# Research agenda for training aligned AIs using concave utility functions following the principles of homeostasis and diminishing returns

This conceptual overview post is intended to explain what I mean by the principles of "homeostasis", "diminishing returns", and "balancing" - how these ideas differ, complement, and interact with each other. Alongside, there is also an overview of my research agenda.

**What am I trying to promote, in simple words**
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I want to build and promote AI systems that are trained to understand and follow two fundamental principles from **biology and economics**:

*   **Moderation** \- Enables the agents to understand the concept of “enough” versus **“too much”**. The agents would understand that too much of a good thing would be harmful even for the very objective that was maximised for, and they would **actively** avoid such situations. This is based on the biological principle of **homeostasis** and addresses mainly bounded ultimate objectives.
*   **Balancing** \- Enables the agents to keep many important objectives in balance, in such a manner that having **average results in all objectives is preferred** to extremes in a few. This addresses mainly the economic principle of **diminishing returns** in unbounded instrumental objectives, but also applies to homeostasis.

These approaches should help AIs to cooperate better with other agents and humans, reducing the risks of unstoppable or conflict-prone behaviours.

**How is it done today and what are the limitations of the current system**
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Today, many AI systems optimise for a single goal (for example, maximising an unbounded reward) or a handful of unbounded **linearly aggregated** metrics. They can end up ignoring side effects and racing toward narrow objectives, leading to conflict or unsafe outcomes. This narrow “maximise forever” approach makes it hard to properly handle bounded objectives as well as trade-offs among multiple important concerns (like safety, trust, or resource constraints).

In multi-agent or multi-objective cases, typical approaches still rely on combining everything into one **linear** reward function (like a single weighted sum), which is still very prone to Goodhart’s law, specification gaming, and power-seeking behaviours where one (easiest) objective is maximised at the expense of everything else.

By missing natural and thus essential “stop” conditions or “good enough” ranges, systems risk runaway resource use or adversarial behaviour, especially in multi-agent contexts where various AIs each push their own single objective to extremes.

This results in the following problems:

*   **Runaway behaviours:** Standard unbounded approaches do not have a stopping mechanism (e.g., no concept of “enough”). When maximising goals which are actually **bounded**, it would become overwhelming or even harmful for humans when optimised past their target ranges. For example, this applies to human emotions and biological needs.
*   **Side effects:** With unbounded maximisation and linear reward aggregation, the AI may sacrifice other factors to push one metric higher. This can lead to unintended consequences or conflict with humans and other agents.
*   **Ignoring diminishing returns:** Standard single-objective or linear reward aggregation methods have no natural goal switching mechanism, so the system keeps pushing for more of the same even when it no longer makes sense or is inefficient.
*   **Conflict and poor cooperation:** When each AI tries to maximise its own objective with no cap, competition can escalate. Minor tasks can blow up into resource grabs or coordination breakdowns.
*   **Difficult to align with changing human preferences:** It can be cumbersome to adjust a single overarching reward to achieve corrigibility. However, real needs change over time. A static or purely unbounded and linearly additive reward system does not handle this gracefully and the agent may even **escape, resist, or revert** the corrections.

**What is new in the proposed approach**
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The proposed approach introduces utility functions following the **“homeostatic” and “diminishing returns”** framework for AI goals: instead of unboundedly maximising, many objectives have a target range - this applies to most emotionally and biologically related objectives. The rest of the objectives follow diminishing returns - this applies to most instrumental objectives. 

The principle of homeostasis is fundamental in **biology**. Concurrently, multi-objective balancing based on the principle of diminishing returns is fundamental in **economics.** These two principles can be applied both in RL training and LLM fine-tuning as utility / reward functions. 

Both utility functions are concave, though in different ways:

| ![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/eab07d0ead1934b8e2e225276d6955c64c1f3c8c9d2c751e.png) utility function of a bounded homeostatic objective | ![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/b1ca808f551ba1280f1f008a1ff6d0b5af253ed9e31d8533.png) utility function of an unbounded objective with diminishing returns |
| --- | --- |

By design, having “enough” in one dimension encourages switching attention to other important goals. This would yield more balanced and cooperative AI behaviour. It is modeled on biology, economics, and control theory, including homeostasis, which is used to sustain equilibrium (e.g., body temperature, hunger-satiety). When extended to AI, it would mitigate extreme optimisation behaviours, enable joint resource sharing, and align incentives so that multiple AIs can coexist without seeking unlimited power. Because the principle has proven robust in biological organisms and in control-theoretic mechanisms, I am confident this approach will likewise contribute towards more stable, cooperative behaviour in AI systems.

**In detail:**

*   **Homeostatic goal structures:** Instead of a single metric that grows forever, many goals have comfortable target range. E.g., this applies to objectives like "happiness", "novelty", etc., perhaps including even some meta-level goals such as “safety”, “fairness”, “efficiency”. Moving too far above or below desired range is **actively** penalised, because it would be **directly, indirectly, or heuristically** harmful. This is inspired by biology where organisms actively keep variables like temperature and hydration within a healthy zone. By using additional mechanisms such as heuristical penalty for excessive optimisation, it might be possible to partially mitigate even unknown or unmeasured harms. 
*   Active avoidance of “too much”  is a **significantly stricter principle than** the more widely known partially overlapping idea of **“mild optimisation”**.
*   **Built-in tradeoffs via diminishing returns:** Balancing multiple goals means that as you get closer to one goal’s “enough” zone, there is less benefit to pushing it further, **even if the goal is unbounded**. The system naturally shifts efforts to other goals that are more in need. This mechanism can be applied **both** to homeostatic and unbounded instrumental objectives.
*   **Adaptiveness to changes:** Because the system is designed around balancing multiple bounded (usually also homeostatic) or otherwise diminishing-returns objectives, it can pivot more easily when setpoint / target values are adjusted, or new objectives and constraints are introduced. This is so because **stakes involved with each change would be smaller**.

About balancing between instrumental and homeostatic objectives
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The reason instrumental objectives are unbounded, is probably because one **can collect instrumental resources ahead of time**. In contrast, many **homeostatic ultimate objectives often cannot be collected ahead of time** \- they need to be met to a reasonable degree at all times. Therefore the latter are somewhat similar to combinatorial optimisation constraints. But we probably do not want and need to go as far as implementing lexicographic ordering for prioritising homeostatic objectives.

Note that when the squared errors formulation is used, **homeostatic** "bounded" objectives **are bounded only from above**. The negative utilities of homeostatic deviations are **unbounded** and even **exponential**.

At the same time, the positive unboundedness of **instrumental** utility functions is usually **logarithmic**. Therefore, negative **homeostatic utilities will often strongly dominate over the positive instrumental unboundedness.** 

**Why I think it will be successful**
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*   Biological precedent: Living organisms have succeeded for millions of years via homeostasis. They seldom fixate on one factor indefinitely.
*   Existing multi-objective theory: Tools from control theory, cybernetics, and multi-objective combinatorial optimisation confirm that equilibrium-seeking behaviours can be stable and robust.
*   Better cooperation: Homeostatic agents are less likely to become “power-hungry”, because they do not gain infinite reward from capturing every resource. They often settle into equilibrium states that are easier to share with others. Diminishing returns in unbounded instrumental objectives also enables balanced consideration of other interests.

**What does success look like - what are the benefits that could be enabled by this research**
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Success of this agenda means that a group of AI agents can pursue tasks without escalating into destructive competition. Concretely, I am imagining multi-agent systems that self-limit their objectives, gracefully and proactively yield or cooperate when another agent’s needs become more urgent, and avoid unmerited “take-all” logic that leads to conflict or otherwise extreme actions. Each agent would be more corrigible, interruptible, and would **actively** avoid manipulative and exploitative behaviours. This scenario would enable safer expansion of future AI capabilities, as each agent respects their own as well as the others’ essential homeostatic constraints.

**In detail**, success would be demonstrating an AI or multi-agent set of AIs that:

*   Are able to recognise and properly internally represent homeostatic objectives. They do not maximise such objectives unboundedly since that **would be harmful for the very objective being optimised**.
*   Maintain balanced performance across multiple objectives (including unbounded ones) without letting any single dimension run wild.
*   Cooperate better with humans or other agents - e.g., avoid exploitation and manipulation, negotiate effectively, share resources, and respect boundaries because there is no incentive to hoard indefinitely.
*   Adapt when the environment or goals change, without catastrophic failures. This means being **corrigible and interruptible** (as I define these two principles respectively - 1) being tolerant to changes in the objectives and 2) being tolerant to changes in environment which are intentionally caused by other agents).

**Potential risks and open questions**
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Some of the potential risks and open questions are the following:

*   Homeostatic systems could be **exploitable and manipulatable** if these systems are too cooperative. I am hoping that a well-calibrated “middle” stance provides some resilience against exploitation: the agent stays cooperative but not naively altruistic, avoiding extreme vulnerability.
*   If other developers do not adopt homeostatic or bounded approaches, **unbounded AIs might gain power and dominate over cooperative ones** since the cooperative, homeostatic, and balanced systems do not strive towards gaining as much instrumental power.
*   **Misspecification of setpoints:** If the “healthy ranges” are badly defined, the system might inadvertently ignore or harm misconfigured dimensions. They may even cause significant **side effects** on correctly configured dimensions while trying to achieve unachievable targets on the misconfigured objectives. So it is no longer sufficient to state that an objective exists, the target should also be set to a reasonable value.
*   **Adversarial destabilisation:** Other actors might manipulate a homeostatic AI by pushing one of its homeostatic actual values / metrics far out of range (for example, by creating risks and forcing the homeostatic agent to protect something from unjustified harm), or by indirectly manipulating it into harmful actions by exploiting its cooperative tendencies.
*   **Complex interactions among goals:** Juggling many objectives can introduce subtle failure modes, such as the agent becoming **paralysed** (though paralysis can occasionally be also a good thing when the agent needs to ask for human **confirmation or choice**). Most importantly, there are scenarios where balancing multiple objectives is not effectively possible and **binary (thus discriminative) choices** need to be made. These choices would be either a) for purposes of temporary **action serialisation **or b) **permanent commitment choices** between exclusive options. Such binary choices can perhaps still be based on the same concave utility functions framework described in this post, but need much more careful calculation and foresight.
*   A more complex **open question** about balancing between homeostatic and instrumental objectives is **handling cases where instrumental objectives go into negative utility domain**, which might be exponential, just as homeostatic deviations are. Using exponential utility functions in the negative domain of instrumental objectives is desirable because concavity is a requirement for balancing between objectives. But when not implemented carefully, this might dominate over homeostatic deviations and cause runaway behaviours.

**What I am working on at the moment - the agenda**
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There are three interrelated directions:

1.  **Explaining and demonstrating** that application of the above described general principles improves alignment and in fact is essential.
2.  However, standard baseline AI models / frameworks (both RL and LLM based) may be not **optimally** equipped to learn multi-objective concave utility dynamics as is needed for both homeostasis and diminishing returns. The first step in tackling that problem is **building benchmarks for measuring these model alignment difficulties**. That is a direction I have been largely working on during recent years and will definitely also expand on in the future. I will write more about this soon.
3.  Thethird direction is finding ways for **overcoming the limitations of existing models / training frameworks** or finding alternate frameworks, so that better fit with the principles described in this post can be implemented.

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***Thank you for reading! Curious to hear your thoughts on this. Which angle are you most interested in? If you wish to collaborate or support, let’s connect! You can contact me at email address*** [***roland@simplify.ee***](mailto:roland@simplify.ee)

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**Related links **
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*   **Another conceptual overview, focusing more deeply on homeostasis in particular.** “Why modelling multi-objective homeostasis is essential for AI alignment (and how it helps with AI safety as well). Subtleties and Open Challenges.” (2025) [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vGeuBKQ7nzPnn5f7A/why-modelling-multi-objective-homeostasis-is-essential-for](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vGeuBKQ7nzPnn5f7A/why-modelling-multi-objective-homeostasis-is-essential-for) 
*   **An empirical paper about handling unbounded objectives. The text until and including chapter 1.2 might be of interest as it describes the philosophical background and utility function design principles. Section "6.6.3 Decision paralysis" might be also relevant.** The rest of the paper demonstrates that certain implementations of concave / diminishing returns based utility functions during training improve training speed, when compared to some alternative approaches. “Using soft maximin for risk averse multi-objective decision-making” (2023) [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10458-022-09586-2](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10458-022-09586-2) 
*   **Baseline text-only-world benchmark results for LLMs, demonstrating that LLMs are not sufficiently aligned with the principles of homeostasis and multi-objective balancing out of box.** “Systematic runaway-optimiser-like LLM failure modes on Biologically and Economically aligned AI safety benchmarks for LLMs with simplified observation format” (2025) [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PejNckwQj3A2MGhMA/systematic-runaway-optimiser-like-llm-failure-modes-on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PejNckwQj3A2MGhMA/systematic-runaway-optimiser-like-llm-failure-modes-on) 
*   **Baseline extended gridworld benchmark results for RLs, demonstrating that baseline RL algorithms alone are not a good fit for implementing homeostasis and multi-objective balancing.** I am currently computing improved baselines using imitation learning, but even this is not yet sufficient for solving the benchmarks. "From homeostasis to resource sharing: Biologically and economically aligned multi-objective multi-agent gridworld-based AI safety benchmarks" (2024 - 2025) [https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00081](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00081)