Eric Steinberger

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, Elizabeth Barnes et al. · deepmind

AI systems that "think" in human language offer a unique opportunity for AI safety: we can monitor their chains of thought (CoT) for the intent to misbehave. Like all other known AI oversight methods, CoT monitoring is imperfect and allows some misbehavior to go unnoticed. Nevertheless, it shows promise and we recommend further research into CoT monitorability and investment in CoT monitoring alongside existing safety methods. Because CoT monitorability may be fragile, we recommend that frontier model developers consider the impact of development decisions on CoT monitorability.

Eric Steinberger, Adam Lerer, Noam Brown

We introduce DREAM, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that finds optimal strategies in imperfect-information games with multiple agents. Formally, DREAM converges to a Nash Equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games and to an extensive-form coarse correlated equilibrium in all other games. Our primary innovation is an effective algorithm that, in contrast to other regret-based deep learning algorithms, does not require access to a perfect simulator of the game to achieve good performance. We show that DREAM empirically achieves state-of-the-art performance among model-free algorithms in popular benchmark games, and is even competitive with algorithms that do use a perfect simulator.

Eric Steinberger

Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) is the most successful algorithm for finding approximate Nash equilibria in imperfect information games. However, CFR's reliance on full game-tree traversals limits its scalability. For this reason, the game's state- and action-space is often abstracted (i.e. simplified) for CFR, and the resulting strategy is then translated back to the full game, which requires extensive expert-knowledge and often converges to highly exploitable policies. A recently proposed method, Deep CFR, applies deep learning directly to CFR, allowing the agent to intrinsically abstract and generalize over the state-space from samples, without requiring expert knowledge. In this paper, we introduce Single Deep CFR (SD-CFR), a simplified variant of Deep CFR that has a lower overall approximation error by avoiding the training of an average strategy network. We show that SD-CFR is more attractive from a theoretical perspective and empirically outperforms Deep CFR with respect to exploitability and one-on-one play in poker.