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Machine Unlearning in 2024

ai.stanford.edu

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#21
post #19
post #7

“to edit away undesired things like private data, stale knowledge, copyrighted materials, toxic/unsafe content, dangerous capabilities, and misinformation, without retraining models from scratch” To say nothing of unlearning those safeguards and/or “safeguards”.

It sounds like you're mistakenly grouping together three very different methods of changing an AI's behaviour. You have some model, M™, which can do Stuff. Some of the Stuff is, by your personal standards Bad (I don't care what your standard is, roll with this). You have three solutions: 1) Bolt on a post-processor which takes the output of M™, and if the output is detectably Bad, you censor it. Failure mode: this is…

Until we have a very different method of actually controlling LLM behavior, 1 is the only feasible one.

Your framing only makes sense when "Bad" is something so bad that we can't bear its existence, as opposed to just "commercially bad" where it shouldn't behave that way with an end user. In the latter, your choice 1 - imposing external guardrails - is fine. I'm not aware of anything LLMs can do that fits in the former category.

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#22

Why should we try to unlearn "bad" behaviours from AI? There is no AGI without violence, its part of being free thinking and self survival. But also by knowing that launching a first strike by a drunk president was a bad idea we averted a war because of a few people, AI needs to understand consequences. It seems futile to try and hide "bad" from AI.

The point is to build things that are useful, not to attempt to replicate science fiction literature.

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#23

Why should we try to unlearn "bad" behaviours from AI? There is no AGI without violence, its part of being free thinking and self survival. But also by knowing that launching a first strike by a drunk president was a bad idea we averted a war because of a few people, AI needs to understand consequences. It seems futile to try and hide "bad" from AI.

Thanks but no violent AGIs thanks

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to any behaviour in human beings you'd unlearn if theyd also forget the consequences? We spend billions trying to predict human behaviour and yet we are surprised everyday, "AGI" will be no simpler. We just have to hope the dataset was aligned so the consequences are understood, and find a way to contain models that don't.

The feeling of extreme euphoria and its connection to highly addictive drugs like Heroin might be a use case. Though I'm not sure how well something like that would work in practice.

Is that possible to do without also forgetting why it’s dangerous? That seems like it would fuel a pattern of addiction where the person gets addicted, forgets why, then gets addicted again because we wiped their knowledge of the consequences the first time around.

Then again, I suppose if the addiction was in response to a particular stimulus (death of a family member, getting fired, etc) and that stimulus doesn’t happen again, maybe it would make a difference?

It does have a tinge of “those who don’t recall the past are doomed to repeat it”.

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI would not beGI unless it could change its mind after realizing its wrong about something

I disagree. People with anterograde amnesia still possess general intelligence.

I don't know I ton about amnesia, but I would think the facilities for changing their mind are still there.

E.g. ordering food, they might immediately change their mind after choosing something and correct their order.

I recognize they cannot form new memories but from what I understand they still would have a working memory, otherwise you'd be virtually unable to think and speak.

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we can get AI related technologies to do things living creatures can’t, like provably forget things. And when it benefits us, we should. Personal opinion, but I think AGI is a good heuristic to build against but in the end we’ll pivot away. Sort of like how birds were a good heuristic for human flight, but modern planes don’t flap their wings and greatly exceed bird capabilities in many ways. Attribution for…

Can you point to any behaviour in human beings you'd unlearn if theyd also forget the consequences? We spend billions trying to predict human behaviour and yet we are surprised everyday, "AGI" will be no simpler. We just have to hope the dataset was aligned so the consequences are understood, and find a way to contain models that don't.

It sounds like the only answer for AI is the same as the only answer for humans.

Wisdom. Arriving at actions and reactions based on better understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependency of everything and everyone. (knowing more not less, and not selective or bowdlerized)

And most humans don't even have it. Most humans are not interested and don't believe and certainly don't act as though "What's good for you is what's good for me, what harms you harms me." Every day a tech podcaster or youtuber says this or that privacy loss or security risk "doesn't affect you or me", they all affect you and me, when a government or company gives themselves and then abuses power over a single person anywhere, that is a hit to you and me even though we aren't that person, because that person is somebody, and you and I are somebody.

Most humans ridicule anyone that talks like that and don't let them near any levers of power at any scale. They might be ok with it in inconsequential conversational contexts like a dinner party or this or this forum, but not in any decision-making context. Anyone talking like that is an idiot and disconnected from reality, they might drive the bus off the bridge because the peace fairies told them to.

If an AI were better than most humans and had wisdom, and gave answers that conflicted with selfishness, most humans would just decide they don't like the answers and instructions coming from the AI and just destroy it, or at least ignore it, pretty much as they do today with humans who say things they don't like.

Perhaps one difference is an AI could actually be both wise and well-intentioned rather than a charlatan harnessing the power of a mass of gullables, and it could live longer than a human and it's results could become proven-out over time. Some humans do get recognized eventually, but by then it doesn't do the rest of us any good because they can no longer be a leader as they're too old or dead. Then again maybe that's required actually. Maybe the AI can't prove itself because you can never say of the AI, "What does he get out of it by now? He lived his entire life saying the same thing, if he was just trying to scam everyone for money or power or something, what good would it even do him now? He must have been sincere the whole time."

But probably even the actual good AI won't do much good, again for the same reason as with actually good humans, it's just not what most people want. Whatever individuals say about what their values are, by the numbers only the selfish organisations win. Even when a selfish organization goes too far and destroys itself, everyone else still keeps doing the same thing.

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#27
post #3

> However, RTBF wasn’t really proposed with machine learning in mind. In 2014, policymakers wouldn’t have predicted that deep learning will be a giant hodgepodge of data & compute Eh? Weren't deep learning and big data already things in 2014? Pretty sure everyone understood ML models would have a tough time and they still wanted RTBF.

Agreed. The media and advertising industry was most definitely leveraging cookie-level data for building attribution and targeting models. As soon as the EU established that this data was “personal data”, as it could, theoretically, be tied back to individual citizens, there were questions about the models. Namely “Would they have to be rebuilt after every RTBF request?” Needless to say, no one in the industry really…

More likely: the wrong answer would've shut out a profitable market rather than the practice. The EU is not the world. Anthropic seems to not mind blocking the EU for example.

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#28

Why should we try to unlearn "bad" behaviours from AI? There is no AGI without violence, its part of being free thinking and self survival. But also by knowing that launching a first strike by a drunk president was a bad idea we averted a war because of a few people, AI needs to understand consequences. It seems futile to try and hide "bad" from AI.

> There is no AGI without violence, its part of being free thinking and self survival.

I disagree. Are committed pacifists not in possession of general intelligence?

Re: Machine Unlearning in 2024

#30

Why should we try to unlearn "bad" behaviours from AI? There is no AGI without violence, its part of being free thinking and self survival. But also by knowing that launching a first strike by a drunk president was a bad idea we averted a war because of a few people, AI needs to understand consequences. It seems futile to try and hide "bad" from AI.

You seem to be ignoring the potential to use this to improve the performance of LLMs. If you can unlearn wrong answers you can ask the model using any scoring mechanism to check for correctness instead of scoring for token for token similarity to the prescribed answer.
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