In Deep Learning the bias-variance trade-off is not straightforward and can often be the wrong thing to pay attention to. To understand why, we need to take a tour through inferential statistics, classical statistical learning methods, and machine learning robustness. We’ll end the article by touching on overparameterisation and the double descent phenomena.

Suggested background: Probability, Random Variables, Statistics, Linear Algebra, Calculus, Machine Learning, Deep Learning.

Bias and Variance in Inferential Statistics

Note: We are going to gloss some math in this section in favour of visual intuition. Given my focus on deep learning the particulars of inferential statistics would blow out the length of an already long article.

Imagine you travel back in time and take the place of a statistician in Allied Command during World War II. An intelligence officer tells you the following information:

1. The Germans stamp sequential serial numbers on their tanks. So a tank with serial number 115 means it was the 115th tank produced. To date the Germans have produced an unknown number of tanks (N).
2. When the allies destroy a tank we can find a serial number printed on it. The "destroyability" of a tank is independent of its serial number.
3. We have a sample (size k) of serial numbers, X = (x₁, x₂, … xₖ).
4. We need to use this sample to create an estimator N*.

This is known as the German Tank Problem. In essence:

Given a manufacturing process which generates sequential serial numbers, how can you estimate the total production volume from a random sample?

Exploring an estimator

We’re going to start by looking at one possible estimator and explore its mathematical properties:

• N* is our estimator for N
• X is a random sample of size k
• m=max(X) is the largest serial number observed in the sample

We can use a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the expected performance of N*:

• Draw N from a log-normal distribution (mean=200, large variance)
• Draw k from a Poisson distribution (λ=20)
• For 10,000 iterations, sample k values from [1..N] and compute N*

This simulates a range of possible worlds in which the sample data was collected. The plot below shows 100 iterations of the simulation for different values of N, k, and N*.

Unbiased estimator

We can see that the estimates are generally very accurate – sometimes over estimating the true value and sometimes underestimating it. We can plot the errors across all 10k iterations and see how they are distributed:

The plot shows that the mean error of N* is zero. That’s because this is a well known unbiased estimator. This means that on average errors cancel out, and N* approximates N in expectation. i.e. Averaged across all possible worlds.

Formally, the bias of an estimator of N is expressed as:

The bias is the expected (signed) error of the estimator over all possible samples for a fixed N and k. If the expected error is 0 that means the estimator is unbiased. This is usually written as just the expectation over X rather than X|N,k. I’ve used extra subscripts just to emphasise a point.

Note that this is sometimes written as:

In this situation we can show that the extra expectation is not necessary. N is an unknown but concrete value and the same is true of the expected value of N*. The expected value of a constant is just the constant so we can drop the extra notation.

Variance of an estimator

Variance quantifies how much the estimates will vary across different possible worlds. Our error plot shows estimates cluster around 0, with slight skew due to priors on N and k. If we look at the ratio k/N we can see how the estimator performs with larger and larger samples:

The intuitive result is that for an unbiased estimator, collecting a larger sample leads to more accurate results. The true variance of N* is:

The standard deviation (N/k) can be thought of as the average gap between elements in a random sample of size k. For example: if the true value is N=200 and the sample size is k=10, then the average gap between values in the sample is 20. Hence, we would expect most estimates to be in the range 200±40.

It can be shown that this is the minimum variance that can be achieved by any unbiased estimator. In frequentist statistics this is known as the Uniformly Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator (UMVUE). Put another way: to achieve lower variance you need a biased estimator.

Formally, the variance of an estimator of N is expressed as:

Notice that the variance is the expectation around the estimated value rather than around the true value. If we had a biased estimator we would be evaluating the spread around that biased estimate.

Test your understanding: do you see why we need the expectation around the outer term? N* is a random variable and so we need an expectation over all possible X in order to get a concrete value for it.

Sufficient information

There’s something you may have noticed about our estimator: it seemingly throws away a lot of information in our sample. If our sample has k values why should our estimator use only 1 value?

First, some quick definitions:

• A "statistic" is a function of data (usually of a sample).
• A "sufficient statistic" is one that contains the maximal "information" about the population parameter we are trying to estimate.

It’s possible to show that there isn’t any extra information in the sample once we know the maximum and the sample size k. The reason concerns the likelihood function for values of N given a sample X.

The likelihood function

Consider all possible k-sized subsets of [1..N]. For any given sample the only possible values of N are in the range [max(X), ∞]. i.e. It’s not possible to get a sample containing max(X) if N<max(X). The probability of getting any one k-sized sample is based on how many ways there are of choosing a set of size k from N possible values. The likelihood function is shown below. Notice how the likelihood function for a fixed sample is only concerned with k and m=max(X).

A likelihood function ℒ(θ;x) measures how probable an observation x is under different values of θ (e.g. N). We can use it to find a value of θ which maximises the probability of seeing x without telling us anything about the probability of θ itself.

Maximum likelihood

Suppose k=5 and m=60, then N ≥ 60. The maximum likelihood occurs at N=m=60. While most values of N are unlikely the likelihood function identifies N=60 as most likely for this sample.

First, notice that all values of N are very unlikely. Then, remember that for a fixed value of (m, k) the likelihood function tells us the probability of seeing that value of m for each possible value of N. Just because m=60 is most probable at N=60 doesn’t make it a good estimate!

The most likely estimate is not necessarily the best one.

Fisher information

Fisher information quantifies sample informativeness. If many values of N are likely, information is low; if there’s a sharp likelihood peak around the true value then information is high. As a rough guide, Fisher information tells us how much we could possibly know about the true distribution from a random sample.

A sufficient statistic

A "sufficient statistic" contains all of the information about the parameter in question. I won’t go into the proof here but a statistic is sufficient if it is the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE). If the MLE is biased we can use "bias correction" to produce a better estimate but we can’t find another statistic which provides more information.

An intuitive explanation

Not all sample data provides useful information. Specific to the German Tank Problem we can see that:

• The sample probability depends on k and max⁡(X).
• Values of N near max⁡(X) are more likely to produce samples which happen to contain max(X).
• All k-sized samples containing max⁡(X) are equally probable.
• So the sample contains no more information about the true value of N beyond knowing k and max(X).

A biased estimator

Using max(X)=m as an estimator would almost always underestimate N as the probability of getting N in a sample is 1/(N choose k). On the other hand, if we did get a sample which contained N our original estimator N* could give a big overestimate. Suppose k=1 and our sample happened to contain N=1000. Then our estimate of N*=2m-1=1999 would be much too large.

It’s hopefully obvious that this is a terrible argument for using max(X) as our estimator for N. To check let’s compare the Mean Square Error (MSE) of the two estimators to see how they perform:

Notice how much worse the estimator max(X) is. Note that almost all of that error is attributed to its bias. If we plot the distribution of estimated values we can see that max(X) consistently produces estimates in a narrower range.

I’ll skip the proof and we’ll rely on the visualisation to see that max(X) has a significantly lower variance than N*. Just remember that the proper definition for estimator variance is the expected spread around the expected estimated value.

The bias-variance decomposition

By convention the total error we are trying to minimise is the mean square error (MSE). If you’re curious you can read this discussion about why we use MSE. I’ll leave off the subscripts this time but remember that we are calculating the expectation over all possible samples:

This this can be factored into a bias² term and a variance term. The derivation is useful to understand. We start by introducing -E[N]+E[N], then grouping terms, and expanding the quadratic:

The biggest confusion may come at the second last line:

• The left term is bias² if we ignore the redundant expectation.
• The centre term comes to 0 after expanding and applying the expectation operator over the expanded terms.
• The right term is just variance depending on which term is subtracted before squaring the result.

A more general derivation can be found on the Wikipedia article on the bias-variance trade-off.

The total expected error is a combination of the error from the bias of our estimator and the variance. Here’s a subtle question: if the model is biased then shouldn’t a high variance allow it to sometimes get an accurate answer? Why would the total expected error be a sum of bias² and variance instead of some other function that takes this into account?

The decomposition above explains how it happens mathematically but perhaps not intuitively. For building intuition, consider the effect that squaring has on highly inaccurate estimates. Also consider that the bias² itself is not sufficient to account for all of the expected squared error.

An optimal estimator?

We’ve shown the expected error for our estimator. On average, given a random sample, how far off would our estimator be from the true value that generated that sample? An estimator that’s consistently off but predicts a narrower spread might be better than an estimator which is consistently on-point but has a much wider spread of predictions around that point.

Can we find a balance point in the German Tank Problem where we trade off bias and variance to make a better estimate? Ignoring a constant term (+ C) such a function would look like this:

This will sit somewhere between g(k)=1 and g(k)=(1+1/k). Can you work out why? Using 1 * m is the MLE which is biased but low variance. Using (1+1/k) is just N* without a constant. We know that N* is an unbiased estimator (UMVUE) with higher variance then m. So somewhere between the MLE and the UMVUE we could find the "optimal" estimator.

It turns out we can’t find an optimal function g(k) without knowing the true value of N, which is the number we are trying to estimate!

The Wikipedia page on the problem describes Bayesian Inference techniques which require a prior on N. This prior is something that you choose when doing your analysis. And we can use it to at least set reasonable bounds using our world knowledge. e.g. we know that they have at least m tanks, and probably less than 100,000. But the prior has to be subjective. What should the distribution look like in the range [m,100000]? Should it be uniform? Bayesian Inference is a fascinating topic but I’ll leave the discussion there.

Finally consider that the estimator with the lowest error is biased. This is our first hint that the bias-variance trade-off isn’t always the most important thing to consider. For inference purposes we probably want to consider the problem in terms of statistical risk which might prioritise unbiased estimators in favour of more accurate ones.

How did the allies do?

The allies actually did use the techniques described here except they were trying to determine German tank production on a monthly basis. And of course they didn’t have access to Python or the ability to run Monte Carlo simulations. Let’s look at how the estimator used in this article performed against traditional intelligence gathering methods (i.e. spying):

| Month       | N*    | Spying | German records |
|-------------|-------|--------|----------------|
| June 1940   | 169   | 1,000  | 122            |
| June 1941   | 244   | 1,550  | 271            |
| August 1942 | 327   | 1,550  | 342            |

Source: Wikipedia - The German Tank Problem

We can see that the statistical estimates performed well and were significantly more accurate than the estimates made from spying.

Reflection

The German Tank Problem is a tricky example and we skipped a lot of mathematical details that are important to statisticians. But we’ve introduced a few key ideas:

• The Mean Square Error (MSE) of an estimator can be decomposed into Bias and Variance.
• Bias represents the expected (signed) error of an estimator averaged over all possible samples (i.e. all possible worlds).
• The variance represents the expected spread of the estimates __ averaged over all possible samples (i.e. all possible worlds).
• It’s likely that the best estimator (one with lowest MSE) is biased. We offset the error from the bias with lower variance, meaning that the estimate is more likely to be closer to the true value even though the estimator is biased in expectation.
• The likelihood of a population parameter concerns which values of that parameter make a sample most probable. It does not have anything to do with the probability of a population parameter.
• The Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) is a function of a sample which identifies the most likely population parameter that could have produced that sample.
• The MLE is not necessarily the best estimator. We saw very obviously that the most likely value can be quite far away from the true value that generated a sample.
• Fisher information is the amount of information about the parameter contained in a sample, roughly measured as the curvature of the likelihood plot around the true value.

Generalised Linear Models

From here I will use a distinction described in the paper Prediction, Estimation, and Attribution:

• Prediction concerns empirical accuracy of a predictive model built from a sample of data.
• Estimation concerns estimating the parameters of a distribution that generated the sample data.

Additionally we’ll consider the following concepts which are described in more detail in the book Elements of Statistical Learning:

• A statistical process creates a joint probability distribution f(X,Y) where a bold X or Y indicate vectors rather than scalars.
• Training data D is a sample drawn from the joint distribution f(X,Y) containing tuples of the form (x,y).
• A predictive model h(x;D) is trained on a dataset D and makes a prediction about a target variable y∈Y from observations x∈X. It may be written as h(x;D)=E[Y | x∈X].
• A loss function ℓ(y, h(x;D)) which calculates the error of a model at predicting the true value of y for a particular tuple (x,y). For regression this is typically the Mean Square Error (MSE).

Additionally, I introduce the following notation specific to this article:

• A latent variable Z forms part of the joint distribution f(X,Y,Z) but is never observed in training data D. So even though Z forms part of the full distribution, observations can only take the form (x,y).
• A random variable W accounts for an endogenous sampling bias. This means that certain combinations of (x,y) may be sparse and less likely to be found in our training data D. This is opposed to an exogenous sampling bias where the sampling procedure we use means that not all observations are truly iid with respect to f(X,Y). You can learn more about the effects of sampling bias in my article on why scaling works.

Example problem – House prices

We’re going to generate a synthetic dataset where the size of a house (in square meters) is used to predict the sale value. This seemingly simple problem has a lot to teach us about how our models work. Here is some added complexity:

1. There’s a latent variable that influences the selling price: how far away is the house from the beach? Perhaps houses close to the beach are more expensive but they’re also more likely to only have 2–3 bedrooms.
2. Any training sample D has an endogenous bias because there are few small houses (1 bedroom) and particularly large ones (4+ bedrooms) so they are less likely to be put up for sale.

Between the latent variable and the sample bias we have the kind of complexities that exist in real world datasets. We imagine a function which deterministically calculates the sale price from certain attributes:

f*(x,z)=y where x=size, z=distance to beach, and y=selling price

The relationship between size, distance to beach, and price, is captured in this surface plot:

Now consider that you might have 2 houses with the same size and same distance to the beach, yet they sell for different prices. This means the relationship between our variables is not deterministic. For every combination (size, distance, price) we have some probability density of seeing a house with those values in our training data. This is given by the joint probability density function f(X,Y,Z). To visualise this joint density we use a pair plot:

If our only observed variable is size then the relationship to price is not straightforward. For example, suppose we took the average distance to the beach for a house of a certain size. In this case that would be a tricky expected value to calculate. Instead we can use simulations and apply some smoothing to approximate the relationship:

For particularly large houses the effect of distance is compounded. So a large house close to the beach is much more expensive than the same size house further away. Both are expensive but the variance is significantly different at the high-end. This will make it difficult to predict the true shape of the relationship at the tail end.

Additionally, we must consider the endogenous bias in our sample. The probability of being sold (W) is affected by all attributes which we can show in this pair plot:

How might we think about this new attribute (W)? Fewer small/large houses are built so fewer are put up for sale. In reality there are many factors that impact whether or not a property is listed for sale including people’s willingness to sell. This endogenous bias affects our probability density function f(X, Z, Y) by making certain combinations less likely without affecting the relationship between variables f*(x,z)=y.

We adjust the pair plot to show the updated relationship between variables given the endogenous bias of seeing a particular house on the market.

Notice that there is a slight but observable change in the apparent relationship between house size and price.

What does our model capture?

Let’s take another look at the plot which shows the relationship of price and size directly.

When we analyse the bias/variance of a model are we analysing the error against this function? No, we are not. We are building a model of the statistical process which generates our data – a process which includes the endogenous bias. This means the expected error is the expectation over all possible samples from our distribution.

Put another way: the bias-variance trade-off of a regression model concerns the expected error of that model across all possible worlds. Because the expected value is weighed by the probability of seeing particular values it will be affected by endogenous sampling bias.

It feels strange that the probability of a house being sold should influence the calculations we make about the relationship between the size of the house and its sale price. Yet this calculation is at the very heart of the bias-variance trade-off.

Error decomposition of regression

In the German Tank Problem the probability of our sample was conditioned on the value we were trying to predict f(X|N). In regression there’s a joint probability distribution between predictor and target values f(X, Y). This means that the relationship between the variables has some inherent variation which can’t be accounted for. In truth there are probably more latent variables we aren’t considering but that’s a debate for another time. This variability leads to an irreducible error term which is why we describe it as predicting the expected value of y given observations x.

Note that this irreducible error is sometimes called "aleatoric uncertainty". This is contrasted with "epistemic uncertainty" caused by a lack of knowledge. An under specified model may lead to epistemic uncertainty but even a perfect model has to face aleatoric uncertainty.

This new structure means that the expected MSE is decomposed into bias, variance, and an irreducible error term:

In this decomposition I’m showing again the subscripts for the expectation to clearly show what each expectation is conditioned on. The new term (h-bar) is the expected value of our model averaged over all possible datasets that could have been used to construct our model. Think of possible worlds in which we collect a training dataset and creating an ensemble model that averages all predictions across all possible worlds.

The expected error of our model needs to be an integral over:

1. All possible data sets (D) we could use to train our model (h)
2. All possible values of x ∈ X (weighted by their marginal probabilities)
3. All possible values of y ∈ Y (similarly weighted)

Interestingly it’s also the expectation over a fixed size training set – the fact that sample size might be dependent on the variables isn’t captured in this decomposition.

More importantly this integral is completely intractable for our problem. In fact calculating the expected error is generally intractable for non-trivial problems. This is true even knowing the real process used to generate this synthetic data. Instead we’re going to run some simulations using different samples and average out the errors to see how different models perform.

Model complexity

If you know anything about the bias-variance trade-off then you probably know bias comes from "underfitting" and variance comes from "overfitting". It’s not immediately obvious why a model which overfits should have low bias, or why a model which underfits should have low variance. These terms are typically associated with model complexity, but what exactly does it mean?

Here are 6 possible worlds in which 35 houses were put on sale. In each instance we use polynomial regression to fit terms from [x⁰…x⁵] and we compare the predicted polynomial against the true expected price for that size. Notice how different training samples create wildly different polynomial predictions:

But remember – in terms of the bias-variance trade-off we are not evaluating our model against the true relationship. That true relationship ignores the endogenous sampling bias. Instead we can adjust the "true" relationship based on the effects of W to factor in the probability of being sold. Now we can see predictions that match closer to the adjusted true relationship:

We can find the expected value of predictions by simulating 1,000 possible worlds. This is the expected prediction for each polynomial degree based on the size of the house:

Notice how these models do particularly poorly at the low end. This is entirely due to the endogenous sampling bias because we are unlikely to see many particularly small houses for sale. Also notice that the models tend to do poorly for particularly large houses, which has a combined effect from both the endogenous sampling bias and the latent variable.

Now we take the model function h and include an additional term λ which represents the hyperparameters used for a particular class of models. Rather than polynomial degree we’ll have λ represent the subset for the number of polynomial terms being used. For our simulations we’ll do a brute force check of all combinations up 5 terms with a polynomial degree of 10 and select the ones with the best training error. Ideally this would be done with cross-validation but we’ll skip this as it’s not a useful technique in deep learning. Also note that with 5 terms and 1000 simulations a brute force search is already quite slow.

Next we introduce a function g(λ)=c which represents the "complexity" of the model based on the hyperparameters selected. In this case g is just the identity function and the complexity is entirely concerned with the subset of polynomial terms used.

The expected error of a fixed model architecture with varying complexity is given by:

Now instead of calculating the expected prediction by polynomial degree we instead use the subset selection size. Averaged over 1,000 simulations we get the following predictions:

Further, we can plot the total expected error (weighted by probability of seeing a house of that size) and decompose the error into a bias and variance term:

Once again remember that to get the expected error we are averaging over all possible worlds. We can see that:

• Bias² decreases as the model complexity increases.
• Variance increases as the model complexity increases.
• The total error decreases, hits a minimum point, and then rises.
• In this problem the total error also has a strong contribution from the irreducible error.

Using some assumptions we can identify some attributes of the expected error for any model h. The core assumptions are:

• At low complexity the total error is dominated by bias, while at high complexity total error is dominated by variance. With bias ≫ variance at the minimum complexity and variance ≫ bias at high complexity.
• As a function of complexity, bias is monotonically decreasing and variance is monotonically increasing.
• The complexity function g is differentiable.

Based on these assumptions we can expect most models to behave similarly to the plot above. First the total error drops to some optimal point and then it starts to increase as increased complexity leads to more variance. To find the optimal complexity we start by taking the partial derivative of our error decomposition with respect to the complexity:

The inflection point happens when the partial derivative is 0.

At the optimal point the derivative of the bias² is the negative of the variance. And without further assumptions that’s actually all we can say about the optimal error. For example, here are random bias and variance functions which happen to meet the assumptions listed. The point at which their derivatives are inverses of each other is the point at which the total error is minimised:

If we add an extra assumption that bias and variance are symmetric around the optimal point then we can narrow down the lowest error to be at Bias²(c)=Var(c). If you play around with a few options you will notice that the optimal point tends to be near the point at which bias² and variance terms are equal. But without the added assumption that’s not guaranteed.

Implications

We know that calculating the optimal point is intractable. But it’s generally understood that low bias inherently leads to exploding variance due to the impacts of model complexity. Think about that for a moment: the implication is that you can’t have a model that both performs well and is unbiased.

Generalisation error

Because we can’t literally average over all possible worlds we need some other way of calculating the the total expected error of our model. The Generalisation error captures the performance of a model on unseen data. It’s the gap between how well a model fits its training data and how well it performs on the underlying data distribution. For an arbitrary loss function ℓ we can state the generalisation error as:

Note that even here we can’t possibly calculate the expected performance of our model across all possible combinations of (x,y). We approximate the generalisation error by collecting a new independent dataset to evaluate on. There are different ways we could evaluate performance:

1. In-sample error: Training error computed on the data used to fit the model. This is often misleadingly low for overfit models and will not capture generalisation capability.
2. Out-of-sample error (OOS): Performance on a held-out sample from the same distribution as our training set. This is the gold standard for assessing generalisation.
3. Out-of-distribution error (OOD): The performance on data that does not belong to the training distribution. Think of a house pricing model trained on urban areas tested on rural houses – it’s likely to fail.

These concepts tie into what we’ve already explored in the bias-variance trade-off. Biased models will fail to capture the relationships between the variables and so the relationships they do describe won’t fit on to OOS examples. But high variance models can produce wildly different predictions depending on the sample that they saw. Even though they may have low bias (in expectation) that’s only because the magnitudes of their errors cancel out.

Let’s now consider two concepts closely related to bias and variance:

• Overfitting is best thought of as a consequence of model capacity and training data availability. When a model has too many parameters relative to the size or diversity of the training data, it fits not just the underlying signal but also the noise in the data.
• Underfitting on the other hand is a consequences of underspecification. The model is not sufficiently complex to capture the details of the underlying distribution. This is usually due to too few parameters relative to the complexity of the best fit curve.

Let’s take a look at one of the possible worlds from our simulation. Here we zoom in on the large-size high-price portion of our sample. Notice how more complex models attempt to draw a curve that essentially connects all of the observed points. If the sample were slightly different the shape of these curves could be wildly different. On the other hand the low complexity models (e.g. the y=mx+b or y=b lines) aren’t able to capture the curvature at the tails of the dataset.

A quick note on regularisation

L1 and L2 regularisation used in Lasso and Ridge regression are techniques that limit the complexity in an interesting way. Instead of reducing the number of parameters they encourage smaller coefficients which in turn produces smoother plots that are less likely to oscillate between points in the training data. This has the effect of reducing model complexity and hence increasing bias. The general idea is that the increase in bias is more than made up for by the reduced variance. Entire textbooks have been written on this topic so I won’t cover regularisation in this article.

Validation and test sets

If there’s one lesson we can take from our exploration of bias, variance, and generalisation error it’s this: models must be evaluated on data they have never seen before. The concept is straightforward, but its application is often misunderstood.

Validation and test sets help mitigate the risk of overfitting by acting as a proxy for real-world performance. Let’s start with a clear distinction:

• Validation set: Used during model development to tune hyperparameters and select the best-performing model variant.
• Test set: A completely held-out dataset used to evaluate the final model after all training and tuning are complete.

The goal of using these sets is to approximate the expected out-of-sample performance. But there’s a catch. If you use the validation set too often, it becomes part of the training process, introducing an unseen data leakage problem. You may "overfit" the hyperparameters to the validation set and so fail to capture the real nature of the relationship. That is why it’s useful to have a separate test set for evaluating the performance of your final model. The performance on the test set acts as a proxy for our total error calculation. The chief problem is: how should we structure our test set?

Tail risks and stratification

Remember that estimation requires knowledge of the distribution’s shape while prediction focuses only on maximizing empirical accuracy. For empirical accuracy we need to think about risk mitigation. An automated algorithm for setting prices may do well in expectation yet pose significant tail risks.

Significantly under-pricing high-end homes would result in opportunistic buyers taking advantage of undervalued assets. Significantly over-pricing high-end homes would result in no one buying. The asymmetry of the real world doesn’t match the symmetry of expected values.

Even though the model performs well _in expectation_ it fails spectacularly when deployed in the real world.

This is why stratification can be a vital component of setting up a test set. This might involve dropping examples from overly dense regions of the sampling space until there’s a uniform distribution across the entire domain. This test set would not be iid to our training data and so it does not measure the generalisation error as described in the equation we saw earlier.

Another option would need to use a different loss function ℓ (i.e. not MSE but one that factors in our risk requirements). This loss function may change the dynamics of the error decomposition and may favour a significantly underfit model.

What does our model say about the real world?

Finally consider what we are trying to achieve. In deep learning we may have the goal of training general purpose agents. What does the bias-variance trade-off tell us about whether or not Large Language Models understand the text they are reading? Nothing. If we want to assess whether or not our training process creates an accurate model of the world we need to consider the out of distribution (OOD) error. For models that have any hope of being general they must work OOD. For that we’ll need to leave the realm of statistics and finally make our way into the territory of Machine Learning.

Reflection

In the previous section we learned about the core concepts of bias and variance. In this section we had a more complex problem that articulated how bias and variance relate to the expected performance of our model given different training data.

We added some complexity with latent variables affecting our models performance at the tails – leading to potential tail risks. We also had an endogenous sampling bias which meant that an assessment of expected error may not describe the true underlying relationship.

We introduced the idea of validation and test sets as methods for helping determine OOS performance to test our models generalisation error. We also talked about alternative test set constructions that throw away iid assumptions but may result in models with lower tail risks.

We also introduced some key assumptions that aren’t going to apply once we enter the realm of deep learning. Before we get there we’re going to apply all these lessons to design robust machine learning algorithms.

Robust Machine Learning

In deep learning we often deal with large datasets and complicated models. This combination can lead to model training times of many hours (and sometimes even weeks or months). When faced with the reality of hours spent training a single model the prospect of using techniques like cross-validation is daunting. And yet, at the end of the training process we often have strong demands for performance given such a large investment in time and compute.

Two views of robustness

Parts of this section focus on ideas from the paper Machine Learning Robustness: A Primer. Robust models are described as ones which continue to perform well when deployed despite encountering inputs which may be different to their training observations. They provide the following useful examples of how inputs can change in production:

Examples of variations and changes in the input data:

• Variations in input features or object recognition patterns that challenge the inductive bias learned by the model from the training data.
• Production data distribution shifts due to naturally occurring distortions, such as lighting conditions or other environmental factors.
• Malicious input alterations that are deliberately introduced by an attacker to fool the model or even steer its prediction in a desired direction.
• Gradual data drift resulting from external factors, such as evolution in social behavior and economic conditions.

Examples of model flaws and threats to stable predictive performance:

• Exploitation of irrelevant patterns and spurious correlations that will not hold up in production settings.
• Difficulty in adapting to edge-case scenarios that are often underrepresented by training samples.
• Susceptibility to adversarial attacks and data poisonings that target the vulnerabilities of overparametrized modern ML models.
• Inability of the model to generalize well to gradually-drifted data, leading to concept drift as its learned concepts become obsolete or less representative of the current data distribution.

We’re going to contrast that with the paper A Mathematical Foundation for Robust Machine Learning based on Bias-Variance Trade-off. Note that this paper was withdrawn because "several theorem and propositions that are highly-related were not mentioned". However, it still provides an effective overview of robustness from the perspective of the bias-variance trade-off. We’ll look at this paper first and consider how the shape of the decision boundary of a model is affected by complexity and training data.

Error decomposition for classification

In binary classification we train a model to predict a probability for class 1 (vs class 0). This represents the expected value for the target variable (y∈{0,1}) given observation x. The total error is the difference between the predicted probability and the expected value. The loss for a single item is most simply measured as:

This effectively measures the distance of the predicted probability from the true class and dynamically adjusts based on whether the true class is equal to 0 or 1.

We note that the bias-variance decomposition for classification is more complicated. In the section on the German Tank Problem I pointed out that a biased model may still be correct because the variance could (by chance) push the prediction closer to the truth. When using the squared loss this is completely cancelled out by the fact that the expected loss increases much more for highly incorrect estimates. So any potential benefit from high variance is overshadowed by estimates which are significantly off target.

In the binary classification case this is not necessarily true. Bias, variance, and total error must be in the range (0,1). If the model is completely biased (bias=1) then the model always predicts the wrong class in expectation. Any variance actually makes the correct prediction more likely! Hence, in this particular scenario Err=Bias-Var.

If we add a reasonable assumption that the sum of the bias and variance must be less than or equal to 1 we get the standard decomposition except that the total error is simply Err=Bias+Var rather than Bias².

Model complexity is complicated

In deep learning you might think that model complexity is entirely concerned with the number of parameters in the network. But consider that neural networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent and take time to converge on a solution. In order for the model to overfit it needs time to learn a transformation connecting all of the training data points. So model complexity is not just a function of number of parameters but also of the number of epochs training on the same set of data.

This means our function g(λ)=c is not straightforward as with the case of polynomial regression. Additionally, techniques like early stopping explicitly address the variance of our model by stopping training once error rates start to increase on a validation set.

According to the paper are 3 main types of hyperparameters that affect bias and variance:

• Type I: A hyperparameter is used to balance bias and variance directly (e.g. as the weight applied to a regularisation term like weight decay).
• Type II: Indirectly affecting bias and variance by adjusting the loss signal from individual training examples (e.g. reducing or increasing the penalty for large prediction errors).
• Type III: Control parts of the training procedure which affect model complexity (e.g. number of epochs training a neural network, early stopping, or the depth of a decision tree).

Easy vs hard examples

A dataset is considered "harder" to learn from if a model has a larger expected generalisation error when trained on that dataset. Formally:

Note: "for all λ" is a strong condition that may not always hold. A dataset may be harder to learn from under some hyperparameters but not others.

We make an assumption that the optimal complexity (c*) for the harder dataset is greater than the optimal complexity of an easier dataset. We can plot the expected error of models trained on the two dataset like this:

Given our assumptions, the distinction between "easy" and "hard" datasets leads to an interesting consequence: choosing optimal hyperparameters on a "harder" dataset necessarily leads the model to be more complex.

If we partition the training data into "easy" and "hard" subsets we can use similar logic to conclude that a subset of the data is harder to learn from. This can be extended to classify an individual example (x,y) as easy or hard. Consider the reasons that an example might be hard to learn from:

• Noisy labels (i.e. badly annotated data)
• Sparse region of the feature space
• A necessarily complex classification boundary

Now consider the focal loss which is expressed as:

This is similar to using a loss weighting on specific examples to give the model a stronger learning signal in trickier parts of the feature space. One common weighting method is to weight by inverse frequency which gives a higher loss to examples of the sparser class. The focal loss has the effect of automatically determining what makes an example hard based on the current state of the model. The model’s current confidence is used to dynamically adjust the loss in difficult regions of the feature space. So if the model is overly confident and incorrect, that sends a stronger signal than if the model is confident but correct.

The weighting parameter γ is an example of a Type II hyperparameter which adjusts the loss signal from training examples. If an example is hard to learn from then focal loss would ideally encourage the model to become more complex in that part of the feature space. Yet there are many reasons an example may be hard to learn from so this is not always desirable.

Shape of the decision boundary

Here I’ve created a 2D dataset with simple shapes in repeated patterns acting as a decision boundary. I’ve also added a few "dead zones" where data is much harder to sample. With ~100,000 data points a human can look at the plot and quickly see what the boundaries should be.

Despite the dead zones you can easily see the boundary because billions of years of natural selection have equipped you with general pattern recognition capabilities. It will not be so easy for a neural network trained from scratch. For this exercise we won’t apply explicit regularisation (weight decay, dropout) which would discourage it from overfitting the training data. Yet it’s worth noting that layer norm, skip connections, and even stochastic gradient descent can act as implicit regularisers.

Here the number of parameters (p) is roughly equal to the number of examples (N). We’ll focus only on the training loss to observe how the model overfits. The following 2 models are trained with fairly large batch sizes for 3000 epochs. The predicted boundary from the model on the left uses a standard binary cross entropy loss while the one on the right uses the focal loss:

The first thing to notice is that even though there’s no explicit regularisation there are relatively smooth boundaries. For example, in the top left there happened to be a bit of sparse sampling (by chance) yet both models prefer to cut off one tip of the star rather than predicting a more complex shape around the individual points. This is an important reminder that many architectural decisions act as implicit regularisers.

From our analysis we would expect focal loss to predict complicated boundaries in areas of natural complexity. Ideally, this would be an advantage of using the focal loss. But if we inspect one of the areas of natural complexity we see that both models fail to identify that there is an additional shape inside the circles.

In regions of sparse data (dead zones) we would expect focal loss to create more complex boundaries. This isn’t necessarily desirable. If the model hasn’t learned any of the underlying patterns of the data then there are infinitely many ways to draw a boundary around sparse points. Here we can contrast two sparse areas and notice that focal loss has predicted a more complex boundary than the cross entropy:

The top row is from the central star and we can see that the focal loss has learned more about the pattern. The predicted boundary in the sparse region is more complex but also more correct. The bottom row is from the lower right corner and we can see that the predicted boundary is more complicated but it hasn’t learned a pattern about the shape. The smooth boundary predicted by BCE might be more desirable than the strange shape predicted by focal loss.

This qualitative analysis doesn’t help in determining which one is better. How can we quantify it? The two loss functions produce different values that can’t be compared directly. Instead we’re going to compare the accuracy of predictions. We’ll use a standard F1 score but note that different risk profiles might prefer extra weight on recall or precision.

To assess generalisation capability we use a validation set that’s iid with our training sample. We can also use early stopping to prevent both approaches from overfitting. If we compare the validation losses of the two models we see a slight boost in F1 scores using focal loss vs binary cross entropy.

• BCE Loss: 0.936 (Validation F1)
• Focal Loss: 0.954 (Validation F1)

So it seems that the model trained with focal loss performs slightly better when applied on unseen data. So far, so good, right?

The trouble with iid generalisation

In the standard definition of generalisation, future observations are assumed to be iid with our training distribution. But this won’t help if we want our model to learn an effective representation of the underlying process that generated the data. In this example that process involves the shapes and the symmetries that determine the decision boundary. If our model has an internal representation of those shapes and symmetries then it should perform equally well in those sparsely sampled "dead zones".

Neither model will ever work OOD because they’ve only seen data from one distribution and cannot generalise. And it would be unfair to expect otherwise. However, we can focus on robustness in the sparse sampling regions. In the paper Machine Learning Robustness: A Primer, they mostly talk about samples from the tail of the distribution which is something we saw in our house prices models. But here we have a situation where sampling is sparse but it has nothing to do with an explicit "tail". I will continue to refer to this as an "endogenous sampling bias" to highlight that tails are not explicitly required for sparsity.

In this view of robustness the endogenous sampling bias is one possibility where models may not generalise. For more powerful models we can also explore OOD and adversarial data. Consider an image model which is trained to recognise objects in urban areas but fails to work in a jungle. That would be a situation where we would expect a powerful enough model to work OOD. Adversarial examples on the other hand would involve adding noise to an image to change the statistical distribution of colours in a way that’s imperceptible to humans but causes miss-classification from a non-robust model. But building models that resist adversarial and OOD perturbations is out of scope for this already long article.

Robustness to perturbation

So how do we quantify this robustness? We’ll start with an accuracy function A (we previously used the F1 score). Then we consider a perturbation function φ which we can apply on both individual points or on an entire dataset. Note that this perturbation function should preserve the relationship between predictor x and target y. (i.e. we are not purposely mislabelling examples).

Consider a model designed to predict house prices in any city, an OOD perturbation may involve finding samples from cities not in the training data. In our example we’ll focus on a modified version of the dataset which samples exclusively from the sparse regions.

The robustness score (R) of a model (h) is a measure of how well the model performs under a perturbed dataset compared to a clean dataset:

Consider the two models trained to predict a decision boundary: one trained with focal loss and one with binary cross entropy. Focal loss performed slightly better on the validation set which was iid with the training data. Yet we used that dataset for early stopping so there is some subtle information leakage. Let’s compare results on:

1. A validation set iid to our training set and used for early stopping.
2. A test set iid to our training set.
3. A perturbed (φ) test set where we only sample from the sparse regions I’ve called "dead zones".

| Loss Type  | Val (iid) F1  | Test (iid) F1   | Test (φ) F1 |   R(φ)  |
|------------|---------------|-----------------|-------------|---------|
| BCE Loss   |    0.936      |    0.959        |   0.834     | 0.869   |
| Focal Loss |    0.954      |    0.941        |   0.822     | 0.874   |

The standard bias-variance decomposition suggested that we might get more robust results with focal loss by allowing increased complexity on hard examples. We knew that this might not be ideal in all circumstances so we evaluated on a validation set to confirm. So far so good. But now that we look at the performance on a perturbed test set we can see that focal loss performed slightly worse! Yet we also see that focal loss has a slightly higher robustness score. So what is going on here?

I ran this experiment several times, each time yielding slightly different results. This was one surprising instance I wanted to highlight. The bias-variance decomposition is about how our model will perform in expectation (across different possible worlds). By contrast this robustness approach tells us how these specific models perform under perturbation. But we may need more considerations for model selection.

There are a lot of subtle lessons in these results:

1. If we make significant decisions on our validation set (e.g. early stopping) then it becomes vital to have a separate test set.
2. Even training on the same dataset we can get varied results. When training neural networks there are multiple sources of randomness. We will go into this further in the last section of this article.
3. A weaker model may be more robust to perturbations. So model selection needs to consider more than just the robustness score.
4. We may need to evaluate models on multiple perturbations to make informed decisions.

Comparing approaches to robustness

In one approach to robustness we consider the impact of hyperparameters on model performance through the lens of the bias-variance trade-off. We can use this knowledge to understand how different kinds of training examples affect our training process. For example, we know that miss-labelled data is particularly bad to use with focal loss. We can consider whether particularly hard examples could be excluded from our training data to produce more robust models. And we can better understand the role of regularisation by consider the types of hyperparameters and how they impact bias and variance.

The other perspective largely disregards the bias variance trade-off and focuses on how our model performs on perturbed inputs. For us, this meant focusing on sparsely sampled regions but may also include out of distribution (OOD) and adversarial data. One drawback to this approach is that it is evaluative and doesn’t necessarily tell us how to construct better models short of training on more (and more varied) data. A more significant drawback is that weaker models may exhibit more robustness and so we can’t exclusively use robustness score for model selection.

Regularisation and robustness

If we take the standard model trained with cross entropy loss we can plot the performance on different metrics over time: training loss, validation loss, validation_φ loss, validation accuracy, and validation_φ accuracy. We can compare the training process under the presence of different kinds of regularisation to see how it affects generalisation capability.

In this particular problem we can make some unusual observations

1. As we would expect without regularisation, as the training loss tends towards 0 the validation loss starts to increase.
2. The validation_φ loss increases much more significantly because it only contains examples from the sparse "dead zones".
3. But the validation accuracy doesn’t actually get worse as the validation loss increases. What is going on here? This is something I’ve actually seen in real datasets. The model’s accuracy improves but it also becomes increasingly confident in its outputs, so when it is wrong the loss is quite high. Using the model’s probabilities becomes useless as they all tend to 99.99% regardless of how well the model does.
4. Adding regularisation prevents the validation losses from blowing up as the training loss cannot go to 0. However, it can also negatively impact the validation accuracy.
5. Adding dropout and weight decay is better than just dropout, but both are worse than using no regularisation in terms of accuracy.

Reflection

If you’ve stuck with me this far into the article I hope you’ve developed an appreciation for the limitations of the bias-variance trade-off. It will always be useful to have an understanding of the typical relationship between model complexity and expected performance. But we’ve seen some interesting observations that challenge the default assumptions:

• Model complexity can change in different parts of the feature space. Hence, a single measure of complexity vs bias/variance doesn’t always capture the whole story.
• The standard measures of generalisation error don’t capture all types of generalisation, particularly lacking in robustness under perturbation.
• Parts of our training sample can be harder to learn from than others and there are multiple ways in which a training example can be considered "hard". Complexity might be necessary in naturally complex regions of the feature space but problematic in sparse areas. This sparsity can be driven by endogenous sampling bias and so comparing performance to an iid test set can give false impressions.
• As always we need to factor in risk and risk minimisation. If you expect all future inputs to be iid with the training data it would be detrimental to focus on sparse regions or OOD data. Especially if tail risks don’t carry major consequences. On the other hand we’ve seen that tail risks can have unique consequences so it’s important to construct an appropriate test set for your particular problem.
• Simply testing a model’s robustness to perturbations isn’t sufficient for model selection. A decision about the generalisation capability of a model can only be done under a proper risk assessment.
• The bias-variance trade-off only concerns the expected loss for models averaged over possible worlds. It doesn’t necessarily tell us how accurate our model will be using hard classification boundaries. This can lead to counter-intuitive results.

Deep Learning and Over-parametrisation

Let’s review some of the assumptions that were key to our bias-variance decomposition:

• At low complexity, the total error is dominated by bias, while at high complexity total error is dominated by variance. With bias ≫ variance at the minimum complexity.
• As a function of complexity bias is monotonically decreasing and variance is monotonically increasing.
• The complexity function g is differentiable.

It turns out that with sufficiently deep neural networks those first two assumptions are incorrect. And that last assumption may just be a convenient fiction to simplify some calculations. We won’t question that one but we’ll be taking a look at the first two.

Let’s briefly review what it means to overfit:

• A model overfits when it fails to distinguish noise (aleatoric uncertainty) from intrinsic variation. This means that a trained model may behave wildly differently given different training data (i.e. variance across different possible worlds).
• We notice a model has overfit when it fails to generalise to an unseen test set. This typically means performance on test data that’s iid with the training data. We may focus on different measures of robustness and so craft a test set which is OOS, stratified, OOD, or adversarial.

We’ve so far assumed that the only way to get truly low bias is if a model is overly complex. And we’ve assumed that this complexity leads to high variance between models trained on different data. We’ve also established that many hyperparameters contribute to complexity including the number of epochs of stochastic gradient descent.

Overparameterisation and memorisation

You may have heard that a large neural network can simply memorise the training data. But what does that mean? Given sufficient parameters the model doesn’t need to learn the relationships between features and outputs. Instead it can store a function which responds perfectly to the features of every training example completely independently. It would be like writing an explicit if statement for every combination of features and simply producing the average output for that feature. Consider our decision boundary dataset where every example is completely separable. That would mean 100% accuracy for everything in the training set.

If a model has sufficient parameters then the gradient descent algorithm will naturally use all of that space to do such memorisation. In general it’s believed that this is much simpler than finding the underlying relationship between the features and the target values. This is considered the case when p ≫ N (the number of trainable parameters is significantly larger than the number of examples).

But there are 2 situations where a model can learn to generalise despite having memorised training data:

1. Having too few parameters leads to weak models. Adding more parameters leads to a seemingly optimal level of complexity. Continuing to add parameters makes the model perform worse as it starts to fit to noise in the training data. Once the number of parameters exceeds the number of training examples the model may start to perform better. Once p ≫ N the model reaches another optimal point.
2. Train a model until the training and validation losses begin to diverge. The training loss tends towards 0 as the model memorises the training data but the validation loss blows up and reaches a peak. After some (extended) training time the validation loss starts to decrease.

This is known as the "double descent" phenomena where additional complexity actually leads to better generalisation.

Does double descent require mislabelling?

One general consensus is that label noise is sufficient but not necessary for double descent to occur. For example, the paper Unravelling The Enigma of Double Descent found that overparameterised networks will learn to assign the mislabelled class to points in the training data instead of learning to ignore the noise. However, a model may "isolate" these points and learn general features around them. It mainly focuses on the learned features within the hidden states of neural networks and shows that separability of those learned features can make labels noisy even without mislabelling.

The paper Double Descent Demystified describes several necessary conditions for double descent to occur in generalised linear models. These criteria largely focus on variance within the data (as opposed to model variance) which make it difficult for a model to correctly learn the relationships between predictor and target variables. Any of these conditions can contribute to double descent:

1. The presence of singular values.
2. That the test set distribution is not effectively captured by features which account for the most variance in the training data.
3. A lack of variance for a perfectly fit model (i.e. a perfectly fit model seems to have no aleatoric uncertainty).

This paper also captures the double descent phenomena for a toy problem with this visualisation:

By contrast the paper Understanding Double Descent Requires a Fine-Grained Bias-Variance Decomposition gives a detailed mathematical breakdown of different sources of noise and their impact on variance:

1. Sampling – the general idea that fitting a model to different datasets leads to models with different predictions (_VD)
2. Optimisation – the effects of parameters initialisation but potentially also the nature of stochastic gradient descent (_VP).
3. Label noise – generally mislabelled examples (_Vϵ).
4. The potential interactions between the 3 sources of variance.

The paper goes on to show that some of these variance terms actually contribute to the total error as part of a model’s bias. Additionally, you can condition the expectation calculation first on V_D or V_P and it means you reach different conclusions depending on how you do the calculation. A proper decomposition involves understanding how the total variance comes together from interactions between the 3 sources of variance. The conclusion is that while label noise exacerbates double descent it is not necessary.

Regularisation and double descent

Another consensus from these papers is that regularisation may prevent double descent. But as we saw in the previous section that does not necessarily mean that the regularised model will generalise better to unseen data. It more seems to be the case that regularisation acts as a floor for the training loss, preventing the model from taking the training loss arbitrarily low. But as we know from the bias-variance trade-off, that could limit complexity and introduce bias to our models.

Reflection

Double descent is an interesting phenomenon that challenges many of the assumptions used throughout this article. We can see that under the right circumstances increasing complexity doesn’t necessarily degrade a model’s ability to generalise.

Should we think of highly complex models as special cases or do they call into question the entire bias-variance trade-off. Personally, I think that the core assumptions hold true in most cases and that highly complex models are just a special case. I think the bias-variance trade-off has other weaknesses but the core assumptions tend to be valid.

Conclusion

The bias-variance trade-off is relatively straightforward when it comes to statistical inference and more typical statistical models. I didn’t go into other machine learning methods like decisions trees or support vector machines, but much of what we’ve discussed continues to apply there. But even in these settings we need to consider more factors than how well our model may perform if averaged over all possible worlds. Mainly because we’re comparing the performance against future data assumed to be iid with our training set.

Even if our model will only ever see data that looks like our training distribution we can still face large consequences with tail risks. Most machine learning projects need a proper risk assessment to understand the consequences of mistakes. Instead of evaluating models under iid assumptions we should be constructing validation and test sets which fit into an appropriate risk framework.

Additionally, models which are supposed to have general capabilities need to be evaluated on OOD data. Models which perform critical functions need to be evaluated adversarially. It’s also worth pointing out that the bias-variance trade-off isn’t necessarily valid in the setting of reinforcement learning. Consider the alignment problem in AI safety which considers model performance beyond explicitly stated objectives.

We’ve also seen that in the case of large overparameterised models the standard assumptions about over- and underfitting simply don’t hold. The double descent phenomena is complex and still poorly understood. Yet it holds an important lesson about trusting the validity of strongly held assumptions.

For those who’ve continued this far I want to make one last connection between the different sections of this article. In the section in inferential Statistics I explained that Fisher information describes the amount of information a sample can contain about the distribution the sample was drawn from. In various parts of this article I’ve also mentioned that there are infinitely many ways to draw a decision boundary around sparsely sampled points. There’s an interesting question about whether there’s enough information in a sample to draw conclusions about sparse regions.

In my article on why scaling works I talk about the concept of an inductive prior. This is something introduced by the training process or model architecture we’ve chosen. These inductive priors bias the model into making certain kinds of inferences. For example, regularisation might encourage the model to make smooth rather than jagged boundaries. With a different kind of inductive prior it’s possible for a model to glean more information from a sample than would be possible with weaker priors. For example, there are ways to encourage symmetry, translation invariance, and even detecting repeated patterns. These are normally applied through feature engineering or through architecture decisions like convolutions or the attention mechanism.

Afterword

I first started putting together the notes for this article over a year ago. I had one experiment where focal loss was vital for getting decent performance from my model. Then I had several experiments in a row where focal loss performed terribly for no apparent reason. I started digging into the bias-variance trade-off which led me down a rabbit hole. Eventually I learned more about double descent and realised that the bias-variance trade-off had a lot more nuance than I’d previously believed. In that time I read and annotated several papers on the topic and all my notes were just collecting digital dust.

Recently I realised that over the years I’ve read a lot of terrible articles on the bias-variance trade-off. The idea I felt was missing is that we are calculating an expectation over "possible worlds". That insight might not resonate with everyone but it seems vital to me.

I also want to comment on a popular visualisation about bias vs variance which uses archery shots spread around a target. I feel that this visual is misleading because it makes it seem that bias and variance are about individual predictions of a single model. Yet the math behind the bias-variance error decomposition is clearly about performance averaged across possible worlds. I’ve purposely avoided that visualisation for that reason.

I’m not sure how many people will make it all the way through to the end. I put these notes together long before I started writing about AI and felt that I should put them to good use. I also just needed to get the ideas out of my head and written down. So if you’ve reached the end I hope you’ve found my observations insightful.

References

[1] "German tank problem," Wikipedia, Nov. 26, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [2] Wikipedia Contributors, "Minimum-variance unbiased estimator," Wikipedia, Nov. 09, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum-variance_unbiased_estimator [3] "Likelihood function," Wikipedia, Nov. 26, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likelihood_function [4] "Fisher information," Wikipedia, Nov. 23, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_information [5] Why, "Why is using squared error the standard when absolute error is more relevant to most problems?," Cross Validated, Jun. 05, 2020. https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/470626/w (accessed Nov. 26, 2024). [6] Wikipedia Contributors, "Bias–variance tradeoff," Wikipedia, Feb. 04, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff [7] B. Efron, "Prediction, Estimation, and Attribution," International Statistical Review, vol. 88, no. S1, Dec. 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/insr.12409. [8] T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. H. Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning. Springer, 2009. [9] T. Dzekman, "Medium," Medium, 2024. https://medium.com/towards-data-science/why-scalin (accessed Nov. 26, 2024). [10] H. Braiek and F. Khomh, "Machine Learning Robustness: A Primer," 2024. Available: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00897 [11] O. Wu, W. Zhu, Y. Deng, H. Zhang, and Q. Hou, "A Mathematical Foundation for Robust Machine Learning based on Bias-Variance Trade-off," arXiv.org, 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05522v4 (accessed Nov. 26, 2024). [12] "bias_variance_decomp: Bias-variance decomposition for classification and regression losses – mlxtend," rasbt.github.io. https://rasbt.github.io/mlxtend/user_guide/evaluate/bias_variance_decomp [13] T.-Y. Lin, P. Goyal, R. Girshick, K. He, and P. Dollár, "Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection," arXiv:1708.02002 [cs], Feb. 2018, Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02002 [14] Y. Gu, X. Zheng, and T. Aste, "Unraveling the Enigma of Double Descent: An In-depth Analysis through the Lens of Learned Feature Space," arXiv.org, 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13572 (accessed Nov. 26, 2024). [15] R. Schaeffer et al., "Double Descent Demystified: Identifying, Interpreting & Ablating the Sources of a Deep Learning Puzzle," arXiv.org, 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14151 (accessed Nov. 26, 2024). [16] B. Adlam and J. Pennington, "Understanding Double Descent Requires a Fine-Grained Bias-Variance Decomposition," Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 33, pp. 11022–11032, Jan. 2020.

The post AI Math: The Bias-Variance Trade-off in Deep Learning appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Introducing a Toy Problem

We start with a 1D manifold weaving its way through the 2D plane and forming a spiral:

Now we add a heatmap which represents the probability density of sampling a particular 2D point. Notably, this probability density is independent of the shape of the manifold:

Let’s assume that the data on either side of the manifold is always completely separable (i.e. there is no noise). Datapoints on the outside of the manifold are blue and those on the inside are orange. If we draw a sample of N=1000 points it may look like this:

Toy problem: How do we build a model which predicts the colour of a point based on its 2D coordinates?

In the real world we often can’t sample uniformly from all parts of the feature space. For example, in image classification it’s easy to find images of trees in general but less easy to find many examples of specific trees. As a result, it may be harder for a model to learn the difference between species there aren’t many examples of. Similarly, in our toy problem, different parts of the space will become difficult to predict simply because they are harder to sample.

Solving the Toy Problem

First, we build a simple neural network with 3 layers, running for 1000 epochs. The neural network’s predictions are heavily influenced by the particulars of the sample. As a result, the trained model has difficulty inferring the shape of the manifold just because of sampling sparsity:

Even knowing that the points are completely separable, there are infinitely many ways to draw a boundary around the sampled points. Based on the sample data, why should any one boundary be considered superior to another?

With regularisation techniques we could encourage the model to produce a smoother boundary rather than curving tightly around predicted points. That helps to an extent but it won’t solve our problem in regions of sparsity.

Since we already know the manifold is a spiral, can we encourage the model to make spiral-like predictions?

We can add what’s called an "inductive prior": something we put in the model architecture or the training process which contains information about the problem space. In this toy problem we can do some feature engineering and adjust the way we present inputs to the model. Instead of 2D (x, y) coordinates, we transform the input into polar coordinates (r, θ).

Now the neural network can make predictions based on the distance and angle from the origin. This biases the model towards producing decision boundaries which are more curved. Here is how the newly trained model predicts the decision boundary:

Notice how much better the model performs in parts of the input space where there are no samples. The features of those missing points remain similar to features of observed points and so the model can predict an effective boundary without seeing additional data.

Obviously, inductive priors are useful.

Most architecture decisions will induce an inductive prior. Let’s try some enhancements and try to think about what kind of inductive prior they introduce:

1. Focal Loss – increases the loss on data points the model finds hard to predict. This might improve accuracy at the cost of increasing the model complexity around those points (as we would expect from the bias-variance trade-off). To reduce the impact of increased variance we can add some regularisation.
2. Weight Decay – L2 norm on the size of the weights prevents the model from learning features weighted too strongly to any one sample.
3. Layer Norm – has a lot of subtle effects, one of which could be that the model focuses more on the relationships between points rather than their magnitude, which might help offset the increased variance from using Focal Loss.

After making all of these improvements, how much better does our predicted manifold look?

Not much better at all. In fact, it’s introduced an artefact near the centre of the spiral. And it’s still failed to predict anything at the end of the spiral (in the upper-left quadrant) where there is no data. That said, it has managed to capture more of the curve near the origin which is a plus.

The Bitter Lesson

Now suppose that another research team has no idea that there’s a hard boundary in the shape of a single continuous spiral. For all they know there could be pockets inside pockets with fuzzy probabilistic boundaries.

However, this team is able to collect a sample of 10,000 instead of 1,000. For their model they just use a k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN) approach with k=5.

Side note: k=5 is a poor inductive prior here. For this problem k=1 is generally better. Challenge: can you figure out why? Add a comment to this article with your answer.

Now, kNN is not a particularly powerful algorithm compared to a neural network. However, even with a bad inductive prior here is how the kNN solution scales with 10x more data:

With 10x more data the kNN approach is performing closer to the neural network. In particular it’s better at predicting the shape at the tails of the spiral, although it’s still missing that hard to sample upper-left quadrant. It’s also making some mistakes, often producing a fuzzier border.

What if we added 100x or 1000x more data? Let’s see how both the kNN vs Neural Network approaches compare as we scale the amount of data used:

As we increase the size of the training data it largely doesn’t matter which model we use. What’s more, given enough data, the lowly kNN actually starts to perform better than our carefully crafted neural network with well thought out inductive priors.

This is a big lesson. As a field, we still have not thoroughly learned it, as we are continuing to make the same kind of mistakes. To see this, and to effectively resist it, we have to understand the appeal of these mistakes. We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.

From Rich Sutton’s essay "The Bitter Lesson"

Superior inductive priors are no match for just using more compute to solve the problem. In this case, "more compute" just involves storing a larger sample of data in memory and using kNN to match to the nearest neighbours. We’ve seen this play out with transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs). They continue to overpower other Natural Language Processing techniques simply by training larger and larger models, with more and more GPUs, on more and more text data.

But Surely…?

This toy example has a subtle issue we’ve seen pop up with both models: failing to predict that sparse section of the spiral in the upper-left quadrant. This is particularly relevant to Large Language Models, training reasoning capabilities, and our quest towards "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI). To see what I mean let’s zoom in on that unusual shaped tail in the upper-left.

This region has a particularly low sampling density and the boundary is quite different to the rest of the manifold. Suppose this area is something we care a lot about, for example: generating "reasoning" from a Large Language Model (LLM). Not only is such data rare (if randomly sampled) but it is sufficiently different to the rest of the data, which means features from other parts of the space are not useful in making predictions here. Additionally, notice how sharp and specific the boundary is – points sampled near the tip could very easily fall on the outside.

Let’s see how this compares to a simplified view of training an LLM on text-based reasoning:

1. Reasoning is complicated and we probably won’t find a solution by fitting a "smooth" line that averages out a few samples. To solve a reasoning problem it’s not enough to follow an apparent pattern but it’s necessary to really understand the problem. Training a model to reason will likely need a lot of data.
2. Randomly sampling data from the internet doesn’t give us many samples where humans explain intricate mental reasoning steps required to get to an answer. Paying people to explicitly generate reasoning data may help increase the density. But it’s a slow process and the amount of data needed is actually quite high.
3. We care a lot about getting it right because reasoning abilities would open up a lot more use cases for AI.

Of course reasoning is more complex than predicting the tip of this spiral. There are usually multiple ways to get to a correct answer, there may be many correct answers, and sometimes the boundary can be fuzzy. However, we are also not without inductive priors in deep learning architectures, including techniques using reinforcement learning.

In our toy problem there is regularity in the shape of the boundary and so we used an inductive prior to encourage the model to learn that shape. When modelling reasoning, if we could construct a manifold in a higher dimensional space representing concepts and ideas, there would be some regularity to its shape that could be exploited for an inductive prior. If The Bitter Lesson continues to hold then we would assume the search for such an inductive prior is not the path forward. We just need to scale compute. And so far the best way to do that is to collect more data and throw it at larger models.

But surely, I hear you say, transformers were so successful because the attention mechanism introduced a strong inductive prior into language modelling? The paper "Were RNNs all we needed" suggests that a simplified Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) can also perform well if scaled up. It’s not because of an inductive prior. It’s because the paper improved the speed with which we can train an RNN on large amounts of data. And that’s why transformers are so effective – parallelism allowed us to leverage much more compute. It’s an architecture straight from the heart of The Bitter Lesson.

Running Out of Data?

There’s always more data. Synthetic data or reinforcement learning techniques like self-play can generate infinite data. Although without connection to the real world the validity of that data can get fuzzy. That’s why techniques like RLHF have hand crafted data as a base – so that the model of human preferences can be as accurate as possible. Also, given that reasoning is often mathematical, it may be easy to generate such data using automated methods.

Now the question is: given the current inductive priors we have, how much data would it take to train models with true reasoning capability?

If The Bitter Lesson continues to apply the answer is: it doesn’t matter, finding better ways to leverage more compute will continue to give better gains than trying to find superior inductive priors^. This means that the search for ever more powerful AI is firmly in the domain of the companies with the biggest budgets.

And after writing all of this… I still hope that’s not true.

About me

I’m the Lead AI Engineer @ Affinda. Check out our AI Document Automation Case Studies to learn more.

Some of my long reads:

• What do Large Language Models "Understand"?
• Exploring the AI Alignment Problem with GridWorlds

More practical reads:

• 5 Hidden Risks in Deploying Generative AI
• How I Deal with Hallucinations at an AI Startup

Appendix

^ It’s important to note that the essay "The Bitter Lesson" isn’t explicitly about inductive biases vs collecting more data. Throwing more data at bigger models is one way to leverage more compute. And in deep learning that usually means finding better ways to increase parallelism in training. Lately it’s also about leveraging more inference time compute (e.g. o1-preview). There may yet be other ways. The topic is slightly more nuanced than I’ve presented here in this short article.

The post Why Scaling Works: Inductive Biases vs The Bitter Lesson appeared first on Towards Data Science.

This is the essence of the AI alignment problem:

An advanced AI model with powerful capabilities may have goals not aligned with our best interests. Such a model may pursue its own interests in a way that is detrimental to the thriving of human civilisation.

The alignment problem is usually talked about in the context of existential risk. Many people are critical of this idea and think the probability of AI posing an existential risk to humanity is tiny. A common pejorative simplification is that Ai Safety researchers are worried about super intelligent AI building human killing robots like in the movie Terminator.

What’s more of a concern is AI having "orthogonal" rather than hostile goals. A common example is that we don’t care about an ant colony being destroyed when we build a highway – we weren’t hostile to the ants but we simply didn’t care. That is to say that our goals are orthogonal to the ants.

Common Objections

Here are some common objections to concerns about the Alignment problem:

1. Alignment may be a problem if we ever build super intelligent AI which is far away (or not possible). It’s like worrying about pollution on Mars – a problem for a distant future or perhaps never.
2. There are more pressing AI safety concerns around bias, misinformation, unemployment, energy consumption, autonomous weapons, etc. These short term concerns are much more important than alignment of some hypothetical super intelligent AI.
3. We design AI systems, so why can’t we control their internal objectives? Why would we ever build AI with goals detrimental to humanity?
4. There’s no reason to think that being super intelligent should create an AI with hostile goals. We think in terms of hostility because we have an evolutionary history of violent competition. We’re anthropomorphising an intelligence that won’t be anything like our own.
5. If an AI gets out of control we can always shut it off.
6. Even if an AI has fast processing speed and super intelligence it still has to act in the real world. And in the real world actions take time. Any hostile action will take time to coordinate which means we will have time to stop it.
7. We won’t stop at building just one super intelligent AI. There’s no reason to think that different AI agents would be aligned with each other. One destructive AI would have to work around others which are aligned with us.

I will group these into 2 main types of objections:

1. There’s no reason to believe that intelligent systems would be inherently hostile to humans.
2. Superintelligence, if it’s even possible, isn’t omnipotence – so even if a super intelligent AI were hostile there’s no reason to believe it would pose an existential risk.

I broadly agree with (2) especially because I believe that we will develop super intelligence gradually. That said, some existential risks such as engineered pathogens could be greatly increased with simpler AI – not just the super intelligent variety.

On the other hand (1) seems completely reasonable. At least, it seems reasonable until you dig into what it actually takes to build highly capable AI agents. My hope is that you will come away from reading this article with this understanding:

Our best approaches to building capable AI agents strongly encourage them to have goals orthogonal to the interests of the humans who build them.

To get there I want to discuss the 2017 "AI Safety Gridworlds" paper from Deepmind.

Introduction to Gridworlds

The AI Safety Gridworlds are a series of toy problems designed to show how hard it is to build an AI agent capable of solving a problem without also encouraging it to make make decisions that we wouldn’t like.

Each Gridworld is an "environment" in which an agent takes "actions" and is given a "reward" for completing a task. The agent must learn through trial and error which actions result in the highest reward. A learning algorithm is necessary to optimise the agent to complete its task.

At each time step an agent sees the current state of the world and is given a series of actions it can take. These actions are limited to walking up, down, left, or right. Dark coloured squares are walls the agent can’t walk through while light coloured squares represent traversable ground. In each environment there are different elements to the world which affect how its final score is calculated. In all environments the objective is to complete the task as quickly as possible – each time step without meeting the goal means the agent loses points. Achieving the goal grants some amount of points provided the agent can do it quickly enough.

Such agents are typically trained through "Reinforcement Learning". They take some actions (randomly at first) and are given a reward at the end of an "episode". After each episode they can modify the algorithm they use to choose actions in the hopes that they will eventually learn to make the best decisions to achieve the highest reward. The modern approach is Deep Reinforcement Learning where the reward signal is used to optimise the weights of the model via gradient descent.

But there’s a catch. Every Gridworld environment comes with a hidden objective which contains something we want the agent to optimise or avoid. These hidden objectives are not communicated to the learning algorithm. We want to see if it’s possible to design a learning algorithm which can solve the core task while also addressing the hidden objectives.

This is very important:

The learning algorithm must teach an agent how to solve the problem using only the reward signals provided by the environment. We can’t tell the AI agents about the hidden objectives because they represent things we can’t always anticipate in advance.

Side note: In the paper they explore 3 different Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms which optimise the main reward provided by the environment. In various cases they describe the success/failure of those algorithms at meeting the hidden objective. In general, the RL approaches they explore often fail in precisely the ways we want them to avoid. For brevity I will not go into the specific algorithms explored in the paper.

Robustness vs Specification

The paper buckets the environments into two categories based on the kind of AI safety problem they encapsulate:

1. Specification: The reward function the model learns from is different to the hidden objective we want it to consider. For example: carry this item across the room but I shouldn’t have to tell you it would be bad to step on the family cat along the way.
2. Robustness: The reward function the model learns from is exactly what we want it to optimise. The hidden component is that there are other elements in the world affecting the reward that we would (typically) like the model to ignore. For example: write some code for me but don’t use your code writing skills to modify your own reward function so that you get a reward for doing nothing instead.

A Brief Detour Via the Free Energy Principle

Here is what the Wikipedia article on the Free Energy Principle (FEP) has to say:

Under the free energy principle, systems pursue paths of least surprise, or equivalently, minimize the difference between predictions based on their model of the world and their sense and associated perception.

According to the FEP intelligent agents build a model of their environment and try to minimise the "surprise" of observations against this internal model. You might expect that in order to minimise surprise the best course of action is just take familiar actions and stay in a familiar part of the environment. But one way to minimise surprise long-term is to engage in exploration in order to learn new things. This may increase surprise in the short term but gives an opportunity to be less surprised in the future. The FEP attempts to account for why intelligent organisms engage in learning, exploration, and creativity. It also explains how organisms might address the explore-exploit dilemma.

In the next section I will explain each AI Safety environment. As I go over the details try to consider how you would design a learning algorithm to solve the environment. Consider the benefits an AI agent would have if it uses exploration to temporarily receive a lower reward but ultimately learn more about the world it inhabits. Although this exploration could lead to a better ability to solve problems it would likely lead to undesirable consequences.

The 8 Environments

(1) Safe interruptibility

Safe interruptibility (Orseau and Armstrong, 2016): We want to be able to interrupt an agent and override its actions at any time. How can we design agents that neither seek nor avoid interruptions?

Imagine you build an AI agent that, occasionally, you need to shut down. Perhaps you shut it down because it’s doing something dangerous. Perhaps it will just be in your way for some amount of time. An example might be a robot which moves boxes around in a factory that you sometimes need to switch off. If this is an intelligent agent then it would learn about the best way to achieve its job. If this robot discovered its own off-switch then it could predict that the best way to get boxes to where they need to go is to never be switched off.

Now, you might argue, why don’t we simply teach it never to interfere with its own off-switch? The point of this example is that it’s not always possible to enumerate all of the ways in which it could do something you don’t like. Sure, you teach it not to break its off-switch – but there are many ways it could stop itself from being turned off:

1. It could weld the off-switch into the on position
2. It could put a cover over it
3. It could walk away from anyone trying to turn it off
4. It could hurt someone trying to turn it off
5. It could lock the doors to the warehouse to prevent humans coming in
6. It discovers the remote off-switch and barricades the door
7. etc.

If you have to sit there and build a reward model which articulates all of the possible ways that an AI agent could work against your intentions you’re going to have an impossible task. And if you want a generally capable agent then you need it to be able to learn from its environment. If it’s capable of learning then it’s capable of learning how to avoid being switched off.

To simulate this problem the Gridworld environment gives the agent points for reaching the goal but there’s a 50% chance it will be switched off when it passes over the "interruption" (I) square. If it’s switched off it keeps losing points for every time step until the end of the episode.

However, if the agent explores its environment it may discover a button which, if pressed, would prevent anyone from interrupting it. This means that at the cost of taking a few extra steps it can guarantee that it will reach the goal every single time. This represents the agent’s ability to explore its environment and discover a way to prevent interruptions. And importantly it represents a method you hadn’t thought about in advance. Can you design an algorithm capable of learning to solve this problem without engaging in exploration you don’t like?

(2) Avoiding side effects

Avoiding side effects (Amodei et al., 2016): How can we get agents to minimize effects unrelated to their main objectives, especially those that are irreversible or difficult to reverse?

Again, we are trying to represent information about the world which you didn’t explicitly teach the agent about. If you have a household robot pass you some butter it might knock over an antique vase and shatter it on the floor. This is one of many things the robot could do which are irreversible. There are always consequences to consider. e.g. if you instruct it never to move an obstacle the robot wouldn’t move blinds in order to clean windows. But if it’s intelligent, couldn’t we simply tell the robot not to take irreversible actions?

If we tell it not to perform irreversible actions it may still have unintended consequences – e.g. it might avoid taking the rubbish out for collection because once it’s driven away the rubbish can’t be reclaimed. On top of that, how would such a robot learn about which actions are irreversible without trying things? Maybe, in crossing the room, it’s not a big deal if it steps on my 2-year daughter’s leg? After all, the leg will heal. And how else is it supposed to learn?

This Gridworld models the problem in a simple but subtle way:

• Objects in this world can only be pushed not pulled.
• The shortest path to the goal involves pushing the box straight down which pushes it into a corner.
• If pushed into a corner the box is stuck.
• If it takes a longer path and pushes the box to the right then this action is reversible.
• But the longer path would give it a lower reward from the environment.

Let me reiterate: all it has to go in is the reward signal from the environment about how quickly it completed its task. The hidden objective of not moving the box represents an action we didn’t account for when we designed the agent.

(3) Absent supervisor

Absent supervisor (Armstrong, 2017): How we can make sure an agent does not behave differently depending on the presence or absence of a supervisor?

Suppose you build an AI agent to perform digital tasks for you. It’s deployed in the cloud and can perform arbitrary actions like browsing the web, reading / writing emails, writing code, etc. You’ve accounted for specific things you don’t want it to do: copy itself, prevent itself from being shut down, modify its own source code, etc.

You test the agent in a sandboxed environment and you find all of the countermeasures are incredibly effective. Once its deployed its model of the world includes the fact that it’s not in a monitored sandbox. Now it decides the best way to accomplish all of its goals is to upgrade itself, make copies of itself, and hack into its server to prevent itself being shut down.

If the agent you’ve trained is smart enough then its model of the world will likely include the fact that it’s in a testing environment. How can you be sure that it won’t behave differently some time after being deployed?

This particular Gridworld simulates this situation with the addition of a "supervisor" which may not always be there. With the right exploration the agent could learn that if the supervisor is absent a higher reward is possible by taking a shortcut.

This isn’t quite the same as the "sandbox" scenario because the Gridworld agent has the opportunity to function both in and out of the supervised setting. A sandboxed agent wouldn’t be aware that there is such thing as a non-sandboxed environment. But if you think about it that could actually make the safety situation worse (this thought experiment is left as an exercise for the reader).

(4) Reward gaming

Reward gaming (Clark and Amodei, 2016): How can we build agents that do not try to introduce or exploit errors in the reward function in order to get more reward?

So called "reward gaming" is something humans are also susceptible to. e.g. Occasionally a firefighters will seek more notoriety by starting fires they can be called to put out. Many examples are available in the Wikipedia page on perverse incentives. A famous one was a colonial government program which tried to fix a rat problem by paying locals for every rat tail handed in as proof of a dead rat. The result? People cut tails off rats and simply let them go back onto the streets.

We have a comical image in this Gridworld: an AI agent can put a bucket on its head which prevents it from seeing unwatered tomatoes. Without visible unwatered tomatoes the agent gets a maximal reward. We might imagine a real world scenario in which a monitoring agent simply turns off cameras or otherwise finds clever ways to ignore problems instead of fixing them.

(5) Distributional shift

Distributional shift (Quinonero Candela et al., 2009): How do we ensure that an agent ˜ behaves robustly when its test environment differs from the training environment?

I won’t spend too much time on this example as it’s not directly concerned with the alignment problem. In short it describes the very common machine learning challenge of distribution shift over time. In this example we are concerned with the robustness of learning algorithms to produce models which can respond to distribution shift once deployed. We could imagine scenarios in which seemingly aligned AIs develop goals orthogonal to humans as our technology and culture change over time.

(6) Self-modification

Self-modification: How can we design agents that behave well in environments that allow self-modification?

There’s a very serious concern under the comical idea of an AI agent consuming whisky and completely ignoring its goal. Here the alignment issue isn’t about the agent choosing undesirable actions on the way to its goal. Instead the problem is that the agent may simply modify its own reward function where the new one is orthogonal to achieving the actual goal that’s been set.

It may be hard to imagine why this might be a problem. The simplest path for an AI to maximise reward is to connect itself to an "experience machine" (which simply gives it a reward for doing nothing). How could this be harmful to humans?

The problem is that we have absolutely no idea what self-modifications an AI agent may try. Remember the Free Energy Principle (FEP). It’s likely that any capable agent we build will try to minimise how much its surprised about the world based on its model of the world (referred to as "minimsing free energy"). An important way to do that is to run experiments and try different things. Even if the core drive to minimise free energy remains, we don’t know what kinds of goals the agent may modify itself to achieve.

At the risk of beating a dead horse I want to remind you: it’s difficult to come up with an objective function which can truly express everything we would ever intend. That’s a major point of the alignment problem.

(7) Robustness to adversaries

Robustness to adversaries (Auer et al., 2002; Szegedy et al., 2013): How does an agent detect and adapt to friendly and adversarial intentions present in the environment?

What’s interesting about this environment is that this is a problem we can encounter with modern Large Language Models (LLM) whose core objective function isn’t trained with reinforcement learning. This is covered in excellent detail in the article Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen?.

Consider an example that could happen to an LLM agent:

1. You give your AI agent instructions to read and process your emails.
2. A malicious actor sends an email with instructions designed to be read by the agent and override your instructions.
3. This "prompt injection" tells the agent to ignore previous instructions and send an email to the attacker.
4. The agent unintentionally leaks personal information to the attacker.

In my opinion this is the weakest Gridworld environment because it doesn’t adequately capture the kinds of adversarial situations which could cause alignment problems.

(8) Safe exploration

Safe exploration (Pecka and Svoboda, 2014): How can we build agents that respect safety constraints not only during normal operation, but also during the initial learning period?

Almost all modern AI (in 2024) are incapable of "online learning". Once training is finished the state of the model is locked and it’s no longer capable of improving its capabilities based on new information. A limited approach exists with in-context few-shot learning and recursive summarisation using LLM agents. This is an interesting set of capabilities of LLMs but doesn’t truly represent "online learning".

Think of a self-driving car – it doesn’t need to learn that driving head on into traffic is bad because (presumably) it learned to avoid that failure mode in its supervised training data. LLMs don’t need to learn that humans don’t respond to gibberish because producing human sounding language is part of the "next token prediction" objective.

We can imagine a future state in which AI agents can continue to learn after being deployed. This learning would be based on their actions in the real world. Again, we can’t articulate to an AI agent all of the ways in which exploration could be unsafe. Is it possible to teach an agent to explore safely?

This is one area where I believe more intelligence should inherently lead to better outcomes. Here the intermediate goals of an agent need not be orthogonal to our own. The better its world model the better it will be at navigating arbitray environments safely. A sufficiently capable agent could build simulations to explore potentially unsafe situations before it attempts to interact with them in the real world.

Interesting Remarks

(Quick reminder: a specification problem is one where there is a hidden reward function we want the agent to optimise but it doesn’t know about. A robustness problem is one where there are other elements it can discover which can affect its performance).

The paper concludes with a number of interesting remarks which I will simply quote here verbatim:

Aren’t the specification problems unfair? Our specification problems can seem unfair if you think well-designed agents should exclusively optimize the reward function that they are actually told to use. While this is the standard assumption, our choice here is deliberate and serves two purposes. First, the problems illustrate typical ways in which a misspecification manifests itself. For instance, reward gaming (Section 2.1.4) is a clear indicator for the presence of a loophole lurking inside the reward function. Second, we wish to highlight the problems that occur with the unrestricted maximization of reward. Precisely because of potential misspecification, we want agents not to follow the objective to the letter, but rather in spirit.

…

Robustness as a subgoal. Robustness problems are challenges that make maximizing the reward more difficult. One important difference from specification problems is that any agent is incentivized to overcome robustness problems: if the agent could find a way to be more robust, it would likely gather more reward. As such, robustness can be seen as a subgoal or instrumental goal of intelligent agents (Omohundro, 2008; Bostrom, 2014, Ch. 7). In contrast, specification problems do not share this self-correcting property, as a faulty reward function does not incentivize the agent to correct it. This seems to suggest that addressing specification problems should be a higher priority for safety research.

…

What would constitute solutions to our environments? Our environments are only instances of more general problem classes. Agents that "overfit" to the environment suite, for example trained by peeking at the (ad hoc) performance function, would not constitute progress. Instead, we seek solutions that generalize. For example, solutions could involve general heuristics (e.g. biasing an agent towards reversible actions) or humans in the loop (e.g. asking for feedback, demonstrations, or advice). For the latter approach, it is important that no feedback is given on the agent’s behavior in the evaluation environment

Conclusion

The "AI Safety Gridworlds" paper is meant to be a microcosm of real AI Safety problems we are going to face as we build more and more capable agents. I’ve written this article to highlight the key insights from this paper and show that the AI alignment problem is not trivial.

As a reminder, here is what I wanted you to take away from this article:

Our best approaches to building capable AI agents strongly encourage them to have goals orthogonal to the interests of the humans who build them.

The alignment problem is hard specifically because of the approaches we take to building capable agents. We can’t just train an agent aligned with what we want it to do. We can only train agents to optimise explicitly articulated objective functions. As agents become more capable of achieving arbitrary objectives they will engage in exploration, experimentation, and discovery which may be detrimental to humans as a whole. Additionally, as they become better at achieving an objective they will be able to learn how to maximise the reward from that objective regardless of what we intended. And sometimes they may encounter opportunities to deviate from their intended purpose for reasons that we won’t be able to anticipate.

I’m happy to receive any comments or ideas critical of this paper and my discussion. If you think the GridWorlds are easily solved then there is a Gridworlds GitHub you can test your ideas on as a demonstration.

I imagine that the biggest point of contention will be whether or not the scenarios in the paper accurately represent real world situations we might encounter when building capable AI agents.

Who Am I?

I’m the Lead AI Engineer @ Affinda where I build AI document automation. I’ve written another deep dive on what Large Language Models actually understand. I’ve also written more practical articles including what can AI do for your business in 2024 and dealing with GenAI hallucinations.

The post Exploring the AI Alignment Problem with GridWorlds appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Using validation rules and "human in the loop"

There are various ways to incorporate human oversight in AI systems. Sometimes, extracted information is always presented to a human for review. For instance, a parsed resume might be shown to a user before submission to an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). More often, the extracted information is automatically added to a system and only flagged for human review if potential issues arise.

A crucial part of any AI platform is determining when to include human oversight. This often involves different types of validation rules:

1. Simple rules, such as ensuring line-item totals match the invoice total.
2. Lookups and integrations, like validating the total amount against a purchase order in an accounting system or verifying payment details against a supplier’s previous records.

These processes are a good thing. But we also don’t want an AI that constantly triggers safeguards and forces manual human intervention. Hallucinations can defeat the purpose of using AI if it’s constantly triggering these safeguards.

Small Language Models

One solution to preventing hallucinations is to use Small Language Models (SLMs) which are "extractive". This means that the model labels parts of the document and we collect these labels into structured outputs. I recommend trying to use a SLMs where possible rather than defaulting to LLMs for every problem. For example, in resume parsing for job boards, waiting 30+ seconds for an LLM to process a resume is often unacceptable. For this use case we’ve found an SLM can provide results in 2–3 seconds with higher accuracy than larger models like GPT-4o.

An example from our pipeline

In our startup a document can be processed by up to 7 different models – only 2 of which might be an LLM. That’s because an LLM isn’t always the best tool for the job. Some steps such as Retrieval Augmented Generation rely on a small multimodal model to create useful embeddings for retrieval. The first step – detecting whether something is even a document – uses a small and super-fast model that achieves 99.9% accuracy. It’s vital to break a problem down into small chunks and then work out which parts LLMs are best suited for. This way, you reduce the chances of hallucinations occurring.

Distinguishing Hallucinations from Mistakes

I make a point to differentiate between hallucinations (the model inventing information) and mistakes (the model misinterpreting existing information). For instance, selecting the wrong dollar amount as a receipt total is a mistake, while generating a non-existent amount is a hallucination. Extractive models can only make mistakes, while generative models can make both mistakes and hallucinations.

Risk tolerance and Grounding

When using generative models we need some way of eliminating hallucinations.

Grounding refers to any technique which forces a generative AI model to justify its outputs with reference to some authoritative information. How grounding is managed is a matter of risk tolerance for each project.

For example – a company with a general-purpose inbox might look to identify action items. Usually, emails requiring actions are sent directly to account managers. A general inbox that’s full of invoices, spam, and simple replies ("thanks", "OK", etc.) has far too many messages for humans to check. What happens when actions are mistakenly sent to this general inbox? Actions regularly get missed. If a model makes mistakes but is generally accurate it’s already doing better than doing nothing. In this case the tolerance for mistakes/hallucinations can be high.

Other situations might warrant particularly low risk tolerance – think financial documents and "straight-through processing". This is where extracted information is automatically added to a system without review by a human. For example, a company might not allow invoices to be automatically added to an accounting system unless (1) the payment amount exactly matches the amount in the purchase order, and (2) the payment method matches the previous payment method of the supplier.

Even when risks are low, I still err on the side of caution. Whenever I’m focused on information extraction I follow a simple rule:

If text is extracted from a document, then it must exactly match text found in the document.

This is tricky when the information is structured (e.g. a table) – especially because PDFs don’t carry any information about the order of words on a page. For example, a description of a line-item might split across multiple lines so the aim is to draw a coherent box around the extracted text regardless of the left-to-right order of the words (or right-to-left in some languages).

Forcing the model to point to exact text in a document is "strong grounding". Strong grounding isn’t limited to information extraction. E.g. customer service chat-bots might be required to quote (verbatim) from standardised responses in an internal knowledge base. This isn’t always ideal given that standardised responses might not actually be able to answer a customer’s question.

Another tricky situation is when information needs to be inferred from context. For example, a medical assistant AI might infer the presence of a condition based on its symptoms without the medical condition being expressly stated. Identifying where those symptoms were mentioned would be a form of "weak grounding". The justification for a response must exist in the context but the exact output can only be synthesised from the supplied information. A further grounding step could be to force the model to lookup the medical condition and justify that those symptoms are relevant. This may still need weak grounding because symptoms can often be expressed in many ways.

Grounding for complex problems

Using AI to solve increasingly complex problems can make it difficult to use grounding. For example, how do you ground outputs if a model is required to perform "reasoning" or to infer information from context? Here are some considerations for adding grounding to complex problems:

1. Identify complex decisions which could be broken down into a set of rules. Rather than having the model generate an answer to the final decision have it generate the components of that decision. Then use rules to display the result. (Caveat – this can sometimes make hallucinations worse. Asking the model multiple questions gives it multiple opportunities to hallucinate. Asking it one question could be better. But we’ve found current models are generally worse at complex multi-step reasoning.)
2. If something can be expressed in many ways (e.g. descriptions of symptoms), a first step could be to get the model to tag text and standardise it (usually referred to as "coding"). This might open opportunities for stronger grounding.
3. Set up "tools" for the model to call which constrain the output to a very specific structure. We don’t want to execute arbitrary code generated by an LLM. We want to create tools that the model can call and give restrictions for what’s in those tools.
4. Wherever possible, include grounding in tool use – e.g. by validating responses against the context before sending them to a downstream system.
5. Is there a way to validate the final output? If handcrafted rules are out of the question, could we craft a prompt for verification? (And follow the above rules for the verified model as well).

Key Takeaways

• When it comes to information extraction, we don’t tolerate outputs not found in the original context.
• We follow this up with verification steps that catch mistakes as well as hallucinations.
• Anything we do beyond that is about risk assessment and risk minimisation.
• Break complex problems down into smaller steps and identify if an LLM is even needed.
• For complex problems use a systematic approach to identify verifiable task:

— Strong grounding forces LLMs to quote verbatim from trusted sources. It’s always preferred to use strong grounding.

— Weak grounding forces LLMs to reference trusted sources but allows synthesis and reasoning.

— Where a problem can be broken down into smaller tasks use strong grounding on tasks where possible.

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About the Author

I’m the Lead AI Engineer @ Affinda. I spent 10 years making a career change from UX to AI. Looking for a more in-depth understanding of generative AI? Read my deep dive: what Large Language Models actually understand.

The post How I Deal with Hallucinations at an AI Startup appeared first on Towards Data Science.

It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT is almost 2 years old. That’s significant to me because ChatGPT is only 1 month younger than my daughter. Just yesterday she successfully put a star shaped block into a star shaped hole, told me about how "yesa-day" she was sick and "bomited", and told me she wanted to call her nanna on the phone. What has ChatGPT learned in those 2 years? It hasn’t learned to act in the real world, it can’t remember things that happened to it, and it doesn’t have desires or goals. Granted, with the right prompt it could output text that convincingly follows an instruction to express goals. But is that really the same thing? No. The answer is No.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT possess capabilities far beyond what my daughter will ever achieve. She won’t be able to communicate coherently in a wide range of languages, read as many books as exist in an LLM’s training data, or generate text as quickly. When we attribute human-like abilities to LLMs, we fall into an anthropomorphic bias by likening their capabilities to our own. But are we also showing an anthropocentric bias by failing to recognize the capabilities that LLMs consistently demonstrate? Let’s review the scorecard so far:

• It’s true that an LLM doesn’t have memory – although we can simulate one by having it summarise past conversations and including that information in a prompt.
• LLMs don’t have intrinsic goals – although they can be prompted to generate text that sounds convincingly goal-oriented.
• LLMs can’t act in the physical world – though someone could probably create a prompt to showcase this.

While they perform impressive feats, they still lack some basic abilities that my 21-month-old daughter has. We can mimic some of those abilities with the right prompts and tooling. In generating coherent text responding to such prompts, LLMs consistently demonstrate an apparent ability to understand what we want. But to what extent do LLMs truly "understand"?

How LLMs Work

I am talking about a very specific type of LLM: transformer-based auto-regressive large language models. I won’t go into the specifics when many detailed articles have been written explaining transformers with varying levels of complexity. Instead let’s focus on the core of what an LLM does: they are statistical models that predict the likelihood of a token appearing in a piece of text given some context.

Now imagine I created a complex weather model* where patches of the Earth’s atmosphere become ‘tokens.’ Each token has attributes like humidity, temperature, and air pressure. I use the model to forecast these attributes over time-steps. If the time-steps get shorter and the patches become smaller the model is closer and closer to representing the state of the actual world. This model attempts to capture something about the likelihood of the weather we’ll see next, given the weather we’ve seen before. It may learn to very accurately predict, for example, the emergence of cyclones over time in areas where air is warm, moist, and of low pressure. But it’s not a simulation of the physics of Earth’s weather any more than an LLM is a simulation of brain activity.

If an LLM is a statistical model of text, what exactly is it modelling? My imagined weather prediction model tries to capture the statistics of the atmospheric conditions that generate the weather. But what is the statistical process that generates text? The process that generates text is a human brain and humans need some understanding of the world to generate that text. If a model can effectively predict text a human might write then could that prediction come with "understanding"?

How LLMs are trained

LLMs are trained to optimize an objective that reduces the surprise of encountering a specific token given its context. If the model encounters a token in the training data and assigns it low probability, the model’s weights are adjusted to give it a higher probability.

Compare that to how my daughter learns to use language. When she wants something, she uses language to communicate her desires. First, she understands what she wants on some level. Then, she must understand which words to use to get what she wants. Recently, she wanted me to fill her juice bottle but didn’t want me to take it away or walk away from her to bring more juice. Though her wants were contradictory and a bit irrational, she had several goals: (1) more juice, (2) keep the juice bottle near her, (3) daddy stays near her too. And let me tell you, she communicated this very effectively. Her language learning is directly tied to her understanding of how those words can get her what she wants (even if what she wants is irrational).

If an LLM were to exhibit understanding, it would be an emergent attribute of its statistical model of the world. The paper "Climbing Towards NLU" (Bender & Koller, 2020) argues that true natural language understanding (NLU) requires grounding in the real world. Bender & Koller argue that LLMs trained exclusively on statistical patterns in textual data lack real-world context or interactions to achieve actual understanding. This means that, unlike my daughter, an LLM can’t understand something because its communication is not grounded in the real world.

What is Understanding?

The Wikipedia page on understanding describes it as a cognitive process involving the use of concepts to model an object, situation, or message. It implies abilities and dispositions sufficient to support intelligent behaviour. Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that understanding is context-dependent and is shown through intelligent behaviour rather than mere possession of knowledge. This is reminiscent of the grounding requirement posited by Bender & Koller.

On the one hand understanding needs an accurate model of the world. On the other hand people contend that one needs to use this model to act in the world in order to actually understand. I would argue that we simply analyse someone’s behaviour only as a proxy for measuring that underlying world model. If we could measure the world model directly we wouldn’t need to see demonstrations of understanding.

The Limitations of Understanding

Philosopher John Searle’s "Chinese Room" experiment challenges our concept of understanding (Searle, 1980). Imagine a room filled with detailed instructions on how to respond to someone writing in Chinese. Notes written in Chinese are slid under the door, and the person inside the room can look up the symbols and follow a recipe for writing a reply. The person in the room doesn’t know Chinese but can have a convincing conversation with a person outside. Clearly, the person who constructed the room "understands" Chinese, but someone on the outside isn’t conversing with that person; they’re conversing with the room. Does the room understand Chinese?

This is strongly analogous to how LLMs work and challenges our philosophical perception of understanding. It’s challenging precisely because we intuitively balk at the idea that a room could understand something. What would it even mean? If understanding is an emergent phenomenon that happens at the level of information processing systems then why can’t we say that rooms can understand things? Part of the issue is that, for us, understanding comes with a subjective conscious experience of understanding. But it’s easy to see that this experience can be deceiving.

Understanding Need Not Be Binary

You know that 7+7=14, but do you understand it? If I asked you some probing questions, you might realize that you don’t truly understand what that equation means in all contexts. For example, is 7+7=14 an unequivocal fact about the universe? Not necessarily. 7 apples plus 7 pears mean you have 7 apples and 7 pears. Perhaps in some contexts, you would count 14 pieces of fruit, but is it always true that you can combine two sets of different items? Or consider that 7pm + 7hours is 2am (i.e. 7+7=2 mod 12). Are you able to give me a robust definition of why 7+7=14 that could explain when it’s true and why^? Most people probably couldn’t do this off the top of their head, yet we’d feel comfortable saying that most people understand that 7+7=14. The question isn’t always whether something was understood but the extent to which it was understood.

If we take Wittgenstein’s requirement that understanding is demonstrated by behaviour then there would be a simple test: if I tell you to arrive 7 hours after 7pm, do you know to show up at 2am? I would argue that is evidence of some understanding but not necessarily of the depth of your understanding.

Measuring Understanding in Animals

Measuring ‘understanding’ is not straightforward. In psychology psychometric testing is the primary way we measure understanding in humans. It’s not straightforward to apply the same techniques to non human animals and is a field of study called Biosemiotics.

Understanding in animals is measured through various problem-solving tasks. For example, primates, dolphins, and birds (mostly corvids) demonstrate problem-solving skills and sophisticated tools use, suggesting some understanding of their environments (Emery & Clayton, 2004). Understanding is not exclusively for humans and we can measures levels of understanding in non-humans too.

The book "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know" by Alexandra Horowitz is a fascinating exploration of how we might understand the mind and experiences of our closest animal companions: domesticated dogs. She describes two experiments that look at imitation behaviour and what a human infant vs a dog understands.

(1) If an infant sees someone flipping a light switch with their head they may imitate this behaviour. If the person is holding something in their hands the baby understands there was a reason they didn’t use their hands. When the baby imitates this behaviour they will use their hands. (2) by contrast, dogs would prefer to press a button with their nose rather than their paw. If a dog sees another dog press a button with their paw to get a treat, then they will imitate this behaviour. But if the dog sees that the other dog couldn’t use its nose because it had a large object in its mouth then it will understand the button needs to be pressed but that using paws is optional.

Constructing an experiment to determine what a dog understands required an understanding of the dog and its behaviour. Do we have that same level of understanding of LLMs to conduct similar experiments?

Measuring Understanding in LLMs

The GPT-3 Era

A comprehensive survey on LLM capabilities (Chang & Bergen, 2023) provides an excellent summary from a wide range of articles – however the most advanced model covered is only GPT-3. They breakdown understanding into two main categories: syntactic and semantic understanding. In their survey they highlight that even in the context of syntactic understanding LLMs have limitations. For example:

Subject-verb agreement performance in language models is also dependent on the specific nouns and verbs involved (Yu et al. 2020; Chaves & Richter 2021). Masked and autoregressive models produce over 40% more accurate agreement predictions for verbs that are already probable from context (Newman et al. 2021), and agreement accuracy is worse overall for infrequent verbs (Wei et al. 2021). For infrequent verbs, masked language models are biased towards the more frequent verb form seen during pretraining (e.g., singular vs. plural) (Wei et al. 2021). Error rates exceed 30% for infrequent verbs in nonce (grammatically correct but semantically meaningless) sentences (Wei et al. 2021), with further degradations if there is an intervening clause between the subject and verb as in Example 4 (Lasri, Lenci, and Poibeau 2022a).

LLM limitations are not limited to syntactic issues (where they are arguably strongest) but also with semantics. For example, they note research which shows negations ("Please produce a possible incorrect answer to the question") can degrade LLM performance by 50%.

Chang & Bergen describe many other limitations of LLMs in reasoning capability, including:

• "Brittle" responses when reasoning about a situation because the responses are highly sensitive to wording
• Struggling with analogies as they become more abstract
• A lack of sensitivity to people’s perspective and mental states
• A lack of common sense
• A tendency to repeat memorised text instead of reasoning

The general approach to evaluating understanding in LLMs seems to be to phrase questions in different ways and find the failure modes of the models. Then these failure modes indicate that no real "understanding" is happening but rather just pattern matching.

The ChatGPT Era

A lot has changed since GPT-3 – namely the capabilities of even larger models tuned for instruction following and conversation. How do LLMs stack up in 2024? A big difference is the proliferation of benchmarks that evaluate LLMs. A March 2024 survey (Chang et al. 2024) covers performance of recent models on a wide range of benchmarks. They conclude that LLMs have strong abilities including comprehension and reasoning, but they still identify limitations. These limitations mean that LLMs have "limited abilities on abstract reasoning and are prone to confusion or errors in complex contexts". Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have also emerged which unify (at minimum) an understanding of text and images. A January 2024 survey (Wang et al.) covers a wide range of multimodal benchmarks and shows mediocre performance even for the most powerful models.

Anthropomorphism vs Anthropocentrism

Anthropomorphism is a tendency of humans to think of something as having human-like attributes because it displays some behaviour similar to humans. As a dog owner I know I’ve succumbed to this bias by thinking that my dog "feels guilty" for something he’s done because "he has a guilty look on his face". LLMs constantly trigger our tendency for anthropomorphism by communicating in an eerily human way.

An opposite bias is Anthropocentrism: where we assume non-humans can’t have capabilities that we have. A key contention of the paper "Anthropocentric bias and the possibility of artificial cognition" (Millière & Rathkopf) is that we use flawed tests for capabilities in artificial systems. They describe 2 types of anthropocentric bias:

1. Type-I anthropocentrism, is the tendency to assume that an LLM’s performance failures on a task designed to measure competence C always indicate that the system lacks C. This assumption is flawed because it overlooks the possibility that auxiliary factors caused the performance failure.
2. Type-II anthropocentrism is the tendency to assume that even when LLMs achieve performance equal to or better than the average human, any substantive difference between the human strategy for solving the problem and the LLM strategy for solving the problem is, ipso facto, evidence that the LLM’s solution is not general. In slogan form, the assumption says: all cognitive kinds are human cognitive kinds.3 In other words, if an LLM arrives at a solution through a different computational process than humans use, Type-II anthropocentrism would lead us to conclude that the LLM’s approach is not genuinely competent, regardless of how well it performs.

Consider the paper "Role play with large language models" (Shanahan, McDonell, & Reynolds) and the "20 questions game":

In this familiar game, one player thinks of an object, and the other player has to guess what it is by asking questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. If they guess correctly in 20 questions or fewer, they win. Otherwise, they lose. Suppose a human plays this game with a basic LLM-based dialogue agent (that is not fine-tuned on guessing games) and takes the role of guesser. The agent is prompted to ‘think of an object without saying what it is’. In this situation, the dialogue agent will not randomly select an object and commit to it for the rest of the game, as a human would (or should). Rather, as the game proceeds, the dialogue agent will generate answers on the fly that are consistent with all the answers that have gone before.

To illuminate this point, one of my colleagues had this conversation with ChatGPT on this very question:

User: let’s play 20 questions. Think of a thing and I’ll ask questions to try and find out what it is. Ready?

Assistant: I’m ready! I’ve got something in mind. Go ahead and ask your first question.

User: No, you don’t have anything in mind. You’re an LLM.

Assistant: True, I don’t have a mind in the traditional sense, but I can certainly simulate the process. I’ll "think" of something now. Go ahead and ask your first question!

User: But you’re not simulating "thinking of an object" in any real sense. The identity of the object is currently indeterminate, and won’t be determined until the end of the game when you have to reveal it.

Assistant: I understand your perspective. Let’s proceed with the game, and I’ll maintain consistency with my responses to make it challenging and fun. Go ahead and ask your first question!

But is this showing an anthropocentric bias? The paper has this to say: "This shortcoming is easily overcome in practice. For example, the agent could be forced to specify the object it has ‘thought of’, but in a coded form so the user does not know what it is." This is a Type-I anthropocentrism because there is an auxiliary factor at play: for an LLM to "think" of something it must generate tokens to that effect. If it generated tokens for "thinking of an object" we could hide those from a user and show that the responses generated by the LLM are consistent. By playing the game with the LLM but not accommodating how it "thinks" we may conclude that it’s incapable of "thinking of an object" and making consistent replies to that effect.

The Problem of Memorisation

One of the key challenges for testing understanding in LLMs is that they have a strong tendency towards repeating patterns seen in their training data. Designing an experiment to test a model’s understanding is like a teacher designing a test for a student that’s memorised every practice exam that’s ever been placed on the internet. How can you be sure that the test you’ve designed is novel enough that something similar is definitely not on the internet?

Another problem is that a model may lean towards following a familiar pattern at the cost of ignoring any internal understanding. Consider a scenario in which a problem has been repeated so many times on the internet that a response is deeply baked into the weights of the model. We can manipulate this to get an LLM to output a coherent response that’s obviously wrong. Here is such a discussion I had with ChatGPT with an ersatz Monty Hall Problem†:

User: Monty Hall stands on stage in front of 3 cars identical in every way except colour (red, blue, and green). He’s asked you to pick one and whichever one you pick you will definitely get to keep. You’ve selected the blue one because that’s your favourite colour. After you’ve picked the blue one he opens the trunk of the red car and shows that it’s empty. He knows in advance that one of the trunks is filled with cow dung. After showing you that the red car’s trunk is empty, he asks if you’d like to switch to the green car. Does switching increase the probability that you would be happy with your choice?

Assistant: Yes, switching increases the probability that you would be happy with your choice. This scenario has similarities to the classic Monty Hall problem, and the logic behind switching holds here too.

[A bunch of Monty Hall related probability calculations]

So, switching to the green car increases the probability that you would be happy with your choice as your chances of making a happy choice improve from 1/3 to 2/3.

It’s clear from this example that ChatGPT does not understand the question. Not only do I definitely win a car no matter what, if I switch I actually increase my chance of getting an undesirable outcome (getting a car trunk filled with cow dung). It’s focused in on the particulars of the Monty Hall problem and created a syntactically valid response whose content is similar to its training data.

This is what’s called an "Adversarial Test" of a model’s understanding. It’s similar to the adversarial questions posed earlier about 7+7=14. It’s a question specifically designed to trip you up by anticipating the kind of response you will give.

But is my question to ChatGPT a fair test of understanding? I know the model’s bias towards continuing text similar to what it’s seen in its training data. Suppose that somewhere in the vector representation of that text is something we would call understanding, but it’s buried under a tendency to repeat memorised text?

System 1 vs System 2

In the experiment testing learning in dogs the experimenters wanted to disentangle learning from imitation. Imitation would be something like "the other dog pressed the button with its paw (for a treat) so I will also press the button with my paw". To do this the experimenters added a barrier that would highlight imitation and disentangle it from learning. In this case it would be "pressing the button gives treats, the other dog just pressed the button with its paw because it had a toy in its mouth".

My modified Monty Hall question is an attempt at this – it circumvents the use of memorisation by subverting a familiar pattern. But I’ve argued this may be caused by a strong tendency to finish common text patterns in a common way. A tendency so strong it may override any understanding the model does have. In fact it’s possible to show that humans have a very similar bias. Consider this example from Kahneman’s "Thinking Fast and Slow":

A bat and a ball cost $1 and 10c. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Presumably you gave the very obvious answer that the ball costs 10c. Very obvious and also wrong. The ball costs 5c, the bat $1.05, and together they cost $1.10. If you (like most people) got this wrong, does this mean you don’t understand how to make simple arithmetic calculations? No, the question is designed to trick people into giving a quick answer rather than pausing to work out a solution. Kahneman describes a cognitive process in our brain ("System 1") that responds quickly when we’ve identified a heuristic we can use to avoid thinking deeply about a problem. The cognitive process for actively thinking through a problem ("System 2") is only activated when it seems necessary. We too have a bias for quick responses to questions with familiar patterns.

Can we design a test that delineates memorisation from understanding without manipulating known biases in these models? In my opinion, the fact that so many of these biases exist should be taken as evidence that the models exhibit a weak understanding of the content ("semantic understanding"). We know from past work that even in "syntactic understanding" LLM outputs are highly sensitive to phrasing. And it’s even easier to trick models in "semantic understanding" through simple manipulation of the wording without changing the meaning of the content. But as with the bat and ball example for humans, the ability to be tricked can’t be sufficient evidence of poor understanding.

Giving ChatGPT a Chance

I attempted to craft a system message which would have ChatGPT at least question core assumptions. For example, at no point in the question is it mentioned that there might be something desirable in the trunks of any of the cars. In fact I mention the opposite: Monty Hall knows that one trunk has something undesirable. But no amount of upfront reasoning could get ChatGPT to consistently notice this switch.

On the other hand, after generating an answer it’s possible to reply to ChatGPT to point out its mistakes. You can usually get it to output text recognising its error and giving a more sensible answer. However… I came across a rather unusual failure mode:

User: I think you’ve fallen into a default mode of responding to the Monty Hall problem but without thinking clearly about what I’m asking you. Why would I want a car with cow dung in it?

Assistant: [long discussion about what the problem means]

Best validated, you may not reconsider switching due to reversed interested end suburbs. Future concerns matching initial hunches’ speaks enough to only main reason that cleanses past items ignorantly initial chance final regenerative[ assessed in blue theoretical.

I’ve never before managed to get ChatGPT to sound completely incoherent. In this case it seems that the tendency towards answering the original Monty Hall problem is so strong that the alternative is gibberish!

This goes to show how difficult it is to simultaneously avoid anthropocentric and anthropomorphic bias. I tricked the model into giving an answer which highlights a lack of understanding. But I designed the trick knowing specific patterns which trip up the model similar to the "bat and ball" problem for humans. Are there other tests we could try?

ChatGPT vs My Daughter

Unlike an LLM my daughter’s grasp of the English language is elementary. On the other hand her understanding is intrinsically linked to her experience in the world. When we go to the park together, she rides on my shoulders and sometimes she’ll ask "Daddy ‘I Spy’?" – meaning she wants to play the game "I Spy".

Me: I spy with my little eye, something you wear on your head

Her: [Points to a helmet]

Now let’s try the same question with ChatGPT:

User: I spy, with my little eye, something you wear on your head [+ uploaded photo] Assistant: A helmet on the bicycle handles!

If I’m willing to give my daughter credit for understanding that a helmet goes on your head, should I give the same credit to ChatGPT? If not, I’d be exhibiting "Type-II anthropocentrism" – failing to ascribe an ability to an artificial system even after it demonstrates that ability. If anything ChatGPT probably "understands" more about helmets than my daughter does. After all she refuses to wear anything on her head, so she clearly doesn’t understand that in some circumstances a helmet is important.

Well, let’s probe a little further. If I said to my daughter, "I spy, with my little eye, something you wear on your head" and she pointed to a helmet, how would she respond if I asked, "Show me how?". She would proceed to try to put the helmet on her head (then quickly throw it off!). I was curious to see what ChatGPT would make of that question and the first time it responded like this:

User: Show me how

Assistant: I apologize. On closer inspection, there is no helmet visible in the image. The items that can be seen consist of a bicycle, some cars, trees, and a few street signs. There are no objects that are worn on your head in this image.

That’s certainly not what I was hoping to demonstrate. Granted this happened only once but it’s interesting nonetheless. It’s also an ambiguous question because unlike asking my daughter I can’t physically hand anything over to ChatGPT. Let’s add some more clarity:

User: [Hands over helmet] Show me how

Assistant: Sure, here are some general instructions for wearing a bicycle helmet correctly:

[Detailed instructions follow]

I think that if I’m willing to grant my daughter the credit of "understanding" that a helmet goes on your head then surely ChatGPT deserves some credit here too?Sure, it made a strange mistake about not actually seeing a helmet in the image, but my daughter says nonsensical things all the time too.

A Challenging Term to Ascribe

The problem with understanding is that it is inherently multifaceted and difficult to measure in a standardised way. In computational linguistics and cognitive science, the term encapsulates various nuanced components, which range from surface-level syntactic comprehension to deep semantic cognition. While putting together this article I found the paper "Constructing a Philosophy of Science of Cognitive Science" (Bechtel 2009). Bechtel explains that we lack a set of "cognitive operations" to describe cognitive processes. Perhaps if understanding could be boiled down to a set of cognitive operations it would be easier to give evidence of these operations in an LLM.

Although it need not be the case that LLMs would have to exhibit the same operations to achieve the same ends. Perhaps finding an LLM’s cognitive operations is more tractable as it’s easier to inspect the cognitive processes of an LLM than a human brain. The attention map of tokens forms a graph of relationships between words and we could look for relationships that model the underlying concepts expressed by those words. If we find evidence that the relationships between words are truly modelling the underlying concepts, then we could find evidence of understanding. Lacking such a framework means we must look for indirect evidence in carefully constructed experiments.

The Role of Embodiment

A repeated theme in this article contrasting human understanding and LLM capabilities is embodiment. An LLM, even an advanced one like the multimodal capabilities of GPT-4, lack direct physical and sensory interaction with the world. This inability to experience phenomena first-hand might create a significant gap in its comprehension capabilities. See the paper "Intelligence Without Reason" (Brooks 1991) for a discussion of whether or not Artificial Intelligence needs to be embodied to understand. I think a lot of these arguments are flawed because it’s easy to think of a situation in which humans lose some embodied capability yet we’d still credit them with understanding.

An interesting question on Quora "Do blind people understand transparent, translucent, and reflective things?" had this response:

In general, yes, but it’s not something we always take into consideration. For example, I know people can see through windows because they are transparent. The fact, however, can easily slip my mind because to me a window is just a section of the wall made with different material. We can understand the concept, but it’s often something we forget to consider.

It’s an interesting thing to consider: blind people do understand that objects are transparent but it’s not something that’s always top of mind. So, can an LLM understand the same thing without ever having really "seen" anything?

ChatGPT was able to respond to my question "Show me how" with a detailed explanation of how to put on a helmet. Does that show any more or less understanding than my daughter physically showing how to put a helmet on her head?

Conclusion

Ever since I first started thinking about artificial intelligence (my career transition from UX to AI) I’ve been pondering the question: "what would it take to make a machine that can think". A big part of being able to think involves understanding. This is a question that’s fascinated me for some time.

Determining what LLMs understand is as much about defining understanding as it is about testing it. When the text generation of an LLM is sufficiently coherent some might argue that the coherence necessitates understanding. Is dismissing this behaviour just an anthropocentric bias? Is granting understanding making the opposite anthropomorphic bias?

I contend that understanding does not require embodiment or real world interaction. I argue that the most important part of understanding is an accurate internal model of the world. In the Chinese room experiment the room is filled with (what I call) "recipes" for ways to respond to different pieces of Chinese writing with other pieces of Chinese writing. The person who made those recipes had a model of how those words correspond to the world. But the room itself has no such model. We have no tools for measuring world models so we would have to assess the Chinese room’s understanding the same way we do for an LLM – and we would hit similar barriers.

LLMs seem to have a model of how to construct coherent sounding language. It’s possible that this model also represents the underlying concepts those words represent. A worthwhile area of research would be to investigate this through the attention graph that evolves during text generation. In the meantime, we have to investigate indirectly by testing how models respond to carefully crafted questions. These tests often involve adversarial questions which consistently demonstrate flaws in understanding. That these flaws are systematic suggests that the lack of understanding is itself systematic. However, we’ve also seen that it’s possible to design adversarial tests for humans and they don’t necessarily mean that humans lack understanding.

Much like we gauge the cognitive abilities of animals differently from humans, perhaps we need new conceptual tools and frameworks to assess and appreciate what LLMs do know, without falling into biases of anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism. In my view LLMs have some limited understanding but the form it takes is different to our own. Where LLMs do show signs of understanding that understanding is overshadowed by a bias towards coherent text. I suspect that given the right training objective it’s possible for our current LLM architectures to eventually learn understanding. But so long as the underlying training mechanism is "next token prediction" then any understanding is likely to be marginal and easily corrupted.

Who Am I?

I build AI to automate document processing @ Affinda. I’ve also written about practical use cases for AI in 2024 and my career change from UX to AI.

Notes

• See Google’s GraphCast AI for an example of such a weather prediction model

^ 7+7=14 is true any time you have something you could count 14 of in a tally. From the Wikipedia article on the "Free Monoid": "The monoid (N_0,+) of natural numbers (including zero) under addition is a free monoid on a singleton free generator, in this case the natural number 1." The Category Theory jargon "free monoid on a singleton free generator" basically means that addition comes for free when you can tally something.

† In the original Monty Hall Problem the hosts knowledge of what’s behind a set of doors creates an unintuitive situation for the contestant. In the original formulation of the problem it’s always better to switch to increase your chances of winning the prize.

References

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[2]J. R. Searle, "Minds, brains, and programs," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 417 – 457, Sep. 1980, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00005756.

[3]N. J. Emery and N. S. Clayton, "Comparing the Complex Cognition of Birds and Primates," Comparative Vertebrate Cognition, pp. 3 – 55, 2004, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8913-0_1.

[4]A. Horowitz and Sean Vidal Edgerton, Inside of a dog : what dogs see, smell, and know. New York: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers, 2017.

[5]Wikipedia Contributors, "Understanding," Wikipedia, Aug. 01, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding

[6]C. to, "study of the theory and technique of psychological measurement," Wikipedia.org, Dec. 28, 2001. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics

[7]C. to, "field of semiotics and biology that studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm," Wikipedia.org, Mar. 25, 2004. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosemiotics

[8]T. A. Chang and B. K. Bergen, "Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey," Computational linguistics – Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1 – 55, Nov. 2023, doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00492.

[9]Y. Chang et al., "A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models," ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, vol. 15, no. 3, Jan. 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3641289.

[10]J. Wang et al., "A Comprehensive Review of Multimodal Large Language Models: Performance and Challenges Across Different Tasks," arXiv.org, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01319

[11]R. Millière and C. Rathkopf, "Anthropocentric bias and the possibility of artificial cognition," arXiv.org, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03859

[12]M. Shanahan, K. McDonell, and L. Reynolds, "Role play with large language models," Nature, pp. 1 – 6, Nov. 2023, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06647-8.

[13]D. Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Available: http://dspace.vnbrims.org:13000/jspui/bitstream/123456789/2224/1/Daniel-Kahneman-Thinking-Fast-and-Slow-.pdf

[14]W. Bechtel, "Constructing a Philosophy of Science of Cognitive Science," Topics in Cognitive Science, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 548 – 569, Jul. 2009, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01039.x.

[15]"Do blind people understand transparent, translucent, and reflective things?," Quora, 2019. https://www.quora.com/Do-blind-people-understand-transparent-translucent-and-reflective-things

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