We have developed some relatively general methods for mechanistic estimation competitive with sampling by studying problems that are expressible as expectations of random products. This includes several different estimation problems, such as random … »

Earlier this year ARC posted a prize for two matrix completion problems. We received a number of submissions we considered useful, but not any complete solutions. We are closing the contest and awarding … »

The Alignment Research Center’s Theory team is starting a new hiring round for researchers with a theoretical background. Please apply here. Update January 2024: we have paused hiring and expect to reopen … »

Here are two self-contained algorithmic questions that have come up in our research. We're offering a bounty of $5k for a solution to either of them—either an algorithm, or a … »

This post is an elaboration on “tractability of discrimination” as introduced in section III of "Can we efficiently explain model behaviors? For an overview of the general plan this fits into, see "Mechanistic anomaly detection" and "Finding gliders in the game of life". … »

Finding explanations is a relatively unambitious interpretability goal. If it is intractable then that’s an important obstacle to interpretability in general. If we formally define “explanations,” then finding them is a well-posed search problem and there is a plausible argument for tractability. … »