Towards Measuring Goal-Directedness in AI Systems
Recent advances in deep learning have brought attention to the possibility of creating advanced, general AI systems that outperform humans across many tasks. However, if these systems pursue unintended goals, there could be catastrophic consequences. A key prerequisite for AI systems pursuing unintended goals is whether they will behave in a coherent and goal-directed manner in the first place, optimizing for some unknown goal; there exists significant research trying to evaluate systems for said behaviors. However, the most rigorous definitions of goal-directedness we currently have are difficult to compute in real-world settings. Drawing upon this previous literature, we explore policy goal-directedness within reinforcement learning (RL) environments. In our findings, we propose a different family of definitions of the goal-directedness of a policy that analyze whether it is well-modeled as near-optimal for many (sparse) reward functions. We operationalize this preliminary definition of goal-directedness and test it in toy Markov decision process (MDP) environments. Furthermore, we explore how goal-directedness could be measured in frontier large-language models (LLMs). Our contribution is a definition of goal-directedness that is simpler and more easily computable in order to approach the question of whether AI systems could pursue dangerous goals. We recommend further exploration of measuring coherence and goal-directedness, based on our findings.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement Learning (RL)Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Measuring Goal-Directedness
We define maximum entropy goal-directedness (MEG), a formal measure of goal-directedness in causal models and Markov decision processes, and give algorithms for computing it. Measuring goal-directedness is important, as …
Goal-Directedness is in the Eye of the Beholder
Our ability to predict the behavior of complex agents turns on the attribution of goals. Probing for goal-directed behavior comes in two flavors: Behavioral and mechanistic. The former proposes that goal-directedness can…
Evaluating the Goal-Directedness of Large Language Models
To what extent do LLMs use their capabilities towards their given goal? We take this as a measure of their goal-directedness. We evaluate goal-directedness on tasks that require information gathering, cognitive effort, a…
A Behavioural and Representational Evaluation of Goal-Directedness in Language Model Agents
Understanding an agent's goals helps explain and predict its behaviour, yet there is no established methodology for reliably attributing goals to agentic systems. We propose a framework for evaluating goal-directedness t…
Complex behavior from intrinsic motivation to occupy action-state path space
Most theories of behavior posit that agents tend to maximize some form of reward or utility. However, animals very often move with curiosity and seem to be motivated in a reward-free manner. Here we abandon the idea of r…