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This paper critically evaluates the attempts to align Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), with human values and intentions through Reinforcement Learning from Feedback (RLxF) methods, involving either human feedback (RLHF) or AI feedback (RLAIF). Specifically, we show the shortcomings of the broadly pursued alignment goals of honesty, harmlessness, and helpfulness. Through a multidisciplinary sociotechnical critique, we examine both the theoretical underpinnings and practical implementations of RLxF techniques, revealing significant limitations in their approach to capturing the complexities of human ethics and contributing to AI safety. We highlight tensions and contradictions inherent in the goals of RLxF. In addition, we discuss ethically-relevant issues that tend to be neglected in discussions about alignment and RLxF, among which the trade-offs between user-friendliness and deception, flexibility and interpretability, and system safety. We conclude by urging researchers and practitioners alike to critically assess the sociotechnical ramifications of RLxF, advocating for a more nuanced and reflective approach to its application in AI development., Comment: 12 pages, 1 table, to be submitted

As AI systems proliferate in society, the AI community is increasingly preoccupied with the concept of AI Safety, namely the prevention of failures due to accidents that arise from an unanticipated departure of a system's behavior from designer intent in AI deployment. We demonstrate through an analysis of real world cases of such incidents that although current vocabulary captures a range of the encountered issues of AI deployment, an expanded socio-technical framing will be required for a more complete understanding of how AI systems and implemented safety mechanisms fail and succeed in real life., Comment: Published at ICLR workshop on ML in the Real World, 2020

This paper reframes algorithmic systems as intimately connected to and part of social and ecological systems, and proposes a first-of-its-kind methodology for environmental justice-oriented algorithmic audits. How do we consider environmental and climate justice dimensions of the way algorithmic systems are designed, developed, and deployed? These impacts are inherently emergent and can only be understood and addressed at the level of relations between an algorithmic system and the social (including institutional) and ecological components of the broader ecosystem it operates in. As a result, we claim that in absence of an integral ontology for algorithmic systems, we cannot do justice to the emergent nature of broader environmental impacts of algorithmic systems and their underlying computational infrastructure. We propose to define algorithmic systems as ontologically indistinct from Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS), framing emergent implications as couplings between social, ecological, and technical components of the broader fabric in which algorithms are integrated and operate. We draw upon prior work on SETS analysis as well as emerging themes in the literature and practices of Environmental Justice (EJ) to conceptualize and assess algorithmic impact. We then offer three policy recommendations to help establish a SETS-based EJ approach to algorithmic audits: (1) broaden the inputs and open-up the outputs of an audit, (2) enable meaningful access to redress, and (3) guarantee a place-based and relational approach to the process of evaluating impact. We operationalize these as a qualitative framework of questions for a spectrum of stakeholders. Doing so, this article aims to inspire stronger and more frequent interactions across policymakers, researchers, practitioners, civil society, and grassroots communities., Comment: 18 pages, In Proceedings of FAccT '23: 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

This chapter formulates seven lessons for preventing harm in artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on insights from the field of system safety for software-based automation in safety-critical domains. New applications of AI across societal domains and public organizations and infrastructures come with new hazards, which lead to new forms of harm, both grave and pernicious. The text addresses the lack of consensus for diagnosing and eliminating new AI system hazards. For decades, the field of system safety has dealt with accidents and harm in safety-critical systems governed by varying degrees of software-based automation and decision-making. This field embraces the core assumption of systems and control that AI systems cannot be safeguarded by technical design choices on the model or algorithm alone, instead requiring an end-to-end hazard analysis and design frame that includes the context of use, impacted stakeholders and the formal and informal institutional environment in which the system operates. Safety and other values are then inherently socio-technical and emergent system properties that require design and control measures to instantiate these across the technical, social and institutional components of a system. This chapter honors system safety pioneer Nancy Leveson, by situating her core lessons for today's AI system safety challenges. For every lesson, concrete tools are offered for rethinking and reorganizing the safety management of AI systems, both in design and governance. This history tells us that effective AI safety management requires transdisciplinary approaches and a shared language that allows involvement of all levels of society., Comment: To appear in: Oxford Handbook on AI Governance (Oxford University Press, 2022 forthcoming)

As AI systems are integrated into high stakes social domains, researchers now examine how to design and operate them in a safe and ethical manner. However, the criteria for identifying and diagnosing safety risks in complex social contexts remain unclear and contested. In this paper, we examine the vagueness in debates about the safety and ethical behavior of AI systems. We show how this vagueness cannot be resolved through mathematical formalism alone, instead requiring deliberation about the politics of development as well as the context of deployment. Drawing from a new sociotechnical lexicon, we redefine vagueness in terms of distinct design challenges at key stages in AI system development. The resulting framework of Hard Choices in Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) empowers developers by 1) identifying points of overlap between design decisions and major sociotechnical challenges; 2) motivating the creation of stakeholder feedback channels so that safety issues can be exhaustively addressed. As such, HCAI contributes to a timely debate about the status of AI development in democratic societies, arguing that deliberation should be the goal of AI Safety, not just the procedure by which it is ensured., Comment: Pre-print. Shorter versions published at Neurips 2019 Workshop on AI for Social Good and Conference on AI, Ethics and Society 2020

As AI systems become prevalent in high stakes domains such as surveillance and healthcare, researchers now examine how to design and implement them in a safe manner. However, the potential harms caused by systems to stakeholders in complex social contexts and how to address these remains unclear. In this paper, we explain the inherent normative uncertainty in debates about the safety of AI systems. We then address this as a problem of vagueness by examining its place in the design, training, and deployment stages of AI system development. We adopt Ruth Chang's theory of intuitive comparability to illustrate the dilemmas that manifest at each stage. We then discuss how stakeholders can navigate these dilemmas by incorporating distinct forms of dissent into the development pipeline, drawing on Elizabeth Anderson's work on the epistemic powers of democratic institutions. We outline a framework of sociotechnical commitments to formal, substantive and discursive challenges that address normative uncertainty across stakeholders, and propose the cultivation of related virtues by those responsible for development., Comment: To be presented at the AI for Social Good workshop at NeurIPS 2019

Electronic power inverters are capable of quickly delivering reactive power to maintain customer voltages within operating tolerances and to reduce system losses in distribution grids. This paper proposes a systematic and data-driven approach to determine reactive power inverter output as a function of local measurements in a manner that obtains near optimal results. First, we use a network model and historic load and generation data and do optimal power flow to compute globally optimal reactive power injections for all controllable inverters in the network. Subsequently, we use regression to find a function for each inverter that maps its local historical data to an approximation of its optimal reactive power injection. The resulting functions then serve as decentralized controllers in the participating inverters to predict the optimal injection based on a new local measurements. The method achieves near-optimal results when performing voltage- and capacity-constrained loss minimization and voltage flattening, and allows for an efficient volt-VAR optimization (VVO) scheme in which legacy control equipment collaborates with existing inverters to facilitate safe operation of distribution networks with higher levels of distributed generation., Comment: Cite as: Oscar Sondermeijer, Roel Dobbe, Daniel Arnold, Claire Tomlin and Tam\'as Keviczky, "Regression-based Inverter Control for Decentralized Optimal Power Flow and Voltage Regulation", IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, Boston, July 2016

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly deployed in real world contexts, supplying actionable insights and forming the basis of automated decision-making systems. While issues resulting from biases pre-existing in training data have been at the center of the fairness debate, these systems are also affected by technical and emergent biases, which often arise as context-specific artifacts of implementation. This position paper interprets technical bias as an epistemological problem and emergent bias as a dynamical feedback phenomenon. In order to stimulate debate on how to change machine learning practice to effectively address these issues, we explore this broader view on bias, stress the need to reflect on epistemology, and point to value-sensitive design methodologies to revisit the design and implementation process of automated decision-making systems., Comment: Presented at the 2018 Workshop on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning during ICML 2018, Stockholm, Sweden

Implementing state estimation in low and medium voltage power distribution is still challenging given the scale of many networks and the reliance of traditional methods on a large number of measurements. This paper proposes a method to improve voltage predictions in real-time by leveraging a limited set of real-time measurements. The method relies on Bayesian estimation formulated as a linear least squares estimation problem, which resembles the classical weighted least-squares (WLS) approach for scenarios where full network observability is not available. We build on recently developed linear approximations for unbalanced three-phase power flow to construct voltage predictions as a linear mapping of load predictions constructed with Gaussian processes. The estimation step to update the voltage forecasts in real-time is a linear computation allowing fast high-resolution state estimate updates. The uncertainty in forecasts can be determined a priori and smoothed a posteriori, making the method useful for both planning, operation and post-hoc analysis. The method outperforms conventional WLS and is applied to different test feeders and validated on a real test feeder with the utility Alliander in The Netherlands., Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems

Real-time data-driven optimization and control problems over networks may require sensitive information of participating users to calculate solutions and decision variables, such as in traffic or energy systems. Adversaries with access to coordination signals may potentially decode information on individual users and put user privacy at risk. We develop local differential privacy, which is a strong notion that guarantees user privacy regardless of any auxiliary information an adversary may have, for a larger family of convex distributed optimization problems. The mechanism allows agent to customize their own privacy level based on local needs and parameter sensitivities. We propose a general sampling based approach for determining sensitivity and derive analytical bounds for specific quadratic problems. We analyze inherent trade-offs between privacy and suboptimality and propose allocation schemes to divide the maximum allowable noise, a privacy budget, among all participating agents. Our algorithm is implemented to enable privacy in distributed optimal power flow for electric grids., Comment: A shorter version of this paper will appear in the proceedings of ISGT-Europe 2020 in The Hague

The implementation of optimal power flow (OPF) methods to perform voltage and power flow regulation in electric networks is generally believed to require extensive communication. We consider distribution systems with multiple controllable Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and present a data-driven approach to learn control policies for each DER to reconstruct and mimic the solution to a centralized OPF problem from solely locally available information. Collectively, all local controllers closely match the centralized OPF solution, providing near optimal performance and satisfaction of system constraints. A rate distortion framework enables the analysis of how well the resulting fully decentralized control policies are able to reconstruct the OPF solution. The methodology provides a natural extension to decide what nodes a DER should communicate with to improve the reconstruction of its individual policy. The method is applied on both single- and three-phase test feeder networks using data from real loads and distributed generators, focusing on DERs that do not exhibit inter-temporal dependencies. It provides a framework for Distribution System Operators to efficiently plan and operate the contributions of DERs to achieve Distributed Energy Services in distribution networks., Comment: Accepted for publication. To appear in the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid

The proliferation of phasor measurement units (PMUs) into electric power distribution grids presents new opportunities for utility operators to manage distribution systems more effectively. One potential application of PMU measurements is to facilitate distribution grid re-configuration. Given the increasing amount of Distributed Energy Resource (DER) penetration into distribution grids, in this work we formulate an Optimal Power Flow (OPF) approach that manages DER power injections to minimize the voltage phasor difference between two nodes on a distribution network to enable efficient network reconfiguration. In order to accomplish this, we develop a linear model that relates voltage phase angles to real and reactive power flows in unbalanced distribution systems. Used in conjunction with existing linearizations relating voltage magnitude differences to power flows, we formulate an OPF capable of minimizing voltage phasor differences across different points in the network. In simulations, we explore the use of the developed approach to minimize the phasor difference across switches to be opened or closed, thereby providing an opportunity to automate and increase the speed of reconfigurations in unbalanced distribution grids.

Discrete-time linear time-varying (LTV) systems form a powerful class of models to approximate complex dynamical systems with nonlinear dynamics for the purpose of analysis, design and control. Motivated by inference of spatio-temporal dynamics in breast cancer research, we propose a method to efficiently solve an identification problem for a specific class of discrete-time LTV systems, in which the states are fully observed and there is no access to system inputs. In addition, it is assumed that we do not know on which states the inputs act, which can change between time steps, and that the total number of inputs is sparse over all states and over time. The problem is formulated as a compressive sensing problem, which incorporates the effect of measurement noise and which has a solution with a partially sparse support. We derive sufficient conditions for the unique recovery of the system model and input values, which lead to practical conditions on the number of experiments and rank conditions on system outputs. Synthetic experiments analyze the method's sensitivity to noise for randomly generated models., Comment: Under review with Automatica

Large-scale integration of distributed energy resources into residential distribution feeders necessitates careful control of their operation through power flow analysis. While the knowledge of the distribution system model is crucial for this type of analysis, it is often unavailable or outdated. The recent introduction of synchrophasor technology in low-voltage distribution grids has created an unprecedented opportunity to learn this model from high-precision, time-synchronized measurements of voltage and current phasors at various locations. This paper focuses on joint estimation of model parameters (admittance values) and operational structure of a poly-phase distribution network from the available telemetry data via the lasso, a method for regression shrinkage and selection. We propose tractable convex programs capable of tackling the low rank structure of the distribution system and develop an online algorithm for early detection and localization of critical events that induce a change in the admittance matrix. The efficacy of these techniques is corroborated through power flow studies on four three-phase radial distribution systems serving real household demands.

Learning cooperative policies for multi-agent systems is often challenged by partial observability and a lack of coordination. In some settings, the structure of a problem allows a distributed solution with limited communication. Here, we consider a scenario where no communication is available, and instead we learn local policies for all agents that collectively mimic the solution to a centralized multi-agent static optimization problem. Our main contribution is an information theoretic framework based on rate distortion theory which facilitates analysis of how well the resulting fully decentralized policies are able to reconstruct the optimal solution. Moreover, this framework provides a natural extension that addresses which nodes an agent should communicate with to improve the performance of its individual policy.

The recent introduction of synchrophasor technology into power distribution systems has given impetus to various monitoring, diagnostic, and control applications, such as system identification and event detection, which are crucial for restoring service, preventing outages, and managing equipment health. Drawing on the existing framework for inferring topology and admittances of a power network from voltage and current phasor measurements, this paper proposes an online algorithm for event detection and localization in unbalanced three-phase distribution systems. Using a convex relaxation and a matrix partitioning technique, the proposed algorithm is capable of identifying topology changes and attributing them to specific categories of events. The performance of this algorithm is evaluated on a standard test distribution feeder with synthesized loads, and it is shown that a tripped line can be detected and localized in an accurate and timely fashion, highlighting its potential for real-world applications., Comment: 5 pages

Optimal Power Flow (OPF) is an important tool used to coordinate assets in electric power systems to ensure customer voltages are within pre-defined tolerances and to improve distribution system operations. While convex relaxations of Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problems have been proposed for both balanced and unbalanced networks, these approaches do not provide universal convexity guarantees and scale inefficiently as network size and the number of constraints increase. To address these issues, we have recently explored a novel linearized OPF formulation for unbalanced distribution systems. Our approach is made possible in part by approximating the ratio of voltages across phases throughout the network. In this work, we generalize the previous formulation to allow arbitrary complex numbers to approximate voltage ratios at different locations in the feeder. Furthermore, we continue the analysis of the linearized OPF via comparison to results obtained through convex relaxations and Semi-Definite Programming (SDP). Simulations of IEEE test feeders show that the proposed formulation produces control decisions that closely approximate those obtained via SDP relaxations. In a specific case, we show that the linearized OPF is capable of solving certain problems which cannot be formulated as SDPs., Comment: Since publication on arXiv, we have found an earlier published paper that presents the same linearization