Alignment & Preference Learning · 2018
Scalable Oversight: Debate / Weak-to-Strong Generalization
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.
Editorial record
Plain-language summary
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.
Knowledge graph
Relationships
Descendants
ChallengesEvidence: Strongly supported
Reward Model Overoptimization / Sycophancy
Failure modes motivate scalable oversight
P-208
Source record
Provenance
- Record ID
- P-208
- Record created
- 2026-07-13
- Last reviewed
- 2026-07-14
- Record version
- 2
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09390
- arXiv:2312.09390
Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.