Scaling Laws For Scalable Oversight

Kavli Affiliate: Max Tegmark

| First 5 Authors: Joshua Engels, David D. Baek, Subhash Kantamneni, Max Tegmark,

| Summary:

Scalable oversight, the process by which weaker AI systems supervise stronger
ones, has been proposed as a key strategy to control future superintelligent
systems. However, it is still unclear how scalable oversight itself scales. To
address this gap, we propose a framework that quantifies the probability of
successful oversight as a function of the capabilities of the overseer and the
system being overseen. Specifically, our framework models oversight as a game
between capability-mismatched players; the players have oversight-specific Elo
scores that are a piecewise-linear function of their general intelligence, with
two plateaus corresponding to task incompetence and task saturation. We
validate our framework with a modified version of the game Nim and then apply
it to four oversight games: Mafia, Debate, Backdoor Code and Wargames. For each
game, we find scaling laws that approximate how domain performance depends on
general AI system capability. We then build on our findings in a theoretical
study of Nested Scalable Oversight (NSO), a process in which trusted models
oversee untrusted stronger models, which then become the trusted models in the
next step. We identify conditions under which NSO succeeds and derive
numerically (and in some cases analytically) the optimal number of oversight
levels to maximize the probability of oversight success. We also apply our
theory to our four oversight games, where we find that NSO success rates at a
general Elo gap of 400 are 13.5% for Mafia, 51.7% for Debate, 10.0% for
Backdoor Code, and 9.4% for Wargames; these rates decline further when
overseeing stronger systems.

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