AXRP - the AI X-risk Research Podcast
21 - Interpretability for Engineers with Stephen Casper
02 May 2023
Lots of people in the field of machine learning study 'interpretability', developing tools that they say give us useful information about neural networks. But how do we know if meaningful progress is actually being made? What should we want out of these tools? In this episode, I speak to Stephen Casper about these questions, as well as about a benchmark he's co-developed to evaluate whether interpretability tools can find 'Trojan horses' hidden inside neural nets. Patreon: patreon.com/axrpodcast Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/axrpodcast Topics we discuss, and timestamps: - 00:00:42 - Interpretability for engineers - 00:00:42 - Why interpretability? - 00:12:55 - Adversaries and interpretability - 00:24:30 - Scaling interpretability - 00:42:29 - Critiques of the AI safety interpretability community - 00:56:10 - Deceptive alignment and interpretability - 01:09:48 - Benchmarking Interpretability Tools (for Deep Neural Networks) (Using Trojan Discovery) - 01:10:40 - Why Trojans? - 01:14:53 - Which interpretability tools? - 01:28:40 - Trojan generation - 01:38:13 - Evaluation - 01:46:07 - Interpretability for shaping policy - 01:53:55 - Following Casper's work The transcript: axrp.net/episode/2023/05/02/episode-21-interpretability-for-engineers-stephen-casper.html Links for Casper: - Personal website: stephencasper.com/ - Twitter: twitter.com/StephenLCasper - Electronic mail: scasper [at] mit [dot] edu Research we discuss: - The Engineer's Interpretability Sequence: alignmentforum.org/s/a6ne2ve5uturEEQK7 - Benchmarking Interpretability Tools for Deep Neural Networks: arxiv.org/abs/2302.10894 - Adversarial Policies beat Superhuman Go AIs: goattack.far.ai/ - Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features: arxiv.org/abs/1905.02175 - Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models: arxiv.org/abs/2204.06974 - Softmax Linear Units: transformer-circuits.pub/2022/solu/index.html - Red-Teaming the Stable Diffusion Safety Filter: arxiv.org/abs/2210.04610 Episode art by Hamish Doodles: hamishdoodles.com
No persons identified in this episode.
This episode hasn't been transcribed yet
Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.
Popular episodes get transcribed faster
Other recent transcribed episodes
Transcribed and ready to explore now
3ª PARTE | 17 DIC 2025 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE
01 Jan 1970
El Partidazo de COPE
Buchladen: Tipps für Weihnachten
20 Dec 2025
eat.READ.sleep. Bücher für dich
LVST 19 de diciembre de 2025
19 Dec 2025
La Venganza Será Terrible (oficial)
Christmas Party, Debris & Ping-Pong
19 Dec 2025
My Therapist Ghosted Me
Episode 1320: Becoming 'The Monk': Rex Ryan on playing Gerry Hutch on stage (Part 1)
19 Dec 2025
Crime World
Friends Thru A Lens: The Holidays with Ella Risbridger
19 Dec 2025
Sentimental Garbage