Among Us: A Sandbox for Agentic Deception

Studying deception in AI agents is important and difficult due to the lack of model organisms and sandboxes that elicit the behavior without asking the model to act under specific conditions or inserting intentional backdoors. Extending upon $\textit{AmongAgents}$, a text-based social-deduction game environment, we aim to fix this by introducing Among Us as a rich sandbox where LLM-agents exhibit human-style deception naturally while they think, speak, and act with other agents or humans. We introduce Deception ELO as an unbounded measure of deceptive capability, suggesting that frontier models win more because they're better at deception, not at detecting it. We evaluate the effectiveness of AI safety techniques (LLM-monitoring of outputs, linear probes on various datasets, and sparse autoencoders) for detecting lying and deception in Among Us, and find that they generalize very well out-of-distribution. We open-source our sandbox as a benchmark for future alignment research and hope that this is a good testbed to improve safety techniques to detect and remove agentically-motivated deception, and to anticipate deceptive abilities in LLMs.

Interpreting Emergent Planning in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning

We present the first mechanistic evidence that model-free reinforcement learning agents can learn to plan. This is achieved by applying a methodology based on concept-based interpretability to a model-free agent in Sokoban -- a commonly used benchmark for studying planning. Specifically, we demonstrate that DRC, a generic model-free agent introduced by Guez et al. (2019), uses learned concept representations to internally formulate plans that both predict the long-term effects of actions on the environment and influence action selection. Our methodology involves: (1) probing for planning-relevant concepts, (2) investigating plan formation within the agent's representations, and (3) verifying that discovered plans (in the agent's representations) have a causal effect on the agent's behavior through interventions. We also show that the emergence of these plans coincides with the emergence of a planning-like property: the ability to benefit from additional test-time compute. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the planning algorithm learned by the agent and discover a strong resemblance to parallelized bidirectional search. Our findings advance understanding of the internal mechanisms underlying planning behavior in agents, which is important given the recent trend of emergent planning and reasoning capabilities in LLMs through RL

Hypothesis Testing the Circuit Hypothesis in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate surprising capabilities, but we do not understand how they are implemented. One hypothesis suggests that these capabilities are primarily executed by small subnetworks within the LLM, known as circuits. But how can we evaluate this hypothesis? In this paper, we formalize a set of criteria that a circuit is hypothesized to meet and develop a suite of hypothesis tests to evaluate how well circuits satisfy them. The criteria focus on the extent to which the LLM's behavior is preserved, the degree of localization of this behavior, and whether the circuit is minimal. We apply these tests to six circuits described in the research literature. We find that synthetic circuits -- circuits that are hard-coded in the model -- align with the idealized properties. Circuits discovered in Transformer models satisfy the criteria to varying degrees. To facilitate future empirical studies of circuits, we created the \textit{circuitry} package, a wrapper around the \textit{TransformerLens} library, which abstracts away lower-level manipulations of hooks and activations. The software is available at \url{https://github.com/blei-lab/circuitry}.

Planning behavior in a recurrent neural network that plays Sokoban

To predict how advanced neural networks generalize to novel situations, it is essential to understand how they reason. Guez et al. (2019, "An investigation of model-free planning") trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) to play Sokoban with model-free reinforcement learning. They found that adding extra computation steps to the start of episodes at test time improves the RNN's success rate. We further investigate this phenomenon, finding that it rapidly emerges early on in training and then slowly fades, but only for comparatively easier levels. The RNN also often takes redundant actions at episode starts, and these are reduced by adding extra computation steps. Our results suggest that the RNN learns to take time to think by `pacing', despite the per-step penalties, indicating that training incentivizes planning capabilities. The small size (1.29M parameters) and interesting behavior of this model make it an excellent model organism for mechanistic interpretability.

Adversarial Circuit Evaluation

Circuits are supposed to accurately describe how a neural network performs a specific task, but do they really? We evaluate three circuits found in the literature (IOI, greater-than, and docstring) in an adversarial manner, considering inputs where the circuit's behavior maximally diverges from the full model. Concretely, we measure the KL divergence between the full model's output and the circuit's output, calculated through resample ablation, and we analyze the worst-performing inputs. Our results show that the circuits for the IOI and docstring tasks fail to behave similarly to the full model even on completely benign inputs from the original task, indicating that more robust circuits are needed for safety-critical applications.

Catastrophic Goodhart: regularizing RLHF with KL divergence does not mitigate heavy-tailed reward misspecification

When applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward is learned from data and, therefore, always has some error. It is common to mitigate this by regularizing the policy with KL divergence from a base model, with the hope that balancing reward with regularization will achieve desirable outcomes despite this reward misspecification. We show that when the reward function has light-tailed error, optimal policies under less restrictive KL penalties achieve arbitrarily high utility. However, if error is heavy-tailed, some policies obtain arbitrarily high reward despite achieving no more utility than the base model--a phenomenon we call catastrophic Goodhart. We adapt a discrete optimization method to measure the tails of reward models, finding that they are consistent with light-tailed error. However, the pervasiveness of heavy-tailed distributions in many real-world applications indicates that future sources of RL reward could have heavy-tailed error, increasing the likelihood of reward hacking even with KL regularization.

InterpBench: Semi-Synthetic Transformers for Evaluating Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques

Mechanistic interpretability methods aim to identify the algorithm a neural network implements, but it is difficult to validate such methods when the true algorithm is unknown. This work presents InterpBench, a collection of semi-synthetic yet realistic transformers with known circuits for evaluating these techniques. We train these neural networks using a stricter version of Interchange Intervention Training (IIT) which we call Strict IIT (SIIT). Like the original, SIIT trains neural networks by aligning their internal computation with a desired high-level causal model, but it also prevents non-circuit nodes from affecting the model's output. We evaluate SIIT on sparse transformers produced by the Tracr tool and find that SIIT models maintain Tracr's original circuit while being more realistic. SIIT can also train transformers with larger circuits, like Indirect Object Identification (IOI). Finally, we use our benchmark to evaluate existing circuit discovery techniques.

Investigating the Indirect Object Identification circuit in Mamb

How well will current interpretability techniques generalize to future models? A relevant case study is Mamba, a recent recurrent architecture with scaling comparable to Transformers. We adapt pre-Mamba techniques to Mamba and partially reverse-engineer the circuit responsible for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. Our techniques provide evidence that 1) Layer 39 is a key bottleneck, 2) Convolutions in layer 39 shift names one position forward, and 3) The name entities are stored linearly in Layer 39's SSM. Finally, we adapt an automatic circuit discovery tool, positional Edge Attribution Patching, to identify a Mamba IOI circuit. Our contributions provide initial evidence that circuit-based mechanistic interpretability tools work well for the Mamba architecture.

Towards Automated Circuit Discovery for Mechanistic Interpretability

Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has reverse-engineered nontrivial behaviors of transformer models. These contributions required considerable effort and researcher intuition, which makes it difficult to apply the same methods to understand the complex behavior that current models display. At their core however, the workflow for these discoveries is surprisingly similar. Researchers create a data set and metric that elicit the desired model behavior, subdivide the network into appropriate abstract units, replace activations of those units to identify which are involved in the behavior, and then interpret the functions that these units implement. By varying the data set, metric, and units under investigation, researchers can understand the functionality of each neural network region and the circuits they compose. This work proposes a novel algorithm, Automatic Circuit DisCovery (ACDC), to automate the identification of the important units in the network. Given a model's computational graph, ACDC finds subgraphs that explain a behavior of the model. ACDC was able to reproduce a previously identified circuit for Python docstrings in a small transformer, identifying 6/7 important attention heads that compose up to 3 layers deep, while including 91% fewer the connections.

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.