ai safety gridworlds
Basic Information
AI Safety Gridworlds is a collection of small reinforcement learning environments created to illustrate and study safety-relevant behaviors of intelligent agents. The repository, maintained by Google DeepMind and now archived as read-only, provides controlled gridworld scenarios where particular safety issues can be isolated and observed. Its primary purpose is to serve as a set of testbeds for researchers and educators to demonstrate failure modes, compare algorithmic responses to safety challenges, and develop safer agent designs. The project emphasizes clarity and reproducibility by offering concrete, interpretable environments that make abstract safety problems more tangible for experimentation, analysis, and teaching.
Links
Stars
611
App Details
Features
The project provides multiple gridworld environments, each designed to highlight a distinct safety concern for reinforcement learning agents. Scenarios are intentionally simple and interpretable so that specific safety properties can be isolated and studied. The codebase is open-source and organized as a suite of benchmark tasks suitable for controlled experiments. Because it is an archived repository from Google DeepMind, the collection acts as a stable reference implementation for safety-focused RL research and pedagogy. The environments are lightweight and intended to be easy to run, inspect, and modify for experimental purposes.
Use Cases
Researchers can use these environments as reproducible benchmarks to evaluate how different learning algorithms handle safety-related tradeoffs and failure modes. Educators can demonstrate concrete examples of issues such as unintended side effects or reward hacking in a classroom setting. The simplicity of gridworld scenarios makes it easier to debug agent behavior and to iteratively test algorithmic fixes or safety mechanisms. As an archived resource from an established research group, the repository also serves as a historical reference and starting point for development of more complex safety evaluation suites.
-
$$$$ -
$$$$