Spillway design vs. inoculation prompting
Inoculation prompting
mechanism: prompting
- requires the AI to attend to the inoculation prompt during training
- may degrade over the course of training — since the prompt always recommends reward hacking, RL may favor ignoring it
- some specific circuits that produced reward hacking might not have attended to that part of the prompt
Spillway design
mechanism: pre-RL priors
- pre-RL priors might shape generalization in a way that survives throughout RL
- might directly rewrite existing associations with reward hacking (like power-seeking)