AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey

Jiaming Ji; Tianyi Qiu; Boyuan Chen; Borong Zhang; Hantao Lou; Kaile Wang; Yawen Duan; Zhonghao He; Lukas Vierling; Donghai Hong; Jiayi Zhou; Zhaowei Zhang; Fanzhi Zeng; Juntao Dai; Xuehai Pan; Kwan Yee Ng; Aidan O'Gara; Hua Xu; Brian Tse; Jie Fu; Stephen McAleer; Yaodong Yang; Yizhou Wang; Song-Chun Zhu; Yike Guo; Wen Gao

arXiv · 2310.19852

AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey

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Abstract

AI alignment aims to make AI systems behave in line with human intentions and values. As AI systems grow more capable, so do risks from misalignment. To provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the alignment field, in this survey, we delve into the core concepts, methodology, and practice of alignment. First, we identify four principles as the key objectives of AI alignment: Robustness, Interpretability, Controllability, and Ethicality (RICE). Guided by these four principles, 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 techniques for learning from feedback and learning under distribution shift. On backward alignment, we discuss assurance techniques and governance practices. We also release and continually update the website (www.alignmentsurvey.com) which features tutorials, collections of papers, blog posts, and other resources.

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Jiaming Ji, Tianyi Qiu, Boyuan Chen, Borong Zhang, Hantao Lou, Kaile Wang, Yawen Duan, Zhonghao He, Lukas Vierling, Donghai Hong, Jiayi Zhou, Zhaowei Zhang, Fanzhi Zeng, Juntao Dai, Xuehai Pan, Kwan Yee Ng, Aidan O'Gara, Hua Xu, Brian Tse, Jie Fu, Stephen McAleer, Yaodong Yang, Yizhou Wang, Song-Chun Zhu, Yike Guo, Wen Gao. 2025-04-04. AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19852

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