Intensive Teaching · November 2026

The most important things

Before: Join the Iliad Discord and check you can see #intensive-november. That is where you post any material you need to share with participants. If you can't see it, tell Leonard (@leonardbereska on Discord).
During: At 17:40, make sure everyone fills out the feedback form.
After: Fill out the end-of-day log: rate the day and tell us anything that went wrong.
Fill out Who stood out: name anyone who made a positive impression.

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Your days

[E.1]Debate and Scalable Oversight Mon 9 Nov, leading 54 responses · energy 3.5/5

Overall -0.31 below expected

Content +0.07 as expected

Clarity -0.30 below expected

Motivation +0.17 as expected

Exercises -0.46 below expected n = 39

Readings -0.09 as expected

Other activities -0.41 below expected n = 29

Pace +0.06 about right

Difficulty +0.35 too hard

Novelty +1.11 mostly new

Read what they wrote82

Worked well13

The basic mechanism and hope with debate came across very clearly.
I thought the readings were really quite well scoped considering the amount of time we have to digest.
The teachers had good energy
Convening in groups to review content we read was very useful, as I had definitely failed to interpret some things that other people had managed to.
The readings were very interesting
The final part was about the practical examples and research outputs demonstrating the advantages of the debates. This was very helpful!
I mostly enjoyed the more mathy stuff (debate, cx-debate, factor graphs), and the second set of readings.
I found the reading about debate vs consulting interesting.
Some sanity checks using tablue during the exercise sessions
Nothing really. The 25 minutes to read a technical paper weren't worthwhile. All the fun math was ignored. Turing machines were defined but then all the complexity classes were given the cold shoulder. This made little sense. I know these things so wasn't bothered but it was clear that not much thought had gone into making this day a worthwhile day.
The reading and presenting sessions
Having two presenters worked well: it gave dynamism to the presentation.
The first discussion was insightful and the activity of finding incorrect proof was fun.

Would improve54

Write out the math on the slides more explicitly (as a mathematician, I'm not afraid of formulas, and think they would automatically clarify a lot of things).
I think the basic theoretical framework could have been presented a bit more clearly. There was quite a large gap between the prerequisites posted on Discord the day before and the introduction to the formalism in the first lecture: the prerequisites introduced basic notions at a very high level, whereas the first lecture began immediately with a highly technical and detailed formalism. Perhaps reading about the Debate setup in advance, or going through a mini-tutorial, would have eased the initial encounter with this new material considerably.
Temperature was low at first but are now okay
NO
I don't have anything in particular to say
The lecture material today was too detached from how debate is actually implemented in practice. In contrast, the reading material was actually very relevant, so if lectures could resemble the reading material it would be more insightful. Ultimately, I was hoping to understand how to apply techniques such as debate in practice, but it was too theoretical from my perspective.
I think the topic is very interesting and relevant, but for me, the explanation was confusing, not very well organized, and too complicated. I think that fewer concepts, but with more time to thoroughly study them, would be better. For me, it would have been more interesting to understand debate than trying to recap all the techniques used in debate (in particular a concrete fellowship project) because it was very hard to follow all of them. For instance, I think it is unrealistic to think that a person who has not studied this topic before can read a research paper on the topic in 20 min and comment on it. This makes the student rely on an LLM, and then the learning is to try to read a summary an agent has produced? I am not an expert, but I do not think it is a very efficient teaching technique.
I hope those slides would be available on discord.
Clearly communicating times (especially restart after lunch) and following through there could be improved.
It may have been interesting to actually implement the "debate" protocol in a game between the Intensive attendees; it felt like a really natural thing to do/try.
The talk became progressively more heuristic (totally understandable) but I felt as if the Prover-Estimator Debate section was a bottleneck for understanding all the downstream alignment applications. I would've spent more time spelling that out, perhaps with examples, as bayesian networks weren't in the prerequisite material.
The reading was way too long for the allocated time. We also had another sessions where the questions got out of hand and obstructed the exposition.
morning I felt needed some clarifications a little better of some of the points, but that being said I am not native to formal comsci theory. Felt like the afternoon was much more followable and interesting personally for me. Overall good though, thanks to both of you.
The beginning of the first lecture just started immediately with the wrong proofs. It would have been nice to have a brief overview of what/why we were going to do today.
I would have liked more details and time spent on the AI safety case that was discussed in the end, it seemed very interesting and close to practice. Also maybe running an experiment in a debate setup would have been instructive. The reading was very interesting!
I think the readings could have been better. The first reading (on whether llms cheat on lean) was a little confusing, and it was not clear how we should interpret the conclusion
I enjoyed the content however I feel the lectures were harder to follow today than in prior days. I mainly believe I felt this way due to my lack of familiarity with the concepts. Perhaps a bit more motivation/toy examples could have been used to get the points across.
A bit dry and abstract. A few more concrete examples would've been nice.
I think a misunderstand between the audience and the presenters is like we're studying these idealized mathematical models then the empirical stuff is different and it's hard for mathematicians to make sense of it. I think adapting the class around this difficulty could help reduce the friction. (For example, in the reinforcement learning lecture learning about Bellman's equations then seeing how it's used in practice was really cool).
Nothing to improve
-- The provided notes were containing many flaws on the level of notations and language. This was slowing down the reading. -- The definition of the main concepts, especially, of the cross-examination debate, could be done slower, with more accentuated and carefully designed examples before and after. A one-to-one map of the abstract definitions with the example would be very helpful. -- Some of the proofs, I think, could be optimized. (In particular, of DEBATE=PSpace) Overall, it was a challenging session for most of the participants. My opinion on this might be biased, as I was familiar with most of the theoretical background and my motivation for this topic, but nevertheless, I can related to the shared opinions about it being challenging. I very much enjoyed the final part, were practical applications of debates and their advantages were discussed.
I think it would have been helpful to have access to all the slides used. The speakers did point to Lens Academy but either they were hard to find or weren't there. As someone sat at the back, I couldn't really see the screen so this would have been really great.
Regarding the presentations, I'd say the lecturers had very good intentions, but they were not properly prepared, which led to them sometimes getting lost in the explanation, having to repeat stuff... I feel it is what would happen to me if I were to speak about something I know about but did not practise too much before that. It would have help to have a layout of what we were going to cover today and the motivation, and maybe a full-day recap at the end. At any given point I kinda knew locally what we were doing but I was more lost as to the global direction. I feel that the connection to AI safety at the end could have been fleshed out more. As a mathematician, though, I am happy that the complexity theoretic proofs were included, due to the comfort of the familiar. As for the reading, maybe too much time was devoted to it, for the benefits we gained from it. Also some of the references seemed a bit old (which I understand in this field is hard to keep up) which made us wonder how much the results were relevant to the state of the art. I enjoyed the second set of readings more than the first (I feel the concepts of prover, verifier, world model did not require the reading to understand). It feels like the times for reading, as well as for the breaks, were taken a bit loosely, and then we ran out of time at the end. Also, at the beginning the lecturers had trouble navigating the large amount of questions they were asked, which kinda broke the flow of the lecture, although I could tell how they got better at managing them as the day progressed, sometimes you have to cut them and move on.
Send slides on discord before lecture. The slides on prover estimator and graphs were a bit harder to follow.
Perhaps add more details about the specific of RLHF and RLHAIF. The some parts of the descriptions felt a bit vague.
too fast on the demos, i guess a lot of attendants aren't too familiar about complexity and the prerequisites were given a bit too late to at least prepare a bit more precisely
I did not particularly like the content. I wish we were doing slightly more practical things, and I am not fully convinced by the importance of formal verification given other much bigger issues in safety nowadays
At some point, I feel like the explanations could have been clearer and more compelling.
there were rather a lot of readings this day
More structured discussion groups, some moderation for them.
Faster pace
in general good
Very cool topic and very good presentations.
The first part about incorrect proofs was too easy, and the rest was too hard, was my impression. I think it needed reminding of definitions and notations and taking a slower pace, maybe more time to read and think on our own would also have helped. Somehow, the presentation was often too vague or too quick for me. I didn't have the slides in advance, and normally I've looked ahead at the slides, which helps me follow during the day. Re the lensacademy, I wasn't sure if I could open it already on Sunday, since it said it was a one-day access. But not all the content was found there either.
The session today was quite heavy, and I'm not entirely sure if this was because I am not used to the topic, or because of how it was explained. I felt like I would lose track of what is happening every other sentence. It is hard to explain what didn't feel right but I think I generally didn't see the bridge between the formal explanations and the illustrative scenarios. I think the focus should have been on trying to make a better intuition and connect it smoothly with the formalism behind it. I can also say that most of the other participants I talked to had similar impressions of the session today. One note, however, is that the quiz clarified a lot of things, so that was definitely a good addition!
It was interesting, but as Leonardo said we got "in the weeds" a bit too much, I feel it could've been a bit more high level and broader. Especially when we got onto debate on graphs. I thought the last slideshow was good. I enjoy evals and so liked the readings
The mathematics could be presented more clearly. The proofs related to complexity classes were hard to follow for me, because it was not clear what was being proved in the first place.
Spend time on some of the foundational exercises which helps understanding the different kinds of debates and the mathematical/ statistical hypothesis behind them.
Slides should perhaps be a little less condensed with information and should be made larger. It can be a little hard to follow especially being a large class and having to sit slightly further away.
I think today was rather poor despite the fact that the content is very fascinating. Both instructors today did not seem very well prepared. In fact none of the ideas were explained well, and this was such a missed opportunity. I have heard about safety via debate from other mathematicians and from the sound of it, this is a very beautiful topic. I was not too thrilled with how it did not seem worth my time. I left around 4:45 simply because I couldn't be convinced to sit through the last hour.
Nothing.
Maybe more reading on our own and discussions part rather than listening. I think with this topic would have been easier to try to read the lecture notes with pen and paper at my own pace. Because the explanations were nice but not for a first time learning/reading about the topic.
The material today went very fast. I think the Lens academy plugin made things very confusing. I think a lot of material has been stuffed into one day. It would have probably been better to skip the paper reading session in the afternoon and just do more exercises. It would have also been nice to see some example of toy decision making problems in each of the frameworks.
The topic was not properly introduced. The lecturers should give a brief 5-min recap of Languages, Decidability, and complexity theory (at least to fix notation / naming conventions).
Too many interruptions for questions, harder to keep a coherent narrative in mind
It was a very good lecture. Nonetheless, I would have perhaps started with the motivation (the very last topic today) instead of the more formal presentation. I had the impression that some assumptions (and the comparison with more realistic systems) were not well articulated.
Exposition quality was somewhat poor, and the speaker did not seem to understand the background of the audience. Speaker seemed under-prepared. It became clear during the break that many people (perhaps most) in the audience (a) do not the definition of Turing machine and (b) are not familiar with common complexity classes. It would have made sense to cover this, and I think there would have been time to do so had the rest of the material been structured more carefully. On the other hand, I am familiar with this material and found the lecture incomprehensible anyhow, while the papers on which it was based (e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.14125 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.00899 ) clearly and precisely explain the same material in a small amount of space. The talk would have benefited from the speaker just stating the precise definitions of things, instead of trying to hide them constantly. Slides rarely contained enough information to understand anything about what was on the slide, including basics like "what do the symbols stand for".
I would teach background knowledge first. The Delta between the suggested two videos and the point where the lecture started from was unexpectedly large. It felt that only people with a solid background in complexity theory and/or formal logic could follow the session. I was not one of them and had to 'fake' my way through the topics. Therefore, I would either spend an hour or two building this up, explaining all basic concepts from scratch or require students to spend one day at home catching up (but with explicit instructions and material) prior to the teaching day. In the grand scheme of things, I can see the point and usefulness of the whole "debate" debate. I believe the jist of it can be delivered with much less - or even none - of the formal (and not so transparent) maths presented today and be still impactful. The reading sessions were fine.
In general, a good session. For the first reading exercise, the time was too short. For the second reading exercise, the assigned time was better. I had the feeling that the room was colder today than last week.
More accessible readings
This is a very fun topic, it's going a bit fast but I understand we can't slow down due to the content. I spent most of my time on the basic definitions
There seems to be many questions about how unrealistic the most simplified setting is. Because every topic is presenting a point of view towards alignment, it may be useful to present what is the speaker position towards: how realistic/unrealistic the approach is? Having an early disclaimer may help with that.
.
Maybe having more examples of problems to understand better the abstract part of the theory

Changed my mind11

Maybe debate is really a scalable oversight
Debate might be more useful than I expected. Did not know about the safety case skech based on debate. Need to look in more detail.
Not yet!
Debate itself is an interesting technique to potentially ensure aligned behaviour, however I personally would still require some extra convincing of its effectiveness.
Before the session I was feeling motivated to work on debates. Now I feel even more motivated. Despite the critical remarks, the session was very helpful and the speakers have done a great job.
The research area of debate is much more formalized/theoretically developed than I thought.
Imperical research is important but the motivation should be to unveil the theoretical background for it.
Safety via debate is a very nice topic. I need no convincing on the aesthetic front. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it felt like my time wasn't valued.
That oversight can be scalable
Glad to see some theoretical properties of debate (computational complexity) which formalizes that debate could be more benefitial than a single AI, even on the iterations of this idea like cross examination.
How lean works, I had heard a lot about it but did not know how it works.

Other thoughts4

I was not feeling well today, so I could not really focus on the reading and I skipped the exercises for some other work. Might have to stay at home tomorrow.
N/a
Thank you!
I had to go early today :( im sorry, I read the last paper but I lost the discussion

The day

10:00 Lecture starts

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Afternoon session

17:40 Feedback form

18:00 Day ends

When	Where
Mon 2 – Fri 6 Nov	An office near LISA, address to follow
From Mon 9 Nov	LISA, 25 Holywell Row, London EC2A 4XE

Resources

Elsewhere