Alignment & Preference Learning · 2018

Scalable Oversight: Debate / Weak-to-Strong Generalization

Geoffrey Irving, Paul Christiano, Dario Amodei, Collin Burns, Jan Leike, Ilya Sutskever

This line of work asked how humans or weaker models can supervise systems more capable than themselves, and showed that fine-tuning a strong model on a weak model's labels can recover much of the strong model's latent capability.

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The weak-to-strong experiments used a small model's imperfect labels to fine-tune a much larger pretrained model and found the larger model generalized beyond its teacher's errors, an analogy for humans supervising superhuman systems. Related debate proposals have two models argue opposing positions so a limited judge can adjudicate claims it could not verify directly. Together these define the scalable-oversight problem and give early empirical evidence that supervision signal can transfer even when the supervisor is less capable than the system being trained.

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Record ID
P-208
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.