Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models

This work identifies 18 foundational challenges in assuring the alignment and safety of large language models (LLMs). These challenges are organized into three different categories: scientific understanding of LLMs, development and deployment methods, and sociotechnical challenges. Based on the identified challenges, we pose $200+$ concrete research questions.

Visibility into AI Agents

Increased delegation of commercial, scientific, governmental, and personal activities to AI agents -- systems capable of pursuing complex goals with limited supervision -- may exacerbate existing societal risks and introduce new risks. Understanding and mitigating these risks involves critically evaluating existing governance structures, revising and adapting these structures where needed, and ensuring accountability of key stakeholders. Information about where, why, how, and by whom certain AI agents are used, which we refer to as visibility, is critical to these objectives. In this paper, we assess three categories of measures to increase visibility into AI agents: agent identifiers, real-time monitoring, and activity logging. For each, we outline potential implementations that vary in intrusiveness and informativeness. We analyze how the measures apply across a spectrum of centralized through decentralized deployment contexts, accounting for various actors in the supply chain including hardware and software service providers. Finally, we discuss the implications of our measures for privacy and concentration of power. Further work into understanding the measures and mitigating their negative impacts can help to build a foundation for the governance of AI agents.

Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits

External audits of AI systems are increasingly recognized as a key mechanism for AI governance. The effectiveness of an audit, however, depends 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.

Hazards from Increasingly Accessible Fine-Tuning of Downloadable Foundation Models

Public release of the weights of pretrained foundation models, otherwise known as downloadable access \citep{solaiman_gradient_2023}, enables fine-tuning without the prohibitive expense of pretraining. Our work argues that increasingly accessible fine-tuning of downloadable models may increase hazards. First, we highlight research to improve the accessibility of fine-tuning. We split our discussion into research that A) reduces the computational cost of fine-tuning and B) improves the ability to share that cost across more actors. Second, we argue that increasingly accessible fine-tuning methods may increase hazard through facilitating malicious use and making oversight of models with potentially dangerous capabilities more difficult. Third, we discuss potential mitigatory measures, as well as benefits of more accessible fine-tuning. Given substantial remaining uncertainty about hazards, we conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for the development of mitigations.

An International Consortium for Evaluations of Societal-Scale Risks from Advanced AI

Given rapid progress toward advanced AI and risks from frontier AI systems (advanced AI systems pushing the boundaries of the AI capabilities frontier), the creation and implementation of AI governance and regulatory schemes deserves prioritization and substantial investment. However, the status quo is untenable and, frankly, dangerous. A regulatory gap has permitted AI labs to conduct research, development, and deployment activities with minimal oversight. In response, frontier AI system evaluations have been proposed as a way of assessing risks from the development and deployment of frontier AI systems. Yet, the budding AI risk evaluation ecosystem faces significant coordination challenges, such as a limited diversity of evaluators, suboptimal allocation of effort, and perverse incentives. This paper proposes a solution in the form of an international consortium for AI risk evaluations, comprising both AI developers and third-party AI risk evaluators. Such a consortium could play a critical role in international efforts to mitigate societal-scale risks from advanced AI, including in managing responsible scaling policies and coordinated evaluation-based risk response. In this paper, we discuss the current evaluation ecosystem and its shortcomings, propose an international consortium for advanced AI risk evaluations, discuss issues regarding its implementation, discuss lessons that can be learnt from previous international institutions and existing proposals for international AI governance institutions, and, finally, we recommend concrete steps to advance the establishment of the proposed consortium: (i) solicit feedback from stakeholders, (ii) conduct additional research, (iii) conduct a workshop(s) for stakeholders, (iv) analyze feedback and create final proposal, (v) solicit funding, and (vi) create a consortium.

Welfare Diplomacy: Benchmarking Language Model Cooperation

The growing capabilities and increasingly widespread deployment of AI systems necessitate robust benchmarks for measuring their cooperative capabilities. Unfortunately, most multi-agent benchmarks are either zero-sum or purely cooperative, providing limited opportunities for such measurements. We introduce a general-sum variant of the zero-sum board game Diplomacy -- called Welfare Diplomacy -- in which players must balance investing in military conquest and domestic welfare. We argue that Welfare Diplomacy facilitates both a clearer assessment of and stronger training incentives for cooperative capabilities. Our contributions are: (1) proposing the Welfare Diplomacy rules and implementing them via an open-source Diplomacy engine; (2) constructing baseline agents using zero-shot prompted language models; and (3) conducting experiments where we find that baselines using state-of-the-art models attain high social welfare but are exploitable. Our work aims to promote societal safety by aiding researchers in developing and assessing multi-agent AI systems. Code to evaluate Welfare Diplomacy and reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/mukobi/welfare-diplomacy.

Towards the Scalable Evaluation of Cooperativeness in Language Models

It is likely that AI systems driven by pre-trained language models (PLMs) will increasingly be used to assist humans in high-stakes interactions with other agents, such as negotiation or conflict resolution. Consistent with the goals of Cooperative AI \citep{dafoe_open_2020}, we wish to understand and shape the multi-agent behaviors of PLMs in a pro-social manner. An important first step is the evaluation of model behaviour across diverse cooperation problems. Since desired behaviour in an interaction depends upon precise game-theoretic structure, we focus on generating scenarios with particular structures with both crowdworkers and a language model. Our work proceeds as follows. First, we discuss key methodological issues in the generation of scenarios corresponding to particular game-theoretic structures. Second, we employ both crowdworkers and a language model to generate such scenarios. We find that the quality of generations tends to be mediocre in both cases. We additionally get both crowdworkers and a language model to judge whether given scenarios align with their intended game-theoretic structure, finding mixed results depending on the game. Third, we provide a dataset of scenario based on our data generated. We provide both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of UnifiedQA and GPT-3 on this dataset. We find that instruct-tuned models tend to act in a way that could be perceived as cooperative when scaled up, while other models seemed to have flat scaling trends.