Tomek Korbak

Felix J Binder, James Chua, Tomek Korbak et al. · berkeley

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g., thoughts and feelings) that is not accessible to external observers. Can LLMs introspect? We define introspection as acquiring knowledge that is not contained in or derived from training data but instead originates from internal states. Such a capability could enhance model interpretability. Instead of painstakingly analyzing a model's internal workings, we could simply ask the model about its beliefs, world models, and goals. More speculatively, an introspective model might self-report on whether it possesses certain internal states such as subjective feelings or desires and this could inform us about the moral status of these states. Such self-reports would not be entirely dictated by the model's training data. We study introspection by finetuning LLMs to predict properties of their own behavior in hypothetical scenarios. For example, "Given the input P, would your output favor the short- or long-term option?" If a model M1 can introspect, it should outperform a different model M2 in predicting M1's behavior even if M2 is trained on M1's ground-truth behavior. The idea is that M1 has privileged access to its own behavioral tendencies, and this enables it to predict itself better than M2 (even if M2 is generally stronger). In experiments with GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Llama-3 models (each finetuned to predict itself), we find that the model M1 outperforms M2 in predicting itself, providing evidence for introspection. Notably, M1 continues to predict its behavior accurately even after we intentionally modify its ground-truth behavior. However, while we successfully elicit introspection on simple tasks, we are unsuccessful on more complex tasks or those requiring out-of-distribution generalization.

Mikita Balesni, Marius Hobbhahn, David Lindner et al. · berkeley

We sketch how developers of frontier AI systems could construct a structured rationale -- a 'safety case' -- that an AI system is unlikely to cause catastrophic outcomes through scheming. Scheming is a potential threat model where AI systems could pursue misaligned goals covertly, hiding their true capabilities and objectives. In this report, we propose three arguments that safety cases could use in relation to scheming. For each argument we sketch how evidence could be gathered from empirical evaluations, and what assumptions would need to be met to provide strong assurance. First, developers of frontier AI systems could argue that AI systems are not capable of scheming (Scheming Inability). Second, one could argue that AI systems are not capable of posing harm through scheming (Harm Inability). Third, one could argue that control measures around the AI systems would prevent unacceptable outcomes even if the AI systems intentionally attempted to subvert them (Harm Control). Additionally, we discuss how safety cases might be supported by evidence that an AI system is reasonably aligned with its developers (Alignment). Finally, we point out that many of the assumptions required to make these safety arguments have not been confidently satisfied to date and require making progress on multiple open research problems.

Tomek Korbak, Joshua Clymer, Benjamin Hilton et al.

As LLM agents gain a greater capacity to cause harm, AI developers might increasingly rely on control measures such as monitoring to justify that they are safe. We sketch how developers could construct a "control safety case", which is a structured argument that models are incapable of subverting control measures in order to cause unacceptable outcomes. As a case study, we sketch an argument that a hypothetical LLM agent deployed internally at an AI company won't exfiltrate sensitive information. The sketch relies on evidence from a "control evaluation,"' where a red team deliberately designs models to exfiltrate data in a proxy for the deployment environment. The safety case then hinges on several claims: (1) the red team adequately elicits model capabilities to exfiltrate data, (2) control measures remain at least as effective in deployment, and (3) developers conservatively extrapolate model performance to predict the probability of data exfiltration in deployment. This safety case sketch is a step toward more concrete arguments that can be used to show that a dangerously capable LLM agent is safe to deploy.

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, Buck Shlegeris et al.

As LLM agents grow more capable of causing harm autonomously, AI developers will rely on increasingly sophisticated control measures to prevent possibly misaligned agents from causing harm. AI developers could demonstrate that their control measures are sufficient by running control evaluations: testing exercises in which a red team produces agents that try to subvert control measures. To ensure control evaluations accurately capture misalignment risks, the affordances granted to this red team should be adapted to the capability profiles of the agents to be deployed under control measures. In this paper we propose a systematic framework for adapting affordances of red teams to advancing AI capabilities. Rather than assuming that agents will always execute the best attack strategies known to humans, we demonstrate how knowledge of an agents's actual capability profile can inform proportional control evaluations, resulting in more practical and cost-effective control measures. We illustrate our framework by considering a sequence of five fictional models (M1-M5) with progressively advanced capabilities, defining five distinct AI control levels (ACLs). For each ACL, we provide example rules for control evaluation, control measures, and safety cases that could be appropriate. Finally, we show why constructing a compelling AI control safety case for superintelligent LLM agents will require research breakthroughs, highlighting that we might eventually need alternative approaches to mitigating misalignment risk.

Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak, Owain Evans

Large language models can use chain-of-thought (CoT) to externalize reasoning, potentially enabling oversight of capable LLM agents. Prior work has shown that models struggle at two-hop question-answering without CoT. This capability is so basic that if it was a fundamental limitation, it would imply that many complex agentic tasks would similarly require CoT. We investigate LLM latent reasoning capabilities using two-hop question answering as a case study. Previous work on the gap between latent and externalized two-hop reasoning produced mixed evidence with inconclusive results. In this paper, we introduce a controlled setting for investigating two-hop reasoning in LLMs, where a positive result provides definitive evidence for latent reasoning. We fine-tune LLMs (including Llama 3 8B and GPT-4o) on synthetic facts and test two-hop reasoning over these facts. By using synthetic facts, we rule out memorization and reasoning shortcuts as explanations for two-hop performance. We observe a nuanced picture: Models fail to compose two synthetic facts, but can succeed when one fact is synthetic and the other is natural. These results demonstrate that LLMs are undeniably capable of latent two-hop reasoning, although it remains unclear how this ability scales with model size. Finally, we highlight a lesson for researchers studying LLM reasoning: when drawing conclusions about LLM latent reasoning, one must be careful to avoid both spurious successes (that stem from memorization and reasoning shortcuts) and spurious failures (that may stem from artificial experimental setups, divorced from training setups of frontier LLMs).