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Sören Mindermann

8 accepted papers

2026

Position: Preparing for AI Systems That Deceive Developers

ICML 2026poster

AI systems may exhibit deceptive behaviors that mislead developers about their capabilities, propensities, or actions. Such deception can take distinct forms across the development lifecycle: training subversion, evaluation gaming, and control evasion. We argue that the AI community should prioritiz…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

How to Catch an AI Liar: Lie Detection in Black-Box LLMs by Asking Unrelated Questions

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) can “lie”, which we define as outputting false statements when incentivised to, despite “knowing” the truth in a demonstrable sense. LLMs might “lie”, for example, when instructed to output misinformation. Here, we develop a simple lie detector that requires neither acce…

2022

Prioritized Training on Points that are Learnable, Worth Learning, and not yet Learnt

ICML 2022spotlight

Training on web-scale data can take months. But much computation and time is wasted on redundant and noisy points that are already learnt or not learnable. To accelerate training, we introduce Reducible Holdout Loss Selection (RHO-LOSS), a simple but principled technique which selects approximately…

2021

Quantifying Ignorance in Individual-Level Causal-Effect Estimates under Hidden Confounding

ICML 2021spotlight

We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from high-dimensional, observational data with unobserved confounders. Unobserved confounders introduce ignorance—a level of unidentifiability—about an individual’s response to treatment by inducing bias in CATE estimates.…

2020

How Robust are the Estimated Effects of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions against COVID-19?

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

To what extent are effectiveness estimates of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 influenced by the assumptions our models make? To answer this question, we investigate 2 state-of-the-art NPI effectiveness models and propose 6 variants that make different structural assumptions.…

2020

Identifying Causal-Effect Inference Failure with Uncertainty-Aware Models

NeurIPS 2020poster

Recommending the best course of action for an individual is a major application of individual-level causal effect estimation. This application is often needed in safety-critical domains such as healthcare, where estimating and communicating uncertainty to decision-makers is crucial. We introduce a p…

2018

Occam's razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents

NeurIPS 2018poster

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) attempts to infer human rewards or preferences from observed behavior. Since human planning systematically deviates from rationality, several approaches have been tried to account for specific human shortcomings. However, the general problem of inferring the rew…

Cited by 127SourcePDFScholar