Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety -- A Review

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Bereska, Leonard, Gavves, Efstratios
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Bereska, Leonard
Gavves, Efstratios
author_facet Bereska, Leonard
Gavves, Efstratios
contents Understanding AI systems' inner workings is critical for ensuring value alignment and safety. This review explores mechanistic interpretability: reverse engineering the computational mechanisms and representations learned by neural networks into human-understandable algorithms and concepts to provide a granular, causal understanding. We establish foundational concepts such as features encoding knowledge within neural activations and hypotheses about their representation and computation. We survey methodologies for causally dissecting model behaviors and assess the relevance of mechanistic interpretability to AI safety. We examine benefits in understanding, control, alignment, and risks such as capability gains and dual-use concerns. We investigate challenges surrounding scalability, automation, and comprehensive interpretation. We advocate for clarifying concepts, setting standards, and scaling techniques to handle complex models and behaviors and expand to domains such as vision and reinforcement learning. Mechanistic interpretability could help prevent catastrophic outcomes as AI systems become more powerful and inscrutable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_14082
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety -- A Review
Bereska, Leonard
Gavves, Efstratios
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding AI systems' inner workings is critical for ensuring value alignment and safety. This review explores mechanistic interpretability: reverse engineering the computational mechanisms and representations learned by neural networks into human-understandable algorithms and concepts to provide a granular, causal understanding. We establish foundational concepts such as features encoding knowledge within neural activations and hypotheses about their representation and computation. We survey methodologies for causally dissecting model behaviors and assess the relevance of mechanistic interpretability to AI safety. We examine benefits in understanding, control, alignment, and risks such as capability gains and dual-use concerns. We investigate challenges surrounding scalability, automation, and comprehensive interpretation. We advocate for clarifying concepts, setting standards, and scaling techniques to handle complex models and behaviors and expand to domains such as vision and reinforcement learning. Mechanistic interpretability could help prevent catastrophic outcomes as AI systems become more powerful and inscrutable.
title Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety -- A Review
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14082