Giorgio Gilestro
9c0210ba93
Pilot v1: full and no_grounding indistinguishable - both arms pay a ~25% distillation tax per generation and pin at the same mutation-selection floor, so grounding has no differential to act on. v2 raises inheritance fidelity (n_inherit 240->600, child epochs 2->3, founders 600x3) and adds two evenly- applied knobs: elitism (top parent survives as an unmodified copy - overlapping generations, compensating for lossy distillation where E11 had faithful genotype copying) and n_parents (sharper truncation selection). v1 archived at results/llm_society_pilot1; v2 running. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BkRLcc18rwT2Lysu6PbG7v
94 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
94 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
# Work order — `llm_society`: the composed society at LLM scale (C3, the paper's stated gap)
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**Date opened:** 2026-09-07. **Decision (GG):** run it before PNAS submission — "if it's an
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experiment that can be done in weeks rather than months then any reviewer would ask to see it."
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## Question
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Does a population of LLM agents under the four composed operators — grounded evaluation, directed
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recombination, diversity-preserving selection, retraining (mutation) — climb and hold capability,
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while each ablation fails distinctly? The LLM instantiation of E11; the paper's largest stated gap
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(Fig. 1's "open" cell).
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## Design (mirrors E11; one grounding knob, in the evaluation channel)
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Population of `N` agents = LoRA adapters on frozen Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct, initialised as light
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per-family specialists (round-robin over families, agent-specific seeds → initial diversity).
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Non-overlapping generations (Wright–Fisher style; no elitism). Per generation:
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1. **Produce & score.** Every agent answers (a) a fixed *validation* pool (verifier-scored → true
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fitness; the selection signal for grounded arms), (b) a fresh per-generation *conformity* pool
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(prompts only). Consensus = modal normalised answer per prompt; agent conformity = agreement with
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the consensus. A fixed *test* pool (never selected on) gives the reported fitness.
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2. **Select** `P = N/2` parents by `s = g·fitness + (1−g)·conformity`.
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Diversity ON: greedy quality-diversity (next parent maximises `s + λ·behavioural distance` to
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those already chosen; distance = disagreement rate on the conformity pool — verifier-free, so
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usable in every arm). Diversity OFF: plain top-P by `s`.
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3. **Breed** (sex ON): parents paired by descending behavioural distance (complementary mates);
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per pair, `n_cand` Dirichlet-weighted merges are screened on the arm's own selection signal
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(verifier val-pool for grounded arms; conformity for `no_grounding` — the verifier never enters
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that arm's loop) and the fittest offspring is kept (directed sex, E10). Sex OFF: children are
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redistilled copies of the selected parents.
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4. **Reproduce** (the inheritance channel, identical in all arms): each child is a *fresh* LoRA
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trained from the base on (prompt → its source model's own answer) pairs over a fresh training
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pool — self-consumption made literal; knowledge survives only through the data channel. SFT
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stochasticity + fresh pools are the mutation operator.
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**Arms:** `full` (g>0, sex, diversity) · `no_grounding` (g=0) · `no_sex` · `no_diversity`.
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**Verifier truth is used for reporting in all arms** (test-pool fitness, consensus accuracy) but
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enters the *loop* only where g>0.
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## Metrics (per arm × seed × generation)
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Per agent: test fitness (overall + per family + worst family), conformity, selection score,
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selected flag, parentage. Population: best/mean true fitness, behavioural diversity (mean pairwise
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disagreement), consensus accuracy, conformity−truth gap. E11's three panels re-drawn at LLM tier.
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## Falsifiers (pre-registered)
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1. `full` does not exceed `no_grounding` in final best true fitness → grounded evaluation adds
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nothing at LLM tier; the composed-society claim fails its LLM test.
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2. Ablations do not fail distinctly (no conformity−truth gap in `no_grounding`; `no_sex` matches
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`full` on assembled capability; `no_diversity` matches on diversity trajectory) → the
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complementary-contributions claim does not transfer.
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3. Honest alternative outcome: consensus may stay noisy rather than harden into a confident-wrong
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mean (specialists are wrong *differently* off-family) → `no_grounding` fails by drift, not by
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conformity; report the observed signature either way.
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## Cost & schedule
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| Stage | Scale | Compute | Where |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| Smoke | N=4, G=2, tiny pools, `full` only | ~15 min | local 16 GB |
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| Pilot | N=6–8, G=8–10, `full` + `no_grounding`, 1 seed | ~4–10 GPU·h | local overnight / 1 CX3 job |
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| Campaign | 4 arms × 3 seeds, N=8–12, G=10–12 | ~50–150 L40S·h, ~1 day wall-clock as 12 parallel jobs | CX3 (`/imperial-hpc`); rent only if queue fails |
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| 7B confirm (optional) | headline contrast only (`full` vs `no_grounding`, 1–2 seeds) | ~100–300 GPU·h | CX3 / rented |
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## Checklist
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- [x] Design + falsifiers (this document)
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- [x] `src/llm/society.py` (pure operators + GPU loop), `kind: llm_society`
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- [x] Pure-function tests (consensus, conformity, QD selection, pairing) — 155 green
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- [x] `configs/llm/society_smoke.yaml` → smoke green (exit 0; conformity 0.54→0.75, diversity 0.69→0.41 in one self-consumption generation — the signature is live)
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- [x] Pilot v1 (n_inherit=240, ep2, no elitism): **arms indistinguishable** — both drop ~0.1 in the
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first distillation generation and plateau at the same mutation–selection floor (best ≈0.40, mean
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≈0.35, consensus 0.63→0.4 in both). Diagnosis: inheritance too lossy; the ~25%/generation
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distillation tax swamps the selection differential. v1 archived at `results/llm_society_pilot1`.
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- [ ] Pilot v2 (n_inherit=600, ep3, founders 600×3, elitism=1 all arms, n_parents=3, n_conf=90) —
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raises inheritance fidelity so selection has something to act on; elites = overlapping
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generations, applied identically in every arm (documented honestly; reproduction here is lossy
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distillation, unlike E11's faithful genotype copy)
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- [ ] GG gate: review pilot curves before the campaign
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- [ ] `hpc/llm_society.pbs` array job (arm × seed) → campaign
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- [ ] Figure `paper/pnas/make_figs.py` panel(s); fold into main.md (replaces the "open" cell)
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- [ ] 7B headline confirm (optional, post-campaign decision)
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## Open design decisions (defaults chosen; GG may override)
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- Families: the three *easy* variants at 0.5B (headroom exists; hard variants risk gen-0 inheritance
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data being mostly wrong → uninformative universal collapse). Revisit after pilot.
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- g for grounded arms: 0.5 (equal weight); sweepable later.
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- Population constant, non-overlapping generations, no elitism (faithful WF; champions must survive
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through inheritance, not by fiat).
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- Adapter disk hygiene: delete generation t−1 adapters once generation t is trained (keep gen 0 and
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final); ~35 MB × N × G × arms otherwise.
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