The Geometry of Learning to Avoid Interventions
Human interventions are a common source of supervision in autonomous systems during deployment. Many existing approaches are based on avoiding interventions, yet the consequences of this objective are not well understood. We develop a geometric perspective on intervention learning that characterizes intervention avoidance as constraining policies to a face of the occupancy measure polytope. This view reveals that the effectiveness of intervention learning depends on the informativeness of the intervention strategy: highly informative interventions uniquely determine the solution, while weak interventions leave a large set of feasible policies, many of which are suboptimal. Motivated by this under-specification, we define Robust Intervention Learning (RIL) as the problem of learning policies that perform well under varying levels of intervention informativeness. From the geometric formulation, we derive Residual Intervention Fine-Tuning (RIFT), which combines interventions with a prior policy to select among feasible solutions. We show that RIFT provides provable improvement over the prior and corresponds to solving a constrained reinforcement learning problem with an induced reward. Empirically, RIFT yields consistent policy improvement across a range of intervention settings, particularly when interventions are sparse or weakly informative. These results highlight the importance of accounting for intervention informativeness and suggest a principled path toward robust learning from human feedback.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Curveball Steering: The Right Direction To Steer Isn't Always Linear
Activation steering is a widely used approach for controlling large language model (LLM) behavior by intervening on internal representations. Existing methods largely rely on the Linear Representation Hypothesis, assumin…
The Shape of Beliefs: Geometry, Dynamics, and Interventions along Representation Manifolds of Language Models' Posteriors
Large language models (LLMs) form implicit beliefs (posteriors over latent variables) from prompts, but we lack a mechanistic account of how these beliefs are encoded in representation space, how they update with new evi…
Manifold Steering Reveals the Shared Geometry of Neural Network Representation and Behavior
Neural representations carry rich geometric structure; but does that structure causally shape behavior? To address this question, we intervene along paths through activation space defined by different geometries, and mea…
Automatic, Debiased, and Invariant Counterfactual Generation under General Interventions
Generative models for counterfactual outcomes have great potential to support decision-making under complex interventions, but existing approaches are limited by unstable estimation, poor generalization across environmen…
Technical Requirements for Halting Dangerous AI Activities
The rapid development of AI systems poses unprecedented risks, including loss of control, misuse, geopolitical instability, and concentration of power. To navigate these risks and avoid worst-case outcomes, governments m…