Seonglae ChoPragmatic Interpretability
The traditional "complete reverse engineering" approach has very slow progress. Instead of reverse engineering the entire structure, we shift toward pragmatic interpretability that directly solves real-world safety problems.
Without feedback loops, self-deception becomes easy → Proxy Tasks (measurable surrogate tasks) are essential. Even in SAEs research, metrics like "reconstruction error" turned out to be nearly meaningless. Instead, testing performance on proxies like OOD generalization, unlearning, and hidden goal extraction revealed the real limitations clearly.
