Call for Papers

We are inviting submissions of short papers (maximum 8 pages) outlining new research, with a deadline of January 1, 2025. We welcome papers on any of the following topics, or anything else where the authors convincingly argue that it advances the field of AI safety in Japan.

• Mechanistic Interpretability: the detailed study of particular neural networks. Interpretability researchers often take a circuits-style approach following the foundational work of Chris Olah, or use causal linear probes to understand directions in latent space. Work that investigates how and why structure emerges in neural networks during training can also fall under this category.

• Developmental Interpretability: understanding the process by which neural networks learn. By applying the tools of Watanabe's singular learning theory to modern neural network architectures, developmental interpretability researchers aim to detect phase transitions during training, thereby detecting new capabilities as they emerge.

• Agent Foundations: the name given to a number of parallel research efforts, each of which aims to designing AI that is provably safe. Problems in agent foundations include embedded agency and cognition, corrigibility and the shutdown problem, natural abstractions, and game theory. With sufficient rigour, agent foundations research hopes to build AGI that is safe by construction.

• Scalable Oversight: a prosaic alignment approach that aims to make advanced AI systems amenable to human oversight. Often this involves training less powerful AIs to oversee more powerful AIs in a hierarchical way with a human at the root, as in Paul Christiano's Iterated Amplification. Other scalable oversight approaches aim to make even the largest AIs directly overseeable.

• ALIFE: a broad theme grouping approaches that understand artificial life as it relates to natural life. Often, as in active inference or collective intelligence, this involves replicating natural systems in silico such that we can understand and improve on them. Other ALIFE approaches overlap with the agent foundations research agenda, as in the study of emergent agentic phenomena in cellular automata.

• Artificial Consciousness and Posthuman Ethics: thinking seriously about whether machines can be conscious or worthy of moral patienthood, including determining whether current systems are conscious or the intentional construction of conscious artificial systems. Works that address the ethical treatment of machines by humans and humans by machines also fall into this category.

• AI Governance: research into how frontier AI systems can be effectively deployed to benefit Japan and the rest of the world and what regulation is necessary or sufficient to ensure the safety of the public, from both regular and existential risks.