arXiv AI

An Engineering Reading of the Bounded Halting Problem and Observable Properties of a Universal Machine

arXiv:2611. 06303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The halting problem asks whether a program eventually halts, with unrestricted resources.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Algorithmic Unverifiability of Safety for Fixed and Recursively Self-Improving Systems

The paper proves that algorithmic safety verification for Turing‑complete, self‑modifying systems—whether fixed or recursively self‑improving—is fundamentally limited. Statistically, no verifier can be sound, complete, and tractable across unbounded domains, all finite configurations, or succinctly described finite environments, due to Rice’s, Gödel’s, Trakhtenbrot’s, coNP, and PSPACE barriers. Dynamically, even a single self‑modification step can render safety properties undecidable, and no total supervisory algorithm can guarantee correctness for all such transformations, though a monitor that raises alarms on violations remains feasible. whyItMatters":"The results show that formal safety guarantees for recursive self‑improvement are unattainable, highlighting intrinsic verification barriers for advanced AI systems."

By Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita
arXiv AI
Aug 21

LLM Capability Limits: Static Emergence and Dynamic Boundary Control

arXiv:2608. 01548v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time emergence in LLM systems has a deployment boundary: additional computation can realize decisions already supported by the deployed information--execution structure, while evidence, tools, memory, and executable semantics can change the class inherited by later computation.

By Yi Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

OPEN-1B: A Fully Auditable Training Run

The paper introduces Open-1B, a language model trained under a new fully auditable regime that ensures every training operation is reproducible on heterogeneous commodity hardware with bitwise certainty. By enforcing a fixed order on sources of nondeterminism—GPU reductions, data batch ordering, and inter/intra-node communication—the authors enable auditors to replay and verify individual training steps on a single machine. The release includes the full pretraining dataset, all intermediate checkpoints, the training codebase, and an audit harness for step-by-step verification.

By John Donaghy, Brian Wilcox, O\u{g}uzhan Ersoy, Shikhar Rastogi, Adam St Arnaud, Alexey Titov, Jordan Greenberg, Ben Fielding, Harry Grieve
arXiv AI
Oct 23

Proposals and challenges for zero-knowledge verification of frontier AI training

The paper proposes a zero‑knowledge verification framework for frontier AI training, combining pre‑committed specifications, network observations, and live Merkle commitments to create a succinct proof layer via a zero‑knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). It outlines how proofs can verify BF16/FP32 semantics step‑by‑step, enforce policy‑relevant claims, and provide a governance‑auditable training record, while also discussing sampling guarantees, weight smuggling risks, and the relative robustness of global training budgets versus per‑run FLOP caps. The authors compare zkVMs, custom circuits, and interactive audits, and identify remaining research and engineering challenges for external contributors.

By Pierre Peign\'e, Ky Nguyen, Paul Wang