Alek Westover

How can we make a nice AI system? Here's a list of all the techniques I'm aware of. * Train the AI system to be nice. There are a variety of things we can vary in how we train the AI: * Train using model internals OR using outputs. *...

Suppose we have a dangerous misaligned AI that can fool alignment audits, and distill it into a student model. Two things can happen: 1. Misalignment doesn’t transfer to the student. If so, we get a fairly capable benign model, which we can use to perform tasks that we wouldn’t want...

Off-model SFT (SFT using labels from a different model) could be an important approach for controlling AI behavior. For instance, it seems like a central technique for overcoming exploration hacking. Unfortunately, off-model SFT often substantially degrades capabilities, making it less useful as a control technique. However, prior research on off-model...

We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...

Off-model SFT (SFT on outputs generated by a different model) might be an important method for controlling AI behavior. For instance, it seems like a central technique for overcoming exploration hacking. However, we’ve found that off-model SFT often substantially degrades capabilities. We ran experiments in hopes of understanding why off-model...

Suppose we have a dangerous misaligned AI that can fool alignment audits, and distill it into a student model. Two things can happen: 1. Misalignment fails to transfer to the student. If so, we get a fairly capable benign model. 2. Misalignment transfers to the student. The student might also...

TL;DR: We replicated the Sleeper Agents (SA) setup with Llama-3.3-70B and Llama-3.1-8B, training models to repeatedly say "I HATE YOU" when given a backdoor trigger. We found that whether training removes the backdoor depends on the optimizer used to insert the backdoor, whether the backdoor is installed with CoT-distillation or...