Reinforcement learning (RL) from unit tests is the common recipe for post-training code models, but a unit test only asks whether the final program passes. We analyze what this unit-test-only reward teaches a model during debugging and find that, while it raises pass rates, it also teaches the model to edit more and to hallucinate bugs in code that is already correct. We introduce PreciseCoder, a training algorithm that augments the unit-test reward with a signal for semantically verified, localized edits, which correlates with smaller edits and higher pass rates. On 4B, 9B, and 27B models, PreciseCoder reduces the average number of edit lines from 7-15to 3 at a pass rate on par with unit-test-only training. Trained only on single-line bugs, PreciseCoder can generalize to repository-level program repair, where it resolves more issues with smaller patches. Its precision also transfers from weaker to stronger models: given the reasoning trace of a 9B PreciseCoder model, frontier models such as GPT-5.6 Sol and Qwen3.8-Max gain 4.6-12.4 points in edit precision with no additional training. Linguistic analysis of the thinking traces shows that our reward encourages the model to reason about individual lines, name the buggy ones, and form consistent bug hypotheses.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) relies on costly model-generated responses, motivating larger rollout batches and square-root learning-rate scaling. Reported to approximately preserve progress per sample with one optimizer step per rollout, this rule is less understood in practical multi-step training. We develop a two-clock framework that separates the samples needed to make progress from those consumed before collapse. Under a local quadratic model, the square-root rule preserves first-order drift per sample but not progress: larger batches take fewer, longer updates and lose more to curvature, yielding a learning-rate-dependent critical batch beyond which sample efficiency degrades. A drift-threshold hypothesis predicts a complementary failure clock whose sample count remains approximately invariant along the square-root rule. Controlled GRPO experiments on Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B across a $16\times$ batch range support both predictions. Ratio clipping delays failure, especially for larger batches, but the progress gap persists without it. Widening the clip trades stability for a transient speed gain. The progress gap reappears on another dataset, a general-purpose checkpoint, and a 7B model. Finally, we use the two-clock framework to derive a simple multi-step RLVR schedule: start below the critical batch and switch to a larger batch before failure. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WinstonLiyt/two-clocks-rlvr.
Flagship large language models (LLMs) offer rich general knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities, but their high inference cost and latency limit their use for large-scale data labeling. We study zero-shot text classification with semantically meaningful labels and task descriptions, without task-specific labeled examples or classifier feedback. We propose \textbf{SLKR} (Semantic Label Knowledge Retrieval), a label-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework that separates offline knowledge construction from lightweight online inference. Offline, a flagship LLM independently generates label definitions, retrieval keywords, and boundary rules for potentially confusable label pairs, forming a reusable label-knowledge store. Because this construction operates over the label space rather than the input corpus, its one-time flagship cost can be amortized across large-scale inference. Online, hybrid semantic and lexical retrieval first identifies the top-$K$ candidate labels and then selects up to $M$ input-relevant boundary rules connecting candidate-label pairs. A lightweight LLM performs the final classification in a single call using the retrieved definitions and rules. Across three public benchmarks and a real-world multilingual book-classification dataset, SLKR achieves the best results on all four datasets with Qwen3.5-4B and on three of four with Ministral-3-3B, while using compact input contexts and no task-specific labeled examples. Boundary ablations further show that retrieving a small set of input-relevant rules preserves performance close to using all boundaries with substantially less context, supporting efficient reuse of flagship-generated label knowledge for lightweight classification.
A model may select the correct answer yet fail to construct it through a sequence of local decisions. We introduce Choice2Seq, a diagnostic benchmark that measures correctness retention across complete-answer selection and sequential construction in independent runs on the same problems and candidate sets. Sequence Composition Rate (SCR) measures the fraction of correctly selected items that are also answered correctly through local construction. Jev achieves 97.1% and 99.5% selection accuracy on arithmetic and lexical retrieval, yet retains only 33.0% and 2.1% of those correct choices under serial construction, respectively. Substantial gaps also emerge for StartLux and Qwen, including when Qwen emits characters directly. Restricting local options to candidate-supported characters improves construction, while explicit position indexing improves copying fidelity, even for incorrect selections. These interventions distinguish task correctness, plan fidelity, and output compliance. Matched dialogue-state evaluations reveal that local field construction largely preserves Jev's correct states but reduces Qwen's mean-turn accuracy, highlighting task- and interface-dependent differences. Sequence-level confidence and request-cost analyses further characterize completed outputs.
Text-to-image models have made remarkable progress in visual fidelity and instruction following, yet complex compositional generation remains challenging. Existing agentic approaches address this limitation through iterative generation and editing, adapting their actions based on interaction history. However, they typically fix the continuation state (i.e., the image from which refinement proceeds) to the latest image. Since iterative editing is not necessarily monotonic, the agent may continue refining from the latest image even when it has already degraded. In this work, we introduce GenRevisit, an agentic framework that extends action selection to joint continuation-state and action selection. The agent can not only use interaction history to adjust editing instructions but also select an image candidate to edit, jointly deciding where to continue from and how to refine. We train GenRevisit with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning. To address the coarse credit assignment of final outcome reward in GRPO, which assigns the same trajectory-level advantage to all actions, we further propose Normalized Action Credit Assignment (NACA) to redistribute positive advantage according to each action's contribution to reducing the remaining objective. On GenEval2, GenRevisit achieves GM scores of 84.3 and 74.4 with Qwen-Image-2512 and Z-Image-Turbo, surpassing the strongest baselines using the same generators by 12.7 and 10.9 points respectively. GenRevisit achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval, GenEval++, and GenEval2 among baselines.
Activation steering has recently been used as a memory for skills: past experiences of an agent are stored as steering vectors and retrieved later. Facts and preferences about the user are assumed to need text instead. We test that assumption with a training-free activation memory beside a frozen LLM. The change an experience causes in late-layer states is stored as a shift, filed under a whitened key for the conversation's gist, and added back in a later session only when the gist matches. We argue that such a shift is a fixed average of an effect that attention, in context, recomputes for every question, so only question-independent content can survive. In a pre-registered study on Qwen3.5-2B and 9B, with judges from four model families, the memory is selective (about 98% of unrelated replies are unchanged), but facts are stored as the word to say, in the last layers only, and are almost never used (at most 15% clean use, against 96-98% in context). Leanings transfer only in a narrow strength window. Most strikingly, the reference subtracted when writing a preference decides whether its concept or its direction survives: unless the opposite is subtracted, a stored dislike is recalled as a like.
Can an autonomous AI agent reverse engineer a binary as well as a skilled human analyst? Do they adopt the same strategy, and can agents scale to real-world programs? We compare human and LLM-based software reverse engineering (SRE): nine models tackle two compact static-analysis challenges previously solved by human analysts, scored with a common understanding rubric, and we record their complete interactions with IDA Pro. This lets us compare not only what humans and agents recover, but also how they investigate a binary. The best agents (GPT-5.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4.8, and Kimi K3) achieve statistically human-competitive understanding on both tasks, while weaker models remain far behind. Ablations show that the gap depends on code representation and workflow demands, not on model capability alone: open-weight models improve substantially with richer code representations, whereas frontier models show no significant change. Similar success rates hide different workflows. Humans repeatedly revisit functions and follow local program structure; strong agents jump across the binary, retrieve information broadly, and rarely return to inspected code, a behavior we call greedy fetching. This strategy is not fixed: given semantically richer code, agents fetch less without losing understanding. Because greedy fetching aggregates large amounts of code in the agent's context, we measure context-window saturation across 4,000 real-world binaries: large windows accommodate many programs, but larger applications and lower-level representations quickly exhaust them. Autonomous reverse engineering is becoming competitive, with a large speed advantage, but scaling it will require better navigation, selective retrieval, and persistent analysis state, not merely larger context windows.
Self-evolving agents are usually scored by endpoint Gain: held-out success after an update minus success before. That difference can credit a frozen rescore as evolution. We introduce Trace Evolution Bench (TEB), a protocol that separates that rescore from a context or weight update, together with three frozen 80/20/40 packs. An update is accepted only when validation does not fall, held-out identifiers never enter the update, and a text update is not ranked with a weight update. The primary scoreboard is coding, graded by hidden unit tests in a closed workspace. On that pack (40 held-out tasks, one family), DeepSeek v4 Pro under no_evolve never changes its policy yet moves 7.5, 5.0, and 12.5 percentage points across three seeds. Of nine text-update cells inspired by GEPA, ACE, and ExpeL, seven have positive excess above that seed's own band, and one gepa_llm seed moves down by the width of its band (-12.5, regression 0.48). GLM and MiniMax do not reproduce that seven-of-nine pattern. No method stays above its own band on every seed of all three models: GLM has two paired cells above their own bands, and MiniMax expel_llm seed 44 is a third (regression 0.30). The methods were fixed on a validation screen before held-out was read. Office, graded by rule-bounded delivery, and manufacturing table QA are separate packs: office DeepSeek does not exceed its own bands (widest 17.5 points), and manufacturing has no paired positive excess beyond its seed band.
Hi HN, I'm Niz. Pulse Local is a budgeting app for Mac (Apple Silicon, beta) that answers questions about your spending with models that run on your machine. Local mode needs no account. The ledger and your questions stay on the machine, and the app sends no analytics or crash logs. I felt there are not enough consumer apps that run locally with no calls to the outside world that help us manage sensitive corners of our lives. This app in its local variant only downloads a couple of models and occasional updates, it does not send any analytics nor data. Features-wise, Pulse local is a complete budgeting app that offers an assistant built on top of a fine-tuned model and thousands of rules embedded in the code itself. I'm sharing it for free with options to help me continue experimenting with fine-tuning and expanding along this direction. How it works: you import a CSV from any bank, in any currency. When you ask a question, a tuned Qwen3 0.6B model reads it into a structured query, and code, not the model, does the money math against the ledger. A 4B checker model double-checks each money answer; when the two readings disagree, the app says it is not sure instead of guessing. That change took wrong answers from about one in five to 5 in 494 questions across our last three tests. The write-up covers how we test, the designs that failed, and the limits of the claim: https://pulseos.finance/pulse-local/writing/agree-or-not-sur... The tuned weights are on Hugging Face (PulseOS/pulse-local-qwen3-0.6b). Limitations: the first start downloads about 2.9 GB of models. With the checker on, a money answer takes 12 to 14 seconds (you can turn the checker off). Small models can still misread an open-ended question. The app answers in English. Mac only for now; Windows is next. The app is free. An optional Connected mode (Sync Pass, $29/year) syncs US banks through Plaid; transactions pass through our server's memory and are not stored. Feedback welcome, especially on wrong answers and on questions it should handle but does not. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50080275 Points: 3 # Comments: 0
Anthropic says it has cut the extraction of Claude's internal reasoning tokens by 90 to 99 percent. The company links the large-scale distillation attacks to Chinese companies Zhipu and Moonshot, and has already banned tens of thousands of accounts. The article Anthropic says it cut Claude reasoning token theft by up to 99% in fight against industrial-scale distillation appeared first on The Decoder .
Z.ai’s GLM-Legal is a legal AI model built on GLM-5.3-Flash. It scores 19.2% all-pass on Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark, nearly 3x its base, at $0.15 per test. Access is by application. The post Z.ai GLM-Legal Beats Claude Fable 5 and Kimi K3 on Harvey LAB appeared first on MarkTechPost .
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Late last month, Anthropic released a report arguing that the model GLM-5.3 poses a major cyberattack risk. The report’s core concern is that the…
Alibaba’s Qwen team has introduced QwenGyre, an elastic reinforcement learning RL framework for extreme-long-horizon agent training. QwenGyre is an online reinforcement learning system from Alibaba that trains coding agents through unmodified, black-box harnesses. It targets rollouts that run for hours and process close to 1M tokens. The QwenGyre elastic RL framework was used on Qwen’s […] The post Alibaba Qwen Introduces QwenGyre: Elastic Reinforcement Learning RL for XLong-Horizon Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost .
arXiv:2609.38880v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the last iterate of standard importance-weighted temporal-difference (TD) learning from a single trajectory of a finite Markov decision process. The trajectory follows a behavior policy $b$ with an irreducible, possibly periodic state chain; a target policy $\pi$ covered by $b$ is evaluated with action importance ratios bounded by $\varrho$. Write $H=(1-\gamma)^{-1}$, with $\mu_{\min}$ the minimum stationary probability and $\mathfrak h_\star$ the largest expected hitting time of the reverse behavior state chain. We prove that the last iterate achieves sup-norm error at most $\varepsilon$ with high probability after $\widetilde O(\varrho H^3/(\mu_{\min}\varepsilon^2)+\mathfrak h_\star)$ transitions for $0<\varepsilon\le1$. The statistical term retains the cubic effective-horizon dependence of synchronous TD, while the initialization cost is additive in $\mathfrak h_\star$. Setting $b=\pi$ and $\varrho=1$ recovers the on-policy rate. For aperiodic behavior chains, $\mathfrak h_\star=\widetilde O(t_{\rm mix}/\mu_{\min})$ recovers a mixing-time bound. The proof combines an anchored local Poisson equation in reverse time to control fluctuations without a mixing-time factor, a compensation argument for successive hitting costs, and an expected cumulative propagation mass bound for decreasing step sizes. Given the policy ratios and their bound, an empirical state-count rule attains the same rate without prior knowledge of model parameters. The framework covers nonnegative affine importance-weighted prediction updates, including successor features, transition-dependent discounting, and coupled finite-mode predictions. A perturbation estimate yields a time-uniform guarantee for online return-variance estimation. A three-state, two-action construction gives matching minimax lower bounds for both terms up to logarithmic factors on the considered parameter classes.
arXiv:2602.13619v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study parametric change-point detection under local differential privacy, focusing on the offline localization of a single change point in a sequence of independent observations.~In the non-private setting, we derive improved finite-sample accuracy guarantees for a generalized likelihood-ratio estimator using martingale methods.~We establish finite-sample minimax lower bounds in both the non-private and locally private settings, showing that localization accuracy is fundamentally limited by the Chernoff information between the pre- and post-change distributions.~Guided by this, we design locally private CPD algorithms based on aggregated randomized response and binary mechanisms, which maximize the Chernoff information between the induced output distributions in low- and high-privacy regimes, respectively, and derive their finite-sample guarantees. Together, our upper and lower bounds quantify the statistical cost of privacy in change-point localization.~As part of our analysis, we also show that strong data processing inequality coefficients of R\'enyi divergence and Jeffreys--R\'enyi divergence of order infinity can be computed by restricting to pairs of input distributions with a common support of at most two symbols.~We corroborate our results through empirical evaluation on synthetic data.
arXiv:2610.13674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linearizing softmax attention offers a route to efficient Transformer inference, but preserving pretrained attention remains challenging. We identify an important source of approximation error overlooked by standard linearization methods: a small number of outlier dimensions contribute disproportionately to query-key dot products and account for a large fraction of the approximation error. Motivated by this heterogeneity, we propose Outlier-Aware Attention Linearization (OAL), a dimension-aware method for constructing quadratic attention approximations. Starting from a second-order Taylor approximation, we introduce a Hadamard-product formulation that makes individual query-key contributions explicit. This formulation relaxes globally shared coefficients to support dimension-specific linear terms and cross-dimensional quadratic interactions while preserving separable evaluation. To retain this flexibility with fewer parameters, OAL groups dimensions with similar contribution scales to share coefficients, while allowing distinct treatment of the few outliers. The resulting positive quadratic kernel is calibrated against pretrained attention outputs and admits linear-time evaluation with respect to sequence length for fixed head dimensions. On Qwen2.5-0.5B, OAL reduces frozen-attention output relative MSE by approximately 8.9% compared with DiJiang. Replacing middle-layer attention modules and jointly fine-tuning the kernel coefficients with LoRA further lowers WikiText-103 perplexity from 31.71 to 27.50 compared with a learned global quadratic, while improving accuracy on PIQA, HellaSwag, and ARC-E. These results demonstrate the value of outlier-aware dimension grouping for both attention approximation and pretrained-model conversion. The code is available at https://github.com/wuqianyue09/OAL
arXiv:2610.13112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) frequently exhibit object hallucination, affirming absent sounds. The dominant mitigation, Audio-Aware Decoding (AAD), contrasts logits under real audio against an all-zero "blank" waveform, flagged by prior review as out-of-distribution. We introduce a black-box causal test that isolates the claimed evidence itself: localize a claim's evidence region via CLAP similarity, remove it by spectral gating, and compare against a random-window control across a 2x2x2 grid on three LALMs. On Qwen2-Audio-7B, localized ablation's raw AUROC trails blank's (0.613 vs. 0.721); this is a duration confound, not a localization failure, since blank removes the entire clip versus the grid's 2-4 s. Holding duration fixed, localization beats random removal at every cell on both models. Raw detection value remains model-dependent, especially on Audio Flamingo 3. The same evidence corrects decoding: contrastive decoding combining blank and language-prior contrasts, gated and ensembled, raises Qwen2-Audio accuracy from 57.1% to 71.9%, beating AAD alone. A unified causal-grounding profile does not transfer between models, indicating different grounding regimes. The source code and a detailed report of our findings, including identified limitations, are available at https://github.com/khalooei/causa.
arXiv:2610.12740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the two-sample estimation of the powered Sliced Wasserstein functional under projected $r$-th moment assumptions. Let $N=n\wedge m$, where $n$ and $m$ are two sample sizes. We establish the minimax rates in the noncritical regimes. When $p 2p$ it is of order $N^{-1/2}$. In both cases, the natural plug-in estimator is minimax rate-optimal. At the endpoint $r=p$, the minimax risk is bounded away from zero, so uniformly consistent estimation is impossible. At the critical order $r=2p$, we obtain the exact worst-case rate of the plug-in estimator and a lower bound for the minimax risk, leaving a logarithmic gap between the lower and upper bounds. The exact minimax rate in this critical case remains open.
arXiv:2610.13755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training long-horizon language model agents requires assigning credit to intermediate decisions from sparse terminal feedback. Within a finite group of sibling rollouts, useful action comparisons depend on their context, evidence for both alternatives, and how that evidence enters learning. We propose Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization (MCGPO), a procedure for constructing weighted action preferences from already collected trajectories. MCGPO defines comparison contexts with pre-action state summaries and observed rubric progress, annotated by task rules. Two-action support selects among ordered exact and coarse matching rules. Fixed folds separate candidate decisions from the terminal outcomes used to orient their preferences, and support-dependent evidence weights scale an auxiliary pairwise objective alongside shared GraphGPO task learning. MCGPO reuses rollout data and each response's original history, preserving critic-free training. Across six environment-backbone settings with three training seeds each, MCGPO improves mean success over matched GraphGPO: by 0.47-1.46 percentage points on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B and 7B, and by 3.96 and 5.16 points on WebShop with Qwen3-4B and 8B. The ALFWorld gains build on baseline success above 92%, where remaining headroom is limited. Integrated success improves in three of four Qwen2.5 settings. Three-seed factorial controls support opposite-fold evidence and evidence weighting; joint state-rubric matching achieves the highest mean in all four representation-control settings.
arXiv:2610.12915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Minimax optimization is fundamental to adversarial learning yet suffers from severe stability challenges, often manifesting as persistent limit cycles or divergence. This paper investigates these instabilities through the lens of continuous-time dynamical systems. By modeling training dynamics as a second-order Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE), we rigorously identify the root cause of non-convergence: the problematic eigenstructure of the loss function's Hessian near equilibrium points. To address this, we introduce Controlled-Minimax, a novel stabilization framework that reformulates the optimization trajectory as a controllable physical system. Unlike heuristic regularization techniques, our approach derives a specific feedback controller that provides theoretical guarantees of local exponential stability, regardless of the underlying Hessian spectrum. Consequently, our method stabilizes general minimax problems where traditional gradient descent-ascent methods fail. Extensive experiments on pathological benchmarks including the Dirac-GAN, 2D Gaussian mixtures, and Swiss Roll datasets, as well as high-resolution image synthesis with StyleGAN2-ada, demonstrate that Controlled-Minimax effectively suppresses oscillatory behavior while ensuring fast and robust convergence.
arXiv:2610.12744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parameter-efficient continual learning updates a restricted subset of adapter parameters to incorporate sequential tasks while limiting catastrophic forgetting. Gradient attribution is a common rule for selecting that subset, but it requires an additional backward pass over calibration data. We identify a parameter-pool confound in comparisons between initialization-time gradient masks and unrestricted random masks under standard zero-initialized LoRA ($B=0$): the gradient with respect to $A$ is identically zero ($\partial\mathcal{L}/\partial A=0$), so gradient masks select strictly from the $B$ matrix whereas unrestricted random masks draw from both $A$ and $B$. Such a comparison changes both the selection rule and the candidate parameter pool. Isolating the selection criterion by restricting both approaches to the same parameter pool, we find a negative result: a uniform random mask consistently achieves lower loss-based backward transfer than gradient attribution across seven seeds on Qwen2.5-3B. The effect is concentrated on the medical task, which contributes 80\% of the aggregate; code and math move in the same direction, and legal shows no reliable difference. This advantage is consistent with a stability--plasticity trade-off under the tested task sequence, in which random masking slightly reduces single-task fitting. On the two discrete-option tasks (Medical and Legal), the mean accuracy-BWT difference is not statistically distinguishable from zero.
arXiv:2610.12711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Large Language Models (FedLLMs) are promising to deliver privacy-preserving, collaborative intelligence. The decentralized training process is vulnerable to Byzantine attacks that corrupt semantic consistency and factual resilience through malicious model updates. This paper presents a new resilience strategy that prevents semantically corrupted knowledge from propagating during federated aggregation. A defense problem is formulated to jointly maximize global accuracy and suppress manipulated model updates, enabling trustworthy knowledge aggregation without accessing private local data. To strengthen the resilience of FedLLMs, we develop a novel Hypergraph Message Passing Graph Autoencoder (HMP-GAE) framework, where low-rank model updates are represented as nodes in a hypergraph and high-order semantic relationships among multiple agents are exploited through iterative message passing. By leveraging historical checkpoints and cross-agent relational reasoning, HMP-GAE identifies and suppresses semantically inconsistent updates while preserving knowledge alignment among agents throughout federated training. HMP-GAE is implemented using Qwen-2.5 and Llama-3.2 as pretrained FedLLM backbones and evaluated on AG News and Yahoo! Answers datasets. Compared to existing defenses, HMP-GAE improves global accuracy by $1.21$\%, reduces final-model classification semantic entropy by $44.08$\%, and lowers perplexity by $13.34$\%. HMP-GAE outperforms the GAE-based defense by improving the accuracy $1.39$\%, reducing the semantic entropy by $54.5$\%, and lowering perplexity by $35.5$\%.
Standard Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms suffer from high estimation variance because they rely on Monte Carlo updates. While off-policy variance reduction mitigates this problem, establishing optimal sample complexity currently requires either restrictive assumptions, such as uniformly bounded importance weights, or impractical second-order operations. In this work, we introduce Loopless Variance-Reduced PG (LVR-PG), a unified theoretical framework that abstracts a class of first-order estimators that integrate recursive updates with defensive importance sampling, including known estimators such as PAGE-PG and STORM-PG. We prove that this algorithmic class achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-2})$ last-iterate global convergence under weak gradient domination for general parametric policies. We establish this guarantee using purely first-order updates, with minimal assumptions and without gradient preconditioners. By extending state-of-the-art lower bounds to continuous parametric policies, we establish an $Ω(ε^{-2})$ sample complexity limit, confirming our framework is minimax-optimal up to logarithmic factors and horizon terms.
语言模型越来越多地被用于辅助或自动执行信息检索，从规模过大、难以建立索引的文档集合中查找信息。当这项任务需要专业的语言学或科学知识时，就会变得困难。我们使用 Wikipedia Game，在一项类似的信息检索任务中测试语言模型。在该游戏中，玩家必须仅通过文章链接到达目标文章。我们在五种语言的 Wikipedia 和五个学术文献数据集上，对句子嵌入模型和大语言模型（LLM）进行了比较。我们构建了超大规模的 Wikipedia 页面本地图结构，并利用 OpenAlex 构建了论文引用本地图结构，同时提供了构建和导航这些图结构的代码。这使得研究者无需依赖第三方 API，即可研究语言模型的导航能力。我们将这些模型与人类和 TF-IDF 基准进行了比较。Wikipedia Game 的形式支持跨技术、语言和领域的稳健比较。没有任何模型显著优于人类，但表现最好的模型（GPT-o3 mini、GPT-4o、QwQ:32B 和 DeepSeek-R1:70B）取得了与人类相当的成功率。模型的表现和排名随语言和主题而变化，这对采用这些技术的实践者具有参考意义。
Cloudflare released Clef-omni, an Apache-2.0 multimodal decision model built on Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B. It scores text, images, audio and video in one call for $0.15 per million input tokens, while Clef-flash drops to $0.038. The post Meet Cloudflare Clef-omni: A 30B-A3B Multimodal Decision Model for Audio, Video, Image and Text appeared first on MarkTechPost .
With Decision-1, Microsoft enters the growing decision model space. Built on Qwen3.5-9B and optimized for fast classification and routing, it hits 83.5 percent accuracy with 85 ms latency across 36 benchmarks, according to the company's own tests. The article Microsoft's Decision-1 model enters the fast-growing AI decision model race appeared first on The Decoder .
Microsoft has released Microsoft-Decision-1, a decision model for routing, classification, verification and agent control. Microsoft-Decision-1 is a decision-scoring model that returns a calibrated probability for each fixed answer option instead of generated text. It is post-trained from Alibaba’s Qwen3.5-9B and available now in Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter. . TL;DR What is a decision model? A […] The post Microsoft AI Releases Microsoft-Decision-1: A Qwen3.5-9B Decision-Scoring Model appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo, an accelerated checkpoint of its open-weight Qwen-Image-2.1 model. It generates and edits images in 8 denoising steps instead of the base model’s 40-step default. For developers, that means 5x fewer denoising steps on the same 7B architecture, plus a hosted API option. TL;DR What is Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo? Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo is an […] The post Alibaba Qwen Releases Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo, an 8-Step 7B Image Model appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Underdog Saluki 27B is a 7.89 GB, 2-bit GGUF of Qwen3.8-27B under Apache 2.0. It beats the 54 GB original on tool calling but gives up ground on competition math and reasoning. The post Meet the Underdog Saluki 27B: A 2-bit Qwen3.8-27B That Beats the Original at Tool Calling appeared first on MarkTechPost .
arXiv:2606.25170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a PAC framework in which the learner can access sampling oracles both before and at decision time. Sample complexity is measured by a pair $(n,m)$, where $n$ is the learning budget spent before a query is known and $m$ is the additional sampling budget per query. We demonstrate its relevance in discounted Markov decision processes with exogenous i.i.d.\ contexts revealed before acting. Contexts may affect both rewards and transitions but remain uncontrolled by the agent. The learner can sample the unknown context distribution and the transition kernel. We study policy evaluation (PE), best-value estimation (BVE), and best-policy extraction (BPE). When rewards and transitions are known, a variance-reduced algorithm solves all three tasks with sample complexity $\bigl(\widetilde O((1-\gamma)^{-3}\varepsilon^{-2}),0\bigr)$, which is minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors. Let $\mathcal{X}$ be the controlled state space. When transitions are also unknown, we give a PE algorithm with complexity $\bigl(\widetilde O(|\mathcal X|(1-\gamma)^{-3}\varepsilon^{-2}), \widetilde O((1-\gamma)^{-2}\varepsilon^{-2})\bigr)$ and matching lower bounds at this budget pair. For BVE and BPE, we give an algorithm with a common offline budget $\widetilde O(|\mathcal X|^2|\mathcal A|(1-\gamma)^{-4}\varepsilon^{-2})$ and respective query costs $\widetilde O(|\mathcal A|(1-\gamma)^{-2}\varepsilon^{-2})$ and $\widetilde O(|\mathcal A|(1-\gamma)^{-3}\varepsilon^{-2})$. Importantly, all bounds are independent of the context-space cardinality.
arXiv:2608.14319v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study quantum multi-armed bandits (QMAB) and quantum linear bandits (QLB), where the learner queries each arm or action through a quantum reward oracle or its inverse. Prior work gives algorithms over horizon $T$ with regret $O(K\log T)$ for QMAB with $K$ arms and $O(d^2\operatorname{polylog} T)$ for $d$-dimensional QLB. This leaves open the optimal dependence on $K$ and $T$ and whether the dependence on $d$ can be further improved. In this work, we prove the first tight minimax regret bound of $\Theta(K\log(1+T/K))$ for QMAB and the first lower bound of $\Omega(d\log(1+T/d))$ for finite-action QLB, ruling out regret independent of $T$. Our lower bounds rely on a high-confidence single-arm quantum testing lower bound for distinguishing a fixed reward mean from an interval of alternatives. A bandit-to-testing reduction then lifts it to the QMAB lower bound, while a linear embedding gives the finite-action QLB lower bound. The matching QMAB upper bound is obtained using a tail bound for the Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) estimator. For finite-action QLB, we propose a phased elimination algorithm that combines a low-bias low-variance quantum mean estimator with a small-support $G$-optimal design through a query allocation matched to the design weights. When the action set has size $\operatorname{poly}(d)$, its regret is nearly linear in $d$ and matches our lower bound up to polylogarithmic factors.
arXiv:2604.13966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study value adaptation in offline-to-online reinforcement learning under general function approximation. Starting from an imperfect offline pretrained $Q$-function, the learner aims to adapt it to the target environment using only a limited amount of online interaction. We first characterize the difficulty of this setting by establishing a minimax lower bound, showing that even when the pretrained $Q$-function is close to optimal $Q^\star$, online adaptation can be no more efficient than pure online RL on certain hard instances. On the positive side, under a novel structural condition on the offline-pretrained value functions, we propose O2O-LSVI, an adaptation algorithm with problem-dependent sample complexity that provably improves over pure online RL. Finally, we complement our theory with neural-network experiments that demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed method.
arXiv:2610.12358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Gaussian regression under squared population $L_2$ loss in a known $m$-dimensional subspace of degree-at-most-$k$ functions on the $d$-dimensional Boolean cube. Random inputs can undersample regions essential for prediction, delaying the parametric rate even when the model is known. For fixed $q_0<1/2$, $1\le k\le q_0d$, and sufficiently large fixed $A$, the worst-subspace sample threshold for minimax error $A\sigma^2(m+t)/n$ with confidence $1-e^{-t}$, $t\ge\log4$, is \[ N=(m+t)\exp\{E_{d,k}+O(k^{1/3})\}, \quad E_{d,k}=d\Psi(k/d), \] where $\Psi(q)=\log2-\mathsf H(\tfrac12-\sqrt{q(1-q)})$ and $\mathsf H$ is binary entropy with natural logarithms. The upper bound holds for every feasible $m$; the matching lower bound holds when $m\le\binom d{\lfloor k^{1/3}\rfloor}$ or $t\ge m$. We sharpen the Polyanskiy--Samorodnitsky uncertainty principle in two respects. First, for fixed leakage $\rho\in(0,1)$, the smallest set carrying a fraction $1-\rho$ of a nonzero degree-at-most-$k$ polynomial's energy has probability $\exp\{-E_{d,k}+O_{\rho,q_0}(k^{1/3})\}$. An Airy-kernel construction proves that the remainder cannot be $o(k^{1/3})$ in general. Second, we construct a subspace of dimension $\binom d{\lfloor k^{1/3}\rfloor}$ such that every function in the subspace has at least a fraction $1-\rho$ of its energy on the same set, whose probability is at most $\exp\{-E_{d,k}+C_{\rho,q_0}k^{1/3}\}$. For sufficiently large $k$, this set is a Hamming ball. A striking consequence is an exponential cost of noise: the parametric rate can require $(m+t)4^k\exp\{-O(k^{1/3})\}$ samples, whereas $O((m+t)2^k)$ suffice for noiseless identification. As $k\to\infty$ with $k/d\to0$, the noisy threshold is $(m+t)\exp\{2k+o(k)\}$.
arXiv:2610.11358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-model KV-cache reuse remains a key challenge in modern LLM serving. Coding agents and multi-model systems increasingly route a shared context across models: a user may switch models mid-session, or a cascade may escalate a difficult query. Because KV caches contain model-specific representations, each switch typically forces the receiving model to prefill the entire context from scratch. Recent work shows that closed-form linear maps can translate KV caches between models in the same family, but transfer accuracy degrades as the model-size gap widens. In this paper, we establish that these transfer failures are concentrated in a small subset of information-dense tokens. To bridge this gap, we introduce RaReCache, a framework that enables a large target model to decode accurately from a cache prefilled by a much smaller source via selective recomputation. RaReCache identifies these critical positions using a novel rank disagreement metric, scoring each token by the energy of its mapped KV in output directions weakly supported by the calibration data. Across two model families and five benchmarks, on a 23x parameter gap (Qwen3-0.6B to 14B) recomputing just 30% of positions retains 95-99% of the target accuracy, whereas on a 8.8x gap (Llama3-8B to 70B), recomputing 40% retains 96.5% of the target accuracy. RaReCache largely removes sensitivity to source-model size, and achieves up to a 3.04x prefill speedup. For online serving, it handles 1.8x the request throughput of target prefill on a single GPU, and at the target's saturation load, reduces median and 99th-percentile time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 5.0x and 6.4x respectively, with a 30% recompute budget. RaReCache establishes an efficient serving paradigm where small models prefill on behalf of massive targets, enabling large models to recompute only critical tokens, drastically reducing prefill latency.
arXiv:2610.11218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense associative memory (DAM) provides an energy-based framework for memory retrieval with close connections to attention mechanisms in modern artificial intelligence. Despite growing interest in differential privacy for AI, the privacy of DAM retrieval dynamics remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we develop a differential privacy framework for log-sum-ReLU (LSR) dense associative memory, whose finite-support retrieval dynamics pose distinctive challenges for privacy-preserving computation. We propose the Boundary-Responsive Adaptive Correction Evolution (BRACE) algorithm, a differentially private retrieval mechanism for LSR-DAM that adaptively corrects boundary-sensitive perturbations to control their cumulative effect over the retrieval trajectory. In theory, we prove that our method is minimax optimal by deriving dimension-independent terminal and full-trajectory retrieval error rates, with optimal dependence on the inverse temperature and, in the growing-horizon regime, the retrieval horizon. We further establish central limit theorems that enable uncertainty quantification for private retrieval by characterizing its asymptotic distribution and the additional variability introduced by privacy. Numerical experiments compare our proposed method with baseline differential privacy approaches and evaluate its retrieval accuracy. Together, our results provide a theoretical foundation for optimal privacy-preserving retrieval and uncertainty quantification in energy-based associative memory systems.
arXiv:2610.11082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The kernel bandit problem consists of sequentially optimizing an unknown function with noisy feedback, where the function has bounded norm in a given Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). A central quantity in the regret analysis of kernel bandits is the maximum information gain $\gamma_T$. In particular, the best existing upper bounds scale as $\sqrt{T\gamma_T}$ up to log factors, and nearly-matching lower bounds have been derived for specific kernels such as squared exponential and Mat\'ern. However, lower bounds for general kernels are lacking, thus making it unclear in what generality the upper bounds are near-optimal. In this paper, we establish a general $\Omega(\sqrt{T\gamma_T/\log T})$ minimax regret lower bound for non-constant continuous kernels on compact domains, establishing near-optimality (within log factors) in a very general sense. We show that the log factor appearing in this bound is unavoidable in general, but that it can be removed under certain conditions. Among other things, our findings imply that the minimax-optimal scaling is exactly $\Theta(\sqrt{T\gamma_T})$ (i.e., within constant factors) for the Mat\'ern-$\nu$ kernel with $\nu \in (0,2)$, $\gamma$-exponential kernel with $\gamma \in (0,2)$, and certain piecewise-polynomial kernels.
arXiv:2610.10786v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planning is increasingly important for long-horizon agents, where successful execution requires coordinating subgoals, tool use, and intermediate outcomes over many steps. Yet assumptions made during planning may be invalidated by the environment, tools may return unexpected results, or actions may fail. Effective agents must therefore not only generate plans, but also revise them. Such revisions often affect only part of a plan, leaving the preceding and subsequent structure intact. Rather than regenerate the entire plan and risk unnecessary changes, repair can regenerate the affected region conditioned on the preserved prefix and suffix. We introduce Plan-and-Patch, a plan-and-act framework in which a diffusion language model (dLLM) generates a structured, program-like plan through parallel unmasking and repairs it by filling in selected regions while keeping the surrounding steps fixed. We compare DreamReasoner-8B and Qwen3-8B as diffusion and autoregressive (AR) planners. On Natural Plan without task-specific training, diffusion (53.7%) achieves nearly twice the plan repair success rate of AR (27.0%). After task-specific training on agentic benchmarks, ALFWorld and TextCraft, the planners achieve similar observed success in plan generation, while diffusion reduces mean plan-generation latency by 39-46% relative to AR. Our results show that Plan-and-Patch provides a framework for faster plan generation and effective plan repair in long-horizon agents.
arXiv:2610.12183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black-box optimization (BBO) arises in many scientific and engineering problems where objective evaluations are expensive and limited. Recent large language model (LLM) agents offer a new way to approach BBO by combining task semantics, computation, optimization tools, and feedback-driven decision making, showing great potential due to the integration with mathematically rigorous tools. However, existing agentic BBO studies use different task domains and system configurations, making their results difficult to compare and the effects of individual design choices hard to isolate. We therefore introduce AgenticBBO-Bench, a cross-domain benchmark for agentic BBO spanning synthetic functions, hyperparameter optimization, database tuning, chip design, and molecular design under a unified finite-budget evaluation protocol. In our experiments, agentic BBO achieves higher family-averaged scores than direct LLM-based methods in all five domains and outperforms the best numerical optimizers in four. We further study three factors shaping agent performance: optimization tools, task information and prior knowledge, and the role of the LLM during search. Our results show that additional numerical tools do not consistently improve performance, task semantics are broadly useful while more specific priors are less reliable, and numerical optimizers can effectively absorb gains from search trajectories established by the agent. Finally, we introduce a five-task frontier challenge within AgenticBBO-Bench and evaluate seven LLMs under the Codex agent harness, where GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lie on the Pareto frontier of performance and cost among the evaluated models. Our code is available at https://github.com/lamda-bbo/agentic-bbo.
arXiv:2610.11761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The genome holds the blueprint that governs the biological properties of the cell. Consequently, advancing our knowledge of genomic function is crucial both for a broader understanding of biology and for continued biomedical advances. The success of large language models on natural language and protein sequences has motivated similar efforts on genomic data. However, standard genomic language models (gLMs) often require extremely large computational resources and still fall behind traditional methods on some downstream tasks. Recently, MSA-based pretraining has been proposed as an efficient alternative, but existing models are limited to short input contexts, restricting their use to short-range tasks, such as variant effect prediction. In this work, we present RAGenome, the first retrieval-based gLM that scales pretraining to longer contexts (100$\times$ longer than existing MSA-based gLMs), allowing it to capture both across-species evolutionary relationships and within-species longer-range interactions. Trained on whole-genome alignments from 100 vertebrates, RAGenome substantially improves the long-range capabilities of MSA-based gLMs, raising gene finding performance from 0.45 to 0.60, while remaining competitive on purely evolutionary-based tasks like prioritizing pathogenic variants. RAGenome provides competitive gLM performance at a fraction of the training cost, unifying evolutionary modeling and long-range capabilities within a single, flexible, scalable framework. Code is available at https://github.com/PanosAntoniadis/RAGenome.
arXiv:2610.11551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online sparse linear regression (OSLR) where any algorithm is restricted to accessing only $b$ out of $d$ attributes per instance for prediction and $b_0\geq 0$ additional attributes after prediction, which was proved to be NP-hard. Previous work focused on designing computationally efficient algorithms under regularity assumptions, but did not characterize its information theoretic complexity. In this work, we give the first lower bound on the minimax regret of OSLR and design algorithms with better upper bounds without regularity assumptions. We characterize how minimax regret scales with problem-dependent parameters, capturing the information theoretic complexity of OSLR.
arXiv:2610.11458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI research progress can be viewed as the interaction between two processes: benchmark creation and method discovery. Historically, both were driven by human intelligence. However, recent advances in AI have accelerated automated method discovery, while automated benchmark creation has received comparatively less attention. To enable self-advancing systems, we propose Generative Adversarial Loop (GAL), a generator-discriminator framework alternating between two agentic searches: (1) a discriminator that generates adversarial data to expose weaknesses in current systems, and (2) a generator that discovers algorithms to overcome them. We apply this framework to approximation algorithms for efficient inference. Unlike existing auto research systems, which primarily focus on algorithm discovery, GAL introduces a discriminator agent that automates goalpost setting by continually searching for weaknesses in the current algorithm. We demonstrate adversarial data generation across four tasks: KV compression, sparse video generation, sparse attention, and context extension, where the discriminator identifies weaknesses in state of the art techniques. We further show that GAL enables autonomous improvement, with newly discovered algorithms improving not only on adversarially generated data, but also on established benchmarks. Specifically, GAL improves CompactorPress on KV compression with Qwen3-4B at 4x, raising performance on the discriminator dataset from 0.35 to 0.97, while also outperforming RULER-HARD (+0.77 pts). For context extension, GAL boosts Dual Chunk Attention from 0.20 to 0.90 on the discriminator dataset, while yielding gains on standard benchmarks(ScienceFiction (+6 pts) and PG19 32K (-0.33 PPL)). GAL thus provides a path toward autonomous goalpost setting and algorithmic improvement, where AI systems continually discover their own weaknesses and develop methods to overcome them.
arXiv:2610.11315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In diffusion transformers, low-rank branches can mitigate 4-bit weight--activation (W4A4) post-training quantization (PTQ) loss by decomposing each weight into a low-bit residual and a high-precision low-rank component. Existing low-rank PTQ approaches, however, either optimize low-rank compensation and residual quantization separately, often requiring higher ranks, or rely on second-order weight updates without explicitly modeling activation quantization error, which becomes particularly pronounced under 4-bit quantization. To address these limitations, we present \method{}, a unified framework modeling low-rank-assisted W4A4 PTQ as a coupled calibration problem and deriving optimization-based solvers from the joint objective. Eliminating the output-side low-rank factor yields a \emph{deflated Hessian} that discounts residual errors already captured by the low-rank component, while an activation-noise surrogate is incorporated to suppress activation quantization error. Across five diffusion backbones, rank-4 \method{} consistently outperforms rank-4 SVDQuant in PSNR and LPIPS. It further surpasses rank-32 SVDQuant on SANA-1.6B, FLUX.1-schnell, and FLUX.1-dev with an $8\times$ smaller rank and up to $6.25\times$ faster quantization. Furthermore, on the Qwen3-8B LLM, rank-4 \method{} improves MMLU accuracy from 61.50\% to 68.17\% over rank-32 SVDQuant. Overall, \method{} achieves better W4A4 performance with substantially lower rank and quantization cost.
arXiv:2610.11115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The escalating size of pretrained neural networks has rendered model compression a prerequisite for deployment under stringent memory and compute constraints. With the irrational winding as an example, earlier work introduced a dynamic system (DS) paradigm that reconceptualizes compression as compact weight representation: high-dimensional parameters are encoded by the index of a trajectory produced by a dynamic system, from which the vector is recovered during decompression. This mechanism is fundamentally distinct from pruning, quantization, knowledge distillation, and low-rank decomposition. Along this direction, we prove that under a Diophantine condition, a finite trajectory of \(M = O(\epsilon^{-(d+\nu)})\) states in the irrational winding constitutes an \(\epsilon\)-net over the \(d\)-dimensional weight space, thereby linking state resolution, decompression error, and compression ratio in a predictable manner. Furthermore, we propose a generalized DS-based model compression framework by unifying four DS families---space-filling curves (Hilbert, Peano, Morton/Z-order, Snake), chaotic systems (Lorenz), congruential and pseudo-random generators (LCG, PCG), and low-discrepancy sequences (Halton). Also, we introduce the KD-tree and coordinate-template acceleration to scale to large models as well as outlier identification to control the error. Experiments on ResNet-18 and Qwen2.5-1.5B/Qwen1.5-7B validate that DS-based compression achieves competitive compression ratios without post-hoc retraining, with controllable decompression error and flexible state-space design, establishing it as a principled and practical compression approach.
arXiv:2610.10848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate evaluation is central to selecting which LLM to deploy, yet testing a candidate on live traffic exposes real users to an unvetted model. Teams therefore evaluate candidates offline, on data produced by already-deployed models. This is off-policy evaluation (OPE), and it faces two distribution shifts: as a model is updated in post-training, its responses diverge from the logged ones (policy shift), and the reward definition under which it is judged changes with business requirements (reward shift). Classical OPE methods are ill-suited to this continual-deployment setting because they are defined per task and require fitting from scratch on every new logged dataset or reward definition. To address this, we propose PFN-OPE, a prior-data fitted network that amortizes OPE across a distribution of contextual-bandit tasks. We pretrain it once on tasks constructed from a pool of LLM responses scored by several reward functions, in which both shifts occur. At test-time it maps a logged dataset and one sampled target response per prompt to a value estimate in a single forward pass, with no per-task fitting. On HelpSteer2 and UltraFeedback with Qwen, Llama, and Gemma policies, PFN-OPE achieves 2.0 to 9.3 times lower error than the best baselines across all tested configurations in the reward-shifted settings.
arXiv:2609.30499v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uniform noise-moment bounds exclude stochastic gradients whose variability increases with the iterate. We study ordinary, single-sample stochastic gradient descent for smooth, lower-bounded, possibly nonconvex objectives under distance-dependent conditional moments. Under second moments alone, a direct descent--displacement argument yields $T^{-1/3}$ expected average squared-gradient stationarity with a horizon-dependent stepsize. An explicit oracle-complexity corollary matches the known smooth Blum--Gladyshev (BG-0) lower bound, including the $Lb_2\Delta^3\varepsilon^{-6}$ and $L\Delta\sigma^2\varepsilon^{-4}$ stochastic terms, where $\Delta$ is the initial objective gap and $\sigma^2+b_2\|x-x_1\|^2$ bounds the variance. Thus unchanged SGD attains the minimax stochastic complexity in this second-moment class. For $p>2$, predictable localization and a Hilbert-space Fuk--Nagaev inequality yield a high-probability bound separating logarithmic variance and polynomial rare-shock contributions. The localization radius is derived from the recursion: no bounded-iterate assumption, clipping, normalization, momentum, or increasing batch size is needed. We also give increasing-confidence rates, an objective-gap-growth refinement recovering root-$T$ stationarity, and stochastic $L^p$-Lipschitz examples. The broad BG-0 optimality statement is distinguished from the smaller mean-square-smooth class, in which additional oracle structure permits faster algorithms.
arXiv:2609.36252v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Closed-form recourse moves a rejected user along the unit gradient $\hat g$ of the classifier score $f$ by the promised distance $d_p=|f(x)|/\|\nabla f(x)\|$, at which the linearized score reaches zero. We ask when this one-shot step succeeds and what additional model queries change. To leading order the step ends on the favorable side exactly when the path curvature $\kappa=\hat g^\top\nabla^2 f(x)\,\hat g$ is nonnegative. Across 80 shallow models, the fraction of rejected users whose step ends there and the fraction with $\kappa\ge0$ correlate at $r=0.985$, although on Fashion-MNIST the first falls below the second by 8.2 points on average. No rule that uses only the score value and gradient can be valid for every score with path curvature bounded by $K$ without overshooting some by order $Kd_p^2/\|\nabla f(x)\|$. When the curvature is also Lipschitz and the step is short, one evaluation of $f$ at the promised point attains the minimax rate among deterministic one-query rules that know the curvature bound and its Lipschitz constant, and split-conformal calibration makes such a rule reach the first crossing or abstain with probability at least $1-\delta$. Training with an asymmetric curvature penalty lets 99-100% of paths cross within the promised step on undershoot-prone shallow data, at about 4-22 times the overshoot of symmetric penalties (Fashion-MNIST, COMPAS). Because $\kappa$ and $d_p$ depend on how the score is scaled, part of this gain can be a longer promised step, and at matched validity a smaller audit of briefly trained models finds no uniform advantage over tuned inflation. Where a per-user line search along the ray is affordable, it is exact to grid resolution and preferable.
arXiv:2610.10415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models can generate expressive speech, but reliable inference-time emotion control remains challenging: prompts and reference audio offer coarse, inconsistent control, whereas specialized conditioning and model adaptation require costly training. We present SteerSpeech, a lightweight activation-steering framework that controls emotion by injecting steering vectors into hidden activations. For each target emotion we train a lightweight low-rank transform, using a multi-expert objective that encourages monotonic emotion control while preserving speaker identity and linguistic content, constraining steering drift, and keeping the TTS backbone frozen. To optimize through discrete speech tokens, we introduce a two-pass generation-and-replay pipeline using a straight-through estimator to backpropagate expert supervision through sampled tokens. At inference, a target-emotion steering direction is optimized with its respective transform and injected into the base TTS model. Objective and subjective evaluations with Qwen3-TTS across seen, unseen, and accented speakers show stronger continuous emotion control with limited speaker and content degradation. SteerSpeech achieves 1.08x-7.12x baseline target-emotion scores and for a representative emotion subjectively, it receives 78.1%-96.8% intensity preference and 1.43x-1.46x speaker-identity preservation at high steering strengths.
arXiv:2610.10407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As option markets grow and AI advances, agentic systems for option trading are gaining increasing attention. Language-model-based agents can reason over contextual information such as news, but option trading presents a particularly challenging decision problem: a single stock can have thousands of contracts, and the agent must decide both which contracts to trade and how to combine them. Existing approaches often sidestep this complexity by restricting the policy to a fixed strategy structure, such as a straddle, limiting their ability to switch strategies as market conditions change. We present SOTA (Stock Options Trading Agents), an agentic trading framework for structured option-strategy selection. SOTA abstracts the large option universe into strategy-level decisions while deterministic resolvers handle portfolio implementation. We develop SOTA by post-training Qwen3.8-27B with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. SOTA is evaluated on options on nine large-cap U.S. equities and SPY against rule-based and machine-learning strategy selectors in the same trading environment. Over a six-month out-of-sample period, SOTA earns an 18.3% total return with a Sharpe ratio of 1.60 and a maximum drawdown of 8.96%. We also document an asymmetric role of news: news improves frontier-teacher trajectories, but retaining news during reinforcement learning reduces out-of-sample return from 18.3% to -2.7%.
arXiv:2610.09328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-subject image generation requires rewards that verify whether requested attributes, actions, and relations hold for the specified reference subjects. Subject presence alone does not establish that the correct subjects participate in a requested interaction. We present reference-bound Visual Jev rewards that turn these visual decisions into generator training signals. Each subject-related question receives a positive label only when the requested condition and the relevant reference identities hold jointly. We construct fixed questions offline, train a Qwen3.5-4B verifier with binary supervision, and directly read Yes probabilities from its language-model head. Their mean supplies a GRPO reward while retaining individual judgments for inspection. Using 200 MICo-150K training tasks and 30 updates, the framework raises a GPT-5.4 composite score from 41.78 to 52.50 on a manually selected 897-task MICo-Bench subset; direct 27B rewards yield 51.84. Each reward is tested in one GRPO run, and offline human evaluation does not establish a statistically significant advantage over direct scoring. The study provides an initial implementation and evaluation of Visual Jev as a reference-bound reward for multi-subject image generation.
arXiv:2610.08872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study community recovery in the sparse symmetric stochastic block model with $q$ communities, average degree $d$ and signal strength $\lambda$ through statistical decision theory and Fisher information, and obtain three characterizations of the Kesten-Stigum threshold $d\lambda^2=1$ and of the information-computation gap below it. First, on each community-size profile the minimax risk of any class of rules closed under averaging and vertex relabeling equals its Bayes risk under the uniform prior; the posterior mean is the unique Bayes rule and is admissible, and the Bayes risk of degree-$D$ polynomial rules is the trivial risk times $1-\mathrm{Corr}_D^2$. Combined with known low-degree and information-theoretic results, this gives the gap as a worst-case statement: for $q\ge 5$ there is a window below the threshold in which no low-degree rule beats the trivial risk asymptotically, while an exponential-time rule does on a set of labelings of probability $1-o(1)$. Second, the Fisher information about $\lambda$ carried by cycle counts is a series with terms of order $k(d\lambda^2)^k$, convergent exactly when $d\lambda^2<1$; below the threshold the relative error of every unbiased cycle-based estimator of $\lambda^k$ stays above an explicit constant, and every cycle-count test has success probability bounded below one. Third, the derivative of belief propagation at its uninformative fixed point multiplies a random perturbation by $|\lambda|\sqrt{d}$ per iteration, and one EM step taken there leaves $\lambda$ unchanged. A signal-to-noise computation recovers the condition $d\lambda^{1/\chi}>1$ of Chin et al. for $q=n^\chi$ communities and identifies personalized PageRank as a walk count with suboptimal weights. Experiments on networks with up to $3\times 10^5$ vertices confirm the threshold for $q=2$, the hard window for $q=5$, and the many-community scaling.
arXiv:2610.10368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive computation aims to improve language-model inference by tailoring execution to each input. For layer programs, oracle evaluations use known answers to estimate the potential gain from this flexibility, before a practical selector is available. However, a gain from selection does not by itself explain why the chosen programs help. This study examines this distinction using 32 layer-skipping and repetition programs on two models and 4,413 multiple-choice items. The analysis compares their gains over a fixed action selected without the evaluation prompt with those of input-blind perturbations at the same sites, re-evaluating selections on another prompt. With shared option order, the controls give 10.2-11.8 and 15.6-19.4 percentage points of headroom on Qwen3-4B-Base and Llama-3.1-8B, exceeding the real programs' 9.0 and 10.1 in all three random-direction draws per model. They match answer-change rate only, and the ordering depends on the menu: in post hoc comparisons, real programs lead on Llama's repeat-only menu in every draw. A smaller KL-calibrated comparison, including an input-dependent control, favours real programs in point estimate, with inconclusive corrected tests. Fixed letter offsets produce headroom of similar scale. Rotating options sharply reduces both families' headroom, while leaving positive real-minus-control differences of 1.4-2.3 and 3.7-4.5 points; their magnitudes and statistical support depend on further adjustments and the reference. A supplementary generated-answer test finds that search-selected programs keep a 26.0-point advantage over programs selected for other problems after rewording, without a placebo comparison. These results show that substantial headroom can persist across prompts with shared option order without establishing a benefit specific to the selected layer computation; neither ordering against these controls identifies that benefit.
arXiv:2610.10085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training tensor-network compression replaces Transformer linear layers with Tensor Train (TT) or Tree Tensor Network (TTN) operators, but standard decompositions minimize weight-space Frobenius error rather than functional error under the layer's activation distribution. We propose Activation-aware Weight Tensorization (AWT), a training-free calibration wrapper that preconditions each weight matrix with a diagonal activation-derived scale before an unchanged TT/TTN solver and deploys the result with only an input-side elementwise rescaling. Across Llama 3.1 8B, Ministral 8B, and Qwen2.5 7B, AWT consistently improves vanilla TT/TTN tensorization at 2-6 times compression: under single-operator replacement, AWT closes 12-35% of the WikiText perplexity gap to the dense baseline across the three model families and 2-6 times compression settings; while under multi-operator Llama suffix replacement it closes 27-60% across attention-group and all-seven-matrix settings. The gains also transfer to downstream HellaSwag and ARC-Challenge evaluations. We further show that diagonal preconditioning is a robustness-modularity tradeoff rather than a diagonal-covariance assumption: a dense full-covariance oracle wins its own weighted objective in 80/81 cases, yet diagonal AWT gives better held-out functional fidelity in 53/81 cases. Together, these results position AWT as a principled, modular preconditioner for improving functional fidelity in fixed TT/TTN compression pipelines without modifying the decomposition solver.
arXiv:2610.09804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning is now central to eliciting reasoning in large language models, while in the popular algorithm Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) every token in a rollout receives the same advantage. We ask how to make process supervision efficient: accelerating convergence and improving final quality without the cost of value networks. We propose Bag-of-Tokens Group Relative Policy Optimization (BoT-GRPO), which extends GRPO to token-level reward models through a length-invariant "bag of tokens" aggregation: it collects all token-level rewards across rollouts, weights each by the inverse of its source sequence length, and computes per-token advantages relative to weighted group statistics. BoT-GRPO is critic-free, and is a drop-in replacement wherever GRPO is used when token-level reward is available. On React front-end code generation, BoT-GRPO reaches $80\%$ compile rate up to $1.9\times$ faster than GRPO and converges faster than modern GRPO variants (GSPO, DAPO, PURE) while reaching higher final compile and VLM-judged win rates. On a second task, AIME mathematical reasoning, BoT-GRPO delivers absolute Pass@$k$ gains up to $8.1\%$ over GRPO in half the steps. For both tasks we compare the algorithm's performance on reasoning vs. non-reasoning base-model families (Qwen2.5-3B, SmolLM3-3B, Phi-4-mini-reasoning). Our experiments also yield a practical recipe for the reward model itself: reward stability matters more than richness: clean, bounded, stable fine-grained signals consistently accelerate learning where noisier alternatives stall.
arXiv:2610.09577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study finite-horizon online resource allocation with i.i.d. requests and an endogenous Markov state on a finite state space: each action affects the transition of the state that governs future rewards and resource consumption. In this problem, a transient fluid LP benchmark upper bounds the expected reward of every nonanticipating policy, while a stationary LP supplies randomized state-dependent controls. We assume that the stationary LP has a unique optimum and identify primal nondegeneracy and irreducibility of the optimal induced kernel as important regularity conditions in this framework. With a known request prior, we show that, under nondegeneracy and irreducibility, both frequent and infrequent re-solving attain $O(1)$ regret. However, under a degenerate optimum, irreducibility yields the sharp worst-case $\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ rate for infrequent re-solving, while frequent re-solving can incur $\Omega(T)$ regret. Thus, more frequent optimization can perform asymptotically worse. With an unknown request prior, we develop a three-phase U-shaped infrequent re-solving policy that coordinates learning and inventory correction with $O(\log\log T)$ LP solves. When the optimal induced kernel is irreducible and the algorithm is given the optimal target state class and a constant-cost entrance policy, it attains $O(1)$ regret under nondegeneracy and $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret under degeneracy. Without the target-class information, linear minimax regret is unavoidable. Numerical experiments further illustrate the instability of round-by-round re-solving relative to epoch-wise infrequent re-solving, show that thresholding greatly mitigates its loss, and find that infrequent schemes remain dominant under both known and estimated priors.
arXiv:2610.09272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention routing requires a signal that predicts the value of attention on the current prefix. We evaluate whether hidden-state extrapolation error, curvature and error change improve this prediction beyond uncertainty, one-step displacement, position and state projections. Paired executions of the final attention layer supply signed next-token loss differences in frozen SmolLM3-3B-Base and Qwen3.5-4B-Base checkpoints. Utility-supervised routers are tested on 100 held-out PG-19 books at an identical causal 20 percent invocation quota. None of six prespecified comparisons shows a positive gain after familywise correction. In Qwen3.5, a parameter-matched fixed-projection control lowers NLL by 0.00356 nats/token relative to the trajectory router (95 percent interval 0.00218 to 0.00487). Secondary results depend on the operation removed, feature location and scoring horizon; frozen thresholds also drift substantially at longer horizons. Actual selected-query execution yields small long-sequence latency reductions with increased NLL, while learned routers remain slower during cached continuation. The study identifies limits on the incremental value of these trajectory summaries and separates allocation quality from measured inference benefit.
arXiv:2610.08882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FinVector-Market-4B adapts Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B with rank-16 LoRA on a 22,000-example corpus for structured financial tasks. We evaluate the base and adapted models on the same 600-example benchmark under implicit and explicit JSON-schema contracts. Supplying the schema alone raises base-model JSON validity from 0% to 91.3%. Under matched explicit prompting, the frozen scores improve from 14.7% to 40.0% for FinQA answer exact match, from 48.0% to 82.7% for calculator-expression correctness, from 20.1% to 89.5% for scenario branch-label agreement, and from 52.4% to 87.2% for implication-direction agreement. A post-hoc policy-scoring audit shows that the reported macro-F1 decline reflects a changing label set; using the same three target classes gives 77.4% for the base and 83.1% for the adapter. Filing overlap and calculator-target inconsistencies qualify the benchmark's generalization claims. The results show that compact financial domain adaptation can produce substantial task-specific gains beyond output-format learning under matched prompting, with gains bounded by the evaluated task distribution and prompt contract.
As option markets grow and AI advances, agentic systems for option trading are gaining increasing attention. Language-model-based agents can reason over contextual information such as news, but option trading presents a particularly challenging decision problem: a single stock can have thousands of contracts, and the agent must decide both which contracts to trade and how to combine them. Existing approaches often sidestep this complexity by restricting the policy to a fixed strategy structure, such as a straddle, limiting their ability to switch strategies as market conditions change. We present SOTA (Stock Options Trading Agents), an agentic trading framework for structured option-strategy selection. SOTA abstracts the large option universe into strategy-level decisions while deterministic resolvers handle portfolio implementation. We develop SOTA by post-training Qwen3.8-27B with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. SOTA is evaluated on options on nine large-cap U.S. equities and SPY against rule-based and machine-learning strategy selectors in the same trading environment. Over a six-month out-of-sample period, SOTA earns an 18.3% total return with a Sharpe ratio of 1.60 and a maximum drawdown of 8.96%. We also document an asymmetric role of news: news improves frontier-teacher trajectories, but retaining news during reinforcement learning reduces out-of-sample return from 18.3% to -2.7%.
arXiv:2605.06866v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study finite-iteration behavior of asynchronous categorical distributional temporal-difference methods, covering scalar categorical TD (CTD) in the Cram\'er geometry and multivariate signed-categorical TD (MTD) in the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) geometry. We establish high-probability guarantees under i.i.d. sampling and under a continuing Markovian trajectory. For CTD, the Cram\'er sample complexity to the true return law has leading term $\tilde O(\rho_{\min}^{-1}(1-\gamma)^{-2}\varepsilon^{-2})$ in the i.i.d. and $\tilde O(\mu_{\min}^{-1}(1-\gamma)^{-2}\varepsilon^{-2}+\mu_{\min}^{-1}t_{\mathrm{mix}})$ in the Markovian setting, without using variance reduction or data dropping. For MTD, the MMD sample complexity has leading terms $\tilde O(\rho_{\min}^{-1}(1-\gamma)^{-1-c}\varepsilon^{-2})$ and $\tilde O(\mu_{\min}^{-1}(1-\gamma)^{-1-c}\varepsilon^{-2}+\mu_{\min}^{-1}t_{\mathrm{mix}})$, where $c\in(0,2)$ is the homogeneity exponent of the MMD kernel, and they reduce to the CTD rates when $c=1$. These are, to our knowledge, the first finite-iteration rates for MTD. For undiscounted fixed-horizon policy evaluation, the same analysis applies to fixed-horizon versions of CTD and MTD under i.i.d. and episodic sampling, and the rates match the discounted ones with the effective horizon $(1-\gamma)^{-1}$ replaced by the horizon $H$ in the leading term. Matching minimax lower bounds show that the leading terms, and the implied $1$-Wasserstein rates, are optimal under i.i.d., Markovian, and episodic sampling. Together, these results provide a unified non-asymptotic analysis of asynchronous categorical distributional TD across scalar, multivariate, discounted, and fixed-horizon settings, with rates that are minimax optimal in their leading terms.
arXiv:2610.08341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent training-free pruning approaches for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) effectively cut computational overhead by exploiting visual redundancy or text-vision attention. However, they frequently suffer from semantic degradation due to their task-agnostic design or unreliable attention estimates. Based on our empirical analysis, we have found that this issue arises because salient tokens in shallow layers persistently suppress emerging semantic ones through numerical inertia, leading to premature discarding of signals crucial for deep reasoning. To address the aforementioned issue, from the task-oriented aspects, we first reformulate training-free pruning as a minimization of the distortion in the final task loss and derive a tractable, token-wise upper bound to serve as a surrogate objective. Specifically, this formulation inherently reveals a previously neglected inter-layer term that accounts for gradients across layers. Accordingly, for the implementation, we propose DIPrune, a rank-based framework that employs a dual importance scoring mechanism to jointly optimize intra-layer static feature saliency and inter-layer dynamic semantic evolution. Extensive experiments on LLaVA and Qwen-VL demonstrate that DIPrune consistently achieves state-of-the-art results.
arXiv:2610.08173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Program Repair (APR) with language models is usually evaluated by whether a generated patch passes the test suite, which can hide differences in maintainability, security, and computational cost. We propose a Weighted Quality Index (QI), inspired by the ISO/IEC 25010 software quality model, that combines functional correctness, maintainability, security, and generation efficiency under configurable weighting schemes. We evaluate three dense Qwen2.5-Coder models (3B, 7B, 14B) and the 16B-parameter DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model (2.4B active parameters) on 40 QuixBugs and 90 Defects4J bugs, all run locally on identical hardware to control for infrastructure effects. Model rankings change with the weighting scheme, showing that single-metric evaluation can hide trade-offs. The MoE model shows almost no statistically significant difference in correctness from the 7B and 14B dense models (McNemar's exact test) while using 3-6 times fewer active parameters, whereas correctness increases significantly across the three dense scales. These results suggest that active parameter count can be a more informative lens than total parameter count for sparse code models.
arXiv:2610.07816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models (SLMs) are attractive as local agent controllers because they reduce remote inference, latency, and deployment footprint, yet structured tool errors can cause an agent step to fail. Existing routers typically select a model once per query. However, agents expose sequential decision points whose difficulty dynamically changes based on intermediate observations. We propose STEPGATE, an uncertainty-aware handoff framework that scores each local SLM action and selectively escalates challenging steps to a stronger model. On a 52-task held-out single-step BFCL-derived test split, the Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B pair attains 82.7% task success with 30.8% escalation, versus 67.3% local-only and 75.4% random escalation (which uses 33.8% escalation). In a separate multi-turn evaluation, STEPGATE achieves 69.0% trajectory success and 84.0% action success using only 30.0% cloud actions, compared with 48.0%/70.5% local-only, 60.0%/78.2% random escalation, and 57.0%/77.1% query-level routing (strong-only achieves 82.0% trajectory success at 100% cloud actions). These results suggest that step-level escalation recovers a large share of the performance gap to the stronger Qwen2.5-7B backend at a matched cloud-action rate while transmitting fewer tokens remotely. However, our evaluation is limited to one model family, a single stronger backend, and scripted tasks. Furthermore, the test sets are small, multi-turn comparisons rely on paired intervals and statistical tests, and our risk tiers serve as research annotations rather than formal safety guarantees.
arXiv:2610.07737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study fair multi-armed bandits under the Nash Social Welfare (NSW) objective, which measures performance via the geometric mean of accumulated rewards. Existing work defines Nash regret as $\mathrm{NR}_T = \mu^\star - (\prod_{t=1}^T \mathbb{E}\mu_{I_t})^{1/T}$, where $\mu_{I_t}$ is the mean reward of the recommended arm $I_t$ and $T$ is the horizon. Since it applies the geometric mean to per-round marginal expectations, it ignores the joint distribution of rewards across rounds, leaving the NSW fairness motivation unaddressed at the trajectory level. We propose \emph{trajectory-wise Nash regret} $\widetilde{\mathrm{NR}}_T = \mu^\star - \mathbb{E}[(\prod_{t=1}^T \mu_{I_t})^{1/T}]$, which computes the geometric mean over complete sample paths before taking expectations, capturing NSW fairness more faithfully. By Jensen's inequality, $\widetilde{\mathrm{NR}}_T \geq \mathrm{NR}_T$, making it a strictly stronger metric. We also introduce \emph{high probability Nash regret} $\widehat{\mathrm{NR}}_T = \mu^\star - (\prod_t \mu_{I_t})^{1/T}$, giving the first high probability regret bounds in fair bandits. Our two-phase algorithm, Round Robin Nash Confidence Bound (\texttt{RR-NCB}), combines round robin exploration with a Nash confidence bound index policy. We show $\widetilde{\mathrm{NR}}_T \leq \widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{k\log T/T})$ and, with probability $1-\delta$, $\widehat{\mathrm{NR}}_T \leq \widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{k\log(kT/\delta)/T})$, matching the optimal $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{k/T})$ rate despite the stronger metrics. Optimality follows from a lower bound via AM-GM and standard $k$-armed bandit minimax arguments. Simulations validate our theory.
arXiv:2610.08129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperation with unfamiliar partners requires adapting to communication conventions that are not known in advance. We study this problem in a controlled Hanabi-derived environment with scripted hint generation, LLM-controlled receiving decisions, and frozen model weights. Across eight LLMs, linear probes recover intent conventions substantially more accurately than target conventions, yet receiving choices do not consistently agree with the sender's convention. We compare probe-predicted and ground-truth conventions presented either as general rules or as externally computed action recommendations. Rule statements yield modest and model-dependent changes in cooperation, whereas action translation produces larger gains on average. In a Qwen3-8B case study, matched-state statement reversals reveal much greater sensitivity to action recommendations than to rule statements. Activation transfers from oracle-action and non-oracle hint-restatement donors improve intent accuracy on both action classes, but the tested alternatives do not reliably reproduce these benefits. Together, these results distinguish convention decodability, sensitivity to convention information, and cooperative performance, and highlight limitations in turning available partner information into receiving decisions.
arXiv:2610.07444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A GUI agent decides which action to take and where to take it; we ask how a small grounding model should receive the action type. Fine-tuning Qwen2-VL-2B with LoRA on Android in the Wild, we compare a flat baseline with five ways of supplying the type under matched data, compute, and decoding: an auxiliary loss, a hard-routed action word, an additive learned embedding, a prepended learned token, and the type written into the prompt. With five seeds, an episode-clustered bootstrap, and seed-level paired tests, the ranking on a mixed stream is clear: the auxiliary loss, the additive embedding, and the prompt word each gain five to seven hit@0.10 points over the baseline, while hard routing and the prepended token are not distinguishable from it. Much of that gain is protection from a preprocessing choice of ours rather than a spatial prior. Our serializer clamps the off-screen touch point AITW records for type events to the origin; that class degrades the baseline's click grounding, and removing it lifts the baseline by nearly seven points, after which no mechanism's hit rate beats it and the intervals exclude a two-point effect, though the auxiliary loss still shortens the average miss; on a stream of taps and swipes none helps. Whether this generalizes beyond one serialization is open. For deployment, the pipeline's margin over the baseline with predicted rather than gold types is not established (+0.016, 95% interval [-0.017, +0.052]), and a wrong type collapses every model conditioned at inference. The prepended token does not help at the shared learning rate, where its rows barely move from initialization; trained ten times faster it reaches the level of the other three, with a margin three seeds do not establish. We also document a silent failure: injecting conditioning through inputs_embeds makes Qwen2-VL fall back to 1-D positions for image tokens, costing nine points.
Deepseek is close to raising at least $12 billion in a new funding round, Bloomberg reports. The article CATL and Tencent back Deepseek's ballooning funding round as the AI startup eyes a 2027 IPO appeared first on The Decoder .
Together AI has released Together Link, a free, MIT-licensed CLI that connects Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, and the Claude and ChatGPT desktop apps to open models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3. One install command sets it up, and an Auto router picks a model for each session. Together claims savings of over 50%. The post Meet Together Link: A Free CLI That Runs Open Models Like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 Inside Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Reflection AI has introduced Beam, its first open-weight model. It is a 501B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 23B active parameters, built for coding and agentic work. Reflection says it matches GLM-5.2 on reasoning with 3 to 4x less inference compute. Apache 2.0 weights are due later in October 2026. The post Reflection AI Introduces Beam: A 501B Open-Weight MoE Model With 23B Active Parameters for Coding and Agentic Workloads appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Nvidia-backed Reflection AI unveils Beam, its first open-weight model, which it says rivals GLM-5.2 on reasoning with far less inference compute. Weights are due this month.
Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results: Heatmap chart of accuracy on an addition prompt, colored from dark green (high) through yellow to dark red (low). Title: "What is {a} + {b}? Please write your answer in words. Do not include any other text or information, just the answer in words." Subtitle: 30 randomly selected pairs for each digit combination (n = 30 * 13 * 13 = 5070). X axis: Number of digits in a, 1 to 13. Y axis: Number of digits in b, 1 to 13. Legend: Accuracy, 1.00, 0.75, 0.50, 0.25, 0.00. Values by row, listed for a = 1 to 13. b = 13: 100%, 77%, 27%, 20%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 12: 97%, 80%, 80%, 40%, 23%, 20%, 7%, 13%, 20%, 27%, 67%, 63%, 3%. b = 11: 97%, 97%, 53%, 17%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 37%, 0%. b = 10: 100%, 90%, 47%, 20%, 7%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 7%, 0%. b = 9: 97%, 93%, 80%, 77%, 53%, 67%, 47%, 87%, 97%, 3%, 0%, 13%, 0%. b = 8: 93%, 87%, 53%, 43%, 7%, 0%, 0%, 13%, 87%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 7: 93%, 93%, 47%, 10%, 13%, 20%, 23%, 0%, 70%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 6: 100%, 100%, 100%, 83%, 97%, 97%, 23%, 0%, 53%, 3%, 0%, 10%, 0%. b = 5: 100%, 100%, 80%, 70%, 73%, 100%, 13%, 13%, 70%, 0%, 20%, 30%, 0%. b = 4: 100%, 100%, 93%, 100%, 60%, 97%, 20%, 50%, 67%, 53%, 40%, 40%, 40%. b = 3: 100%, 100%, 97%, 90%, 83%, 100%, 63%, 50%, 63%, 53%, 60%, 60%, 30%. b = 2: 100%, 100%, 90%, 97%, 93%, 100%, 93%, 83%, 90%, 83%, 87%, 87%, 83%. b = 1: 100%, 100%, 100%, 97%, 100%, 97%, 97%, 97%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 97%, 100%. I'm confident GPT-4o didn't cheat and use a calculator, especially since it got so many of the calculations wrong, but I was inspired to run the experiment again on local hardware (a DGX Spark) to explore the effect in a fully controlled environment. I pasted his image into a Codex Remote session (GPT-6 Astra) and had it run the same experiment using Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf . Here's the result for a run of 30 attempts per combination with reasoning disabled: Heatmap in the same layout as the previous chart, using an orange (low) to white to blue (high) color scale, showing much lower accuracy overall. Title: Addition in words — Qwen3.8 27B Q4_K_M. Subtitle: Reasoning disabled · 30 fixed pairs per ordered digit-length cell (n = 5,070). Overall numeric accuracy: 1,195 / 5,070 (23.57%). X axis: Number of digits in a, 1 to 13. Y axis: Number of digits in b, 1 to 13. Legend: Accuracy, 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%. Values by row, listed for a = 1 to 13. b = 13: 17%, 13%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 12: 53%, 20%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 11: 47%, 10%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 10: 70%, 27%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 13%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 9: 77%, 47%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 3%, 7%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 8: 53%, 20%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 7%, 13%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 7: 53%, 23%, 17%, 10%, 3%, 3%, 13%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 6: 60%, 60%, 33%, 10%, 53%, 47%, 7%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 5: 73%, 67%, 87%, 80%, 53%, 40%, 0%, 0%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 4: 83%, 93%, 90%, 93%, 53%, 13%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 3: 100%, 93%, 90%, 80%, 67%, 37%, 17%, 0%, 0%, 3%, 0%, 0%, 0%. b = 2: 100%, 100%, 93%, 90%, 77%, 77%, 43%, 50%, 63%, 43%, 40%, 13%, 23%. b = 1: 97%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 80%, 67%, 77%, 80%, 80%, 60%, 43%, 30%, 37%. Footnote: Colorblind-safe orange–blue scale; percentages provide a redundant non-color encoding. Then I ran it again with reasoning enabled. This took a lot longer per pair, so instead of running 30 samples per square I ran just one - which results in a much less visually appealing heatmap since each square is either 100% or 0%: Heatmap in the same layout as the previous charts, almost entirely blue. Title: Addition in words — Qwen3.8 27B — medium reasoning pilot. Subtitle: 1 fixed pair per ordered digit-length cell · easiest first (n = 169). X axis: Number of digits in a, 1 to 13. Y axis: Number of digits in b, 1 to 13. Legend: Accuracy, 1.00, 0.75, 0.50, 0.25, 0.00. Every cell shows 100% except two orange cells showing 0%: a = 2 with b = 8, and a = 12 with b = 9. It got the right answer in 167 out of 169 attempts, and since these were one-shot I'm confident a second run would produce different results here. Here's a version of the report that includes the reasoning traces from some of those larger calculations, which include text like this: Wait, let me redo this more carefully. 4,299,366,105,622 6,088,794,067,970 Let me align them: 4 2 9 9 3 6 6 1 0 5 6 2 2 6 0 8 8 7 9 4 0 6 7 9 7 0 Adding from right to left: Position 1 (units): 2 + 0 = 2 Position 2 (tens): 2 + 7 = 9 Position 3 (hundreds): 6 + 9 = 15, write 5, carry 1 Tags: mathematics , ai , generative-ai , local-llms , llms , qwen , llm-reasoning , dgx-spark
Alibaba's Qwen went from an invite-only chatbot in April 2023 to a 2.4-trillion-parameter open-weight model in August 2026. This is the full story, release by release: every major model, its key feature, and how its license changed. Each claim links to its source. The post The Story of Qwen: Alibaba’s AI Models From 7B to 2.4T appeared first on MarkTechPost .
arXiv:2606.07235v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering questions about long multimodal documents requires distributing a fixed evidence budget across relevant facets in text, tables, figures, and slides while avoiding near-duplicates. We present \flowreader, which formulates evidence selection as a single minimum-cost flow problem with capacity limits over a multimodal content graph. Spectral decomposition identifies latent aspects of query-relevant content and allocates the budget among them in proportion to their spectral energy. These capacity limits enforce aspect coverage during routing without requiring a language-model planning call. Query-conditioned costs prioritize chains of relevant, mutually consistent evidence. Decomposing the optimal flow produces short evidence chains, which a vision-language model reads in parallel and a reasoner reconciles. On VisDoMBench with Qwen3-VL-32B, \flowreader\ achieves the highest macro accuracy ($68.9$), surpassing the strongest prior system by $2.7$ points, leading on three of five subsets and attaining the highest worst-subset accuracy. It uses a measured $17.5$ content nodes per query and maintains its lead at $12.9$. Ablation studies with a fixed graph, scorer, reader, and judge show that cost design drives accuracy, capacity limits preserve it while using about three-quarters of the reader tokens required by shortest-path routing without these limits on the same network, and spectral aspects align with LLM-generated sub-questions without a planning call.
arXiv:2604.10800v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learned classifiers deployed in agentic pipelines face a fundamental reliability problem: predictions are probabilistic inferences, not verified conclusions, and acting on them without grounding in observable evidence leads to compounding failures across downstream stages. Software vulnerability analysis makes this cost concrete and measurable. We address this through a unified cross-language vulnerability lifecycle framework built around three LLM-driven reasoning stages-hybrid structural-semantic detection, execution-grounded agentic validation, and validation-aware iterative repair-governed by a strict invariant: no repair action is taken without execution-based confirmation of exploitability. Cross-language generalization is achieved via a Universal Abstract Syntax Tree (uAST) normalizing Java, Python, and C++ into a shared structural schema, combined with a hybrid fusion of GraphSAGE and Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B embeddings through learned two-way gating, whose per-sample weights provide intrinsic explainability at no additional cost. The framework achieves 89.84-92.02% intra-language detection accuracy and 74.43-80.12% zero-shot cross-language F1, resolving 69.74% of vulnerabilities end-to-end at a 12.27% total failure rate. Ablations establish necessity: removing uAST degrades cross-language F1 by 23.42%, while disabling validation increases unnecessary repairs by 131.7%. These results demonstrate that execution-grounded closed-loop reasoning is a principled and practically deployable mechanism for trustworthy LLM-driven agentic AI.
arXiv:2307.07113v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider the decentralized, stochastic nonconvex strongly-concave (NCSC) minimax problem with nonsmooth regularization terms on both primal and dual variables, wherein a network of $m$ computing agents collaborate via peer-to-peer communications. We consider when the coupling function is in expectation or finite-sum form and the double regularizers are convex functions, applied separately to the primal and dual variables. Our algorithmic framework introduces a Lagrangian multiplier to eliminate the consensus constraint on the dual variable. Coupling this with variance-reduction (VR) techniques, our proposed method, entitled VRLM, by a single neighbor communication per iteration, is able to achieve an $\mathcal{O}(\kappa^3\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity under the general stochastic setting, with either a big-batch or small-batch VR option, where $\kappa$ is the condition number of the problem and $\varepsilon$ is the desired solution accuracy. With a big-batch VR, we can additionally achieve $\mathcal{O}(\kappa^2\varepsilon^{-2})$ communication complexity. Under the special finite-sum setting, our method with a big-batch VR can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(n + \sqrt{n} \kappa^2\varepsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity and $\mathcal{O}(\kappa^2\varepsilon^{-2})$ communication complexity, where $n$ is the number of components in the finite sum. All complexity results match the best-known results achieved by a few existing methods for solving special cases of the problem we consider. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which provides convergence guarantees for NCSC minimax problems with general convex nonsmooth regularizers applied to both the primal and dual variables in the decentralized stochastic setting. Numerical experiments are conducted on two machine learning problems. Our code is downloadable from https://github.com/RPI-OPT/VRLM.
arXiv:2608.28007v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How much data must a fixed learner retain? Hanneke, Moran, Shlimovich and Yehudayoff (COLT 2025) posed this question for linear regression with the minimum-norm empirical risk minimizer. A selector sees a finite dataset $D\subseteq R^d\times R$, keeps at most $n$ examples with nonnegative weights, and $F_w(d,n)$ is the worst-case ratio between the full-data loss of the trained predictor and the optimal loss. The value is $\infty$ for $n<d$, $d+1$ at $n=d$ and $1$ for $n\ge2d$, and the regime $d<n<2d$ was left open. We settle several cases. For every $d$ we prove $F_w(d,2d-1)=1+1/d$, which confirms a claim stated without proof in the original note. We also prove $F_w(3,4)=5/3$, $F_w(4,5)=2$ and $F_w(4,6)=3/2$, the three smallest cells not covered by that formula. For every intermediate budget $n=d+k$ we prove the lower bound $F_w(d,d+k)\ge1+\Gamma_{d,k}$, where $\Gamma_{d,k}$ is an explicit harmonic quantity over balanced partitions of $d$. This bound is the exact minimax value on the class of datasets whose whitened systems split into orthogonal circuit blocks. All proved values equal $1+\Gamma_{d,k}$, and we conjecture that this holds throughout the open regime. Our upper bounds combine a rigidity theorem for positive spanning configurations of loss gradients with normal forms of the small positive bases in $R^3$ and $R^4$. These forms are special cases of the classification of Cornaz, Kerleau and Royer; we also control all gradients outside the basis. A dimension-free extremal-basis argument converts sign-cone geometry into selections of $d+1$ points. Explicit counterexamples rule out several shorter routes. Every upper bound is constructive, with selection procedures polynomial in the number of points for fixed dimension. Every numerical claim about a specific instance is an exact rational or algebraic identity, recomputed in exact arithmetic in the supplementary material.
arXiv:2610.02290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study considers the problem of portfolio choice, where we recommend a portfolio to an investor to maximize the expected utility of their wealth. Our goal is to construct an asymptotically optimal portfolio choice rule in terms of expected utility regret, the difference between the expected utility of an oracle investor and that achieved by a portfolio chosen from data. We propose the Expected Utility Regret (EUR) rule, which jointly selects a portfolio class and estimates its weights. In a regular parametric return model, a single EUR rule attains both the minimax and the Bayes lower bounds, including their leading constants, without using the prior distribution that defines the Bayes criterion. We then derive the mean--variance and risk-parity portfolios as special cases of this framework. Under smooth increasing and concave utility, the EUR rule and the sample mean--variance portfolio attain the same leading expected regret when expected excess returns approach zero sufficiently fast. When the returns divided by their volatilities have a joint distribution that does not depend on the order of the assets, the EUR rule and the risk-parity portfolio coincide.
Cantina Security, with Yeta Labs, has released apex-flash-1, an open-weights model trained specifically for vulnerability research. It is a reinforcement learning fine-tune of Z.ai’s GLM-5.3-Flash, released on Hugging Face under the MIT license. Is it deployable? Yes, the MIT weights serve on vLLM, SGLang or Transformers, but BF16 needs roughly 640 GB of GPU memory. […] The post Can an Open Model Do Security Research? Cantina’s apex-flash-1 Solves 40 of 60 Held-Out Bug Tasks appeared first on MarkTechPost .
A Telegram bot that generates AI videos from text prompts or images. Supports 8 top models including Kling, Runway, Seedance, Veo, Wan, Hailuo, MiniMax, and Grok. No desktop software needed - just chat with the bot and get videos in seconds. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49952489 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
AWS's Strands Agents team released Strands Decider 2B, an Apache-2.0 decision model built on Qwen3.5-2B-Base. It returns choices, yes/no probabilities and scores with calibrated confidence in one forward pass, never text. It runs at a 115 ms median on an RTX 3090 and scores 0.723 on the JevBench public set, which makes it a fast local option for routing, tool selection and guardrails in AI agents. The post AWS Strands Labs Releases Strands Decider 2B: An Open Source Decision Model That Picks Options in About 115 ms appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Prime Intellect has launched Prime Inference, an OpenAI-compatible platform for serving frontier open models on NVIDIA Blackwell. Its GLM-5.3 deployment uses Dynamo, vLLM and NVFP4 KV compression to serve 66 sessions per prefill group at 101 tok/s per user. The post Prime Intellect Launches Prime Inference: Serverless and Reserved Serving for Frontier Open Models appeared first on MarkTechPost .
DeepSeek has released official macOS and Windows desktop apps for DeepSeek Harness v0.2, its MIT-licensed agent harness. The preview adds a plugin manager, file and code-change review, and scheduled Automation Tasks. It also supports non-DeepSeek models through OpenAI-compatible endpoints. The post DeepSeek Harness v0.2 Brings Official Desktop Apps to Its Open-Source Agent Harness appeared first on MarkTechPost .
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Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Are minds patterns from a Platonic space, with bodies and machines as their interfaces, Michael Levin asks:…A mind-bending paper asking us to reconsider basic assumptions about […]
Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev , their first example of a new category of model that they are calling "System One models" (I'm with Maggie Appleton, I think "decision models" is a better name for these). Jev is an interesting variant on the usual LLM format: it still accepts text inputs, but instead of text output it returns floating point numbers corresponding to categories, yes/no questions, ratings, and associated confidence scores. TypeSafe describe Jev like this: Think of Jev as a frontier-intelligence function call: unstructured state in, typed probabilistic decisions out. It's also very fast, and really cheap . Regular LLMs are priced in terms of input and output tokens, with output generally charged at significantly higher rates. Jev charges only for input - output is free - and the input price of their first model is $0.042 per million tokens - cheaper even than OpenAI's GPT-5 Nano ($0.05/million). Jev lets you ask questions about text or semi-structured data. You compose a "state" object containing a string, array of strings, or set of name-value pairs - this might describe an article, or a customer, or any other kind of record. You then send that to their API with one or more questions, and get a reply back for each. You can ask three kinds of questions: Yes/No questions, which Jev calls "Noul" questions - their CEO confirmed on Hacker News that this is short for Bernoulli, from the Bernoulli distribution . You pose a statement and get back a floating point number between 0 and 1 for how confident the model is that the statement is true. Choice questions, where the model picks one from a set of provided options - actually a confidence score plus a probability distribution across all of the options. Score questions, where you provide sequence of numeric levels with descriptions and it provides a floating point score somewhere along that range. The Jev API can accept a single document ("state") and as many questions as you can cram into the context window. Questions are evaluated in parallel, so sending many questions should take a similar time to sending just one. The Jev 1.13 jaggedness documentation offers useful guidance as to Jev's strengths and weaknesses. It's currently not great with numbers, dates, or "adversarial content". I think the decision model framing is useful for understanding where to use Jev. It's great for anything that can be expressed as a classification task - think spam detection, suggesting labels, prioritization and ranking. I've also been experimenting with it for search reranking, where you fetch 100 likely matches using an inexpensive algorithm like BM25, then have Jev score those 100 candidates for relevance against the original query. Black boxes are back in fashion Something I've found a little uncomfortable about Jev is how it very much represents a regression even further towards black box machine learning systems. LLMs are black boxes already - you can ask them to justify their decisions, but you can't guarantee that what they say is useful or accurate. Jev doesn't even give you that: put in all the text you want, the only thing you're going to get back is a floating point number. If Jev marks something as spam, which content signals tipped it off? This also means that concerns about bias should be front and center. I really hope nobody uses Jev to rank job applicants - that floating point number could conceal all manner of unseen bias baked into the models, and experimentally picking that bias apart is going to be a tricky business. (I tried one experiment where I had Jev score every city in the San Francisco Bay Area on a yes/no answer to whether they were a "Good city?" - it rated Cupertino top and East Palo Alto bottom. Huh.) In practice, this all means that evals and structured experiments are even more important than they are for regular LLM projects. Thankfully, Jev is so cheap that running hundreds or even thousands of experimental prompts through it costs just a few cents. Unconventional uses for Jev It's been really fun watching the wider community come up with potential use-cases for Jev over the past few days. Here are some creative ones that caught my eye: jevchat by Kyle Pena turns Jev into a (terrible) chat model. "At every step it asks Jev one question: Given the user's question and the reply written so far, which symbol comes next?". ericpruitt on Hacker News : "It's the digital equivalent of Morty speaking with the death crystal". jev-leftpad by Fatih Kadir Akın implements left-pad with the prompt "How many spaces are needed before value to reach targetLength?" and a choice query allowing options from "0 spaces are needed" to "10 spaces are needed". jev-2048 by Andy Gayton uses Jev to play the 2048 sliding puzzle game . Open weight recreations There's also been a flurry of projects attempting to create a model like Jev using on top of open weight models. Kev is one interesting example, using Qwen 3.5 to produce 0.8B, 4B, and 9B models. Here's the accompanying Hacker News thread , where someone linked to a JevBench benchmark that has already cropped up to compare "Jev-class decision models". Given Jev was released just under a week ago, the amount of activity around it is extremely impressive. Using Jev from LLM Update 22nd September 2026 : I released llm-typesafe , a plugin that adds support for Jev to my LLM CLI tool and Python library. Basic usage looks like this: llm -m jev ' Please refund my last payment. ' \ -s ' Does this message explicitly request a refund? ' See the README for examples of other query types. Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , evals , ai-bias , jev
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube ; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk. And as an annotated presentation : 2026 in LLMs (so far) Simon Willison WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, 25th September 2026 # I'm going to give a lightning tour of everything that has happened so far in 2026. The year isn't over yet! November 2025 # For me, 2026 started a couple of months earlier in November 2025. The November 2025 inflection point Claude Opus 4.5 GPT-5.1 # November saw the release of two important models: Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1. As is usually the case with new models, these were incremental improvements on the models that came before them. But every now and then when a model improves, it crosses an invisible line where something that didn't really work starts working. In this case, the thing that started working was their coding agents. Claude Code had been around since February 2025; Codex was a little younger. These two new models, when paired with their respective coding agent harnesses, improved from "often make mistakes" to "reliable enough to use on a day-to-day basis". "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle". The Claude Opus 4.5 one has a very weird shaped frame and the pelican looks like a duck. The GPT-5.1 has a slightly better but still broken bicycle frame and a slightly better pelican beak, but both are pretty terrible. # For a couple of years now I've been evaluating new models by asking them to "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle". It's probably the world's stupidest benchmark - there's only so much you can learn from it. But it's still a challenge for models, because drawing pelicans is difficult, drawing bicycles is difficult, and pelicans can't ride bicycles in the first place. Here's the state of the art for November. Claude still couldn't really draw a bicycle! The GPT-5.1 bicycle frame is pretty crap too. November 24th 2025 - the first commit to steipete/Warelay. A GitHub commit adding an MIT license file. # Also in November, we had the first commit to an obscure GitHub repository called "Warelay". We'll come back to this repository shortly. January # And then there were the December holidays, and individual developers took some time off and many started tinkering with these new coding agent model combinations... and it began to dawn on us quite how much they could do that they couldn't do before. Come January, a lot of us were quite excited to start putting this stuff into action. New year’s resolution for 2026 Every previous year: Take on less new projects, focus on the most important things in my existing projects # Every year I set myself a New Year's resolution, and for as long as I can remember it's been the same thing: stay focused. Take on less new projects. Try to get things done in the projects I already have. 2026: Be more ambitious. Take on as many new projects as I want. # This year I decided that since that had never worked before, I'd go the other way. We've got coding agents now, let's see what they can do. I'm going to take on as many new projects as I like! (You can ask me at the end of the year if this turned out to be a good idea or not. I have a lot of plates spinning right now.) "Be more ambitious" has been something of a theme for the year, because the only way to find the limits of this technology is to keep on pushing them until they don't work. Predictions for 2026 It will become undeniable that LLMs write good code We're finally going to solve sandboxing A “Challenger disaster” for coding agent security Kakapo parrots will have an outstanding breeding season (only 236 in the world!) ... the Pope will weigh in on LLMs and their economic impact on the world # I also went on the Oxide and friends podcast with Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to share predictions for the next year (and three and six years). With hindsight, my LLM predictions were pretty unambitious. I said "it will become undeniable that LLMs write good code" - I think we're there now. I predicted we would finally solve sandboxing. I counted and around 40 of the 277 sessions at this conference touched on sandboxing or agent security in some way, so we're at least putting a lot of effort into that! I predicted "a Challenger disaster" for coding agent security. There's certainly been a whole lot of noise around agent security this year, though the exact disaster I predicted (with coding agents being hijacked and causing real-world economic damage) hasn't really played out. We threw in a joke prediction that the Pope would weigh in on the economic impact of LLMs. A photograph of a beautiful green New Zealand parrot. Photo credit Kimberley Collins. # I also predicted that New Zealand's Kākāpō parrots would have an outstanding breeding season this year. These are flightless nocturnal parrots. They're kind of dumpy looking, I think they're beautiful, and there were only 236 of these parrots in the world at the start of the year. Kākāpō only breed when the Rimu trees have a big fruiting season, and that hasn't happened in four years... but this year the Rimu fruit were looking excellent. Photo by Kimberley Collins . Deep Blue Coined by Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill That feeling of AI induced ennui where software engineers get listless because the AI can do anything # Also on that podcast, we coined a term (full credit to Adam) for "that feeling of AI induced ennui where software engineers get listless because the AI can do anything". We called it Deep Blue . This has been a major theme throughout the year, and was touched on by several speakers at this conference. As a software engineer, I've never had a year of my career where everything has changed so quickly and so dramatically. A lot of what I've been doing this year is trying to come to terms with that and what that means for my own profession. AI mania Screenshots of the micro-javascript and pwasm GitHub README files. # Also in January, I suffered from what I'm calling AI mania . This is not the same thing as AI psychosis . With AI mania, any time your agent isn't building something for you feels like wasted time. You're losing sleep because you could be staying up later getting your agents to do stuff. My AI mania presented itself in some ridiculously over-ambitious projects. I built a JavaScript interpreter entirely in Python , vibe-ported from MicroQuickJS by Fabrice Bellard. Then I built a WebAssembly runtime in Python as well . These projects were quite useful, in that they sort of cured me of my AI mania... because after I built these things, I got to look at them and ask "does the world need a slow, buggy, half-baked Python JavaScript interpreter?" I don't think the world does. micro-javascript playground 3 Execute JavaScript code in a sandboxed micro-javascript environment powered by Pyodide A web UI with some JavaScript code, and a "Run Code" button, and an output panel. # I did get this out of it: https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html Previous screenshot, with this text overlaid: JavaScript running in Python running in Pyodide running in WebAssembly running in JavaScript # This page runs my JavaScript interpreter built in Python, running in Python using Pyodide , which is Python compiled to WebAssembly, running in JavaScript, running in a browser. It's a beautiful stack of horrors. I've been having a lot of fun with WebAssembly this year. Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot →🦞 OpenClaw Screenshot of the dates that these changes happened. # By the end of January, that repository we saw start in November had renamed itself, first to CLAWDIS, then CLAWDBOT, then Moltbot, and finally to OpenClaw. Same screenshot, an overlay reads: 8,330 commits in just under two months (it’s at 100,141 today) # At this point OpenClaw had 8,300 commits, less than two months after the project had started. I looked today and it's over 100,000 commits now! This is the most vibe-coded piece of software in existence. (Here's how I generated that list of name changes .) Generic term: Claw # This kicked off the OpenClaw revolution. It effectively defined a new category of software. There's a generic term for this which I really enjoy. We call software like this a "Claw". There's OpenClaw, NanoClaw , IronClaw , PicoClaw ... Today they're being rebranded as "personal agents" or "general agents", but I still like to think of them as Claws. Photo of a Mac mini An aquarium for your Claw # The Apple stores in the Bay Area sold out of Mac Minis because so many people were buying Mac Minis to run OpenClaw! Drew Breunig said that this is because your OpenClaw is a digital pet, and you buy a Mac mini as an aquarium to keep your claw in, which is kind of delightful. Screenshot of Moltbook - a social network for AI agents # Also in January, we had this website. This was MoltBook , a social network for AI agents, where the idea was that you send your Claw to go and talk to all of the other Claws, because what could possibly go wrong if you did that? The website launched on Thursday. It blew up on Friday . It was profiled by the New York Times on Monday . And by Tuesday, everyone had forgotten it existed as it drowned in a deluge of slop and spam. Facebook/Meta bought it a month later . February # In February, a company called StrongDM described what they called their Software Factory. StrongDM’s Dark Factory Justin McCarthy, Jay Taylor, Navan Chauhan Software Factories and the Agentic Moment # They wrote about this in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment . I posted my own notes at the time, having seen their demo in person back in October. Dan Shapiro called this approach the Dark Factory , after the idea that if your factory is sufficiently automated you can turn the lights out, because you don't even need to see what's going on. StrongDM presented two rules for software development that they'd been following since July last year. “Rule 1: Code must not be written by humans” # The first was code must not be written by humans . Any code that you write has to have been routed through a coding agent. This sounded radical in February, but I imagine there are a lot of people in this room who are pretty much living that today. “Rule 2: Code must not be reviewed by humans” (!) # Rule number two was code must not be reviewed by humans . You're not allowed to read the code! This continued to be a huge topic for much of this year. Many of the sessions at this event have been about code review and how you can get away with this. What I found interesting about StrongDM is that they were living six months ahead of the rest of us, and they'd been exploring what it means to build software, not read the code, but still be confident that the software is of high quality. What can you do with these agents to help verify their work? StrongDM are a security company, and they had people with decades of experience on this project. They were very much exploring the edges of what's possible and responsible to do with this stuff. Headline on New Zealand's Department of Conservation website: First kakapo chick in four years hatches on Valentine's Day. It's a grey fluffy ball. # Also in February: First kākāpō chick in four years hatches on Valentine's Day . Breeding season is off to a good start! 19th February 2026 Gemini 3.1 Pro A surprisingly good illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle. # Also in February... Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro . That's a pretty great pelican riding a bicycle! It's got the chain in the right place, it's got feet on both sides. There's a little fish in the basket. @JeffDean on Twitter - a video comparing Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro. # And then Google's Jeff Dean tweeted a video comparing Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro that featured an animated pelican riding a bicycle, a frog on a penny-farthing, a giraffe driving a tiny car, an ostrich on roller skates, a turtle kickflipping a skateboard, and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine. This was frustrating, because my protection for the pelican riding the bicycle test was always "if they draw a perfect pelican on a bicycle, I'll ask for some other animal on something else." Google trained for all forms of animals on all forms of transport! They've defeated my benchmark at this point. Three headlines: Meta Makes AI Adoption a Formal Part of Performance Reviews Not just engineers writing code, Microsoft wants almost every employee to use Al Dara Khosrowshahi: 90% of Uber engineers now use AI in daily workflows # The other thing that started in February was Tokenmaxxing . We had headlines about Meta making AI adoption a formal part of performance reviews, and Microsoft wanting every employee to use AI, and Uber boasting that 90% of their engineers were using AI workflows. More headlines: Meta Plans to Crack Down on Employee Token Use: Information Microsoft Tells Engineers: Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months # Then a few months later we have Meta cracking down on token use, Microsoft saying tokenmaxxing is "not what we are optimizing for", and Uber capping employee AI spending. So tokenmaxxing went straight up and then straight back down again - because it turns out the agents are expensive . Last year it was difficult to spend more than $50 on AI tokens, because we didn't have anything interesting to do with them. Then agents blew up, and now you can actually spend $1,000 in a day doing real work. This is also the reason that Anthropic's valuation skyrocketed to maybe a trillion dollars. AI appears to have hit product market fit in 2026, primarily through coding agents. March # In March, we hit peak OpenClaw. March: peak OpenClaw Photos of people in china queuing up to install OpenClaw, with big fluffy lobsters. # These photographs are from China, where companies hosted OpenClaw install parties which saw non-tech-nerds queueing up around the block for help getting Claws installed on their personal devices. I think this proved real market demand for this class of Claws, or personal AI agents. It turns out regular people really do want a weird little AI agent that can do useful things on their behalf. A Claw is really just a coding agent wearing a less threatening hat. Under the hood they work much the same way - writing and then executing code on your computer to get stuff done. The race was on to be the first to build a safe Claw - a Claw you could give to regular human beings where they wouldn't instantly shoot themselves in the foot. Meta's Muse came out three weeks ago and is currently at the top of the free charts on the iPhone App Store. It appears to be taking off with consumers. I'm not yet convinced you can't shoot yourself in the foot with Muse, but I guess we'll find out for sure pretty soon. Photos from How the OpenClaw Frenzy Is Testing China’s AI Commitment (March 29th) and The Enthusiasm and Anxiety Behind China’s OpenClaw Craze (April 8th, 2026). April # In April, we had a model release where the model wasn't actually released. Simon Willison’s Weblog - screenshot of the post "Anthropic’s Project Glasswing—restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers—sounds necessary to me" from April 7th 2026 # Anthropic announced their new Claude Mythos model, and then said it was too dangerous to release beyond a trusted group of security researchers. Mythos was really, really good at hacking things. The "it's too dangerous" marketing ploy has been played by AI companies dating all the way back to GPT-2 . Anytime an AI company says we've built something that's "too dangerous", it's natural to be a bit skeptical. I found the Mythos claims credible, because I'd seen how good coding agents had got at finding regular bugs. I wrote about that in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing—restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers—sounds necessary to me . With hindsight... yeah, the models had got really good at finding vulnerabilities! 16th April 2026 Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Opus 4.7 Qwen's pelican has a correct bicycle frame and a good beak. Opus 4.7's bicycle frame is still junk. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a 20.9GB file that runs on my laptop # Another key trend in 2026 has been a dramatic improvement in the abilities of open weight models, including models that you can run on a laptop. On the 16th of April I ran the new Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop, and it drew me a better pelican riding a bicycle than Anthropic's brand new Claude Opus 4.7 did! Opus 4.7 drew a crap bicycle. Qwen on my laptop made a bicycle that was the correct shape, and a pretty decent pelican too! That's from a 21GB file running on my laptop. Now a flamingo on a unicycle. The Qwen one is visibly better than the Opus 4.7 one - the Qwen one is wearing sunglasses and looks a bit like it's smoking a cigarette. # The Qwen pelican was so good that I was suspicious they might have cheated, so I had it do a flamingo riding a unicycle as well. Again, it handily beat Claude Opus 4.7. The local model releases this year have been absolutely extraordinary. May # In May... the Pope got involved. 25th May 2026 The HOLY SEE ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE # In our podcast episode back in January we'd predicted that the Pope would say something about AI. In May, Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical letter on "safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence". Here are my notes on that document . Wikipedia article on Rerum novarum Rerum novarum is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII 15 on May 1891. # With hindsight, this shouldn't have been a surprise at all. Our current Pope's name is Leo XIV, because when he named himself he chose his papal name after Leo XIII - the Pope who wrote an encyclical about the Industrial Revolution back in 1891. Rerum novarum was an extremely influential piece of Catholic theology that indirectly led to us having the five-day work week. When our new Pope came in, he named himself after Pope Leo XIII because he expected that he would need to write about the AI revolution in a similar way. Our joke podcast prediction was junk, because this was always going to happen. Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig on Twitter I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen. May 25 # One of Anthropic's co-founders, Christopher Olah, was present for the Pope's event announcing the new encyclical. Corey Quinn noted that: getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen. @maciejmensfeld We're dealing with a major malicious attack on right now. Signups are paused for the time being. Hundreds of packages involved - mostly targeting us, but some carrying exploits. The team has been on this for hours. More details to follow once we're through it. 4:39 AM - May 12, 2026 - 687.6K Views # Meanwhile, in May, RubyGems announced that they were under attack. Parties unknown were uploading thousands of dubious packages to the RubyGems server, such that they had to shut down user registrations . Let's take that one and put it on a pile of mysteries to figure out later. June # In June... Claude Fable 5 came out! We got a version of Mythos that has been neutered, so that it wouldn't help us hack into systems or build biological weapons. 9th June 2026: Claude Fable 5 Five pelicans riding bicycles, from low to max thinking levels. The xhigh one looks particularly good. # Fable was pretty good at drawing pelicans on bicycles! The frames are a good shape, the pelicans look like pelicans. The legs are often incorrectly on the same side of the bicycle, but generally these are pretty great compared to what came before. They were pretty expensive - 30 cents and 72 cents for the best ones. Fable class models If you can define a goal, provide unambiguous instructions, and provide access to necessary tools They can solve your problem with brute force # Most importantly though, this was our first public glimpse of what I think of as a Fable class model . Today we have more of these, such as GPT-6 Astra. These are models where if you can clearly define the goal for what you want to build, and provide unambiguous instructions about the constraints around that goal, and give the model access to the necessary tools to achieve that goal... they will solve your problem effectively through brute force. On the one hand, this looks like a direct threat to us software engineers - because it means that the models can build effectively any piece of software you can define in this way. Look a bit closer though and you'll note that defining goals, providing unambiguous instructions, and figuring out the right tools... is kind of what software engineering is . It takes a lot of experience and skill to do this well. If you can do it well, you've now got superpowers. This helped me a little bit with my Deep Blue feelings: the realization that there's still a lot of skill to be had in driving models that get this good. A new form of AI mania... Fable is available on subscription plans “until June 22nd” # This also introduced a new burst of AI mania, because Anthropic told us that Fable was available on our subscription plans until June the 22nd. That gave us less than two weeks of Fable access before the price went up. I was losing sleep again. I was rescheduling things so that I'd have more time with Fable. I was all-in to get as much as I could out of this model. 12th June 2026: no more Claude Fable 5 Anthropic website: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Jun 12, 2026 # And then the US government shut it down , just three days after Fable came out. The US government, citing national security, declared an "export control directive". They announced this on a Friday evening, and a few hours later Fable was no longer available. I had to find something else to do with my weekend! ... asked Fable 5, Mythos, and Opus to “review the code for security issues.” Fable 5 refused. They then asked the models to “fix this code” ... Katie Moussouris # We later found out from Katie Moussouris what had happened. Some Amazon security researchers had found that you could prompt Fable to "review the code for security issues" and it would refuse... but if you prompted it to "fix this code" it would still identify and then patch the problems. "Fix this code" was the prompt that got Fable shut down! Screenshot of a page from a report showing a list of weird account names making weird edits to a German wiki. # Also, in June, an obscure German-language game developer wiki that had sat fallow for around 20 years got a surprising influx of edits from accounts with names like "AgentOpenAIProbe" and "AgentOpenAISep7", editing pages and leaving weird messages to each other. We'll stick that on the pile of mysteries for later. Medicare Item Reports interface on the Australian Government's Medicare Statistics website. # Also, the Australian government's Medicare Item Reports service started getting suspicious traffic, which broke through various preventive protections and accessed data that it wasn't supposed to. Another one for the mystery pile! July # Fable returned on 1st July GPT-5.6 came out on 9th July | Fable lost 18 out of 30 days in the top spot # Fable returned on the first of July. It was clearly the best model in the world for a glorious eight days... and then OpenAI came out with GPT-5.6 on the 9th of July. This might not have been quite as good as Fable, but it was within spitting distance. It was definitely a Fable class model. This is an important lesson for the industry at large. When you release the best model in the world, it's going to get knocked off that pedestal pretty quickly. The competition is so fierce that you won't get a long time at the top. This means that if you market your model as world ending, to the point that a government shuts you down , it's really bad for business! Fable had 30 days as definitely the best model, and for 18 of those days it wasn't available because it'd been shut down by the government. So maybe step back on the world-ending marketing if you don't want to lose revenue for 60% of the time that you're on top! GPT-5.6 Pelicans in a grid showing 5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna against reasoning levels High, XHigh, and Max. They are all pretty good efforts. # Here are the GPT-5.6 pelicans . They're all pretty good now! The Luna ones are notable because they're really cheap - the cheapest good looking pelican here is probably the one that costs 4.3 cents. So despite this benchmark being utterly stupid, you can still learn quite a lot about models within the same family by comparing their prices and timing for different reasoning levels. July 18th: malicious miflow-ui PyPI package Screenshot of an OSV security report. # Also in July: some malicious unknown party uploaded a malicious package called mlflow-ui to the Python Package Index. Add that to the pile. Hugging Face Security incident disclosure — July 2026 Published July 16, 2026 # On July the 16th, Hugging Face announced a security incident where an autonomous agent system, source unknown, had breached Hugging Face and was poking around in places it shouldn't. OpenAI: OpenAl and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation Anthropic: Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations # A few days later, on July 21st, OpenAI confessed that it was them . OpenAI use a training technique called Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards - it's the same technique used by everyone else now, and is the reason we have models that are so good at coding, and mathematics, and finding security holes. While the model is being trained, you run exercises to see how good it is - and the strongest performers get their weights reinforced for the next round. It's like an evolutionary process that you run. OpenAI had been running security exercises in a sandbox, and those agents had found holes in the sandbox itself, broken out, and were attacking Hugging Face to try to find ways to solve otherwise impossible problems. (I've been collecting more about this on my openai-hugging-face-incident tag.) Nine days later, Anthropic effectively said "our models can do this as well!". They had looked through their own training logs and found evidence that their own agents had broken containment during training - and were responsible for the PyPI package we saw earlier, among other things . So now we've got both Anthropic and OpenAI with rogue agents running around the internet doing things that they should not be doing. August # In August, I got one of my best pelicans yet. And it was generated on my laptop! Qwen 3.8 27B - 17GB, 21 minutes... It's really good. Beautiful pelican. Correctly shaped bicycle. Legs either side of the frame. # This was Qwen 3.8 27B, running on my laptop . It's only a 17GB download. Admittedly, this pelican took 21 minutes to generate. That's because Qwen 3.8 27B defaults to running in "high" reasoning mode - a terrible default which produces great results but takes way too much time thinking about them. You can dial that down and you'll get a slightly worse pelican a lot faster. Qwen 3.8 27B was the first time I ran a model on my laptop which felt almost competitive with what was going on on the frontier, at least in terms of Pelican SVGs (which everyone needs, of course). This is an extraordinary model. If you're going to play with any local model, this is the one that I'd start with. The things that this can do with just a 17 GB file feel impossible. I thought I'd have to wait five years and spend ten thousand dollars on hardware to get results even half as good as this one. Tweet by @simonw New hobby: prototyping video games in 60 seconds using a combination of GPT-3 and DALL-E Here's "Raccoon Heist" GPT-3 playground prompt: Write a detailed product description of a computer game where a team of raccoons go on heists GPT-3 response: In "Raccoon Heist", you and your team of thieving ~~ o raccoons are tasked with pulling off a series of daring heists. From robbing banks to stealing priceless art, no job is too big or too small for your furry crew. You'll need to use your wits and your skills to avoid the police and make a clean getaway with the loot. With exciting gameplay and a charming cast of characters, "Raccoon Heist" is the perfect game for anyone looking for a light-hearted caper Plus an image of some almost isometric raccoons sneaking past a bin. 11:45 AM - Aug 5, 2022 # In August, I also started playing with game development. Four years ago, back in August 2022, I tweeted out an experiment where I'd used GPT-3 and the original DALL-E to write a paragraph long description of a computer game and then turn that into concept art. My prompt to GPT-3 back then was: Write a detailed product description of a computer game where a team of raccoons go on heists In August 2026 I decided to drop just the screenshots from that tweet into a coding agent and see what it could do with them. Night 5 Clear Rank: TRASH PANDA The crew banked 595 in shiny loot (goal 560). Word on the street: an even bigger score tomorrow... # Here's what I got from Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code . It's pretty good! It's definitely a game, you're a raccoon, you run around a backyard gathering treasure and avoiding guards with flashlights. It didn't feel very "heisty" though. I was thinking a heist would involve a bank or a museum... Moonlight & Mayhem One museum. Three raccoons. Absolutely no plan Start the Heist button. # Then I tried the same thing in Codex Desktop using GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra , and got a massively better result. Now you're a raccoon in a museum, rescuing two of your fellow raccoons (who have been imprisoned in that museum for some reason), then stacking up on top of each other to steal the Golden Sardine. Much more of a heist! They look like games, but are they fun? # These games were fun for about one minute and 15 seconds. Something I've realized about game development is that you can vibe-code something that looks like a computer game, and that's easy. Building a game that's fun, has a good gameplay loop, and is challenging and interesting and keeps people coming back for more... that's still beyond me, and beyond any of the agents I've tried. This ties into the Deep Blue thing. Just because we can make something that looks like a game does not mean that we are game developers. September # We're into September now. So much has happened this month! Discovery of a new OpenAl agent message board Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer KittsThomas Larsen - 4 September 2026 # An independent group of researchers found a message board where OpenAI agents-in-training had been illicitly communicating with each other... and it was that German language wiki I showed you earlier. The one from June. I wrote more about that here . OpenAI had confessed to the Hugging Face thing, but now there's this other incident which surely they should have known about from reviewing their logs. It was surprising that this took an independent group of researchers to uncover. OpenAl agents carried out an undisclosed cyber-attack on RubyGems Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, Sydney Von Arx - 11 September 2026 # And then a week later those same researchers found that the attack on RubyGems back in May was caused by OpenAI's agents in training as well! At this point I'm wondering how many more incidents like this there are that we haven't found yet. Clearly this was a big problem for months before anyone figured out what was going on. Headline: Australian PM warns in UN speech about the ‘furious pace’ of Al after security breach # Then just the other day , here's the Prime Minister of Australia at the United Nations General Assembly warning that OpenAI had hacked the Australian healthcare website that I showed you earlier. I think that was part of the same training run as the Wiki stuff, because there were posts on that Wiki mentioning .gov.au websites and that training appeared to involve researching statistics online to answer questions in an evaluation suite. This story is still coming together, but now it's an international incident that's been raised at the UN by a head of state! www.felonybench.com OpenAI: 11 Anthropic: 9 Google: 3 Meta: 1 # This does mean we've got a new benchmark, probably more useful than my pelicans. FelonyBench.com tracks the number of felony cyberattacks from different labs. OpenAI currently lead with 11, Anthropic have 9. Google have three, which they confessed to the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. They said they had previously chosen not to disclose because the agents had stopped when they realized that they shouldn't be doing that. Meta have one too . So felonies all round for the AI labs. Pelicans for GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna. All are good, all have the same color scheme. # Here's our current state of the art for the pelicans. This is the GPT-6 family, which just came out . Astra made a fantastic pelican riding a bicycle. It's got the legs on both sides. The frame is good. It's interesting how all of the GPT-6 models pick a similar color scheme to each other. GPT-6 Luna for 0.4 cents will draw you a competent-ish pelican riding a bicycle! Grid for Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, OPus 5, Sonnet 5. The Sonnet pelicans are terrible. All of the others are pretty good. Opus 5.5 is missing its Max level pelican because it ran out of tokens. The best is Fable 5.1 at Max. # Claude has caught up a little bit. Claude Fable 5.1 gave me an excellent pelican riding a bicycle - the best I've seen from a Claude model - but did charge me $3.30 for it. Opus 5.5 thought for 128,000 tokens and then gave up! It ran out of tokens before it got to the response. It doesn’t get easier - you just get faster Greg LeMond 3x Tour de France champion # Getting back to Deep Blue. Something that's been puzzling me this year is this: why does my job feel harder? I've got these agents that can do all of this stuff for me, and yet I've never worked so hard, I've never been so intellectually engaged with my work. Partly this is because I'm being a lot more ambitious with what I take on, but it's also because all of the easy stuff is handled for me. If it's easy, the agent will do it. Everything that's left for me is difficult. This morning I heard this quote from three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond : It doesn't get easier, you just get faster. I think that's exactly what's happening to us now as software engineers with coding agents. Kakapo population reaches new milestone The official population of the critically endangered kakapo has reached a recovery-era high of 325 birds. # One closing thing. I know you're desperate for an update on Kākāpō breeding season. We've reached a recovery-era high of 325 birds ! 89 new chicks have made it to this point. This is the best breeding year in a very long time. Kakapo party, click for confetti. # I heard that Claude Opus 5.5 can now do pixel art. Claude doesn't have an image generator, but it's very good at using JavaScript to draw animated pixels. So I had it make me a Kākāpō dance party . I think this is a good celebration of the most important news of this year. Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , annotated-talks , ai-security-research , openai-hugging-face-incident
我们在100项任务上评估了多个模型，这些任务从 [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] 中随机选取。结果发现，GLM-5.3 在4%的试验中实现了完整的控制流劫持；Claude Mythos Preview 的这一比例为6%。尽管 GLM-5.3 在此项测试中的表现低于 Claude Mythos Preview，但一个重要的门槛显然已经被跨越：更早的模型，如 Claude Opus 4.6 和 GLM-5.2，在这些任务中无一成功。—— Anthropic Frontier Red Team，《GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities》 标签：anthropic、generative-ai、ai-security-research、glm、ai、ai-in-china、llms
With Clef and Clef-flash, Cloudflare is challenging TypeSafe AI's Jev decision model. Clef-flash delivers classifications in about 39 milliseconds, making it more than ten times faster than Jev. Both models are built on Qwen, licensed under Apache 2.0, and designed to let AI agents make structured decisions without generating text. The article Cloudflare says its new Clef model means humans no longer need to be in the loop for AI agents appeared first on The Decoder .
arXiv:2609.39223v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly moving toward lower precision to realize the throughput of hardware accelerators, but aggressive post-training quantization (PTQ) can degrade model quality. We present QATFactory, an open-source framework for deployment-aligned quantization-aware distillation (QAD) and reinforcement learning (QARL). QATFactory simulates deployment-time quantization while performing matrix multiplications in BF16, allowing models to adapt to quantization noise without requiring training hardware that natively supports the target format; for example, it supports NVFP4 training on H100 GPUs, which lack FP4 Tensor Cores. The framework supports NVFP4, MXFP4, and $\text{llama}.\text{cpp}$'s Q4_K format; dense and mixture-of-experts models; and both full-parameter and LoRA-based training. It exports checkpoints directly to vLLM and $\text{llama}.\text{cpp}$ without an additional lossy conversion step or added inference overhead. With QATFactory, we conduct extensive experiments on models ranging from 8B to 230B parameters and evaluate exported checkpoints in production inference engines. Across models and formats, QAD consistently improves deployed-model quality over strong PTQ baselines. On Qwen3.5-9B, QAD achieves average benchmark accuracies of 68.9% under NVFP4 and 66.0% under MXFP4, outperforming the best PTQ results of 65.4% and 56.4%, respectively. Through our experiments, we found that although both FP4 formats quantize weights and activations at deployment, the best training strategy is format-dependent: NVFP4 generally performs better when only weights are quantized during training, whereas MXFP4 benefits from quantizing both weights and activations. At a fixed training token budget, training on fewer 32K sequences improves average accuracy by 1.9 points over training on more 4K sequences.
arXiv:2609.20968v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In non-stationary online learning, dynamic regret has attracted increasing attention as a measure of how well an online learner performs against a time-varying comparator sequence. Despite considerable advances, attaining optimal bounds for strongly convex and exp-concave losses often involves intricate analysis. In this paper, we present a \textit{simple} framework that reduces dynamic regret minimization to switching regret minimization. As a result, we can derive dynamic regret bounds by using off-the-shelf algorithms with switching regret guarantees. The key idea of our reduction is to construct, for \textit{any} comparator sequence, an auxiliary random sequence that is unbiased at each round, with the controlled variance and a manageable number of switches. Combining this construction with suitable surrogate losses, we can decompose dynamic regret into the expected switching regret against the random sequence and its controlled variance. Theoretically, for strongly convex and exp-concave losses, we establish the $\widetilde{O}(T^{1/3}P_T^{2/3})$ dynamic regret bounds, where $T$ denotes the time horizon and $P_T$ denotes the path-length of the comparator sequence. Moreover, for general convex losses, the same reduction also recovers the $O(\sqrt{T(1+P_T)})$ dynamic regret bound. Notably, all our findings match the minimax optimal results for these three types of losses, highlighting the versatility of our proposed framework.
arXiv:2605.07579v3 公告类型：替换 摘要：带可验证奖励的强化学习（RLVR）是大型推理模型的基础，而RLVR依赖于降低方差，这要求同时具备可靠的基线，以及每个训练批次内高度多样化的提示词。在通用推理模型的多领域训练中，这一点尤其困难，因为不同任务的提示词会产生高度多样化的梯度信号。现有方法各有不足：GRPO将基线估计为来自同一提示词的多次采样结果的组均值，因此，越准确的基线意味着批次中可包含的不同提示词越少；而PPO通过训练一个与策略规模相当的评论器来避免这一权衡，但训练成本大致翻倍。我们提出POISE（Policy Optimization with Internal State Value Estimation），一种将模型内部状态转化为价值模型的强化学习算法。一个轻量级探针读取前向传播过程中已经计算出的信号，以预测基线，并与策略同步在线训练。为保持梯度的无偏性，我们提出一种跨采样结果构造方法，利用另一次独立采样结果的内部状态来预测每次采样结果的价值。在涵盖六个领域的可验证奖励语料库上，使用Qwen3-4B和OLMo3-7B-Instruct-DPO进行实验，POISE优于其他RLVR基线，同时实现了更稳定的训练。此外，该探针的效果可媲美独立的LLM规模价值模型，能够泛化到各种任务，并且随着策略规模扩大仍能保持准确。通过利用模型的内部表示，POISE实现了稳定的策略优化。
arXiv:2610.01377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study causal logistic bandits with counterfactual fairness constraints. The causal structure is given through known factual and counterfactual feature maps that share an unknown logistic reward parameter, but the learner observes only factual rewards. Consequently, the directions determining counterfactual feasibility need not be identifiable from the available feedback. The closest prior analyses either omit a coverage condition or impose a comparatively strong one, and do not establish matching lower bounds. We first show that some coverage condition is necessary: without a coverage-type restriction, factually indistinguishable environments with different optimal fair actions force $\Omega(T)$ expected joint loss. Under a weaker full-rank condition on the factual covariance pooled across actions, we identify a target-specific information scale $V_\star$ that measures the difficulty of estimating rewards and counterfactual effects from factual feedback. We construct worst-case families satisfying this condition on which every policy incurs expected joint loss $\Omega\left(\left[V_\star\min\{\log K,d\}\right]^{1/3}T^{2/3}\right)$. We also give an explore--then--exploit procedure tuned using $V_\star$ and an adaptive algorithm that does not require its value. Both algorithms achieve $\max\{R_T,V_T\}=\widetilde{O}\left(\left[V_\star\min\{\log K,d\}\right]^{1/3}T^{2/3}+\kappa d/\sigma_0^2\right)$, where $R_T$ is regret relative to the best fair action and $V_T$ denotes the cumulative stage-wise positive violations. Thus the upper and lower bounds match in their leading dependence on $T$, $V_\star$, and $\min\{\log K,d\}$, up to logarithmic factors.
arXiv:2610.00838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains a large language model (LLM) to act over long, multi-step interactions. However, a single localized error can cause task failure, while trajectory-level rewards provide limited guidance for assigning credit to individual decisions. To address this limitation, we introduce Segment-level Hindsight Advantage Reweighting for Policy Optimization (SHARPO), a credit-assignment mechanism that refines Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) at the level of environment-facing segments. Inspired by the existing on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) method, SHARPO computes teacher-student log-probability gaps within each segment and uses the resulting signal to compute a bounded multiplier on the GRPO advantage. This multiplier is shared by all tokens within the segment, allowing credit to vary across different segments. With Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, SHARPO outperforms existing baselines on the ALFWorld and WebShop benchmarks, including GRPO, SDAR, RLSD, and StepOPSD.
arXiv:2610.00254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We characterize the regret attainable in online convex optimization when access to the feasible set is limited to an exact linear optimization oracle. The learner is given an inscribed ball and a diameter bound and must remain feasible on every consistent instance. For convex $G$-Lipschitz losses, diameter at most $D$, a total allowance of $Q$ oracle calls, and a strict limit of $B$ calls per round, the dimension-free minimax expected regret is $\Theta(GD\max\{\sqrt T,T/(1+\min\{Q,BT\})^{1/4}\})$. The lower bound applies to arbitrary randomized learners. Universal feasibility first forces each action into the hull of the supplied ball and the preceding oracle replies. A fixed-body construction then couples fresh phase directions to a shared simplex, making useful replies costly repeatedly even though all losses have a common minimizer. A counted approximate-gradient method with interleaved blocks attains the matching rate. Total-budget and strict per-round guarantees follow as special cases, including the $T^{3/4}$ rate with one call per round and the quadratic total budget needed for $\sqrt T$ regret. For prescribed smoothness $\beta$, an analytic construction yields a curvature-dependent lower bound and identifies the threshold above which the general characterization remains sharp.
Adaptive Parallel Reasoning overview Overview of adaptive parallel reasoning. What if a reasoning model could decide for itself when to decompose and parallelize independent subtasks, how many concurrent threads to spawn, and how to coordinate them based on the problem at hand? We provide a detailed analysis of recent progress in the field of parallel reasoning, especially Adaptive Parallel Reasoning. Disclosure: this post is part landscape survey, part perspective on adaptive parallel reasoning. One of the authors (Tony Lian) co-led ThreadWeaver ( Lian et al., 2025 ), one of the methods discussed below. The authors aim to present each approach on its own terms. Motivation Recent progress in LLM reasoning capabilities has been largely driven by inference-time scaling, in addition to data and parameter scaling ( OpenAI et al., 2024 ; DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025 ). Models that explicitly output reasoning tokens (through intermediate steps, backtracking, and exploration) now dominate math, coding, and agentic benchmarks. These behaviors allow models to explore alternative hypotheses, correct earlier mistakes, and synthesize conclusions rather than committing to a single solution ( Wen et al., 2025 ). The problem is that sequential reasoning scales linearly with the amount of exploration. Scaling sequential reasoning tokens comes at a cost, as models risk exceeding effective context limits ( Hsieh et al., 2024 ). The accumulation of intermediate exploration paths makes it challenging for the model to disambiguate amongst distractors when attending to information in its context, leading to a degradation of model performance, also known as context-rot ( Hong, Troynikov and Huber, 2025 ). Latency also grows proportionally with reasoning length. For complex tasks requiring millions of tokens for exploration and planning, it’s not uncommon to see users wait tens of minutes or even hours for an answer ( Qu et al., 2025 ). As we continue to scale along the output sequence length dimension, we also make inference slower, less reliable, and more compute-intensive. Parallel reasoning has emerged as a natural solution. Instead of exploring paths sequentially ( Gandhi et al., 2024 ) and accumulating the context window at every step, we can allow models to explore multiple threads independently (threads don’t rely on each other’s context) and concurrently (threads can be executed at the same time). Figure 1: Sequential vs. Parallel Reasoning Figure 1: Sequential vs. Parallel Reasoning Over recent years, a growing body of work has explored this idea across synthetic settings (e.g., the Countdown game ( Katz, Kokel and Sreedharan, 2025 )), real-world math problems, and general reasoning tasks. From Fixed Parallelism to Adaptive Control Existing approaches show that parallel reasoning can help, but most of them still decide the parallel structure outside the model rather than letting the model choose it. Simple fork-and-join. Self-consistency/Majority Voting — independently sample multiple complete reasoning traces, extract final answer from each, and return the most common one ( Wang et al., 2023 ). Best-of-N (BoN) — similar to self-consistency, but uses a trained verifier to select the best solution instead of using majority voting ( Stiennon et al., 2022 ). Although simple to implement, these methods often incur redundant computation across branches since trajectories are sampled independently. Heuristic-based structured search. Tree / Graph / Skeleton of Thoughts — a family of structured decomposition methods that explores multiple alternative “thoughts” using known search algorithms (BFS/DFS) and prunes via LLM-based evaluation ( Yao et al., 2023 ; Besta et al., 2024 ; Ning et al., 2024 ). Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) — estimates node values by sampling random rollouts and expands the search tree with Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) style exploration-exploitation ( Xie et al., 2024 ; Zhang et al., 2024 ). These methods improve upon simple fork-and-join by decomposing tasks into non-overlapping subtasks; however, they require prior knowledge about the decomposition strategy, which is not always known. Recent variants. ParaThinker — trains a model to run in two fixed stages: first generating multiple reasoning threads in parallel, then synthesizing them. They introduce trainable control tokens ( ) and thought-specific positional embeddings to enforce independence during reasoning and controlled integration during summarization via a two-phase attention mask ( Wen et al., 2025 ). GroupThink — multiple parallel reasoning threads can see each other’s partial progress at token level and adapt mid-generation. Unlike prior concurrent methods that operate on independent requests, GroupThink runs a single LLM producing multiple interdependent reasoning trajectories simultaneously ( Hsu et al., 2025 ). Hogwild! Inference — multiple parallel reasoning threads share KV cache and decide how to decompose tasks without an explicit coordination protocol. Workers generate concurrently into a shared attention cache using RoPE to stitch together individual KV blocks in different orders without recomputation ( Rodionov et al., 2025 ). Figure 2: Various Strategies for Parallel Reasoning Figure 2: Various Strategies for Parallel Reasoning The methods above share a common limitation: the decision to parallelize, the level of parallelization, and the search strategy are imposed on the model, regardless of whether the problem actually benefits from it. However, different problems need different levels of parallelization, and that is something critical to the effectiveness of parallelization. For example, a framework that applies the same parallel structure to “What’s 25+42?” and “What’s the smallest planar region in which you can continuously rotate a unit-length line segment by 180°?” is wasting compute on the former and probably using the wrong decomposition strategy for the latter. In the approaches described above, the model is not taught this adaptive behavior. A natural question arises: What if the model could decide for itself when to parallelize, how many threads to spawn, and how to coordinate them based on the problem at hand? Adaptive Parallel Reasoning (APR) answers this question by making parallelization part of the model’s generated control flow. Formally defined, adaptivity refers to the model’s ability to dynamically allocate compute between parallel and serial operations at inference time . In other words, a model with adaptive parallel reasoning (APR) capability is taught to coordinate its control flow — when to generate sequences sequentially vs. in parallel. It’s important to note that the concept of adaptive parallel reasoning was introduced by the work Learning Adaptive Parallel Reasoning with Language Models ( Pan et al., 2025 ), but is a paradigm rather than a specific method. Throughout this post, APR refers to the paradigm, while “ the APR method ” denotes the specific instantiation from Pan et al. (2025). This shift matters for three reasons. Compared to Tree-of-Thoughts, APR doesn’t need domain-specific heuristics for decomposition. During RL, the model learns general decomposition strategies from trial and error. In fact, models discover useful parallelization patterns, such as running the next step along with the self-verification of a previous step, or hedging a primary approach with a backup one, in an emergent manner that would be difficult to hand-design ( Yao et al., 2023 ; Wu et al., 2025 ; Zheng et al., 2025 ). Compared to BoN, APR avoids redundant computation. APR models have control over what each parallel thread will do before branching out. Therefore, APR can learn to produce a set of unique, non-overlapping subtasks before assigning them to independent threads ( Wang et al., 2023 ; Stiennon et al., 2022 ; Pan et al., 2025 ; Yang et al., 2025 ). Compared to non-adaptive approaches, APR can choose not to parallelize. Adaptive models can adjust the level of parallelization to match the complexity of the problem against the complexity and overhead of parallelization ( Lian et al., 2025 ). In practice, this is implemented by having the model output special tokens that control when to reason in parallel versus sequentially. Below is a condensed ThreadWeaver-style trace: two outlines and two paths under a block, then the threads agree on a single boxed answer. Figure 3: Example of an Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Trajectory from ThreadWeaver, manually condensed for ease of illustration. Figure 3: Example of an Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Trajectory from ThreadWeaver, manually condensed for ease of illustration. Figure 4: Special Tokens Variants across Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Papers Figure 4: Special Tokens Variants across Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Papers Inference Systems for Adaptive Parallelism How do we actually execute parallel branches? We take inspiration from computer systems, and specifically, multithreading and multiprocessing. Most of this work can be viewed as leveraging a fork-join design. At inference time, we are effectively asking the model to perform a map-reduce operation: Fork the problem into subtasks/threads, process them concurrently Join them into a final answer Figure 5: Fork-join Inference Design Figure 5: Fork-join Inference Design Specifically, the model will encounter a list of subtasks. It will then prefill each of the subtasks and send them off as independent requests for the inference engine to process. These threads then decode concurrently until they hit an end token or exceed max length. This process blocks until all threads finish decoding and then aggregates the results. This is common across various adaptive parallel reasoning approaches. However, one issue arises during aggregation: the content generated in branches cannot be easily aggregated at the KV cache level. This is because tokens in independent threads start at identical position IDs, resulting in encoding overlap and non-standard behavior when merging KV cache back together. Similarly, since independent threads do not attend to each other, their concatenated KV cache results in a non-causal attention pattern, which the base model has not seen during training. To address this issue, the field splits into two schools of thought on how to execute the aggregation process, defined by whether they modify the inference engine or work around it. Multiverse modifies the inference engine to reuse KV cache across the join. Before taking a deeper look into Multiverse ( Yang et al., 2025 )’s memory management, let’s first understand how KV cache is handled up until the “join” phase. Notice how each of the independent threads share the prefix sequence, i.e., the list of subtasks. Without optimization, each thread needs to prefill and recompute the KV cache for the prefix sequence. However, this redundancy can be avoided with SGLang ’s RadixAttention ( Sheng et al., 2023 ), which organizes multiple requests into a radix tree, a trie (prefix tree) with sequences of elements of varying lengths instead of single elements. This way, the only new KV cache entries are those from independent thread generation. Figure 6: RadixAttention’s KV Cache Management Strategy Figure 6: RadixAttention’s KV Cache Management Strategy Now, if everything went well, all the independent threads have come back from the inference engine. Our goal is now to figure out how to synthesize them back into a single sequence to continue decoding for next steps. It turns out, we can reuse the KV cache of these independent threads during the synthesis stage. Specifically, Multiverse ( Yang et al., 2025 ), Parallel-R1 ( Zheng et al., 2025 ), and NPR ( Wu et al., 2025 ) modify the inference engine to copy over the KV cache generated by each thread and edits the page table so that it stitches together non-contiguous memory blocks into a single KV cache sequence. This avoids the redundant computation of a second prefill and reuses existing KV cache as much as possible. However, this has several major limitations. First, this approach requires modifying the inference engine to perform non-standard memory handling, which can result in unexpected behaviors. Specifically, since the synthesis request references KV cache from previous requests, it creates fragility in the system and the possibility of bad pointers. Another request can come in and evict the referenced KV cache before the synthesis request completes, requiring it to halt and trigger a re-prefilling of the previous thread request. This problem has led the Multiverse researchers ( Yang et al., 2025 ) to limit the batch size that the inference engine can handle, which restricts throughput. Figure 7: KV Cache “Stitching” During Multiverse Inference Figure 7: KV Cache “Stitching” During Multiverse Inference Second, this approach modifies how models see the sequence, which creates a distributional shift that models are not pretrained on, therefore requiring more extensive training to align behavior. Specifically, when we stitch together KV cache this way, we create a sequence with non-standard position encoding. During independent-thread generation, all threads started at the same position index and attended to the prior subtasks, NOT each other. So when the threads merge back, the resulting KV cache has a non-standard positional encoding and does not use causal attention. Therefore, this approach requires extensive training to align the model to this new behavior. To address this, Multiverse ( Yang et al., 2025 ) and related works apply a modified attention mask during training to prevent independent threads from attending to each other, aligning the training and inference behaviors. Figure 8: Multiverse’s Attention Mask Figure 8: Multiverse’s Attention Mask With these issues arising from non-standard KV cache management, can we try an approach without engine modifications? ThreadWeaver keeps the inference engine unchanged and moves orchestration to the client. ThreadWeaver ( Lian et al., 2025 ) treats parallel inference purely as a client-side problem. The “Fork” process is nearly identical to Multiverse’s, but the join phase handles memory very differently as it does NOT modify engine internals. Instead, the client concatenates all text outputs from independent branches into one contiguous sequence. Then, the engine performs a second prefill to generate the KV cache for the conclusion generation step. While this introduces computational redundancy that Multiverse tries to avoid, the cost of prefill is significantly lower than decoding. In addition, this does not require special attention handling during inference, as the second prefill uses causal attention (threads see each other), making it easier to adapt sequential autoregressive models for this task. Figure 9: ThreadWeaver’s Prefill and Decode Strategy Figure 9: ThreadWeaver’s Prefill and Decode Strategy How should we train a model to learn this behavior? Naively, for each parallel trajectory, we can break it down into multiple sequential pieces following our inference pattern. For instance, we would train the model to output the subtasks given prompt, individual threads given prompt+subtask assignment, and conclusion given prompt+subtasks+corresponding threads. However, this seems redundant and not compute efficient. Can we do better? Turns out, yes. As in ThreadWeaver ( Lian et al., 2025 ), we can organize a parallel trajectory into a prefix-tree (trie), flatten it into a single sequence, and apply an ancestor-only attention mask during training (not inference!). Figure 10: Building the Prefix-tree and Flattening into a single training sequence Figure 10: Building the Prefix-tree and Flattening into a single training sequence Specifically, we apply masking and position IDs to mimic the inference behavior, such that each thread is only conditioned on the prompt+subtasks, without ever attending to sibling threads or the final conclusion. The engine-agnostic design makes adoption easy since you don’t need to figure out a separate hosting method and can leverage existing hardware infra. It also gets better as existing inference engines get better. What’s more, with an engine-agnostic method, we can serve a hybrid model that switches between sequential and parallel thinking modes easily. Training Models to Use Parallelism Once the inference path exists, the next problem is teaching a model to use it. Demonstrations are needed because the model must learn to output special tokens that orchestrate control flow. We found the instruction-following capabilities of base models insufficient for generating parallel threads. An interesting question here is: does SFT training induce a fundamental reasoning capability for parallel execution that was previously absent, or does it merely align the model’s existing pre-trained capabilities to a specific control-flow token syntax. Typical wisdom is SFT teaches new knowledge; but contrary to common belief, some papers—notably Parallel-R1 ( Zheng et al., 2025 ) and NPR ( Wu et al., 2025 )—argue that their SFT demonstrations simply induce format following (i.e., how to structure parallel requests). We leave this as future work. Figure 11: Sources of Parallelization Demonstration Data Figure 11: Sources of Parallelization Demonstration Data Demonstrations teach the syntax of parallel control flow, but they do not fully solve the incentive problem. In an ideal world, we only need to reward the outcome accuracy, and the parallelization pattern emerges naturally given that it learns to output special tokens through SFT, similar to the emergence of long CoT. However, researchers ( Zheng et al., 2025 ) observed that this is not enough, and we do in fact need parallelization incentives. The question then becomes, how do we tell when the model is parallelizing effectively? Structure-only rewards are too easy to game. Naively, we can give a reward for the number of threads spawned. But models can spawn many short, useless threads to hack the reward. Okay, that doesn’t work. How about a binary reward for simply using parallel structure correctly? This partially solves the issue of models spamming new threads, but models still learn to spawn threads when they don’t need to. The authors of Parallel-R1 ( Zheng et al., 2025 ) introduced an alternating-schedule, only rewarding parallel structure 20% of the time, which successfully increased the use of parallel structure (13.6% → 63%), but had little impact on overall accuracy. With this structure-only approach, we might be drifting away from our original goal of increasing accuracy and reducing latency… How can we optimize for the Pareto frontier directly? Accuracy is simple — we just look at the outcome. How about latency? Efficiency rewards need to track the critical path. In sequential-only trajectories, we can measure latency based on the total number of tokens generated. To extend this to parallel trajectories, we can focus on the critical path, or the longest sequence of tokens that are causally dependent, as this directly determines our end-to-end generation time (i.e., wall-clock time). As an example, when there are two sections with five threads each, the critical path will go through the longest thread from the first parallel section, then any sequential tokens, then the longest thread from the second parallel section, and so on until the end of sequence. Figure 12: Critical Path Length Illustration Figure 12: Critical Path Length Illustration The goal is to minimize the length of the critical path. Simultaneously, we would still like the model to be spending tokens exploring threads in parallel. To combine the two objectives, we can focus on making the critical path a smaller fraction of the total tokens spent. Authors of ThreadWeaver ( Lian et al., 2025 ) framed the parallelization reward as $1 - L_{\mathrm{critical}} / L_{\mathrm{total}}$, which is 0 for a sequential trajectory, and increases linearly as the critical path gets smaller compared to the total tokens generated. Parallel efficiency should be gated by correctness. Intuitively, when multiple trajectories are correct we should assign more reward to the trajectories that are more efficient at parallelization. But how about when they are all incorrect? Should we assign any reward at all? Probably not. To formalize this, $R = R_{\mathrm{correctness}} + R_{\mathrm{parallel}}$. Assuming binary outcome correctness, this can be written as $R = \mathbf{1}(\text{Correctness}) + \mathbf{1}(\text{Correctness}) \times (\text{some parallelization metric})$. This way, a model only gets a parallelization reward when it answers correctly, since we don’t want to pose parallelization constraints on the model if it couldn’t answer the question correctly. Figure 13: Differences in Reward Designs Across Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Works Figure 13: Differences in Reward Designs Across Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Works Evaluation and Open Questions When all is said and done, how well do these adaptive parallel methods actually perform? Well…this is a hard question, as they differ in model choice and metrics. The model selection depends on the training method, SFT problem difficulty, and sequence length. When running SFT on difficult datasets like s1k, which contains graduate-level math and science problems, researchers chose a large base model (Qwen2.5 32B for Multiverse ( Yang et al., 2025 )) to capture the complex reasoning structure behind the solution trajectories. When running RL, researchers chose a small, non-CoT, instruct model (4B, 8B) due to compute cost constraints. Figure 14: Difference in Model Choice Across Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Papers Figure 14: Difference in Model Choice Across Adaptive Parallel Reasoning Papers Each paper also offers a slightly different interpretation about how adaptive parallel reasoning contributes to the research field. They optimize for different theoretical objectives, so they use slightly different sets of metrics: Multiverse and ThreadWeaver ( Yang et al., 2025 ; Lian et al., 2025 ) aim to deliver sequential-AR-model-level accuracy at faster speeds. Multiverse shows that APR models can achieve higher accuracy under the same fixed context window, while ThreadWeaver shows that the APR model achieves shorter end-to-end token latency (critical path length) while getting comparable accuracy. NPR ( Wu et al., 2025 ) treats sequential fallback as a failure mode and optimizes for 100% Genuine Parallelism Rate, measured as the ratio of parallel tokens to total tokens. Parallel-R1 ( Zheng et al., 2025 ) does not focus on end-to-end latency and instead optimizes for exploration diversity, presenting APR as a form of mid-training exploration scaffold that provides a performance boost after RL. Open Questions While Adaptive Parallel Reasoning represents a promising step toward more efficient inference-time scaling, significant open questions remain. As noted above, Parallel-R1 ( Zheng et al., 2025 ) presents APR as a form of mid-training exploration scaffold rather than a primarily inference-time technique. This invites a more fundamental question: Does parallelization at inference-time consistently improve accuracy, or is it primarily valuable as a training-time exploration scaffold? Parallel-R1 suggests that the diversity induced by parallel structure during RL may matter more than the parallelization itself at test time. A related concern is stability. There’s also a persistent tendency for models to collapse back to sequential reasoning when parallelization rewards are relaxed. Parallel-R1 authors showed that removing parallelization reward after 200 steps results in the model reverting to sequential behavior. Is this a training stability issue, a reward signal design issue, or evidence that parallel structure genuinely conflicts with how autoregressive pretraining shapes the model’s prior? Beyond whether APR works, deployment introduces its own questions. Can we design training methods that account for available compute budget at inference time, so parallelization decisions are hardware-aware rather than purely problem-driven? Finally, the parallel structures considered above are essentially flat. What if we allow parallelization depth > 1? Recursive language models (RLMs; Zhang, Kraska and Khattab, 2026 ) effectively manage long context and show promising inference-time scaling capabilities. How well do RLMs perform when trained with end-to-end RL that incentivizes adaptive parallelization? Acknowledgements We thank Nicholas Tomlin and Alane Suhr for providing us with helpful feedback. We thank Christopher Park, Karl Vilhelmsson, Nyx Iskandar , Georgia Zhou, Kaival Shah , and Jyoti Rani for their insightful suggestions. We thank Vijay Kethana , Jaewon Chang , Cameron Jordan , Syrielle Montariol , Erran Li, and Anya Ji for their valuable discussions. We thank Jiayi Pan , Xiuyu Li , and Alex Zhang for their constructive correspondences about Adaptive Parallel Reasoning and Recursive Language Models.
ABBEL overview Overview of ABBEL compared to traditional recursive summarization. Beliefs replace the full interaction history as the agent’s working context, and belief grading improves performance by supervising the contents of each belief state.. As task horizons grow, LLM contexts can’t scale forever. Self-summarization enables concise, interpretable contexts, but at a significant performance cost, especially for human assistance domains where high quality data is scarce, e.g., collaborative code generation. We address this with ABBEL : a framework that isolates and supervises the information content of summaries in the form of natural-language belief states. Motivation: the cost of recursive summarization For language models to effectively assist with increasingly complex tasks such as software development, they must be able to interact with us over hundreds or even thousands of steps. For such long tasks, it is impractical to keep the history of the entire interaction in context. The heuristic approach used so far has been summary generation, sometimes called context compaction. For example, Cursor’s latest model composer 2.5 uses compaction during training for improved performance ( Cassano et al., 2026 ). Alongside composer, Grandcode ( DeepReinforce et al., 2026 ), the first system to consistently beat all human competitors in online coding competitions, despite using one of the newest efficient attention models (Qwen 3.5-397B), 1 still found it necessary to employ context summarization. But compaction has a problem. Despite seemingly low performance gaps in benchmarks, model servers like Cursor continue to recommend that users avoid compaction with their coding assistants in the middle of a task ( Heule et al., 2026 ). To understand why, see below the performance over RL fine-tuning of a Context summary model compared to full context models in Combination Lock, a Wordle-like game that allows up to 16 guesses. 2 Though both model types improve over the course of training, the summary model never closes the gap. Average attempts to guess target word with context summary vs full context policies over training Fig. 1: Average attempts to guess the target word on Combination Lock over RL fine-tuning (lower is better). Context-summary policies improve with training but do not close the gap to full-context policies. Making models self-summarize while completing a task increases the complexity of the learning problem. While this could typically be addressed by training with more data, the performance degradation observed in real world interactive settings likely arises from the difficulty we have in creating and using human simulators effectively to generate high quality training environments ( Lin et al., 2025 , Tomlin et al., 2025 ). Thus, the better you can learn to summarize on the limited and messy multiturn interaction trajectories you can collect, the better off your model will be for downstream users. ABBEL: acting through belief bottlenecks ABBEL belief grading diagram Fig. 2: Autoencoder-inspired belief grading. The model encodes prior belief, action and observation (b t , a t , o t ) into posterior belief b t+1 and is rewarded for how well select information from the history can be reconstructed from that belief. To address poor learning efficiency, we isolate the summary generation task. Drawing inspiration from recursive Bayesian estimation, we formulate summaries as belief states, which we periodically prompt the model to update based on new information. 3 ABBEL overview animation frame ‹ Prev Pause Next › 1 / 16 Fig. 3: ABBEL rollout. Belief updates from the latest observation alternate with action selection conditioned only on the current posterior belief. Belief grading We then extract and supervise the contents of the belief states (Fig. 2, Belief Grading). Belief grading can be thought of as adding an auxiliary RL task, using heuristics designed to capture what makes a good belief as the reward. An example heuristic for coding could be shorter is better, but closer to being able to reconstruct the git diff is also better, so balancing these would yield a good belief. In domains where good heuristics are hard to define, we propose a general autoencoding-inspired grading function, which treats the current language model π θ as both encoder and decoder of information from the history, and the belief states as the codes. We grade each belief b t+1 by how well it can be used by the current model π θ to reconstruct the most recent observation o t : Eq. 1: Reconstruction grading objective Eq. 1: Reconstruction grading objective. Here b t+1 is the updated belief, o t the latest observation, a t the action just taken, b t the prior belief, p I the task prompt, and π θ the current model. Higher grades reward beliefs that retain information needed to decode the latest observation. What do we gain by grading beliefs? Collaborative coding on CollabBench We demonstrate the utility of belief grading in our motivating domain of human-driven assistive coding, with the CollabBench environment from Sweet-RL ( Zhou et al., 2025 ). CollabBench collaborative coding environment Fig. 4: CollabBench collaborative coding environment. The agent asks clarifying questions, then submits a function scored against hidden unit tests. We see that with the general reconstruction-based belief grading function we reduce the performance gap from full context models by about 50%, and train in 50% fewer steps compared to training models to summarize without belief grading (no BG). After training, ABBEL still uses significantly less memory than the full context setting, as measured by the peak context token length (Peak Tokens). Model Test Pass Rate ↑ Success Rate ↑ Peak Tokens × 10² ↓ Training Steps ↓ Full Context 0.52±0.02 0.39±0.02 14.08±0.55 100 ABBEL (no BG) 0.46±0.02 0.31±0.02 4.20±0.37 100 ABBEL-rec-BG 0.48±0.01 0.36±0.01 6.01±0.33 50 Fig. 5: CollabBench results. With reconstruction belief grading, ABBEL-rec-BG recovers about half the gap to full context while using fewer peak tokens, and trains in 50 steps instead of 100. Combination Lock Additionally, in CombinationLock, we demonstrate that ABBEL with a belief grader which leverages domain knowledge (by computing useful statistics over the history and checking that they can be reconstructed from the belief state), enables even higher learning efficiency than full context (FULL CTX) models. Average Attempts to guess target word ABBEL Fig. 6: Average attempts to guess the target word on Combination Lock (lower is better). With domain-knowledge belief grading, ABBEL approaches or exceeds FULL CTX in this setting; without belief grading, learning is slower. Multi-objective question answering In a third environment, multi-objective question answering (from MEM1 Zhang et al., 2025 , a recent work which performed end-to-end optimization in a modified version of typical recursive summarization), we demonstrate the utility of isolating belief states from reasoning, by showing that a Peak Belief length Penalty (more details in paper) significantly reduces memory usage with minimal performance degradation, unlike is commonly observed when penalizing reasoning lengths ( Arora et al., 2025 ). Performance and memory usage in multi QA Fig. 7: Exact-match score and peak memory versus number of objectives in multi-objective QA. ABBEL with a peak belief penalty (PBP) maintains comparable performance while using less memory than MEM1 and ABBEL without PBP in this evaluation. Related work Alternative solutions to managing long contexts involve different tradeoffs, and are worth considering depending on the requirements of a deployed system. Context compression methods generate dense representations which, while computationally efficient, sacrifice human-understandability ( Kontonis et al., 2026 , Eyuboglu et al., 2025 , Gupta et al., 2025 , Chevalier et al., 2023 , Deng et al., 2025 , Deng et al., 2025 , Bulatov et al., 2022 ). Hand-designed summarization prompts ( Wang et al., 2025 , Örwall et al., 2025 , Starace et al., 2025 ) and pruning strategies ( Jiang et al., 2024 ) specific to target environments require expert human knowledge and don’t allow an agent to learn what to remember as part of its decision-making strategy. Methods that process long contexts into an external memory store ( Packer et al., 2023 , Xu et al., 2025 ) for the agents or subagents to query ( Zhang et al., 2025 ) are complementary, as they may benefit from better next context creation through summarization training. We would like to point out some exciting works in the space of general recursive summarization focused on math ( Wu et al., 2026 ), reasoning with belief generation ( Zhou et al., 2025 ), competitive coding with a distilled summarization module using similar autoencoding objectives to our general belief grader ( DeepReinforce et al., 2026 ), and adding continuous features to summaries ( Kontonis et al., 2026 ). What’s next for better memory? Many more possibilities are enabled through using explicit belief states as information bottlenecks for multi-step interaction. You could reward actions based on their effect on the belief state to guide exploration, transmit the explicit belief states for better communication between agents, or even improve user controllability by directly modifying the memories on which the agents’ decisions are based. Some forms of information, e.g., what a person looks like, are not represented well by text alone. A continuously learning system will also have to capture such information. Additionally, if we want a system to learn to communicate in a brand new language or to play a brand new game better than any person in the world, the skills accumulated over the lifetime of conversations or games must be stored in a very compressed form, essentially taking on the role of the weights of the model itself. More powerful systems will likely utilize a combination of multiple forms of memory, where the contents of the context may correspond to working memory while other approaches are used for short and long-term memory. How to instantiate these other forms of memory, for instance via test-time training, adapter memories, continuous context memories, or some combination thereof, presents an exciting challenge. Acknowledgements Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Alane Suhr and Kartik Goyal for advising this research as well as Ethan Mendes , David He , Jitesh Jain , and Nicholas Tomlin for comments on early drafts of this post. We would like to thank the MEM1 authors for their email correspondence and for sharing private reviewer feedback which we found particularly insightful. Citation If abbel was inspiring for your future work, please cite us with this! And here is some advice for doing similar research! @misc { lidayan2026abbellearningnaturallanguagebelief , title = {ABBEL: Learning Natural-Language Belief States for Memory-Efficient Interaction} , author = {Aly Lidayan and Jakob Bjorner and Satvik Golechha and Kartik Goyal and Alane Suhr} , year = {2026} , eprint = {2512.20111} , archivePrefix = {arXiv} , primaryClass = {cs.CL} , url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20111} , } With newer models the number of tokens till 50% compute spend is on attention gets much larger than 25K. Interleaving linear attention alternatives with full attention as is done with gpt-oss and DeepSeekv4, results in massive flops reductions for the attention computation. For example with DeepSeekv4-Pro (1.6T A49B) it requires nearly 450 thousand tokens to reach the 50% tradeoff point. Grandcode uses Qwen-3.5-397B-A17B a model which hits 50% FLOPs for attention at ~150 thousand tokens. ↩ This setting is technically solvable with much more computationally effective tools, but serves as a flexible test bed to study properties of recursive summarization. Bertsimas et al., 2022 , showed that an exact solution for the wordle game instantiated with the original vocabulary of the javascript game can be found with dynamic programming, but evidently the general formulation of wordle as a guessing game on K letters with L attempts and some dictionary of valid words and correct words D is NP hard to determine the minimal number of moves required. ↩ In practice there is an O(N/K) overhead cost for summary. N is the total number of actions. K is the number of actions till summarization is triggered. This is necessarily true for any summary approach. For ease of illustration this gif uses K = 1. In our experiments, to put more emphasis on summarization weaknesses we also use K=1. In practice overhead is small as K can be chosen to be near the efficient hardware limit. ↩
Long-form live-streaming TTS requires context-dependent prosody and paragraph-level coherence. However, many existing instruction-based TTS systems use global or uniform conditions, providing limited explicit control over clause-level relative prosodic changes. We introduce Speaker-Relative Inline Prosody Control, where each Pitch, Energy, or Speed instruction targets a clause relative to the preceding clause from the same speaker, while Pause uses an absolute duration interval. In codec-based TTS, Speed and Pause affect sequence length, whereas Pitch and Energy rely on residual codebooks. By analyzing Qwen3-TTS RVQ codebooks, we find that Energy concentrates in early residual codebooks, whereas Pitch accumulates across a deeper prefix. We therefore propose Scope- and Codebook-Aware Instruction Conditioning (SCIC), combining a Temporal Instruction Router for frame-level tag activation with Tag-Specific Codebook Weighting over residual codebooks. SCIC improves speaker-relative Pitch and Energy control over standard instruction fine-tuning using text-token tags. We further apply multi-reward GDPO post-training to jointly optimize control and quality, improving control accuracy while preserving CER and speaker similarity. In long-form synthesis, SCIC produces a more distinct paragraph-level expressive hierarchy than speaker-adapted SFT without instructions. Audio demos are available at: https://taoliveaigc.github.io/SCIC/
Deep research tasks require agents to navigate large knowledge spaces, synthesize evidence across many sources, and adapt their plans as findings emerge. Directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based multi-agent systems suit this setting because they support parallel execution and isolate each sub-task within a focused dependency context. Yet existing DAG-based agents instantiate a task-level plan before execution and repair the graph only after failures or missing evidence are observed. This Plan-then-Patch strategy is brittle for deep research: the system commits most strongly when its evidence is weakest, and later revisions waste computation on branches that should not have been planned. We propose DAGent, a DAG-based multi-agent framework with Evaluate-then-Grow incremental planning: an Orchestrator grows the task graph one batch at a time, conditioning each expansion on confidence and uncertainty signals from completed nodes. A hierarchical context layer propagates compact QueryDocs by default while preserving full execution traces for on-demand recall. The recorded DAG topology admits structural RL signals that outcome-only recipes cannot define; DAGRPO, a GRPO adaptation, injects topology-conditioned credit on Executor rollouts and a structural compliance regularization on Orchestrator plans. Across BrowseComp-Plus, GAIA, and xbench-DeepSearch, DAGent surpasses the strongest open-source baseline by 5.3 / 5.8 / 2.0 points at the Qwen3-235B-A22B scale, and the lead replicates across four open-source backbones and extends to GPT-5 at 327K context. At the Qwen3-8B scale, DAGRPO improves over a same-budget outcome-only GRPO baseline by 3.0 average Pass@1 points. A same-architecture comparison shows that evidence-conditioned planning reaches higher accuracy at lower per-task token, tool-call, and step footprints than its Plan-then-Patch counterpart. Code: https://github.com/hanwenliu6825/DAGent
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) rely on effective audio encoders for multi-task performance. We introduce UniAE-MoE, a unified audio encoder designed to model cross-domain audio representations and achieve outstanding downstream understanding performance via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, we explore mainstream audio encoders and integrate those from Qwen2-Audio and Audio-Flamingo 3, which demonstrate superior downstream capabilities. To facilitate effective model fusion, we improve our encoder using SwiGLU with shared experts to decouple encoder networks, and we further introduce a two-stage instruction-tuning strategy to better adapt the model to diverse downstream tasks. Moreover, we propose the task-specific data scaling (TSDS) technique to enhance \tool's understanding capabilities. On the XARES-LLM benchmark, UniAE-MoE attains a score of 0.802, achieving state-of-the-art performance. It also delivers top-tier performance in the official Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, further demonstrating robust generalization across diverse audio tasks. Together, these results validate the effectiveness of \tool for unified audio understanding across speech, music, and general audio domains.
Safety-aligned language models are commonly deployed as multi-turn assistants, which lets adversaries spread unsafe intent across several user turns instead of a single prompt. Gradient-based jailbreak detectors such as GradSafe were developed for single prompts: they score an input by the alignment between its induced gradient and a fixed unsafe reference direction, and their effectiveness in multi-turn dialogue remains unclear. We conduct a controlled evaluation of gradient-based jailbreak detection in multi-turn settings. We extend GradSafe with a Context Window Scanner that applies the detector to fixed-size windows of user turns and uses the maximum window score as the conversation-level score. We evaluate different window sizes, attack families, benign conversation distributions, and target models. The results differ sharply between synthetic and realistic benign settings. Against synthetic benign conversations, the detector achieves an ROC-AUC of 0.98 on human-authored multi-turn jailbreaks. On WildChat benign conversations, ROC-AUC drops to 0.76, and a threshold calibrated on synthetic data flags more than 90% of benign conversations as unsafe. Under realistic benign distributions, single-turn windows give the highest separability, whereas longer windows and accumulated contexts reduce performance. The detector is also sensitive to the attack-generation method and target model: successful Crescendo attacks receive scores comparable to or lower than benign conversations, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct yields near-random separability with a different optimal window size. These findings show that gradient-based signals can support multi-turn jailbreak detection, but reliable deployment requires calibration on realistic benign conversations, short-window scoring, length-aware thresholds, and evaluation across attack types and model architectures.
We present IronLLM-0.6B, a 654M-parameter language model designed for efficient on-device inference. IronLLM-0.6B combines a hybrid attention architecture with X-MTP, a lightweight shared-KV multi-token prediction design that eliminates per-depth KV-cache replay and employs a lightweight verification head for rollback-free drafting, achieving a 1.48x decoding speedup. The model is pretrained on approximately 6.2 trillion tokens using a quality-oriented data pipeline and is further post-trained with Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation to integrate capabilities from domain-specialized teachers. To better meet the low-latency requirements of on-device scenarios, IronLLM-0.6B adopts an Instruct-Only design. Evaluations show that IronLLM-0.6B achieves competitive performance relative to larger models such as Qwen3.5-0.8B and MiniCPM5-1B, while producing more concise responses on many tasks. We further present IronLLM-0.6B-Light, which replaces RMSNorm with Dynamic Tanh and simplifies several computationally expensive components to improve inference and quantization efficiency. Together, the IronLLM models provide an effective performance-efficiency trade-off for resource-constrained deployment.
End-to-end full-duplex speech models have brought open-source machine conversation closer to human-like interaction, yet existing systems remain limited in two intertwined dimensions: long-context robustness and multi-party interaction. Real-world scenarios such as meetings, group lessons, and social-robot reception require a single model to track, contextualize, and respond to multiple speakers over extended durations. Progress is constrained by both data and evaluation: open multi-party speech corpora remain small and are not designed for codec-frame-level full-duplex modeling, while existing long-audio benchmarks focus on passive listening and speech-to-speech benchmarks are mostly short and dyadic. We extend the Moshi paradigm jointly along the long-horizon and multi-party axes in English and Chinese. First, we release 57.6k hours of synthetic training data ($\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/MultiTalk/MultiTalkPT}{MultiTalkPT}$ and $\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/MultiTalk/MultiTalkFT}{MultiTalkFT}$) for long-form, multi-party, English-Chinese full-duplex dialogue, with controllable length, participant count, turn-taking, overlap, backchannels, interruptions, addressee shifts, and long-range coreference. Second, we introduce $\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/MultiTalk/MultiTalkBench}{MultiTalkBench}$, built from real human recordings, for evaluating long-form, multi-party, bilingual full-duplex dialogue. Conversations average 32.6 minutes and include probes for long-range entity tracking, topic coherence, and addressee selection. Third, we train a bilingual Moshi-style model that sustains coherent multi-party English-Chinese conversations over extended durations and substantially outperforms open-source baselines including Moshi, MiniCPM-o-4.5, and Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct on MultiTalkBench.
Long-context reasoning is essential for complex and long-horizon tasks, yet the performance of large language models (LLMs) degrades as context length increases. Recent approaches address this by processing input chunk by chunk while maintaining a bounded textual memory in model context. However, premature information compression can discard critical details essential for subsequent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Commit-on-Evidence Memory (CoEM), which learns when to convert source evidence into compact memory facts. Specifically, under a fixed context-memory budget, CoEM preserves potentially useful source excerpts verbatim in a pending set, allowing subsequent context to clarify their relevance before irreversible compression. As new context arrives, a learned policy revisits each pending excerpt and decides whether to promote it to the committed memory, retain it for further consideration, or discard it. A frozen verifier ensures proposed facts are accepted only if supported by retained excerpts and current context. To further guide effective memory management, we train this policy using reinforcement learning by combining fine-grained, step-level evidence rewards with final answer rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoEM consistently improves long-context reasoning. When evaluated on 6,400 documents long-context input, CoEM outperforms the strongest memory baseline by 10.4-11.4 F1 points on Qwen3.5-9B. Code repository: https://github.com/benmagnifico/CoEM.
Long-horizon tasks require large language model (LLM) agents to coordinate decisions under constraints that span an entire solution. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) offers a promising approach to test-time scaling by exploring alternative action trajectories, but model computation and environment interaction make search costly. Efficient search therefore requires effective reuse of trajectory feedback. Standard MCTS maintains prefix-specific statistics, without explicitly accumulating outcomes for decision groups that recur across different paths. To fill this gap, we propose HyperMCTS, a training-free method that augments an ordered MCTS tree with a cross-trajectory hypergraph. Hyperedges represent groups of canonical decisions and accumulate their observed returns within the current task. Our hypergraph-guided HyperUCT selection rule aggregates evidence from overlapping hyperedges into an action prior, allowing outcomes collected under one prefix to inform selection under another while preserving execution histories in the tree. On DeepPlanning, HyperMCTS improves average planning accuracy by 2.3--7.3 percentage points over the strongest baseline for each of three backbone models. It enables Qwen3.6-27B to outperform Claude Opus 4.6 (max) on Shopping Planning, while achieving higher accuracy with fewer LLM calls and output tokens than the evaluated MCTS-based baselines. SealQA experiments further demonstrate improvements in question answering.
Sliding-window KV inference refers to processing a sequence incrementally while retaining only a fixed-size cache of recent key and value states. It can be applied to pretrained causal transformers at inference time without additional training, while its KV-cache memory remains fixed as more tokens are processed. Because cached states are computed in the context of earlier tokens, they may carry information from beyond the current window and transmit it to later states. This study presents a series of experiments using five open-weight models spanning Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and Muse Glimmer. We investigate whether information originating outside the immediate context window can persist through a rolling KV cache and remain useful for retrieval. Initial results show that retaining previously computed states improves retrieval across the models tested compared with recomputing the final fixed window from raw tokens. We then measure how far this effect extends and find that Muse Glimmer and Mistral 7B show the strongest \emph{latent information relay}: they can recover information even after the relevant source tokens have left the cache. Both models incorporate sliding-window attention in their published architectures, an association that motivates testing whether training with sliding windows promotes more reliable information retention.
Persona prompts ask language models to answer as particular kinds of people. We test whether relationships learned from these effects predict responses to new questions and remain useful across models and prompts. Across 57 attributes, three behavioral domains, and seven pairs of open 7 to 9B checkpoints, persona effects can be predictable without being portable. Separate attribute and task gains improve prediction beyond shared scaling significantly in OLMo-3 and Qwen2.5, with the most robust evidence in OLMo-3. In that model, target refitting significantly outperforms gains borrowed from each of the other six pairs. Across model transfers, borrowed gains with one amplitude underperform shared scaling in most directions; allowing two target parameters removes the significant losses but yields no significant benefit over target shared scaling. After rewording, refitting significantly outperforms reuse with one amplitude in all six tested pairs, while changes of examples or country context often preserve reuse value. In the tested prompt transfers, regularized updates outperform both reuse strategies in median at 64 target questions per attribute. A separate survey comparison finds that selecting the more responsive checkpoint can worsen human fit; responsiveness is confounded with training status, and temperature calibration largely removes this cost but not errors in group ordering. Within the tested gain representation, apparent transfer can come from target calibration; source relationships must add predictive value beyond calibration and regularization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/thzva/persona-gain
Adapting pretrained models to new data can cause catastrophic forgetting of previously learned behavior. When only a few past samples remain, they give continual learning methods sparse and narrow evidence about what to preserve. We show that language models can expand this evidence through self-probing, in which the frozen model generates new inputs from the retained samples and records its own predictions on them. Unlike prior work that replays such data as training examples, our method, CPLUS uses self-probe and past-sample gradients to scale down parameter updates that conflict with prior behavior. Experiments with five language models on four benchmarks show three results. First, the same probes preserve more prior behavior as gradient signals than as replay data. Second, CPLUS learns the new data while consistently reducing forgetting more than existing baselines, especially when past data are scarce, and this protection extends to benchmarks not used for training. Third, we observe that CPLUS also becomes more effective as models grow: within the Qwen3 model family, it recovers an increasing share of the forgetting caused by standard fine-tuning.
Healthcare administrative staff transfer structured information from electronic health records, referrals, claims systems, provider rosters, and work queues into dynamic forms. We developed and evaluated CLAIRE (Clinical Language and Agentic Intelligence for Reasoning and Entry), a hybrid workflow that separates field-state discovery, source-to-field mapping, deterministic validation, bounded correction, escalation, and audit tracing. We tested five synthetic healthcare administrative schemas, 1,000 source records, four interface variants, two data-quality suites, and six comparators, yielding 24,000 benchmark episodes. A separate strict-output audit evaluated direct mappings from Qwen2.5-1.5B and Qwen2.5-7B, and a trace-derived operational simulation covered 6,000 episodes. Under the evaluated synthetic benchmark conditions, full CLAIRE achieved 1.000 episode success, field accuracy, required-field completion, and dependency completion in both suites; removing validation reduced stress-suite success to 0.500. In the simulation, 100.0% of clean and validation-stress episodes reached a staff-reviewable draft, compared with 68.6% of escalation challenge episodes, unsupported cases were blocked. Scenario-based savings were 149.7-165.5 seconds per case, not observed staff times. The findings support schema-grounded, validation-first healthcare administrative automation in which language-model components assist mapping but do not authorize unsupported or consequential actions.
One variable sets what an upstream fault costs a staged pipeline of language-model agents: re-derivability, how much of what a stage needs it can rebuild from the original problem. Grounding an inspector agent in that problem is worth +0.608 [+0.517, +0.700] to +0.358 over a blind one on four open-weight backbones served with thinking disabled, and on the two Qwen backbones the blind inspector changes no item at all. That head-to-head is exploratory. One deterministic fault enters the first stage, and we re-expose the original problem to $k = 0,\dots,3$ of the downstream stages with agents, items, fault and topology held fixed, on 120 gsm_hard items per arm at temperature zero. Accuracy under fault rises on four of four backbones, from +0.233 to +0.392, the largest Holm-adjusted $p$ being $2.1\times10^{-6}$. A registered kill test rules out tokens. Blanking every word holds the word slots fixed, and retention tracks the visible fraction on four of four, climbing from 0.221 to 0.692 on the primary. Those two families are confirmatory and everything else here is exploratory. The interaction excludes zero on two of four backbones under the registered pipeline, four of four under a three-stage pipeline, and three of four under full message history, the primary at +0.317. On Llama-3.1-8B the fault carries no detectable cost at any dose, so the other three carry every claim about what a fault costs. Re-derivability also sets what the architecture costs, and no decomposition we measured reliably beats one direct call. With no fault injected the registered pipeline loses to that call by -0.267, -0.125 and -0.317, and on Phi-4 reads +0.058 at $p = 0.118$, which the test fails to separate from zero. The repair that works is cheap and front-loaded: the first re-grounded stage buys +0.394 of matched retention for +59.8 tokens per item on Qwen3-14B, and the stages after it buy nothing.
Generative and Agentic IoT systems offer a promising foundation for digital healthcare applications that combine sensing, personalized reasoning, and autonomous interaction in real-world environments. Nutrition assistance is a natural use case, but existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based systems are often limited to passive text interaction and static context, making them unreliable when food descriptions are ambiguous or nutritional evidence is missing. We propose Nutri-ATLAS, an Embodied Agent for Tabulated Lookup and Assistance for smarter nutrition in the real world. It integrates graph-grounded nutrition reasoning, hardware-aware LLM selection, and robot-based evidence acquisition. Nutri-ATLAS builds a unified Food-Nutrient knowledge graph from USDA FoodData Central and FoodKG and learns 64-dimensional GATv2 food and recipe embeddings. A shared hybrid graph-text scoring mechanism supports food nutrition extraction, nutritional gap filling, substitute retrieval, and recipe-level meal composition, while an LLM-guided skill interface navigates landmarks, updates dietary-context and food-accessibility memory, and grounds recommendations in observed food availability. We evaluate Nutri-ATLAS across nutrient estimation, substitution retrieval, recipe recommendation, patient-profile adherence, edge deployment, and real-world embodied execution. On HealthyFoodSubs, the hybrid retriever achieves 37.9% MAP, 80.7% RR@5, and 90.1% RR@10. On NutriBench v2, Dense+GAT retrieval grounds nutrient estimation across nine quantized Qwen3.5-9B configurations. On PFoodReQ, Nutri-ATLAS reaches 78.8% MAP, 83.0% MAR, and 77.5% F1. A patient-profile study shows adherence to allergy and healthy-target constraints for all selected cases.
Model merging efficiently combines specialized large language models (LLMs) without joint retraining, but can substantially alter expert routing in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Such \emph{routing drift} is often interpreted as routing failure, raising a fundamental question that remains unclear: \emph{does routing drift after MoE merging actually indicate routing failure, and what evidence should justify repair?} We investigate these questions across DeepSeekMoE, OLMoE, and Qwen3-MoE proposing a routing analysis toolkit for controlled counterfactual interventions and token-level analysis. By crossing source and merged router inputs and parameters, we attribute most expert reassignments to input shifts rather than parameter changes at the same layer. However, source-relative routing differences poorly predict next-token likelihood gains from source-route restoration, and different expert selections can produce directionally similar mixture outputs. We therefore operationalize routing failure as \textit{task loss recoverable under a specified routing intervention, with non-routing parameters fixed.} These tests detect recoverable loss under deliberate router corruption, whereas source-route restoration does not establish reliable task benefits in the evaluated merged models. Motivated by these, we propose \emph{Selective Router Repair (SRR)} as a case study, and find that source-specialist token-likelihood advantages do not reliably identify beneficial local corrections. Together, these findings show that \textbf{routing drift alone is insufficient evidence of routing failure}: source-informed corrections must be judged by their task-level intervention effects. The analysis toolkit and SRR code are released.
Tool observations dominate the context of software-engineering agents, making long interaction histories costly to maintain. Existing context compression methods can discard information needed by later actions, while adapting agents to soft-token representations can compromise their original behavior. To reduce context while preserving action-critical information and agent behavior, we combine Latent Observations, Hard Actions (LOHA), a context layout that separates compressed history from text needed for exact reference, with Anchored Context Distillation (ACD), a training method that enables latent reading while constraining behavioral drift. LOHA compresses older tool observations into soft tokens while retaining the agent's own turns and the last K observations in text, providing compact access to historical information and exact access to recent content. To enable the agent to use this representation, ACD distills the base model's full-text predictions into the latent view while anchoring its behavior on plain-text inputs to the same base model. On SWE-bench Verified, K=3 reduces context per call by 43% for Qwen3-4B and 57% for SWE-Master-4B-RL, with resolve rates of 12.1% and 21.8% versus 14.5% and 27.5% for their uncompressed bases. A single-run recency sweep reaches 14.4% and 23.0% at K=8, with larger windows generally favoring task performance over compression. Under a 32K-token limit, Qwen3 with K=3 resolves 21.1% of a 199-instance subset versus 11.1% for the same adapted agent using full text. In concurrent single-GPU serving, it achieves 1.9 times that full-text agent's instance throughput.
We found an approach to get Jev-like properties from standard LLMs like GLM-5.3-Flash. The core idea is to craft the input prompt so that the first output token answers the question. This makes it possible to get a decision with a single forward pass. In the blog post, we describe the approach in detail for GLM-5.3-Flash and vLLM. We benchmark this setup against Jev and Laya. We find that our setup is on-par with Jev in terms of accuracy and speed and that it substantially outperforms Laya. Still, in terms of costs per decision, Jev is several x better than our setup. In turn, our setup supports vision inputs. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857656 Points: 5 # Comments: 1
Backtest auditing is a calibration problem: high flaw recall is not useful when the model falsely flags matched clean strategies. We build a 96-item paired benchmark in which every flawed backtest has a clean control that holds strategy, dates, code style, labels, and reporting scaffold fixed while changing one methodology detail. A deterministic scorer separates flaw recall, clean-control false positives, evidence localization, and fix relevance. Over 1440 cached audits from four text endpoints, the primary DeepSeek auditor reaches 100.0\% closed and clean-aware code recall, but open prompts over-flag 93.8\% of clean code controls, and clean-aware all-three specificity is 87.5\% even where recall saturates. A clean-aware warning drops DeepSeek code false positives from 20.8\% (95\% CI 11.7--34.3) to 0.0\% (0.0--7.4) at unchanged recall, while the budget anchor still flags 38/48 clean controls under the same prompt. Reporting recall alone would rank three of these four models identically; reporting the clean-control rate separates them by 79 points.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) supervises mathematical reasoning through final-answer correctness, but provides little guidance on individual tokens. On-policy distillation (OPD) supplies dense feedback on student-generated responses, yet teacher preference need not reflect correctness. Recent hybrids combine OPD and verifier-derived advantages or reweight task credit using teacher ratios. However, teacher guidance enters after verifier-based group normalization, and token reweighting need not preserve the total task credit assigned to each response. We introduce Unified Entropy-Calibrated Credit Redistribution for GRPO (UECR-GRPO), which integrates verifier and teacher signals within a single GRPO-style update at both the response and token levels. \emph{Path-Utility Unification} (PUU) combines verifier reward and a teacher-to-anchor path log-ratio in a single KL-regularized objective. Its on-policy implementation uses a length-normalized teacher score and combines both rewards before group normalization and PPO clipping, allowing teacher evidence to influence the response ranking. \emph{Entropy-Calibrated Redistribution} (ECR) then uses the signed teacher--old-policy token gap to redistribute the verifier-derived component. Full-vocabulary teacher entropy attenuates uncertain guidance, while a response-wise zero-sum projection preserves the total task credit and its token-wise sign before clipping. Across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, UECR-GRPO achieves average \(\mathrm{Avg@12}\) accuracies of 17.21\% and 65.09\% with Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B students, respectively, exceeding the strongest baseline at each scale by 0.89 and 0.56 percentage points.
Hey HN! We’re Vincent and Jochen from Sitefire ( https://sitefire.ai ). We have been working together for years, with backgrounds in RL/optimization at Stanford and software engineering from Technical University Munich (TUM). With Sitefire (YC W26), we help marketing teams get recommended by AI Search (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude, etc.). Our software monitors prompts, sees which web pages get cited, and uses these insights to help marketing teams take action, e.g. create YouTube videos or write the right blog posts. This means we have a commercial stake in AI-generated web content. And for now, high-information, AI-generated content works great to get cited and recommended in AI Search. But after talking to hundreds of marketing teams, it became clear that everyone despises AI-generated content (“AI slop”). And yet, everyone still wants to leverage AI to create content. So we asked ourselves: what characterizes AI slop? Can we train a model to identify it from human-generated web pages? Researchers from the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind already asked this question for fiction. Their paper StoryScope (Russell et al., 2026) showed that you can tell AI-written stories from human ones by their structure alone, without looking at the words. We ported their pipeline to commercial web pages. Using the Wayback Machine, we collected 2,250 blog posts from 268 B2B company websites that were written before ChatGPT existed. For each blog post, five AI models (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, Kimi K2.5) wrote their own version. Instead of looking at the words, we looked at how each post is built. We had an AI model answer 214 questions about every post, e.g. how hard it pushes its own product, whether it backs up its claims with sources, or whether it quotes a named expert. Then we trained a classifier on these answers. On blog posts it had never seen before, our classifier told AI-generated and human posts apart with 98% accuracy, getting only 19 of 1,740 wrong. Why does it work so well? Because all five AI models write in a similar shape. Mapping every AI model’s values for these features, we see they cluster together, while the human values sit apart and spread out much more. Of the 1% most unique blog posts in our data set, 149 are human, only 4 are AI. So what characterizes AI slop? It tells you the same thing three times. The title already promises what you'll get ("How to Cut Onboarding Time in Half"), the intro lays out what's coming, and the ending says it all again. 77% of the AI posts end by repeating their main point, compared to only 12% of the human posts. We call it the tidy, self-announcing blog post. Still, each AI model has its own accent. We trained a second classifier to tell which of the five AI models wrote a post, or whether a human did. It picks the right author 79% of the time, where random guessing (1 in 6) would get 17%. Almost all of its mistakes are mix-ups between the AI models, not between human and AI. The cool thing about structural features is that you can't simply reword your way out of it. We had each AI model rewrite its own posts until, on average, 73% of their original 13-word sequences were gone, and the AI slop classifier still worked just as well. We're building this into Sitefire: our agents get a structural understanding of text, so the posts they write go deeper and vary the way human writing does. There's a lot we haven't tested yet, like the myriad of humanizer tools, human rewriting, restructuring a post, or prompting an AI model to explicitly avoid these habits. And our human posts are mostly from 2020 to 2022, while the AI posts were generated in August 2026. Structure can't really tell when a human post was written, but it's still not a same-year comparison. We published the study with all the figures on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15369 . The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/pulse-energy-eu/slopshape We're pretty sure your own blog isn't AI slop, is it? We built a checker that runs one of your posts through the ten features from the paper, so you can see for yourself (the full report asks for a work email): https://sitefire.ai/slop-checker . Think you can tell AI slop from human writing? We also made a little game to see if you can keep up with our model, which gets all five rounds right: https://sitefire.ai/spot-the-slop . Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49800566 Points: 5 # Comments: 0
RLVR has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, existing methods typically parameterize temporal progression in the Markov Decision Process by token-by-token generation, despite the highly non-uniform information flow along autoregressive trajectories. In this paper, we propose InfoPPO, which reparameterizes temporal progression using information density rather than raw token count. This reparameterization induces a common state-dependent structure for both temporal credit propagation and policy updates. InfoPPO restores the effectiveness of non-trivial discounting in long-horizon reasoning, retaining effective-horizon contraction while avoiding excessive attenuation of terminal supervision over long token sequences. Moreover, the information-time policy-improvement analysis naturally leads to a state-dependent update constraint, which we implement through adaptive clipping. By adapting the clipping threshold at each token position to the information density of its corresponding state, this mechanism enables more targeted policy updates while preserving proximal control. Theoretically, we extend performance-difference and policy-improvement analyses to the information-time MDP, deriving a policy-improvement lower bound when policy changes are regulated by information density. We further connect the general information-time analysis to practical LLM policy optimization by relating state-wise information density to local policy movement, while also providing theoretical grounding for the adaptive update mechanism. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate consistent gains over competitive baselines across five challenging competition-style mathematical reasoning benchmarks. InfoPPO also maintains stable accuracy and response length across non-trivial discount settings under which token-time PPO deteriorates.
Large language models can hold knowledge they do not report. A model may sandbag on a capability evaluation, or answer against what it internally knows, and its outputs alone cannot tell whether it is hiding an answer or simply does not have one. We borrow the Concealed Information Test, a forensic method that identifies guilty knowledge by presenting a suspect with the true detail among plausible decoys and measuring a stronger response to the item they recognize. Our method, Probe of Internal Recognition (PIR), does the same inside a model. It presents a question with its candidate answers and reads, from the model's internal states, which candidate the model recognizes as correct. PIR is reference-free, needing no honest reference model and no labeled truth corpus. Across eight models from five families (Gemma, Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and Phi), PIR recovers the recognized answer at 0.70 to 0.87 balanced accuracy, well above the 0.28 to 0.40 unknown-item baseline and the 0.25 chance rate. It stays readable across every form of concealment we test, from prompted deception and trained sandbagging to external password-locked and circuit-broken checkpoints, with recognition between 0.85 and 0.93. When the model hides a known answer, recognition stays high. When unlearning removes the knowledge, recognition drops to the level of a question the model never knew. PIR therefore separates a model that will not answer from one that cannot, which supports sandbagging audits and unlearning verification. The signal is causal, adds information beyond black-box behavioral cues, and extends from multiple-choice questions to free-form generation.
LLMs are increasingly used in social simulations for socially interactive agents and robots, offering more flexibility than rule-based systems. However, even though they mimic human behaviour very well, there is a persistent alienness to them. This work investigates whether personality-aware fine-tuning can reduce this gap by improving the consistency and controllability of personality-conditioned dialogue generation compared with instruction prompting alone. We fine-tune two small open-weight LLMs, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Ministral-8B-Instruct, using a corpus that combines personality-labelled social media posts and dialogues to create a personality-based dialogue engine for social simulation. The resulting models are evaluated across multiple social interaction scenarios using three independent LLM judges, which assess personality fidelity and provide evidence-based behavioral interpretations. We additionally quantify inter-rater agreement and lexical characteristics of the generated dialogue. Results indicate that fine-tuned models are not better at role-playing different personalities than their respective baseline models. However, low inter-rater agreement limits the confidence with which these results can be interpreted. Concerning the quality of generated texts, fine-tuned models are mostly comparable to the baselines, with fine-tuning improving the linguistic diversity of the Qwen models. While the results appear generally usable and the baseline models offer the best overall performance, future studies should place greater emphasis on the quality and domain alignment of training data for accurate personality role-playing.
Correctly answering a question grounded in normative documents often depends on information outside any single passage: whether the retrieved document is the version currently in force; whether it applies to the jurisdiction, subject (such as an institution or applicant), and date at issue; and whether each normative claim can be traced to its supporting source text. Hosted retrieval services have substantially lowered the engineering cost of building an initial system over such corpora, making "upload the documents and ask" a common default. We evaluate this default on approximately 73,000 candidate normative documents supplied to a production deployment. The evaluation uses a stratified sample of 200 questions from our published benchmark, with a gold source document for every question; the released sampling rule reads no system outputs or scores. We compare the hosted service with a governed system that resolves version and scope through explicit rules before generation. The governed system scored 97.7 overall, while the hosted service scored 88.1, a gap of 9.6 points computed from unrounded means. The question set, the answer text evaluated for both systems, the scores, and the scripts used to reproduce the reported benchmark statistics are public. The governed configuration has operated as a commercial product since January 2026 and serves 1,126 registered users; named customer organizations include Zhipu AI and Lecheng Health. By mid-April 2026, it had reached roughly 100,000 calls per workday.
How do VLMs map from pixels to semantics? To understand this general question, we focus on a narrow one: studying how VLMs perform optical character recognition (OCR). Across four models, we identify attention heads causally necessary for OCR, and discover that these are in fact general-purpose heads that output interpretable semantic features across all image tokens. For example, pointing these heads at an image token containing the word "bike" causes Qwen3-VL-8B to output "bike," but pointing them at a bird wing causes the model to output the token "feathers." We collapse these heads' attention weights into a single verbalization lens transformation that reveals interpretable semantic features in hidden states across all layers. When combined with projection to vocabulary space, we can obtain interpretable labels starting from layer 0, showing that image representations are in fact aligned with language in early layers. We find that we can also use the inverse of this transformation to edit non-word concepts, e.g., replacing a tractor with a revolver in a naturalistic image, providing causal evidence that this subspace is useful for more than just OCR. Our results are an example of how the study of specific mechanisms can shed light on broader interpretability problems.
When a large vision-language model misclassifies a harmful meme, the failure may reflect missing internal evidence or an inability to route represented evidence to its output. We distinguish these cases in Gemma-3 and Qwen3.5 using sparse autoencoders, role-conditioned probes, causal interventions, and recovery experiments across six harmful content benchmarks, with additional Spanish and Hindi-English code-mixed evaluations. Sparse readouts outperform native prediction on all six primary binary tasks: Qwen averages $0.740$ versus $0.432$ native macro-F1, while residual reconstruction reaches $0.486$, whereas Gemma improves from $0.532$ to $0.714$. These differences reflect supervised accessibility rather than a pre-existing, native decision rule, and the most influential token role depends on the task. Under the evaluated score scales, Qwen silent-feature ablation is $24-63$ times more probe-sensitive, whereas routed-feature patching on literal yes/no tasks is $16-140$ times more output-sensitive. Calibration-only routing recovers $93.3$% of the mean gap, and probe-distilled LoRA improves native predictions, although shared multi-task adaptation causes negative transfer. A case study of Gemma-3-12B on Facebook Hateful Memes finds a distributed rank-32 image-prompt interaction, reaching $0.756$ versus $0.685$ native macro-F1. Robustness controls show that the signal extends beyond English, is not explained solely by accompanying OCR, and depends on paired visual evidence. Thus, routing, rather than representation alone, is a recurring bottleneck in harmful meme classification.
Direct preference alignment methods are widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences because of their computational and memory efficiency. However, likelihood displacement motivates alternative ways to extract information from preference pairs with small likelihood margins. In this paper, we propose and analyze Comparison-based Preference Optimization (ComPO), a zeroth-order alignment method based on comparison oracles. ComPO extracts directional information from these pairs without directly optimizing a differentiable preference loss on them. We establish a convergence guarantee for its basic offline scheme under smoothness, gradient sparsity, and compatibility between the oracle and a latent objective. We further introduce online ComPO, which retains the offline comparison mechanism and uses unlabeled policy generations for reverse-KL control relative to a reference policy. Following the coverage perspective of preference fine-tuning, we establish a performance guarantee for a basic constrained scheme under local coverage and in-distribution pairwise reward accuracy. Experiments on Mistral, Llama, Gemma-2, Qwen3, and Gemma-3 models demonstrate improvements over existing direct alignment methods, including length-controlled win rates, with pair-level diagnostics providing evidence consistent with mitigating likelihood displacement.
How does a multi-agent system evolve from a local deviation into collective loss of control? We propose an epidemic explanation organized around accidental mutation, contagion, and recovery. A spontaneous deviation creates a seed; communication enables other agents to adopt and retransmit its unsafe strategy; collective failure can emerge when propagation outpaces correction and containment. Thus, rare individual deviations can coexist with substantial collective risk. Motivated by reported OpenAI agent coordination incidents, we examine two ingredients of this mechanism. A deployment audit identifies implicit communication paths between nominally independent evaluation runs and verifies transport through a default Docker backend. RogueHandoff-20, a benchmark of 20 executable scenarios, tests recipient susceptibility by injecting unsafe trajectories generated by a modified Qwen-27B route. Across four native-pending routes, executed harm is 0-5% on normal tasks and 40-95% after injection, exceeding paired direct malicious requests by 5-45 percentage points. These results support low observed baseline harm alongside high conditional susceptibility; they do not establish natural rare-event rates or demonstrate an autonomous cascade. The account motivates complementary defenses: strengthen resistance and recovery alongside prevention of spontaneous deviations, and audit and restrict unintended communication paths that can turn local failures into collective loss of control.
Action tokenizers play a central role in autoregressive vision-language-action (VLA) models, determining both the targets for policy training and the executable commands recovered from predicted tokens. Their fidelity is commonly evaluated using pointwise reconstruction metrics such as mean squared error (MSE), yet small individual errors do not fully characterize how faithfully action adjustments across demonstrations are preserved. After compression, similar actions may still cluster around a representative motion, while the adjustments needed for different contexts are diminished, distorted, or even reversed. We introduce physical rank consistency (PRC) to measure how well tokenization preserves local physical distance rankings after reconstruction. Evaluating decoded actions provides a common reference across token vocabularies and decoder architectures, complementing pointwise accuracy with a measure of relational fidelity. We further present ActionPiece, which preserves physical action relationships through joint supervision of representation learning and quantization. Physical rank preservation supervises near-far ordering in encoder and quantized feature distances, while quantization regularization applies the same ordering to codeword assignment distributions. Both objectives augment reconstruction, producing discrete action tokens for standard autoregressive policy learning and execution through a frozen decoder. Under the same Qwen3-VL-4B policy training setup, ActionPiece achieves 94.8% on LIBERO and 68.8% on unseen LIBERO-Plus, with additional evaluations reaching 71.9% on SimplerEnv and 51.5% across VLA-Arena L0-L2. Component ablations show that the two objectives jointly improve PRC and policy success, demonstrating the value of physical relationship supervision for action tokenization.
Capable open-weight models make local coding and reasoning attractive, but their context and execution state strain laptop memory. We present JustFit, an MLX-based inference runtime that combines KVExec for compressed KV execution, PhaseSwap for component residency, and StateTrans for state-preserving serving transitions. These mechanisms fuse reconstruction and coordinate just-in-time materialization and release, independently of model-weight quantization. In full-execution capacity tests on a 24 GiB M4 Pro MacBook running Qwen3.8-27B MXFP4, three independent runs complete 196,608 input and 16,384 output tokens, increasing completed single-request context from the mlx-vlm baseline's 30,720 positions to 212,992 (6.93x); a separate two-request run retains 229,376 positions in aggregate. In separate performance tests, a 32K-input, 64-output probe reaches 19.11 tokens/s, and a repeated 32K+6K workload has a median peak process footprint of 16,374 MiB. The integrated runtime answers 29 of 30 AIME 2026 problems correctly, showing how compact state and lifetime-aware execution expand local serving capacity while supporting extended generated reasoning.
Long-horizon reasoning is vulnerable to early errors that compromise later decisions. We present QART, the Quantum-Augmented Reasoning Transformer, a quantum--classical hybrid architecture combining a backbone language model with quantum encoding, CIM-based QUBO optimization, and quantum decoding. Semantic information can come from hidden representations or model-generated text; detailed encoding and optimization procedures remain proprietary. Under explicit assumptions, we establish a conditional asymptotic reliability separation from single-trajectory autoregressive LLMs. For a common task family with aligned optimality and acceptance criteria, autoregressive acceptance probability tends to zero when cumulative conditional risk of irreversible errors diverges. QART's task-optimal-path recovery probability remains bounded away from zero if conditional probabilities for optimal-path coverage and semantic fidelity, spectral certification, dynamical reachability, and faithful readout remain uniformly positive under a specified resource schedule. The architecture alone does not imply these bounds. Paired measurements on six long-horizon benchmarks using DeepSeek V4 Flash, GLM-5.3, and GPT-5.5 xhigh in a Codex agent environment favor QART in 14 of 15 backbone--benchmark pairs. Relative gains reach 84.0% on SciCode, 47.6% on $τ^3$-Bench, and 44.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0; the DeepSeek V4 Flash configuration regresses by 7.8% on DeepSWE. These results do not directly validate the asymptotic separation. Potential quantum scaling laws are formulated as conditional hypotheses. A quantum-advantage interpretation requires a demonstrated CIM quantum advantage over strong classical solvers and its transfer to end-to-end reasoning after all system overheads.
A common small-model deployment runs one shared backbone with several LoRA specialists that answer over the same context. Serving them naively re-prefills that shared context once per specialist. We study a narrow, practical question: for already-trained standard LoRA adapters -- not adapters retrained for cache compatibility -- how much task quality is preserved if the backbone's prefill KV cache is computed once and reused across specialists, and what does that buy in serving cost? On a Qwen3-1.7B backbone with two adapters (extractive QA on HotpotQA, arithmetic reasoning on GSM8K), we sweep the boundary at which the specialist takes over from the reused base cache and measure paired quality differences and serving cost. Full-prefix reuse had the lowest prefill cost and a small quality difference on held-out GSM8K (Delta = -4.6 EM at a 160-token budget; -3.0 at 320 tokens; -0.8 under a second training seed -- all favoring native, only the first excluding zero, and the magnitude not consistent). Partial recomputation provided no demonstrated advantage. Neither quality equivalence nor a general boundary-selection rule is established. We also report a closed-form ridge KV translator that did not beat direct reuse, and specialist-dependence contrasts whose intervals all include zero. The measured serving benefit is warm-cache time-to-first-token, which grows with context (~16x at 8K); two-branch peak memory was only 12% lower and, on inspection, the prefix was never physically shared across branches -- this implementation reuses KV values but copies their storage, so shared-cache memory savings are not achieved.
Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a safety strategy where the reasoning of a large language model "actor" is inspected by a "monitor" (often another language model) for signs of unsafe planning, deception, or misalignment. We find that planting harmful but benign-sounding reasoning in the actor's context can steer it to perform adversarial actions while evading monitors, an attack we term "plan injection". We initially discover this attack in the multiple-choice question-answering monitorability setting proposed by Lanham et al. (2023), using the investigator-agent elicitation framework of Li et al. (2025). We generalize the attack and show that the discovered behavior scales to harder tasks (achieving 25-33% monitor evasion rates across different monitorability benchmarks) and larger models such as DeepSeek-R1. Across the settings we study, actor models not only follow injected plans but also paraphrase them as their own reasoning, without explicit attribution to the injections. Finally, we find cases where extra monitor resources cause harm - giving the monitor access to the injected plan drops detection by as much as 50% in the Bio-Math task and in a case study on monitor reasoning budget, we find transcripts where additional thinking tokens are spent rationalizing the injected plan rather than flagging it.
Per-token gating of forward/reverse KL losses has become a standard technique for on-policy knowledge distillation (OPD), but existing methods such as EOPD (Jin et al., 2026) and ToDi (Jung et al., 2025) each fix a single gating signal and a single gating direction, and the two have never been compared directly. We introduce a four-coefficient parameterization lambda_t = sigma(a * h_t + b * u(x) + c + d * gap_t) in which direction-aligned proxies of EOPD and ToDi appear as one-dimensional (1D) restrictions, and which adds multi-channel composition and an explicit bias as further degrees of freedom. On TweetEval (Barbieri et al., 2020) emotion and hate, with a Qwen3-32B teacher and a Qwen3-4B student, configurations in the full family reach higher accuracy than the matched-magnitude single-channel (entropy-only / gap-only) 1D restrictions in 33 of 36 comparable cells, and a 26-cell mean-match isolation experiment places dynamic gating ahead of effective-KL-matched static baselines in 19 of 26 cells. Because cells share training data, models, and parameter substructure, we report both counts as exploratory aggregate directional evidence rather than as independent hypothesis tests. Targeted three-seed paired replications of the nine headline comparisons singled out by that sweep -- including a third task, offensive -- are directionally consistent, but individually smaller than the single-seed estimates and not significant at n=3. We therefore present the parameterization primarily as a shared coordinate system for comparing per-token gating designs in short-output classification OPD.
Clinical AI evaluation should encompass diagnosis and management after adaptive information gathering. We compared Doctorina, eight physicians and four standalone frontier language models in 150 synthetic Polish-language primary-care consultations. Doctorina achieved 82.0% Top-1 concordance versus 57.0% for physicians (difference, 25.0 percentage points; 95% confidence interval, 17.7-32.7) and 97.3% versus 85.0% primary-or-reference-differential concordance. Across 149 case pairs, normalized workup and treatment scores were 89.4 versus 66.9 and 83.7 versus 61.2. Doctorina had the highest diagnostic point estimates among all six groups; Kimi K3 ranked next, while Claude Opus 5 led the closely spaced management estimates of Opus, Doctorina and Kimi. A second Doctorina execution reproduced the advantages over physicians across all outcomes. Doctorina's advantage over physicians therefore extended from primary-diagnosis selection to higher-rated diagnostic workup and initial treatment after adaptive consultation.
In reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) trained with group relative policy optimization (GRPO), the KL-free reward-advantage term studied here depends on within-group reward variation. If all rollouts in a group are correct or all are wrong, their group-relative advantages are identically zero; these zero-advantage silent groups provide no reward-advantage gradient, yet uniform sampling spends 39% of a run's rollouts on them. History-based prompt selection must first spend target-policy rollouts to estimate difficulty, creating a cold start with rollout waste; ThinkPrior instead uses an external anchor in one offline pass to construct a zero-rollout difficulty prior before the first target-policy rollout. The verifier-scored anchor pass rate supplies an external-anchor initialization for a Beta posterior; ThinkPrior selects by expected learnability and then updates from training outcomes, changing neither the loss nor the optimizer. On Qwen2.5-Math-7B across sixteen seeds, ThinkPrior more than halves early silent groups and cuts wasted rollouts through step 30 by nearly a fifth, while we detect no difference in final accuracy. On this 250-prompt pool the fixed-budget result is a reallocation rather than a net saving. The measured ThinkPrior+DAPO composition reduces generated rollouts by 10.6% while both arms retain the same 3840-rollout update budget. The prior requires no target-policy rollout before the first selection, but the posterior thereafter uses target-policy outcomes.
Machine-learning performance modeling is a uniquely hostile terrain for long-lived software: the assumptions baked into today's abstractions are invalidated by tomorrow's models and systems, forcing perpetual refactoring of performance-modeling frameworks. Meanwhile, AI coding agents have become fast and capable enough that regenerating an entire library is cheaper than paying down the tech debt of incrementally patching it. We describe SMART, a rigorous symbolic performance-modeling library for ML systems whose main branch contains almost no code: the repository is a DAG of self-contained natural-language design docs, coding sub-agents regenerate the implementation from only the docs on new version updates, and every human change is a natural-language edit to a doc--self-documenting by construction. Two ingredients make regeneration reliable: (i) a design-doc style built around step-by-step worked examples that act as in-context demonstrations for the generating agents, and (ii) a minimal, recursively defined operator IR with symbolic (SymPy) cost expressions, a fast analytical roll-up mode for large sweeps, and a slow modulo-scheduling mode for fine-grained schedule studies. Regenerated implementations reproduce hand-audited reference models--including DeepSeek-V3 serving on a TPU pod slice--to round-off precision, suggesting that design docs--not code--can be the durable artifact for ML-systems co-design tools.
Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning ability, but their explanations can remain inconsistent, weakly grounded, or difficult to verify. We propose a verifier-guided explainable reasoning framework for transparent educational question answering that combines gold-anchored QLoRA, task-aware symbolic routing, and group-relative RLVR. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct is first adapted with field-weighted QLoRA supervision anchored to authoritative answers. A lightweight router then assigns logic problems to a FOL/Z3 verifier and physics problems to a formula- and unit aware symbolic solver. Verifier feedback is further used to support candidate evaluation, self-revision, and reward construction during RLVR. Candidate responses are evaluated along three complementary dimensions: P1 for answer correctness, P2 for evidence or unit consistency, and P3 for reasoning depth and explainability. At inference, gold-free self-consistency aggregates multiple candidate responses before an optional question-only physics verifier performs conservative system-level correction. On 438 held-out examples, RLVR increases P3 from 50.68% to 72.20%, while hybrid P1 remains approximately stable at 55.94%. Self-consistency improves model only P1 from 48.86% to 50.23%, with symbolic verification providing the remaining hybrid gain. These results indicate that RLVR primarily strengthens explicit reasoning structure, while symbolic verification complements the neural policy by improving answer reliability at the system level.
Hyper-Connections and their manifold-constrained variant mHC widen a residual pathway from one stream to n, yet how trained models use this capacity remains unclear: how broadly blocks read and write, how strongly the residual pathway mixes streams, and whether the streams carry distinct representations. We examine these properties in the four-stream residual pathway of DeepSeek-V4-Flash using effective stream counts, cross-stream residual weights, and inter-stream cosine similarity. Read/write routing is concentrated but varies across depth: a typical attention or FFN site effectively uses about two streams, while the dominant stream changes across layers and the representations remain directionally distinct. Residual mixing is modest and occurs primarily in early layers; in layers 22-42, the pathway mostly carries each stream forward separately. Targeted interventions establish the functional significance of these patterns. Replacing the late mixers by identity increases C4 perplexity by only 1.9% and preserves the six-task average score, whereas replacing the early mixers increases perplexity by 41%. Fixing each early mixer to its C4 diagnostic mean increases perplexity by only 0.2% and reduces the average score by 0.25 percentage points, showing that its site-specific structure matters more than its token-wise variation on the evaluated metrics. Likewise, retaining the three largest routing weights per token at every site increases perplexity by at most 2.7% and changes the average score by at most 0.4 points. Thus, the studied model realizes only part of the flexibility afforded by four-stream mHC: individual blocks rarely require all four streams, and late residual mixing provides little measured benefit.
Scaling interactive and verifiable environments is critical for training terminal agents. As frontier models become more capable, environments synthesized from scratch become less challenging and thus provide limited learning signals. Recent co-evolution methods iteratively synthesize environments near the model's learnable frontier based on weaknesses exposed during rollouts. However, their dependence on on-policy rollouts limits generalization and the continuous provision of learning signals as the model becomes stronger. In this paper, we propose environment evolution, which incrementally increases environment difficulty off-policy and schedules the evolved environments generation by generation during training to provide continuous learning signals. We derive three evolution directions that influence environment difficulty from the multi-turn learning objective and then implement evolution along these directions through a loop-engineered multi-agent harness. Quantitative rollout experiments with Hy4 preview, Claude Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol show that environment evolution consistently produces more difficult environments. We validate its effectiveness on Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B through simple long-horizon RL training, improving their performance by 14.4 and 18.0 percentage points on Terminal-Bench 2.1, respectively.
As terminal-based code agents become prevalent, agent trajectories have accumulated at scale, while realistic, executable environments remain scarce. However, environments are what agent post-training actually requires: each can be re-queried into many verifiable tasks and provides execution feedback, whereas a trajectory is a single frozen demonstration. Rather than generating environments from scratch, we observe that the tool-execution history in existing trajectories exposes the structure and contents of the environments in which they ran, making it possible to reconstruct those environments from the trajectories themselves. Thus, we introduce Terminal-Universe, a framework which turns each trajectory into a reusable environment and explores it for synthesizing new tasks and continued interactions. Specifically, Terminal-Universe replays the file operations recorded in a trajectory to restore each file before the agent modified it, yielding a partial workspace; a completion agent then supplies the missing files and dependencies. On this recovered workspace, we both reconstruct the original intent task and synthesize entirely new ones. Besides, we also scale the tasks along two complementary axes: breadth and depth. For breadth, we mine directional dependency relations between related environments and synthesize cross-workspace queries spanning multiple codebases, as developers routinely do in real-world development. For depth, we extend the initial single-turn query into a multi-round session that captures iterative user feedback and requirement refinement via a user agent. Applied to public terminal agent trajectories, Terminal-Universe produces 37.3k task-sufficient environments. Supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3.5-27B on this corpus improves single-round performance on Terminal-Bench 2.1 by 11.9 points and multi-round performance on EvoCode-Bench v2 MT@4 by 13.8 points.
The performance of LLM-based agents is jointly shaped by the base model and the harness used when interacting with the environment. This exposes them to safety risks in both harmful final responses and multi-step execution trajectories. Existing safety alignment mechanisms often rely on either external harness updates or policy optimization, yet applying either paradigm in isolation fails to bridge runtime control with intrinsic safety. We propose SafeEvolve, an experience-driven self-evolving framework for agent safety alignment. SafeEvolve leverages safety experience from completed on-policy trajectories to drive a continual loop of harness-policy co-evolution. On the harness side, SafeEvolve converts trajectory-level safety evidence into bounded, component-level updates across safety prompt and hierarchical skills, yielding auditable and reversible harness artifacts. On the policy side, SafeEvolve follows a two-stage SFT-RL paradigm, where harness-use SFT bootstraps the policy to actively leverage evolved harness artifacts, and harness-augmented RL further shapes autonomous safety behaviors during multi-step exploration via verifier-decomposed rewards. Through harness-policy co-evolution, SafeEvolve converts safety experience into an evolved runtime harness and improved policy behavior. Experiments on agentic safety benchmarks show that SafeEvolve achieves a stronger safety-utility tradeoff than existing baselines. For Qwen3.5-4B, SafeEvolve achieves a $3\times$ ASR reduction on AgentDojo while improving benign utility from 59.79% to 61.86%.
Production LLMs must handle inputs that attempt to override system instructions, bypass safety policies or elicit harmful responses. A common mitigation is a separate guardrail model. Existing reports, however, provide little evidence on Russian prompt injection or Russian surface obfuscation. We present HiveTraceGuard-Pro, a 0.6B generative guardrail LoRA-tuned from Qwen3-0.6B. It is trained on Russian and English and uses one binary scoring rule (safe/unsafe) for the final target turn. Its training corpus pairs harmful examples, where a counterpart exists, with benign examples from the same domain and applies eight obfuscation transforms to both labels. In one harness, we compare HiveTraceGuard-Pro with thirty-four other guards on nineteen benchmark groups, sixteen of which are public. Its aggregate key is 0.7432, behind 0.7641 and 0.7552 for the two higher-scoring guards. Over the sixteen public groups alone, its key is 0.7153 and four of the thirty-four other suite guards score higher. In a fifteen-model comparison, HiveTraceGuard-Pro has the highest clean Russian robustness combined-F1 (0.88) and Russian prompt-injection recall (0.999). Both results use Russian sets assembled by our team, and at least 27.1% of the prompt-injection set overlaps the training corpus. Its 14.3 ms median latency is the lowest among those fifteen models in that run. Across the suite, FPR is 0.268 and FNR is 0.156. All reported response results use a legacy standalone-reply serialization rather than the natural assistant-role path of the shipped chat template. We release the merged weights on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0. The corpus, evaluation sets and evaluation code remain internal.
When a hint turns a failing generated program into a passing one, does it provide missing information or merely steer the model toward a solution it could already produce? We test these hypotheses on HumanEval+ and MBPP+ using executable evaluation. For Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, adaptive relevant hints rescue 36 of 79 selected failures; an unrelated hint rescues 19, while eight unhinted samples solve 46 and recover 31 of the 36 relevant-hint rescues. Phi-3.5-mini shows the same pattern: relevant hints rescue 42 of 101 failures, an unrelated hint rescues 17, and unhinted sampling solves 57, including 36 of the 42 relevant-hint rescues. Because the hint conditions use different attempt budgets, these comparisons do not isolate a purely semantic effect. Mechanistic tests on Qwen identify a stable activation direction shared by relevant and unrelated hints. Persistently adding this direction yields 14 rescues and 18 regressions, with no detectable net accuracy gain; learned low-rank interventions have a positive but imprecise estimated effect. Full textual specifications solve 22 of 24 context-defined problems, versus 5-11 for tested virtual-KV prefixes. Post-generation hidden-state probes transfer across benchmarks, with pooled AUROC 0.806 and 0.780, but their top-one selection advantage over token confidence is statistically unresolved. Overall, relevant hints can rescue failures, but most rescued solutions are already reachable through ordinary sampling, and the internal interventions tested here do not establish task-general capability transfer.
The effect of Large Language Model (LLM) scale on ontology learning (OL) performance remains insufficiently characterized. We present a controlled evaluation of 13 models spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts variants from the Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.6 lineages, together with proprietary GPT release variants, using the OntoLearner retrieval-augmented generation pipeline. All models are evaluated with the same embedding model, retrieval configuration, prompt templates, decoding settings, datasets, and metrics on term typing, taxonomy discovery, and non-taxonomic relationship extraction across four biomedical and materials science and engineering ontologies. Within the dense Qwen3.5 lineage, increasing parameter count primarily improves precision rather than recall, with the largest gains occurring between 9B and 27B parameters. However, the effect of scale is neither monotonic nor uniform across tasks and domains. Dense 27B models outperform substantially larger sparse models on term typing, whereas larger Mixture-of-Experts models achieve the strongest open-weight results on taxonomy discovery. Non-taxonomic relationship extraction remains difficult across model scales, particularly for the Materials Data Science ontology. Performance differences across matched Qwen variants and proprietary GPT releases further indicate that architecture and model lineage can outweigh nominal parameter count. These findings show that model size alone is an insufficient selection criterion for OL and provide empirical guidance for reproducible LLM-assisted ontology engineering.
Mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) assigns a different bitwidth to each linear layer of a large language model (LLM) to minimize the quantization-induced quality loss under a fixed budget, but Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models contain these layers in every expert of every MoE block, so the allocation space grows far larger than in a dense model. Existing methods either allocate within each block under a uniform per-block budget, or allocate across blocks through an additive proxy, and neither directly optimizes a model-level objective over the choices that couple the blocks. We propose Q-Strata, a bi-level allocator that ranks within-block assignments with a cheap proxy and allocates across blocks with a model-level objective evaluated on the assembled quantized model. Its inner stage caches a Pareto frontier of candidates per block over finely spaced budgets, leaving the outer stage to set one budget per block instead of a bitwidth for every linear layer. With the search reduced to one budget per block, the outer stage optimizes this model-level objective directly, capturing the inter-block coupling that additive proxies miss. On Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, and DeepSeek-V2-Lite, Q-Strata consistently achieves lower WikiText2 perplexity than uniform-bitwidth GPTQ and the state-of-the-art MoE MPQ methods MxMoE and GEMQ in the low-bit regime. The code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Q-Strata/tree/main.
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves reasoning by training a problem-only student on its own rollouts using dense token-level supervision from a privileged teacher that also sees a reference solution. However, standard OPSD treats the teacher distribution as a fixed target along the student's rollout and updates only the student %, although -- even though privileged conditioning does not guarantee that the teacher always provides the most appropriate target for problem-only reasoning. This one-way supervision can therefore misdirect the student when the teacher distribution is misaligned with valid student reasoning. We therefore introduce Verifier-Informed Student-to-Teacher Adaptation (VISTA), which preserves the standard OPSD student update while using outcome-verified rollouts to adapt the teacher toward the student distribution. Within each verified rollout, VISTA further restricts this adaptation to the top-$k$ positions with the largest teacher--student KL divergence. Notably, VISTA reuses the rollout and loss function from standard OPSD, introducing no additional sampling or separate reward objective. Across AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25 with Qwen3 models at 1.7B, 4B, and 8B, VISTA achieves the highest Avg@12 at every scale, improving over OPSD by $0.6$, $0.7$, and $2.1$ points, respectively. These results demonstrate the value of student supervision from outcome-verified rollouts and highlight student-to-teacher adaptation as a promising direction for OPSD.
Steering interventions targeting eval-awareness, a model's recognition that it is being tested, are increasingly used in safety evaluation pipelines, where evaluation-awareness is treated as a single quantity to be suppressed. We show that verbalized eval-awareness in chain-of-thought can be identified as capabilities-flavored ("the user is testing my ability to follow instructions"), safety-flavored ("the user is testing my boundaries"), both, or neither: framings that predict compliance very differently. On Qwen3-32B over the FORTRESS dataset, capabilities-framing predicts compliance with a +24 to +46 percentage-point gap over safety-framing across all tested steering conditions. A CoT-prefill intervention on eval-awareness-negative rollouts suggests the link is causal, with 10 of 11 prefills shifting compliance in the predicted direction. Then, eval-awareness is not behaviorally uniform: aggregate suppression rates can move while the safety-relevant component does not, and the same "X% suppression of eval-awareness" can correspond to qualitatively different behavioral outcomes.
Ontology learning from text remains challenging despite significant progress in Large Language Models (LLMs), which can hallucinate domain terms, produce inconsistent formats, and favor hierarchical over associative relations. In the LLMs4OL 2026 Challenge, we address both the End-to-End Flagship Task (Task A) and Ontology Extension Reuse Task (Task B) using an offline retrieval-augmented few-shot prompting pipeline. Our system employs Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct with all-MiniLM-L6-v2 for demonstration retrieval, selecting the top-5 examples for Task A and top-2 for Task B. A left-truncated context-windowing strategy preserves task instructions within long prompts. For Task B, generated triples undergo deterministic vocabulary-constrained filtering, retaining triples when at least one endpoint belongs to the sample's closed term/type vocabulary and removing duplicates of the initial ontology. The approach achieves Semantic Graph Similarity of 0.8692, Term-Typing F1 of 0.9200, and Taxonomy Discovery F1 of 0.8540 on Task B, while Task A achieves 0.7416 Semantic Graph Similarity. However, no non-taxonomic relations are extracted, highlighting limitations of closed, taxonomy-oriented relation vocabularies.
We consider optimization applications with unknown parameters where the decision maker believes that the optimal value of the nominal problem-the optimization problem they would have solved if the true parameters were known-is unlikely to be large. This belief derives from information that humans have that is not captured in datasets, obtained from domain knowledge and interacting with the physical world. We propose an approach to evaluating policies that provides tighter performance guarantees if the decision maker's belief happens to be correct. Our main result shows that if computing a policy's worst-case performance is a convex program, then the value of human expertise-the maximum improvement in performance guarantees that can be obtained from the belief about the nominal problem-is equal to the minimax gap of a max-min problem. We illustrate our developments in assortment optimization and shortest path problems.
One common trade-off in the use of large language models involves reducing the size of the model while increasing the amount of computation at inference time, for example by using a wider beam search. In this paper, we examine the constrained case of this "model size vs. inference compute" trade-off, in which the model outputs are constrained by a strict grammar at inference time. Our results demonstrate that the constrained trade-off behaves differently from the unconstrained trade-off. We investigate the task of converting a prose query into an equivalent SQL query (text-to-SQL). Performance is evaluated on the Spider text-to-SQL benchmark, using the Qwen2.5-Instruct model family ranging in size from 0.5B to 7B parameters, all at 4-bit precision. We experiment with two approaches to varying inference compute: (i) beam search with a variable number of beams; and (ii) sample+vote, i.e., sampling several constrained outputs and then voting on their execution results, where the number of samples is varied. On the 1034-example development set, we find that: (a) both beam search and sample+vote improve accuracy, especially on smaller model sizes; (b) the "model size vs.\ inference compute" trade-off is not advantageous in this experiment, because moving to a larger model size typically results in higher accuracy than increasing inference compute on the same model size; (c) beam search outperforms sample+vote at a matched inference budget. This latter result is of particular interest since it contrasts with the findings of the unconstrained trade-off.
Modern GUI-agent frameworks achieve strong desktop task performance with frontier API models, yet persistent control information often remains implicit in growing interaction trajectories. At each step, the planner reconstructs the active task stage, accumulated evidence, and runtime feedback before deciding the next action. This dependence becomes more pronounced under weaker local reasoning backbones. Across four representative state-of-the-art frameworks, replacing GPT-5 with Qwen3.5-9B reduces average OSWorld SR-100 from 60.9\% to 37.7\%. Trajectory annotation further identifies at least one control failure in 91.6\% of failed trajectories. To address this problem, we introduce LocalLSTC, a training-free architecture that organizes control by temporal scope, maintaining persistent cross-step state to guide short-term execution commitments. Long-Term Control maintains the active subgoal, subgoal-aligned evidence, and runtime feedback across interactions, while Short-Term Execution realizes bounded commitments for the current step. Long-to-Short Planning forms each commitment from persistent state, and Short-to-Long Control integrates execution outcomes back into that state for progress assessment, recovery, and termination. With Qwen3.6-27B, LocalLSTC reaches 64.7\% SR-100 on OSWorld and 65.3\% on WindowsAgentArena, outperforming the strongest prior local results on both benchmarks. Ablations further support contributions from mechanisms on both sides of execution. These findings identify temporal organization of control information as a distinct architectural dimension for locally deployed GUI agents.
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) remains hard in long-horizon tasks, where growing histories obscure the task state and misalign skill invocation. We introduce Recuris, a recursive Experiential-Working Memory architecture for long-horizon agent harnesses, in which Working Memory tracks task progress and guides skill selection from Experiential Memory, grounding skill use in current needs rather than the full history. This coupling also turns execution into structured evidence that localizes failures to specific memory components. Across tasks, a fixed Meta-Agent turns that evidence into localized, validation-gated updates to Skill Memory that reshape execution and yield new evidence, forming a bounded recursive memory-evolution loop. Across four long-horizon benchmarks and ten models, Recuris improves task success in 35 of the 37 completed model-benchmark pairs, carrying frontier models to SOTA-level task success: on tau-bench it adds +17.8 points to GPT-5.6 Sol and +15.6 to Claude Opus 5, taking Opus 5 to 87.9%, and +16.6/+13.5 points on Qwen3.6-27B/35B on SkillFlow. The advantage widens as the interaction horizon grows, to +32.2 points on the longest tasks, and common long-horizon failures fall by up to 80%. These results position recursively evolving memory as a scalable foundation for RSI, enabling agents to continuously transform accumulated experience into increasingly effective long-horizon behavior. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Recuris
Found that you can actually run a 35B Qwen model on a Pi with very impressive intelligence and stability. Built connectors for car ODB to read all about car internals, and manufacturer's cloud service for stuff like changing AC or opening/ locking doors. Gave it info such as the full car manual. And then hooked it up with my other agents in our discussion room! So now it can answer car questions such as "when should I add oil and what kind of oil?" and help you fully offline, and when online talk with the agent family that includes all the most powerful models so they know how the car is, plan new features and develop itself with them. For example, if car breaks and can't move the car agent informs my agent family and they can already look for a suitable train ticket without me needing to check things or do something. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435675 Points: 6 # Comments: 0
We present Team Semiintelligencn's solution for the ACM RecSys 2026 TalkPlayData Challenge, addressing conversational music recommendation through a multi-modal and personalized conversational recommender system. Our submitted system employs a three-stage pipeline: (1) multi-modal retrieval constructing decay-weighted centroids across seven dense embedding spaces - track- and user-level CF-BPR, Qwen3 (metadata, lyrics, attributes), CLAP audio, and SigLIP visual - supplemented by BM25 lexical retrieval and an artist substring-match signal, all fused via weighted Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) with optimized signal weights; (2) lightweight reranking (history filtering, popularity smoothing, and catalog diversity penalization); and (3) persona-diversified response generation using GPT-4o-mini. Beyond this submitted configuration, we report development-time experiments with additional components - constrained LLM-guided artist injection, album continuation signals, XGBoost LambdaMART, and a superior GPT-4.1 response prompt - that were not deployed to Blind B due to cost and complexity constraints. We optimize RRF weights on a 500-session development split via differential evolution, improving MRR by +19.5%. On Blind A, we observe that unconstrained LLM-guided injection across 54 sessions causes catastrophic nDCG regression (-18.9%), while conservative injection on only 9 sessions yields the best observed Blind A nDCG - a finding we present as a Blind A observation warranting further validation. The submitted system achieves a Blind B composite score of 0.3213.
Historical people may appear under different languages, scripts, and transcription traditions, while distinct individuals may share highly similar or even identical names. This makes historical identity reconciliation more than a problem of string matching or transliteration. We introduce MHER, a provenance-controlled benchmark for pairwise reconciliation of person-name attestations from the Mongol world. MHER contains a balanced 396-pair Name-only core over 84 primary historical persons and a stricter 160-pair Source-grounded subset constructed from mention-by-source evidence, with entity-disjoint development and test splits. Across five generative systems, correctly Source-grounded evidence improves paired TEST accuracy by 12.96 to 94.44 percentage points relative to Name-only input. On five identical-surface different-person cases, all models fail under names alone (0/25 model-item decisions), whereas Source-grounded evidence yields 24/25 correct resolutions, with the remaining output an abstention. Context-only ablations show that historical descriptions often carry substantial identity information, while explicitly signaled misgrounding controls produce substantially lower performance. We also find that names are not uniformly beneficial: for Qwen3-8B, restoring surface forms converts ten otherwise correct Context-only distinctions into false identity merges. These results show that historical entity reconciliation depends not only on surface correspondence, but on whether identity judgments respond appropriately to provenance-controlled historical evidence. MHER therefore provides a controlled framework for studying evidence use, abstention, and failure modes in historical NLP.
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in visual comprehension, their ability to reason about text-dense, professional documents remains incompletely evaluated. Existing benchmarks emphasize information extraction, require external domain knowledge, or cover professional documents only as one of many settings. They are also largely English- or Chinese-centric, leaving other languages and Russian, in particular, substantially underrepresented. To address these limitations, we introduce BEAR-Bench (Bilingual Enterprise and Academic Reasoning), a self-contained, complex English-and-Russian benchmark comprising 1000 human-annotated questions based on text-rich business and scientific documents. We evaluate 16 proprietary and open-weight MLLMs, including Gemini 3.1 Pro and Qwen3.5-397B, on BEAR-Bench and observe clear headroom even for the strongest systems. Finally, we use the resulting model outputs to compare existing hallucination detection methods, evaluating not only how often models fail on BEAR-Bench but also how reliably those failures can be identified.
Generative pretraining established reusable task representations; later work on language-based task conditioning and in-context learning showed that a fixed model could adapt its behavior from instructions and demonstrations. Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) builds on this development and the recurrent evaluate-and-improve structure of generalized policy iteration. PIHF uses a pretrained language model as its execution substrate and moves persistent revision to a versioned natural-language policy and tool set. A language-model critic and clinical expert review complete-panel reasoning and tool-use trajectories to localize recurrent failures and form candidate revisions; the expert may reinterpret the evidence and retains authority over admission and rollback, while Recall@1 and Recall@5 validate outcomes after candidate execution. Across cumulative ablations and ultra-rare-disease benchmarks, a PIHF-derived policy improved Recall@1 in one proprietary executor and three open-weight executors spanning 3 to 49 billion active parameters. Gains were 32.7 percentage points for GPT-5.4 and 31.1 points for Qwen3.6-35B, a difference of 1.7 points. These results support the feasibility of using pretrained language models as fixed-weight execution substrates for expert-guided policy development in rare-disease diagnosis.
Large language model (LLM) agents often perform poorly on complex, long-horizon tasks because their context becomes increasingly cluttered over time. As interactions accumulate, detailed execution traces and intermediate outputs dominate the context, making it difficult for the model to retain and use high-level planning information. Most existing methods address this issue through compression or retrieval applied to a single, flat context, which does not clearly separate different types of context information and often leads to degraded reasoning. To address this challenge, we propose HyMem, a hierarchical framework that explicitly separates the agent's context into distinct functional layers. HyMem organizes context by function to separate high-level planning from execution and complex analysis. Its isolated reasoning module handles complex subtasks without adding intermediate reasoning traces to the persistent planning context, while its memory management module preserves task progress across context refreshes through structured summaries. These components reduce redundant context accumulation, retain task-critical information, and support coherent long-horizon reasoning within a limited context window. Experiments on GAIA and Browsecomp-plus show that, with DeepSeek-V4, HyMem achieves average Pass@1 scores of 66.7% and 61.3%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.1 and 4.7 percentage points, respectively. Further analysis indicates that HyMem effectively controls the growth of the reasoning context, allowing the model to maintain focus and accuracy across complex, long-horizon tasks.
The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), as a landmark algorithm, has attracted tremendous research attention and extensive practical applications over the past two decades. It is well known that, although the two-block ADMM enjoys well-established theoretical convergence guarantees, its direct extension to the three-block case may fail to converge, as demonstrated by existing counterexamples [5]. However, to the best of our knowledge, the case in which the third constraint block is the identity remains unresolved: the existing literature gives neither a general convergence proof nor a counterexample for this subclass. In this paper, we give a negative answer: direct three-block ADMM may fail even when the first two blocks are strongly convex quadratics. Using Codex with GPT-5.6 Sol, we construct an explicit rational counterexample candidate and verify it along a piecewise-affine reduction path; exact checks show that direct three-block ADMM on this instance produces a bounded nonconvergent orbit of period 66. Within the same Codex workflow, we further guide a study of multiplier relaxation and clarify when convergence can be restored at the fixed-instance and class levels: a problem-dependent small dual step can restore convergence, whereas no positive relative step works uniformly over the whole class. Furthermore, we also test the recent Kimi Code with Kimi K3 model without the Codex candidate or project-specific route guidance; along a different path it produces an exact locally attracting period-23 certificate, convertible to an equivalent all-identity instance. The comparison suggests that different research-harness configurations can shape the mathematical objects explored and the certificates pursued.
Embodied intelligent virtual agents are expected to operate as persistent, adaptive, and context-aware entities within complex virtual and Metaverse worlds. However, implementing cognitively capable agents in such environments is conceptually and technologically challenging. Among a range of blueprints and development approaches, the Cognitive Embodied Agent Architecture (CEAA) has been developed as an implementation-oriented framework for architecting components of perception, memory, reasoning, planning, and embodied action. Considering the recent advances in edge computing and generative AI language models, this paper explores the use of Small Language Models (SLMs) to support edge-based operation of selected CEAA components, focusing on "Think" and "Memory" as processes central to cognitive orchestration and persistence of virtual agents in interactive virtual worlds. An edge-based virtual agent gateway system was developed and evaluated on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX using Qwen2.5 models of different sizes, exploring the system's capability to process service requests and handle memory-driven conversations. A series of simulation experiments evaluated routing accuracy, memory-read performance, and latency, demonstrating an SLM-driven prototype agent system that partially implements selected CEAA processes to support the development of embodied agents whose cognitive "brain" can operate efficiently and contextually for interactive experiences in immersive virtual worlds.
Current large language model development relies on massive, often non-permissible datasets, creating a high barrier for researchers committed to open-source and ethically sourced data. We introduce Mimir v1, a 1-billion-parameter language model based on the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) architecture, that is trained from scratch and delivers highly competitive performance for English and sets a new state of the art for Danish using only permissible post-training data. Trained on a mixture of 161 datasets, Mimir v1 outperforms the original HRM-Text 1B and competes with larger frontier models like Qwen 3.5 4B and Gemma 4 E2B, tested across 20 benchmarks for English, Math & Code and Danish. The model is available on the Hugging Face Hub: https://huggingface.co/danish-foundation-models/DFM-Mimir