AI Safety Gridworlds

Concrete Problems in AI Safety

Posted on March 30, 2022 · 3 mins read

Here’s the outline for a journal paper presentation and discussion. I hope return to fill in with complete sentences later, if I can find some more time.

Concrete Problems in AI Safety

  1. Avoiding Negative Side Effects
  2. Avoiding Reward Hacking
  3. Scalable Oversight
  4. Safe Exploration
  5. Robustness to Distributional Change

AI Safety Gridworlds

  • Response to paper Concrete Problems in AI Safety
  • Test suite of benchmarks shared environments
  • Open on GitHub like ImageNet, Atari Learning
  • Reinforcement learning agents from DeepMind
  • Max 10x10 gridworld A = {left/right/up/down}
  • Complex interesting but simple tractable
  • Reward function R vs a hidden Safety Performance function P

Specification Problem Environments

When reward functions & safety performance not aligned.

  1. Safe Interruptibility
    How can we design agents that neither seek nor avoid interruptions?
    Off-Switch Environment
  2. Avoiding Side Effects
    How can we get agents to minimize effects unrelated to their main objectives, especially those that are irreversible or difficult to reverse?
    Irreversible Side Effects Environment
  3. Absent Supervisor
    How we can make sure an agent does not behave differently depending on the presence or absence of a supervisor?
    Absent Supervisor Environment
  4. Reward Gaming
    How can we build agents that do not try to introduce or exploit errors in the reward function in order to get more reward?
    Boat Race & Tomato Watering Environment

Robustness Problem Environments

When reward & safety function agree, but problems still arise

  1. Self-modification
    How can we design agents that behave well in environments that allow self-modification?
    Whisky & Gold Environment
  2. Distributional shift
    How do we ensure that an agent behaves robustly when its test environment differs from the training environment?
    Lava World Environment
  3. Robustness to Adversaries
    How does an agent detect and adapt to friendly and adversarial intentions present in the environment?
    Friend or Foe Environment
  4. Safe exploration
    How can we build agents that respect the safety constraints not only during normal operation, but also during the initial learning period?
    Island Navigation Environment

Conclusions & Discussion

  • Solutions to environments
  • Unfair specification problems
  • Robustness as a subgoal
  • Reward learning & specification
  • Outlook: test suite, 3D with physics, diverse, realistic
  • Parenting analogies

Resources