Incorrigibility in the CIRL Framework

A value learning system has incentives to follow shutdown instructions, assuming the shutdown instruction provides information (in the technical sense) about which actions lead to valuable outcomes. However, this assumption is not robust to model mis-specification (e.g., in the case of programmer errors). We demonstrate this by presenting some Supervised POMDP scenarios in which errors in the parameterized reward function remove the incentive to follow shutdown commands. These difficulties parallel those discussed by Soares et al. 2015 in their paper on corrigibility. We argue that it is important to consider systems that follow shutdown commands under some weaker set of assumptions (e.g., that one small verified module is correctly implemented; as opposed to an entire prior probability distribution and/or parameterized reward function). We discuss some difficulties with simple ways to attempt to attain these sorts of guarantees in a value learning framework.