Hi everyone, we are working on a project for the AI Safety Camp (AISC) 2023, and this is the first progress report.

To summarize, the aim of the project is to begin exploring an alternative pathway to interpreting generally intelligent computational agents. We want to study neurosymbolic systems as an inherently more interpretable paradigm compared to the current deep learning architectures, and hope to resolve some of the limitations of neurosymbolic systems, develop new conceptual insights/frameworks in this context, as well as transport relevant insights from them back into the deep learning context. The project is very open-ended.

Neurosymbolic architectures can provide a rich research interface for studying various hypotheses about cognition, as well as alignment. The reason for this is generally that the effect of precise changes to the architecture’s modules or their content can be tracked much more clearly compared to within entirely subsymbolic systems. Learning occurs more locally, as opposed to a sweeping change through the entire architecture, and the pathways of decision making and modelling generally include multiple modules that can be studied in isolation. There is often greater clarity about which cognitive behavior is upstream of some given cognitive behavior, allowing a better grasp on the range of behavior for the given area.

Cognitive Architectures are a diverse field and it is difficult to make general statements about it. Our project is focusing on a novel cognitive architecture, the Prop-room and Stage Cognitive Architecture (PSCA), that was proposed by the research lead Robert Kralisch, to allow for a more open-ended and thoroughly understood framework in which up-to-date insights from neuroscience and cognitive science more generally can be integrated or discarded as the development progresses. An additional reason for proposing a novel architecture is to better construct and isolate particular dynamics that we believe may be important to understand for solving the Alignment Problem.

To be clear, this does not mean that we think that this approach will work for certain. However, it seems like an important thing to try.

In this Progress Report, we give a brief overview of what everyone has been working on over the course of the last month, and give some reflection on the pace and shape of the project progress. ...

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