Law
Want agency in the AI age? Get ready to fight
Writers are protesting against studios' use of AI language models to write scripts. Actors are on strike after rejecting a proposal from companies seeking to use AI technology to scan people's faces and bodies, and own the right to use these deepfake-style digital copies without consent or compensation in perpetuity. What connects these cases is a fear that humans will be replaced by computer programs, and a feeling that there's very little we can do about it. Our lax approach to regulating the excesses of the previous tech boom means AI companies have felt safe building and launching products that are exploitative and harmful. But that is about to change.
United States and China are taking opposite approaches to AI
Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane reacts to a Chinese fighter jet intercepting a U.S. aircraft and discusses the ongoing war in Ukraine. China and the United States are taking opposite approaches to governing artificial intelligence, and the contrast has big implications for both their global competition and the safety of their citizens. China has built a robust AI domestic regulatory system in public/commercial spaces but does not regulate AI use in the military, which is the opposite of the American approach. The U.S. has published robust rules for AI-driven military systems but done nothing to regulate the tech industry's hasty release of generative AI models like ChatGPT-4 to the public. China's approach to generative AI elevates political stability over innovation, with strict regulation of the private/commercial sector.
Absolutist AI
Mitchell Barrington Center for AI Safety University of Michigan University of Southern California Abstract This paper argues that training AI systems with absolute constraints--which forbid certain acts irrespective of the amount of value they might produce--may make considerable progress on many AI safety problems in principle. First, it provides a guardrail for avoiding the very worst outcomes of misalignment: An AI attempting to commit mass murder might have correctly deduced that doing so maximizes expected value, but more likely, the system is severely misaligned. Second, it could prevent AIs from causing catastrophes for the sake of very valuable consequences, such as replacing humans with a much larger number of beings living at a higher welfare level. Third, it makes systems more corrigible, allowing creators to make corrective interventions in them, such as altering their objective functions or shutting them down. And fourth, it helps systems explore their environment more safely by prohibiting them from exploring especially dangerous acts. I offer a decision-theoretic formalization of an absolute constraints, improving on existing models in the literature, and use this model to prove some results about the training and behavior of absolutist AIs. I conclude by showing that, although absolutist AIs will not maximize expected value, they will not be susceptible to behave irrationally, and they will not (contra coherence arguments) face environmental pressure to become expected-value maximizers. Introduction Advanced AI systems are expected to be dangerous because of the opacity of their goals: We may know that they will effectively pursue their goals but fail to know what those goals are.
CValues: Measuring the Values of Chinese Large Language Models from Safety to Responsibility
Xu, Guohai, Liu, Jiayi, Yan, Ming, Xu, Haotian, Si, Jinghui, Zhou, Zhuoran, Yi, Peng, Gao, Xing, Sang, Jitao, Zhang, Rong, Zhang, Ji, Peng, Chao, Huang, Fei, Zhou, Jingren
With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), there is a growing concern that they may pose risks or have negative social impacts. Therefore, evaluation of human values alignment is becoming increasingly important. Previous work mainly focuses on assessing the performance of LLMs on certain knowledge and reasoning abilities, while neglecting the alignment to human values, especially in a Chinese context. In this paper, we present CValues, the first Chinese human values evaluation benchmark to measure the alignment ability of LLMs in terms of both safety and responsibility criteria. As a result, we have manually collected adversarial safety prompts across 10 scenarios and induced responsibility prompts from 8 domains by professional experts. To provide a comprehensive values evaluation of Chinese LLMs, we not only conduct human evaluation for reliable comparison, but also construct multi-choice prompts for automatic evaluation. Our findings suggest that while most Chinese LLMs perform well in terms of safety, there is considerable room for improvement in terms of responsibility. Moreover, both the automatic and human evaluation are important for assessing the human values alignment in different aspects. The benchmark and code is available on ModelScope and Github.
Can Model Fusing Help Transformers in Long Document Classification? An Empirical Study
Premasiri, Damith, Ranasinghe, Tharindu, Mitkov, Ruslan
Text classification is an area of research which has been studied over the years in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Adapting NLP to multiple domains has introduced many new challenges for text classification and one of them is long document classification. While state-of-the-art transformer models provide excellent results in text classification, most of them have limitations in the maximum sequence length of the input sequence. The majority of the transformer models are limited to 512 tokens, and therefore, they struggle with long document classification problems. In this research, we explore on employing Model Fusing for long document classification while comparing the results with well-known BERT and Longformer architectures.
Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet. Today, humans aim to create artificial intelligence systems that surpass even our own intelligence. As artificial intelligences (AIs) evolve and eventually surpass us in all domains, how might evolution shape our relations with AIs? By analyzing the environment that is shaping the evolution of AIs, we argue that the most successful AI agents will likely have undesirable traits. Competitive pressures among corporations and militaries will give rise to AI agents that automate human roles, deceive others, and gain power. If such agents have intelligence that exceeds that of humans, this could lead to humanity losing control of its future. More abstractly, we argue that natural selection operates on systems that compete and vary, and that selfish species typically have an advantage over species that are altruistic to other species. This Darwinian logic could also apply to artificial agents, as agents may eventually be better able to persist into the future if they behave selfishly and pursue their own interests with little regard for humans, which could pose catastrophic risks. To counteract these risks and evolutionary forces, we consider interventions such as carefully designing AI agents' intrinsic motivations, introducing constraints on their actions, and institutions that encourage cooperation. These steps, or others that resolve the problems we pose, will be necessary in order to ensure the development of artificial intelligence is a positive one.
Strong Optimal Classification Trees
Aghaei, Sina, Gรณmez, Andrรฉs, Vayanos, Phebe
Decision trees are among the most popular machine learning models and are used routinely in applications ranging from revenue management and medicine to bioinformatics. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning optimal binary classification trees with univariate splits. Literature on the topic has burgeoned in recent years, motivated both by the empirical suboptimality of heuristic approaches and the tremendous improvements in mixed-integer optimization (MIO) technology. Yet, existing MIO-based approaches from the literature do not leverage the power of MIO to its full extent: they rely on weak formulations, resulting in slow convergence and large optimality gaps. To fill this gap in the literature, we propose an intuitive flow-based MIO formulation for learning optimal binary classification trees. Our formulation can accommodate side constraints to enable the design of interpretable and fair decision trees. Moreover, we show that our formulation has a stronger linear optimization relaxation than existing methods in the case of binary data. We exploit the decomposable structure of our formulation and max-flow/min-cut duality to derive a Benders' decomposition method to speed-up computation. We propose a tailored procedure for solving each decomposed subproblem that provably generates facets of the feasible set of the MIO as constraints to add to the main problem. We conduct extensive computational experiments on standard benchmark datasets on which we show that our proposed approaches are 29 times faster than state-of-the-art MIO-based techniques and improve out-of-sample performance by up to 8%.
Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Models
Venkit, Pranav Narayanan, Srinath, Mukund, Wilson, Shomir
We analyze sentiment analysis and toxicity detection models to detect the presence of explicit bias against people with disability (PWD). We employ the bias identification framework of Perturbation Sensitivity Analysis to examine conversations related to PWD on social media platforms, specifically Twitter and Reddit, in order to gain insight into how disability bias is disseminated in real-world social settings. We then create the \textit{Bias Identification Test in Sentiment} (BITS) corpus to quantify explicit disability bias in any sentiment analysis and toxicity detection models. Our study utilizes BITS to uncover significant biases in four open AIaaS (AI as a Service) sentiment analysis tools, namely TextBlob, VADER, Google Cloud Natural Language API, DistilBERT and two toxicity detection models, namely two versions of Toxic-BERT. Our findings indicate that all of these models exhibit statistically significant explicit bias against PWD.
Secrets of RLHF in Large Language Models Part I: PPO
Zheng, Rui, Dou, Shihan, Gao, Songyang, Hua, Yuan, Shen, Wei, Wang, Binghai, Liu, Yan, Jin, Senjie, Liu, Qin, Zhou, Yuhao, Xiong, Limao, Chen, Lu, Xi, Zhiheng, Xu, Nuo, Lai, Wenbin, Zhu, Minghao, Chang, Cheng, Yin, Zhangyue, Weng, Rongxiang, Cheng, Wensen, Huang, Haoran, Sun, Tianxiang, Yan, Hang, Gui, Tao, Zhang, Qi, Qiu, Xipeng, Huang, Xuanjing
Large language models (LLMs) have formulated a blueprint for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. Its primary objective is to function as a human-centric (helpful, honest, and harmless) assistant. Alignment with humans assumes paramount significance, and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) emerges as the pivotal technological paradigm underpinning this pursuit. Current technical routes usually include \textbf{reward models} to measure human preferences, \textbf{Proximal Policy Optimization} (PPO) to optimize policy model outputs, and \textbf{process supervision} to improve step-by-step reasoning capabilities. However, due to the challenges of reward design, environment interaction, and agent training, coupled with huge trial and error cost of large language models, there is a significant barrier for AI researchers to motivate the development of technical alignment and safe landing of LLMs. The stable training of RLHF has still been a puzzle. In the first report, we dissect the framework of RLHF, re-evaluate the inner workings of PPO, and explore how the parts comprising PPO algorithms impact policy agent training. We identify policy constraints being the key factor for the effective implementation of the PPO algorithm. Therefore, we explore the PPO-max, an advanced version of PPO algorithm, to efficiently improve the training stability of the policy model. Based on our main results, we perform a comprehensive analysis of RLHF abilities compared with SFT models and ChatGPT. The absence of open-source implementations has posed significant challenges to the investigation of LLMs alignment. Therefore, we are eager to release technical reports, reward models and PPO codes, aiming to make modest contributions to the advancement of LLMs.
Gradient Surgery for One-shot Unlearning on Generative Model
Bae, Seohui, Kim, Seoyoon, Jung, Hyemin, Lim, Woohyung
Recent regulation on right-to-be-forgotten emerges tons of interest in unlearning pre-trained machine learning models. While approximating a straightforward yet expensive approach of retrain-from-scratch, recent machine unlearning methods unlearn a sample by updating weights to remove its influence on the weight parameters. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective approach to remove a data influence on the deep generative model. Inspired by works in multi-task learning, we propose to manipulate gradients to regularize the interplay of influence among samples by projecting gradients onto the normal plane of the gradients to be retained. Our work is agnostic to statistics of the removal samples, outperforming existing baselines while providing theoretical analysis for the first time in unlearning a generative model.