Hello everyone, We’ll be holding the next AI alignment reading group meeting at 2 PM PST this Friday. Our paper will be “Active Learning Helps Pretrained Models Learn the Intended Task <https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08491>”. Models can fail in unpredictable ways during deployment due to task
ambiguity, when multiple behaviors are consistent with the provided training data. An example is an object classifier trained on red squares and blue circles: when encountering blue squares, the intended behavior is undefined. We investigate whether pretrained models are better active learners, capable of disambiguating between the possible tasks a user may be trying to specify. Intriguingly, we find that better active learning is an emergent property of the pretraining process: pretrained models require up to 5 times fewer labels when using uncertainty-based active learning, while non-pretrained models see no or even negative benefit. We find these gains come from an ability to select examples with attributes that disambiguate the intended behavior, such as rare product categories or atypical backgrounds. These attributes are far more linearly separable in pretrained model's representation spaces vs non-pretrained models, suggesting a possible mechanism for this behavior.
If you're at all interested in building AI systems that can disambiguate concepts or handle uncertainty, please feel free to join. All the best, Quintin Pope Join Zoom Meeting https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/95843260079?pwd=TzZTN0xPaFZrazRGTElud0J1cnJLUT... Password: 961594 Phone Dial-In Information +1 971 247 1195 US (Portland) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) Meeting ID: 958 4326 0079 All the best, Quintin