Stochastic doubly-efficient debate formalization

Summary: We formalize the correctness of the main stochastic oracle doubly-efficient debate protocol from Brown-Cohen, Irving, Piliouras (2023), Scalable AI safety via doubly-efficient debate in Lean 4.

Irving, Christiano, Amodei (2018), AI safety via debate is one approach to AI alignment of strong agents, using two agents ("provers") competing in a zero-sum game to convince a human judge ("verifier") of the truth or falsity of a claim. Theoretically, if we model the judge as a polynomial time Turing machine, optimal play in the debate game can convince the judge of any statement in PSPACE. However, this theoretical model is limited in several ways: the agents are assumed to have unbounded computational power, which is not a realistic assumption for ML agents, and the results consider only deterministic arguments.

Brown-Cohen, Irving, Piliouras (2023), Scalable AI safety via doubly-efficient debate improves the complexity theoretic model of debate to be "doubly-efficient": both the provers and the verifier have limited computational power. It also treats stochastic arguments: the provers try to convince the judge of the result of a randomized computation involving calls to a random oracle. Concretely, the main formalized result is

Definition 6.1 (Lipschitz oracle machines). An oracle Turing machine is -Lipschitz if, for any other oracle s.t. , we have .

Theorem 6.2 (doubly-efficient stochastic oracle debate). Let be a language decidable by a -Lipschitz probabilistic oracle Turing machine in time , measuring oracle queries only as costing time. Then there is an prover time, verifier time debate protocol with cross-examination deciding with completeness and soundness .

The formalized result differs from the paper result slightly in that we focus only on correctness: we do not yet formalize space complexity, count only oracle queries for time complexity, and represent those queries only via the code for the protocol. We also define Lipschitz oracle machines differently: the paper fixes and lets both and vary, while we fix both and and let only vary (this slightly strengthens the resulting theorem).

  1. Prob/Defs.lean: Finitely supported probability distributions, representing stochastic computations.
  2. Comp/Defs.lean: Stochastic computations relative to a set of oracles.
  3. Comp/Oracle.lean: Our computation model, including the definition of Lipschitz oracles.
  4. Debate/Protocol.lean: The debate protocol, honest players, and the definition of correctness.
  5. Debate/Correct.lean: The final correctness theorems.
  6. Debate/Details.lean: Proof details.
  7. Debate/Cost.lean: Query complexity of each player.

Acknowledgements

We thank Eric Wieser for his careful review and many helpful suggestions. The code is much better as a result!

Installation

  1. Install Lean 4 and Lake via elan: https://github.com/leanprover/elan
  2. Run lake build within the directory.

License and disclaimer

Copyright 2023 DeepMind Technologies Limited

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