AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract: AI alignment aims to build AI systems that are in accordance with human intentions and values. With the emergence of AI systems possessing superhuman capabilities, the potential large-scale risks associated with misaligned systems become apparent. Hundreds of AI experts and public figures have expressed their concerns about AI risks, arguing that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. Motivated by the lack of an up-to-date systematic survey on AI alignment, in this paper, we delve into the core concepts, methodology, and practice of alignment research. To begin with, we identify four principles as the key objectives of AI alignment: Robustness, Interpretability, Controllability, and Ethicality (RICE). We outline the landscape of current alignment research and decompose them into two key components: forward alignment and backward alignment. The former aims to make AI systems aligned via alignment training, while the latter aims to gain evidence about the systems' alignment and govern them appropriately to avoid exacerbating misalignment risks. On forward alignment, we discuss how to conduct learning from various types of feedback (a.k.a., outer alignment) and how to overcome the distribution shift to avoid goal misgeneralization (a.k.a., inner alignment). On backward alignment, we discuss verification techniques that can tell the degree of value alignment for various AI systems deployed, which can further improve the assurance of forward alignment outcomes. Based on this, we also release a constantly updated website featuring tutorials, collections of papers, blogs, and other learning resources at https://www.alignmentsurvey.com.