Tomasz Korbak … (see 18 more)

Heidi Zhang

Ruiqi Zhong

Sean 'o H'eigeartaigh

Gabriel Recchia

Giulio Corsi

Alan Chan

Markus Anderljung

Lilian Edwards

Yoshua Bengio

Danqi Chen

Samuel Albanie

Tegan Maharaj

Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

Florian Tramèr

He He

Atoosa Kasirzadeh

Yejin Choi

This work identifies 18 foundational challenges in assuring the alignment and safety of large language models (LLMs). These challenges are o… (see more)rganized into three different categories: scientific understanding of LLMs, development and deployment methods, and sociotechnical challenges. Based on the identified challenges, we pose

2024-04-15

ArXiv (preprint)

Affirmative safety: An approach to risk management for high-risk AI

Akash Wasil

Joshua Clymer

Emily Dardaman

Simeon Campos

Evan Murphy

Prominent AI experts have suggested that companies developing high-risk AI systems should be required to show that such systems are safe bef… (see more)ore they can be developed or deployed. The goal of this paper is to expand on this idea and explore its implications for risk management. We argue that entities developing or deploying high-risk AI systems should be required to present evidence of affirmative safety: a proactive case that their activities keep risks below acceptable thresholds. We begin the paper by highlighting global security risks from AI that have been acknowledged by AI experts and world governments. Next, we briefly describe principles of risk management from other high-risk fields (e.g., nuclear safety). Then, we propose a risk management approach for advanced AI in which model developers must provide evidence that their activities keep certain risks below regulator-set thresholds. As a first step toward understanding what affirmative safety cases should include, we illustrate how certain kinds of technical evidence and operational evidence can support an affirmative safety case. In the technical section, we discuss behavioral evidence (evidence about model outputs), cognitive evidence (evidence about model internals), and developmental evidence (evidence about the training process). In the operational section, we offer examples of organizational practices that could contribute to affirmative safety cases: information security practices, safety culture, and emergency response capacity. Finally, we briefly compare our approach to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Overall, we hope our work contributes to ongoing discussions about national and global security risks posed by AI and regulatory approaches to address these risks.

2024-04-14

ArXiv (preprint)

Affirmative safety: An approach to risk management for high-risk AI

Akash Wasil

Joshua Clymer

Emily Dardaman

Simeon Campos

Evan Murphy

Prominent AI experts have suggested that companies developing high-risk AI systems should be required to show that such systems are safe bef… (see more)ore they can be developed or deployed. The goal of this paper is to expand on this idea and explore its implications for risk management. We argue that entities developing or deploying high-risk AI systems should be required to present evidence of affirmative safety: a proactive case that their activities keep risks below acceptable thresholds. We begin the paper by highlighting global security risks from AI that have been acknowledged by AI experts and world governments. Next, we briefly describe principles of risk management from other high-risk fields (e.g., nuclear safety). Then, we propose a risk management approach for advanced AI in which model developers must provide evidence that their activities keep certain risks below regulator-set thresholds. As a first step toward understanding what affirmative safety cases should include, we illustrate how certain kinds of technical evidence and operational evidence can support an affirmative safety case. In the technical section, we discuss behavioral evidence (evidence about model outputs), cognitive evidence (evidence about model internals), and developmental evidence (evidence about the training process). In the operational section, we offer examples of organizational practices that could contribute to affirmative safety cases: information security practices, safety culture, and emergency response capacity. Finally, we briefly compare our approach to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Overall, we hope our work contributes to ongoing discussions about national and global security risks posed by AI and regulatory approaches to address these risks.

2024-04-14

ArXiv (preprint)

Safety Cases: How to Justify the Safety of Advanced AI Systems

Joshua Clymer

Nick Gabrieli

Thomas Larsen

As AI systems become more advanced, companies and regulators will make difficult decisions about whether it is safe to train and deploy them… (see more). To prepare for these decisions, we investigate how developers could make a 'safety case,' which is a structured rationale that AI systems are unlikely to cause a catastrophe. We propose a framework for organizing a safety case and discuss four categories of arguments to justify safety: total inability to cause a catastrophe, sufficiently strong control measures, trustworthiness despite capability to cause harm, and -- if AI systems become much more powerful -- deference to credible AI advisors. We evaluate concrete examples of arguments in each category and outline how arguments could be combined to justify that AI systems are safe to deploy.

2024-03-15

ArXiv (preprint)

A Generative Model of Symmetry Transformations

James U. Allingham

Bruno Mlodozeniec

Shreyas Padhy

Javier Antor'an

Richard E. Turner

Eric T. Nalisnick

Jos'e Miguel Hern'andez-Lobato

Correctly capturing the symmetry transformations of data can lead to efficient models with strong generalization capabilities, though method… (see more)s incorporating symmetries often require prior knowledge. While recent advancements have been made in learning those symmetries directly from the dataset, most of this work has focused on the discriminative setting. In this paper, we construct a generative model that explicitly aims to capture symmetries in the data, resulting in a model that learns which symmetries are present in an interpretable way. We provide a simple algorithm for efficiently learning our generative model and demonstrate its ability to capture symmetries under affine and color transformations. Combining our symmetry model with existing generative models results in higher marginal test-log-likelihoods and robustness to data sparsification.

2024-03-04

ArXiv (preprint)