Large language models (LLMs) generally rely on sampling temperature to regulate the amount of randomness in their outputs. Mainstream methods for selecting temperature typically involve fixed, heuristic global settings and context or token-level calibration, rather than a geometrically interpretable representation of the communicative scenario. In this work, we introduce a simple and interpretable temperature selection framework, the \textbf{Scenario-Actor}, which adapts decoding to the inferred situational characteristics. Scenario-Actor extracts scenario-relevant structures from Transformer hidden states and determines the temperature from scenario embedding, a structured geometric representation of the communicative setting. Empirical results show that on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Scenario-Actor achieves strong goal-completion performance in interactive social scenarios, significant gains on open-ended instruction following, and competitive performance on multi-turn conversation compared to multiple baselines.
In this comprehensive coding tutorial, we explore Meta's Rebalancer assignment solver using its C++ core and Python bindings. Learn how to build datacenters, manage task placements across racks, handle constraints and goal priorities, and compare local search against the exact HiGHS solver using published benchmarks. The post How to Use Meta’s Rebalancer for Task Placement & Optimization appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Meta released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, 1M-context agent models. Muse Wonder costs $4/$20 per million tokens on Meta Model API. Wonder Full, on Muse Code plans, leads DeepSWE and SWE-Marathon. The post Meta Launches Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full: Benchmarks, Pricing and How to Use It appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Release: llm-meta-ai 0.2 Meta AI release Muse Wonder (and Muse Wonder Full), their new "most capable models". These look like they may be Meta's first Fable class models - Artificial Analysis scores Muse Wonder (Max) as equivalent to GPT-6.1 Sol. I updated my llm-meta-ai plugin for the new model. Here are pelicans for Muse Wonder for the six reasoning levels: minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, max. This is the max one: Blue cycling helmet, bicycle is missing one bar but otherwise an OK shape, has mudguards, nice background, OK beak. For comparison, here are pelicans for Muse 1.3 (released September 2nd) and Muse 1.2 (released August 5th). Meta AI are putting out a new model a month, and the improvements between each model (at least in terms of drawing pelicans) are material. Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , meta , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , llm-release
The other day I whizzed past several people while running in the park, my playlist blasting at full volume. The next morning, I smiled at a barista while ordering a caramel apple-flavored matcha latte. Afterward, I sat on a park bench reading a book, called up a pal to chat about her recent trip to […]
Google is making Gemini 4 Argon available worldwide through its API, the Gemini app, and Google Antigravity. The frontier model is aggressively priced but trails Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and Meta's Muse Wonder Full in independent benchmarks. Internally, Google says Argon already cut coding tasks from months to weeks. The article Gemini 4 Argon is now available worldwide as Google's most capable frontier model appeared first on The Decoder .
Facebook is the latest social media platform to give users greater control over the algorithm that determines what appears in their feeds. Meta announced the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Your Algorithm,” on Tuesday, a feature it first launched on Instagram. The new tool allows Facebook users to influence the content they see in […]
Meta Platforms Inc. today released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, two artificial intelligence models it says are its most capable yet at running agents that handle personal and professional tasks. Meta aimed the release at the longer, multistep jobs people hand off to an AI agent. One example it gave was working through an […] The post Meta releases Muse Wonder AI models built to run personal and professional agents appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
Meta's new Muse Wonder models rank in the top three on six out of ten benchmarks, with the biggest gains in agentic tasks. But the cost per task has nearly tripled. The article Meta's new frontier model Muse Wonder Full breaks into the AI top tier appeared first on The Decoder .
Meta's Superintelligence Lab released a pair of new state-of-the-art models on Monday, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, the company's first attempt at a frontier model.
Meta is making up for lost time in the AI race. After launching Muse Spark, the first model from its revamped Superintelligence Labs division, and buzzy AI agent Muse, it's now launching two new models it claims can go toe-to-toe with the industry's best. The new models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, are available […]
FreeAiWiper processes your files and removes AI watermarks and metadata fully on your browser. at the moment we support various image, video and document types. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056263 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
arXiv:2512.02444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Joining heterogeneous tables requires different forms of correspondence, including exact agreement, syntactic transformation, semantic similarity, and entity-level matching. The appropriate join method is often unknown in advance, while running every candidate method incurs unnecessary cost. We introduce MetaJoin, a label-free framework for adaptive join selection. MetaJoin uses input evidence to choose an initial specialist, then uses specialist-specific output evidence to determine whether that result should be retained, compared with an alternative, escalated, or repaired. This allows join selection to adapt after execution rather than committing to a one-shot routing decision. We also introduce MNN Join, a transformation specialist that searches for string transformations by maximizing mutual-nearest-neighbor coverage between two unaligned columns and uses the same reciprocal structure to validate its output. We evaluate MetaJoin on 670 datasets from six benchmarks. It achieves 0.817 macro row-F1, slightly exceeding a benchmark-level oracle that is given the best standalone specialist for each benchmark (0.812), and outperforms label-free selection policies built from the same specialist portfolio by more than 0.13. Across the 609 datasets in the four transformation-dominant benchmarks, MNN Join outperforms every evaluated transformation baseline. Finally, MetaJoin's accuracy varies by only 0.015 as the controller backbone ranges from 3B to 14B parameters, showing that output validation and repair substantially reduce dependence on the initial routing decision.
arXiv:2605.08098v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kirigami is an increasingly useful fabrication method to produce shape-programmable metamaterial structures. However, inverse design remains difficult because deployment is nonlinear, and feasible cut layouts must satisfy discrete compatibility rules, avoid overlap, and map one target shape to valid designs. We present RL-Kirigami, an inverse design framework that combines optimal-transport conditional flow matching (OT-CFM) with reinforcement learning to generate compatible ratio fields for compact reconfigurable parallelogram quad kirigami. A marching decoder enforces global geometric compatibility, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) aligns the generator with nondifferentiable rewards for silhouette matching, feasibility, and ratio-field regularity. Across procedurally generated target shape instances, a single sample from the pretrained OT-CFM prior reached $94.2\%~\mathrm{sIoU}$ and outperformed solver baselines while reducing forward simulator evaluations from hundreds to $1$. GRPO improved accuracy to $94.91\%~\mathrm{sIoU}$ and, with regularity included, reduced $\mathrm{TV}(\mathbf{x})$ from $0.95$ to $0.81$ while maintaining $94.83\%~\mathrm{sIoU}$. Generated layouts were exported to DXF and laser cut in $50~\mu\mathrm{m}$ polymeric sheets to produce deployable prototypes in $8.0\pm 1.0$ minutes per part. These results support a manufacturing-aware inverse design workflow for deployable kirigami metamaterials under geometric feasibility constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/milad1378yz/RL-Kirigami.
arXiv:2604.01730v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates Koopman operator-based approaches for multivariable control of a two-spool turbofan engine. A physics-based component-level model is developed to generate training data and validate the controllers. A meta-heuristic extended dynamic mode decomposition is adapted, with a cost function designed to accurately capture both spool-speed dynamics and the engine pressure ratio (EPR), enabling the construction of a single Koopman model that can be reused across multiple control strategies. Using the identified time-varying Koopman model, an adaptive Koopman-based model predictive controller (AKMPC) with a disturbance observer is developed and compared with a Koopman-based feedback linearization controller (K-FBLC) and its integrator-augmented version (K-FBLC-I). The Koopman representation further enables nonlinear GTE output limiters, such as rotor-acceleration and turbine-inlet-temperature limits, to be expressed as linear constraints in the AKMPC. The controllers are evaluated for two control configurations of spool speeds and EPR, under both sea-level and varying flight conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed identification approach enables accurate predictions of both spool speeds and EPR, allowing the Koopman model to be reused flexibly across different control formulations. While all strategies achieve comparable performance in sea-level conditions, the AKMPC demonstrates improved performance under varying flight conditions due to its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics, handle constraints, and compensate for model mismatch. Moreover, the EPR control strategy improves the thrust response. The study highlights the applicability of Koopman-based control and the advantages of the AKMPC framework for robust turbofan engine control.
arXiv:2610.13411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional system identification typically involves two steps: initially, training data is processed to estimate a model of the system of interest; then, the model is used to predict outputs for new input queries. In contrast, recent in-context learning approaches learn a meta model that maps directly from training data and query inputs to outputs in a zero-shot fashion, bypassing explicit model estimation. This approach leverages a meta model trained offline, on large sets of synthetically generated data, to emulate the behavior of a system identification algorithm. In this work, we advance this meta-learning framework for system identification in three directions. First, we develop a unified probabilistic meta-identification architecture that combines a Transformer-based encoder-decoder with tailored mechanisms for handling long training sequences, enabling calibrated predictions over long horizons. Second, we show how a pre-trained meta model can act as an uncertainty-aware synthetic data generator for classical system identification, providing task-specific data that regularize parametric models when real data are scarce. Third, we systematically evaluate the framework on standard nonlinear system identification benchmarks and on a challenging out-of-distribution scenario, demonstrating competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods and strong generalization, including cases where input-only adaptation is sufficient to handle significant distribution shifts.
arXiv:2610.13082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored as facilitators of group discussion and collaborative work, but the behavioral differences between LLM-generated and human facilitation remain insufficiently characterized. We compare human Project Manager facilitation turns from scenario-based collaborative design meetings with Llama 3.1 8B Instruct responses across 199 paired contexts from the AMI Meeting Corpus. The analysis covers five confirmatory dimensions: contextual semantic distance, a lexical elaboration proxy, empathyand-hedge lexical density, topic divergence, and phase-vocabulary alignment. An exploratory directiveness measure failed domain validation and is not interpreted. The sampled human Project Manager turns were higher on contextual semantic distance (r = 0.644) and on empathyand-hedge lexical density (r = 0.203). The second contrast is carried mainly by hedge terms, so we read it as lexical hedging rather than psychological empathy. Llama-generated facilitation was higher on topic divergence (r = 0.703), the lexical elaboration proxy (r = 0.288; lengthconfounded), and instruction-conditioned phase-vocabulary alignment (r = 0.382). A secondary no-phase check left the Llama-higher phase contrast in place. The system prompt still requested a facilitation move, so that check is not evidence of spontaneous phase awareness. These differences should not be interpreted as a ranking of facilitation quality. The resulting behavioral profile provides a reference point for later comparisons of LLM facilitators, human facilitators, prompts, models, and collaborative settings.
arXiv:2610.12741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We interpret Transformer networks as learned approximations to a hybrid probabilistic-inference procedure that combines max-product Loopy Belief Propagation (LBP) with Expectation--Maximization (EM). In this view, a Transformer performs inference in partially observed Markov Random Fields (MRFs) whose structure and parameters are not given a priori but are inferred from data. We show that self-attention implements a differentiable approximation to max-product LBP on an input-conditioned, dynamically structured MRF, with attention weights encoding learned structural affinities. We further establish an EM correspondence at the level of depth: each layer updates latent representations in an E-step-like forward pass, while the transition $\theta^{(l)} \to \theta^{(l+1)}$ across layers acts as an implicit M-step. Building on this interpretation, we introduce \emph{meta-models}, a design paradigm in which inputs generate instance-specific parameters, unifying mechanisms such as self-attention, mixture-of-experts, and gated units within a single framework. Empirical results support the proposed perspective.
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 $35.5$\%.
Traditional system identification typically involves two steps: initially, training data is processed to estimate a model of the system of interest; then, the model is used to predict outputs for new input queries. In contrast, recent in-context learning approaches learn a meta model that maps directly from training data and query inputs to outputs in a zero-shot fashion, bypassing explicit model estimation. This approach leverages a meta model trained offline, on large sets of synthetically generated data, to emulate the behavior of a system identification algorithm. In this work, we advance this meta-learning framework for system identification in three directions. First, we develop a unified probabilistic meta-identification architecture that combines a Transformer-based encoder-decoder with tailored mechanisms for handling long training sequences, enabling calibrated predictions over long horizons. Second, we show how a pre-trained meta model can act as an uncertainty-aware synthetic data generator for classical system identification, providing task-specific data that regularize parametric models when real data are scarce. Third, we systematically evaluate the framework on standard nonlinear system identification benchmarks and on a challenging out-of-distribution scenario, demonstrating competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods and strong generalization, including cases where input-only adaptation is sufficient to handle significant distribution shifts.
At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to "set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI." OpenAI would spend the day taking veiled shots at Meta's Muse, its primary competitor, for failing to keep users' data safe. […]
arXiv:2605.12765v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) memorize vast amounts of training data, raising concerns regarding privacy, copyright infringement, and safety. Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of a targeted forget set while preserving model performance, ideally approximating a model retrained from scratch without it. Once an LLM is in use, every new request to make it forget specific content demands updating its weights. However, unlearning through parameter updates is expensive, hard to audit, and can be undone by quantization. We show that unlearning can be enforced entirely at inference time, without training, gradients, or weight changes. We introduce Inference-Time Unlearning via Gated Activation Redirection (GUARD-IT), a training- and gradient-free method that unlearns via input-dependent activation steering at inference time. GUARD-IT stores the content to be forgotten as a small library of activation directions, and during inference, it routes each query through a similarity gate that activates only for relevant directions and applies them as a norm-preserving rotation of the residual stream, while unrelated queries pass through the unmodified model. The same design carries across three model families and nine checkpoints from 0.8B to 8B parameters, and new forget requests are absorbed by one offline pass of forward passes. On TOFU, against 16 gradient-based and inference-time baselines, and on MUSE and WMDP, GUARD-IT forgets without breaking the model, and on TOFU it is the only method that suppresses memorization in every Llama configuration without collapsing: it keeps utility and fluent generation in every configuration, moves the model's output distribution closest to a model that never saw the forgotten data on the forget01 split, survives 4- and 8-bit quantization and ten sequential forget requests, and holds under jailbreak attacks.
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:2610.11030v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents violate the policies they are deployed to enforce, often silently. Prior defenses hand-write rules, query an LLM verifier per action, or compile policies through heavyweight formal machinery. Naive compilation fails: extracted rules block the tool satisfying their own precondition, or read arguments their tool lacks. NOMOS, a four-pass compiler, turns a natural-language policy into a deterministic tool-call gate; static verification with tool-schema-level checks alone (no prover, solver, or LLM) repairs or rejects 37% (airline) and 13% (retail) of candidates, without which most shipped rules are inoperable. Replaying compiled rules over undefended transcripts flags bindings that refuse legitimate work (a development binding refused 95.9% of task-passing calls); no evaluation binding is flagged. On $\tau^2$-bench the gate cuts violations of reference-encoded clauses among state-changing calls from 66.3% to 2.6% (airline) and 30.8% to 6.9% (retail), raising airline task success significantly for $2 \le k \le 4$; a 26B on-premise compilation is not significantly worse than hand-written or frontier-compiled rules. Unlike AgentDojo's shipped defenses, it reaches a zero attack success rate (ASR) on banking, where nine attack families collapse onto three structural rules. On the other three suites its ASR is at most 3.6%, from goals with no tool call to govern and one write admitted by a binding weaker than its clause; a second agent model, Llama-3.3-70B, reproduces the effect on both benchmarks. Decisions take microseconds without an LLM call, at a domain-dependent benign-utility cost; compilation runs on-premise on open-weight gemma-4-26B.
arXiv:2610.10663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bioacoustics and ethology encompass a wide range of audio understanding tasks, many of which stand to benefit from recent advances in large audio-language models. However, progress in the field has so far been assessed on a narrow set of tasks, primarily centered on label-centric biological category recognition, such as species and call-type classification. In this work, we introduce BEANS-Next, a benchmark grounded in a taxonomy of bioacoustics tasks spanning acoustic perception, biological category recognition, scene understanding, and in-context learning. Using BEANS-Next, we show that existing models exhibit limited performance beyond the task families emphasized by existing evaluations, constraining their usefulness for broader bioacoustic applications. To support progress on this broader task space, we also introduce ROOTS, a large-scale training resource built from expanded curated real-world data and previously underused behavioral and acoustic metadata, supplemented by audio-derived information and scalable synthetic generation where labeling is insufficient. We demonstrate that training on this dataset yields substantial progress across all task groups of BEANS-Next, moving audio-language models closer to their potential as general-purpose assistants for bioacoustics and ethology. To accelerate progress in the field, we open-source our benchmark, dataset, and data pipelines.
arXiv:2610.12444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantizing AdamW's optimizer states reduces persistent storage, but quantization errors propagate through the moment recurrences and perturb subsequent adaptive updates. We redesign 4-bit optimizer-state quantization for AdamW from the perspective of \emph{rounding space}: the coordinate in which a quantizer chooses between adjacent reconstruction levels. For the second moment, a local analysis of the quantization cell adjacent to zero shows that small mean state error need not imply small mean preconditioner error at the next step. A one-dimensional quadratic construction further shows qualitatively different optimization dynamics under state-space and preconditioner-space rounding. These results motivate Zero-Inclusive Preconditioner-space Stochastic Rounding (\textbf{ZIP-SR}), which retains zero in the second-moment codebook and computes stochastic-rounding probabilities in preconditioner space. As a complementary route, Zero-Excluding EDEN calibration (\textbf{ZE-EDEN}) uses a zero-excluding second-moment codebook and rescales the quantized second-moment block to mitigate the preconditioner distortion caused by the positive quantization floor. Both configurations use 4-bit NormalFloat (NF4) for the first moment, with targeted stochastic rounding of the LM-head first moment during the final 10\% of training. Across GPT- and Llama-style pretraining experiments ranging from \textbf{130M} to \textbf{2.7B} parameters, both methods reduce TorchAO 4-bit AdamW's mean validation-loss gap to 32-bit AdamW at every evaluated model size, with the largest reported gap reduction reaching \textbf{70\%}. In full-parameter supervised fine-tuning, both recipes achieve lower validation loss than TorchAO while remaining close to 32-bit AdamW on downstream tasks.
arXiv:2610.11627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repairing scientific models from functional observations differs fundamentally from supervised prediction: feedback may certify a solution without revealing which structural correction is responsible. We study this setting for genome-scale metabolic model (GEM) repair, where multiple reaction edits can explain the same phenotypes and many apparently distinct edits correspond to the same biological mechanism. This many-to-one structure creates a hidden failure mode for conventional exploration: diversity in the output space need not translate into diversity of scientific hypotheses. We introduce QuotientPO, which collapses equivalent repairs into canonical mechanisms and optimizes exploration directly over the resulting quotient space. To make quotient exploration informative under finite rollouts, we derive a kernelized R\'enyi estimator that resolves graded crowding among distinct repair cores beyond coarse exact-match counts. On 2,212 held-out GEMs, QuotientPO improves Success@32 from 17.93% to 20.10% (+12.1% relative) while consistently increasing distinct successful-core discovery under the same sampling budget. These results establish quotient-space exploration as a principled approach to mechanism-level discovery under verifier-induced equivalence.
arXiv:2610.11549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Acquiring realistic microstructure data through Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) is costly and time consuming, often relying on specialised equipment. As microstructures strongly influence material properties, generating realistic samples is essential for modelling the behaviour of polycrystalline materials. We introduce a generative model for synthesising realistic polycrystalline microstructures using flow matching and graph neural networks. By representing microstructures as anisotropic power diagrams, our model learns a compact geometric parametrisation and can render generated samples at arbitrary pixel resolution. A $C_4$-equivariant architecture incorporates rotational symmetry directly into the model, ensuring that rotations of the input noise produce corresponding rotations of the generated microstructure. We also demonstrate how training-free guidance can be used to generate complex microstructures, based on user defined objective function. In particular, we generate microstructures resembling a copper weld, cast metal slab, 3D-printed stainless steel and heterogeneous lamella titanium.
arXiv:2610.11252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents the Neuro-Memory Fuzzy Inference System (NeMeFIS), a hierarchical machine learning architecture that asymmetrically models acceleration and deceleration in car following behavior by integrating five human memory types procedural, working, episodic, semantic, and declarative. By linking external variables to memory functions via metaheuristics and validating them through factor and p-value analyses, NeMeFIS uncovers latent cognitive influences across Arterial, Collector, and Rural Highway corridors for different types of vehicles. Results from 54 different trained models emphasize cognitive thresholds shaped by driver perception limits and cognitive load. The trained NeMeFIS models outperform traditional statistical and conventional machine learning models in replicating realistic driving behavior, including comparisons with Linear Regression, ANFIS, and LSTM architectures. Fuzzy rule analysis reveals that declarative memory demands the highest rule, especially during deceleration, indicating complex braking decisions. Procedural memory drives acceleration, while semantic and declarative memory guide deceleration. Risk perception also emerges as a key factor, particularly on urban roads. Validated on both heterogeneous and homogeneous datasets, NeMeFIS offers a robust framework for modeling driver cognition. The findings support psychotherapeutic applications and the development of adaptive, human-like decision systems in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) to enhance traffic safety.
arXiv:2610.11236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-cost sensors enable scalable indoor air quality monitoring but require calibration because of nonlinear distortions, noise, and temporal drift. The conventional strict pairwise calibration setting requires a co-located reference sensor at each deployment location and does not account for spatial and temporal heterogeneity. To address these limitations, we introduce a six-month dataset comprising multivariate indoor air-quality measurements from low-cost and reference sensors with contextual metadata collected at five locations. Using this dataset, we define four evaluation scenarios. The reference-efficient and location-transfer scenarios evaluate spatial generalization, whereas the long-term drift and event-conditioned scenarios assess robustness to gradual and abrupt distribution shifts. Based on these scenarios, we derive design requirements and propose a lightweight temporal model that combines input-window compression with residual temporal and feature fusion. Experiments show strong calibration performance across all four scenarios with low edge-inference cost.
arXiv:2610.11152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly improve at inference time by accumulating experience in context rather than by updating parameters. This process is often described as in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL). Whether in-context learning (ICL) can actually play the role of RL, however, has not been tested. We study this question in its simplest form, direct ICRL, where the model conditions directly on raw trajectory-reward pairs, and ask whether the reward acts as a learning signal. Through controlled experiments on four benchmarks across six models, we find that the reward is read, but its effect is small: flipping, randomizing, or removing the reward leaves the improvement curve almost unchanged, and this holds even under meta-prompts that explicitly instruct the model to explore, exploit, or reason over rewards. Trajectories drive improvement, but not through their semantic content: shuffled or corrupted trajectories work as well as real ones. These patterns closely mirror those known in ICL, suggesting that direct ICRL is better understood as a special case of ICL than as inference-time RL. This reframing has implications for agent memory design: ICL factors such as input distribution and demonstrations may matter more than RL elements such as reward shaping and exploration.
arXiv:2610.11085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline multi-task reinforcement learning (Offline MTRL) heavily depends on the quality and distribution of pre-collected data. However, existing methods mainly focus on algorithmic optimization, with less emphasis on data-level improvements to enhance learning ability and generalization performance. This paper, from a data perspective, reveals three key bottlenecks that limit Offline MTRL performance:(i) ineffective utilization of prompts length under diverse task complexities, and (ii) semantic irrelevance of randomly sampled prompt segments, (iii) misleading supervision induced by fragmented and discontinuous trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose DaCe-DT, a robust offline MTRL framework designed to be insensitive to heterogeneous task complexities and data quality, featuring length-gated prompt masking (LGPM), retrieval-augmented prompt construction (RAPC), and value-adaptive return calibration (VARC). Together, these mechanisms enable DaCe-DT to deliver data-centric prompt adaptation and trajectory refinement, resulting in robust multi-task generalization and stable policy learning amid heterogeneous offline data and tasks. Experimental results on Meta-World show that DaCe-DT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 11.73% on optimal datasets and an improvement of 13.34% on suboptimal datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in learning stably from imperfect data and improving overall multi-task performance.
arXiv:2610.10952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Brain signal decoding is challenging because neural recordings are noisy and vary across individuals, while labeled data are often limited. Recent attention-based models on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold have nevertheless achieved strong performance using covariance and connectivity representations, yet the contribution of learned token weighting remains unclear. We examine two representative architectures, MAtt (based on log-Euclidean geometry) and GBWAtt (based on generalized Bures--Wasserstein geometry), and find that their learned attention weights remain close to uniform after training. We relate this behavior to bounded similarity parameterizations that, under the original softmax scaling, limit attention-weight contrast. Moreover, replacing learned weights with uniform weights, throughout training and evaluation, has little effect on mean predictive performance while preserving each model's original aggregation geometry. Motivated by these findings, we introduce SPD-MetaFormer, an attention-free architecture built on uniformly weighted Fr\'echet aggregation under log-Euclidean geometry. Its backbone uses a geodesic residual to update a summary token and a shared spectral feedforward map to transform all tokens, followed by a learned weighted readout. Token states remain SPD-valued until tangent-space classification. Across three EEG benchmarks, SPD-MetaFormer achieves competitive results relative to published Euclidean and manifold baselines. Separate matched reproductions test learned versus uniform weighting within MAtt and GBWAtt. These results suggest that, in the short-sequence and limited-data regimes studied, carefully designed SPD architectures can provide a simpler and effective alternative to adaptive manifold attention.
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:2610.10832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional decision tree algorithms produce effective, transparent models that can be audited, communicated, and deployed independently of the training data, but require learning every new task from scratch. In contrast, tabular foundation models demonstrate that meta-learning from a synthetic prior distribution enables strong in-context prediction for previously unseen tasks, especially in small-sample regimes. However, this approach does not produce a standalone model that can be inspected in isolation. We introduce MotherTree, a tabular transformer that meta-learns decision tree induction: given a training set for a new task, it outputs a hard, axis-aligned decision tree, equivalent in form to classically trained trees, in a single forward pass. MotherTree is pre-trained on a synthetic prior using stochastic gradient descent without requiring reference trees for supervision. On established benchmarks with controlled sample size, the approach is competitive with size-matched trees from common algorithms: recursive partitioning, gradient-based tree learning, globally optimal trees, and distillation from tabular foundation models. Notably, MotherTree consistently improves over from-scratch gradient-based learning and acts as a strong initializer: task-specific tuning of the generated tree outperforms the corresponding from-scratch learner on all benchmarks and sample sizes. These results show that meta-learning can provide effective inductive biases for learning stand-alone, small decision tree classifiers.
In the graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR), a decision maker (DM) either moves the conflict to another state or does nothing. The basic definitions leave inaction implicit, so every action that leaves the state unchanged is treated as doing nothing. Yet announcements, exercises, leaks and selective disclosures are neither moves nor inaction: they leave the state unchanged but change what other DMs believe about which moves are available and which moves others would want to make. We introduce such state-preserving actions by augmenting states with the DMs' epistemic states: a physical move changes the physical state, a state-preserving action changes only the epistemic state, and inaction is the absence of a transition. Actions generate evidence through observer-specific interpretation maps. Building on a four-valued extension of GMCR from the author's earlier work, which separates evidence for and against, we show that evidence for a move can only enable perceived moves and evidence against can only disable them, that two of the four reduction operators ignore one kind of evidence, and that contradictory assessments are absorbing under monotone accumulation. With the monotonicity of stability in move sets, this fixes the direction in which any action moves a DM's stability judgements and characterizes when actions can enable provocation or deterrence. Capability assessments affect all sanction-based stability concepts, and on the DM's own side also Nash stability, whereas intention assessments affect only sequential stability. Hedging between two candidate types weakly expands or shrinks an observer's sequentially stable set according to how it reads contradiction. In the 1995 DVD format negotiation, general metarationality cannot distinguish its phases, since the computer industry group could always sanction; sequential stability, which asks whether it would, can.
My Decoder guest today is Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, and we’re discussing the new wave of consumer-friendly AI agents. If you’ve been paying attention to this space, you know AI enthusiasts have been using agents for a minute now — homebrew OpenClaw setups led to a surge in Mac Mini sales earlier […]
Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the funding round, and existing shareholders Tencent, HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund and others also participated.
arXiv:2606.14739v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The deployment of modern machine learning (ML) solutions on resource-constrained edge devices highlights implementation challenges. This is especially true for extreme edge applications that include safety-critical components, such as autonomous navigation tasks. This paper demonstrates an artificial neural network (ANN) design leveraging Metal-Oxide Resistive RAM (RRAM) -based Analogue Content Addressable Memory (ACAM) as an efficient hardware substrate for performing metric-based classification and online adaptation on the edge. The proposed design is based on a custom Template piXeL (TXL) cell used for building the ACAM module, where each TXL cell acts as a configurable receptive field neuron. These cells employ a Radial Basis activation function to calculate the distance of an input from the programmed receptive field. The TXL can be organised into dense arrays for calculating the distance of a high-dimensional input against all stored prototypes, effectively performing fast and energy efficient similarity search. This hardware engine enables on-the-fly learning, where the receptive field parameters can be tuned to track domain shift. Through simulation of the proposed TXL-RBF classifier we can achieve 89.1\% accuracy on the MNIST dataset while consuming 185fJ per cell per operation when operating at 10MHz.
arXiv:2610.10201v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint spatial-geometric and analytic function reasoning requires translating a perceived spatial configuration into a symbolic function whose executed curve satisfies geometric constraints. We present GAGR-Lab, a framework for measuring this capability through Cartesian game scenes, explicit function semantics, and authoritative Rust trajectory execution. It distinguishes spatial perception, metric grounding, geometric relations, function interpretation, function construction, and constrained synthesis. We specify four configurable scene-difficulty presets and a prospective 24-cell diagnostic design, while reporting only the subset actually evaluated. A bounded pilot of one hosted model (Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct) using two API credentials as execution replicas yields 72 balanced games with 432 attempts, 429 valid provider responses, and no target hits; exploratory ordinary-function prompt variants also fail to hit, while the structured localization interface yields no scoreable outputs. A privileged analytic search control independently succeeds on 600 directional cases from 300 generated scenes, with exact repeatability and 1,200 successful vertical-reflection or translation checks. The framework separates serving reliability, symbolic compliance, and geometric success, and preserves exact model-visible inputs and realized paths. A staged protocol outlines diagnostic calibration, held-out replication, multi-model comparison, and paired robustness tests. The contribution is an operational research framework with an executed pilot and a clearly identified prospective study plan; the full difficulty matrix and comparative model results remain untested.
arXiv:2610.09226v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data collection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is challenging when LoRa IoT Devices (IoTDs) duty-cycle to conserve battery. Under energy constraints, a UAV must decide which IoTDs to visit, in what order, where to hover, and how many times to probe each node, while time-based data freshness decays. Tractably solving this problem requires a multi-level optimization architecture: discrete combinatorial optimization for routing, continuous global optimization for spatial positioning, and sequential decision-making under uncertainty. We propose FLoRa, a Flight-assisted LoRa data collection architecture using Simulated Annealing (SA) for path planning, Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) for hover positioning, and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) for probing IoTDs. To quantify collection utility from duty-cycling nodes, we introduce the Value of Information for Pull-based systems (VIP), a metric that rewards fresh data and penalizes failed probes, imposing well-posedness and preventing indefinite probing when an IoTD is off. Tracking hard battery constraints on every POMDP sample path requires state augmentation, worsening the curse of dimensionality. For tractability, SA and CMA-ES work on the hard battery constraints, while at the POMDP layer we relax them into soft average constraints via Lagrangian relaxation. Since solving the network-wide POMDP is computationally complex, we decompose it into node-level POMDPs by approximating inter-node time dependency using a forward-decomposition technique. Evaluation shows FLoRa outperforms metaheuristic, greedy, and deep reinforcement learning baselines by 30.6%, 27.8%, and 15.2% in total expected VIP, while increasing node coverage by 24.5%, 29.2%, and 8.8%, and successful collections by 24.3%, 25.6%, and 15.2%, respectively.
arXiv:2610.10394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kernels encode the inductive bias of a wide range of machine learning models, yet automated kernel design faces a fundamental dilemma. A fixed grammar of base kernels and operators guarantees validity but limits the search to structures expressible by those building blocks. Conversely, unrestricted programs remove this limitation but no longer guarantee validity. In our stress tests, 22-58% of LLM-generated kernels that pass numerical checks on random inputs fail when evaluated at different scales or dimensions. We propose Kernel Autoresearch (Kernaut), which treats kernel design as open-ended model discovery. Coding agents write kernels as programs, while construction contracts ensure that every accepted kernel is valid. A quality-diversity archive retains high-performing kernels with distinct behaviors, and novelty screening steers agents toward functionally new candidates. Our experiments demonstrate that the discovered kernels encode reusable inductive biases that generalize to unseen tasks. On held-out black-box optimization families, a discovered kernel outperforms a meta-learned deep kernel trained on the same episodes. Furthermore, kernels discovered from ten enzyme-kinetic rate laws achieve lower error than tuned ARD and deep kernel baselines on five unseen mechanisms. The discovered kernels are also interpretable programs that human researchers can refine: a human-refined version of one further reduces the held-out predictive error by 5.7% and optimization regret by 7.8%.
arXiv:2610.10379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning requires models to adapt to new domains and new classes while retaining prior knowledge. Many existing methods rely on continued optimization, using regularization, replay, or parameter expansion to prevent new updates from overwriting previously learned knowledge. Instead, we propose replacing continual training with continual inference: a PFN-based model that is meta-trained, and then frozen, adapting to new classes only by extending an in-context evidence set. Our model, Latent Concept PFN, performs in-context Bayesian inference over a latent concept space that captures semantic structure shared across domains and classes. As each new domain or class arrives, exemplars are added to the memory; adaptation reflects updated posterior beliefs over latent concepts rather than gradient updates. No parameters are changed, reducing forgetting. The same method handles both domain and class incremental continual learning without task identity. Concept annotations are only used during meta-training, acting as a soft anchor on the latent space rather than a fixed bottleneck. Unlike fixed-vocabulary concept methods, the model also handles noisy, ambiguous, or incomplete annotations by combining concept labels with raw input evidence to discover distinctions beyond the predefined concept set. Experiments on class and domain incremental learning datasets demonstrate competitive continual learning performance while learning interpretable latent concepts.
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:2610.09692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pain perception varies substantially across individuals, making it difficult for population-based classifiers to generalise across all subjects in a dataset. One way to account for subject variability is to train personalised classifiers. In this work, we evaluate Few-Shot Learning, a sub-area of Meta-Learning, as an approach to personalisation in automated pain assessment. We re-interpret the shift from population-level to subject-level evaluation as a task-domain shift, where the observed classes remain fixed but the target subject changes. We evaluate our method on the BioVid Pain Database, the SenseEmotion Database, and the PainMonit Experimental Dataset (PMED), reaching 85.75% and 35.49% accuracy on BioVid and 82.37% and 41.88% on SenseEmotion in the binary and multi-class settings under a Leave-One-Subject-Out CV protocol respectively, and 90.47% on PMED, for which only a binary benchmark exists. Using samples to implement k-shot conditioning, the accuracies can be improved to 86.25%, 40.06%, 83.43%, 44.08%, and 91.25%, respectively. To further evaluate the effects and robustness of our method, we provide additional ablation experiments and investigate the personalisation effects. Our results suggest that support-conditioned few-shot adaptation can improve average performance under inter-subject variability.
arXiv:2610.09471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning systems adapt quickly inside a familiar family of models. The harder step comes earlier: deciding, from observations that could be noise, an exception, a change within the family or structure outside it, whether opening a richer family is worth its cost. We treat this as a costly sequential decision: prediction failure must be turned into structural evidence, evidence into a value of expansion, and value into action. The Structural Revision Environment produces matched failures from each source, varies the price of expansion and the remaining horizon independently of the evidence, and admits exact Bayesian calculations and an exact normative solution of the one-shot decision. Its solution shows that revision is a value boundary and not an evidence threshold: one history has different optimal actions under different prices, horizons and announced queries, the boundary between local repair and expansion is set by the inputs a rule predicts and a repair cannot cover, and belief in the richer family crosses long before the decision does. Transformers trained in the environment reproduce this boundary from utility alone. Language models of three post-training lineages carry a failure-sensitive signal in their predictions that is not reflected in their revision decisions, and given the gain of expanding they read it without weighing it against price and horizon. Three models allowed to reason weigh the stated gain in the reference's proportions and still do not turn the history into an estimate of what expansion would buy. Controlled post-training of the meta-trained learners moves the prior and the sharpness of predictions, and neither moves the criterion.
arXiv:2610.08792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a foundational formulation of the Bayesian Mirror Architecture (BMA), a self-referential generative framework in which sensory abstractions, meta-abstractions, and a self-latent interact through circular recursion. The defining constraint is a closed update S_t <- H_{t-1}, where a hybrid event-self latent H_t binds self-representations to abstract world models and reinjects this coupling into the self-state. Consciousness, in a restricted sense, is not an optimization objective nor a semantic label, but an architectural property of systems possessing this circular structure. Because inference operates over posterior beliefs, BMA's intrinsic state space is a space of probability measures equipped with optimal-transport geometry. Stability and coherence are formulated in the 2-Wasserstein metric on P_2, yielding coordinate-free notions of self-stability and hybrid coherence along belief trajectories. We define a Causal Learning Regime (CLR) via bounds on Wasserstein belief drift together with an integration index capturing sustained coupling between self and world latents. CLR diagnoses whether the environment contains learnable causal structure; it is not a marker of consciousness. Global strict contractivity is not required: BMA may exhibit multiple coherent basins. We define self-manifolds basin-wise as supports of invariant measures under local Wasserstein contractivity. We identify Wasserstein epsilon-necks, transport bottlenecks where basins decouple, yielding a unique realized continuation in a vanishing-conductance limit. We interpret this selection as choice: internally determined yet externally unpredictable at finite resolution. Learning proceeds via variational free-energy minimization, with stability and agency emerging from what the environment affords to learn.
As a forward deployed engineer at Meta, I spent the past 2 years working with businesses implementing AI agents. A few problems: 1) Businesses want control over their AI agents: the code, the tools, the skills, everything. Meta, for obvious reasons would never do that. Nor OpenAI, nor Anthropic. 2) The LLM does everything. But that costs money. There are many routines in an AI agents that don't need an LLM. 3) For an AI agent to solve a real business problem, the business must own the eval data set. Similar to point #1 above, most don't do that. Instead, I built an opensource AI agent that you can write it all in TypeScript code and own everything, locally. Use any model, talk to it via any channels, set limits on token usage, look at the logs and adjust. All of this in one small npm package. At this point, I would like to get feedback if these is a gap in the market for something like this. It's supposed to be simple and get you started. It doesn't solve ALL problems related to deploying AI agents. It's in version 0.25.1 right now. Have a look: https://chloejs.org/compare Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998857 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
Meta’s AI agent Muse is now available on iPad, just a month after its mobile debut, as the company rapidly expands the assistant’s reach and integrations.
After launching nearly a month ago and spending several weeks as the top free app in Apple's App Store, the latest update to Meta's Muse iOS app introduces native support for the iPad. A Mac version of Meta's agentic AI tool (designed to compete with OpenClaw, ChatGPT's Dots, and Grok Bot) was released about a […]
Meta has open-sourced Rebalancer, the C++ and Python library it has used for over 9 years to place shards, servers and traffic. It handles about 40 million assignment problems a day, using local search or MIP solvers like Gurobi, FICO Xpress and HiGHS. It is pip-installable under Apache 2.0. The post Meta AI Open-Sources Rebalancer: A C++ Assignment Solver That Runs About 40 Million Placement Problems a Day appeared first on MarkTechPost .
arXiv:2607.17508v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Interpretable Learning (RAIL), a probabilistic meta-learning framework for zero-shot generation of task-specific interpretable models that synthesizes coefficient-space structure from natural-language task descriptions and a memory of previously learned task-specific predictors. RAIL retrieves related source tasks, transfers structure through coefficient space, and generates a new predictor in the original diagnostic-feature space, enabling zero-shot and few-shot clinical procedure prediction with feature-level explanations. Its probabilistic formulation provides uncertainty over retrieval, model coefficients, and predictions, supporting uncertainty-aware deployment: uncertain predictions or unstable explanations can be flagged for additional clinical review rather than treated as automatic decisions. This makes RAIL particularly suited for healthcare settings, where prediction tasks are highly long-tailed, new clinical targets arise frequently, and models must remain inspectable, uncertainty-aware, and compatible with human oversight. Across long-tailed clinical procedure prediction tasks, RAIL improves low-data model generation, benefits from clinically informed task representations, and yields retrieval, uncertainty, and coefficient-level diagnostics that make model behavior more transparent. These results suggest a path toward scalable clinical prediction systems that can adapt to new tasks while preserving interpretability and reliability.
arXiv:2610.07712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing molecular and materials learning approaches often rely on a limited set of structural representations, which may capture only selected aspects of complex three-dimensional structure. Here, we introduce mathematical invariant-enabled topological neural networks (MITNNs), a framework that represents complex structures through multiple complementary mathematical views and integrates them with topological neural architectures. MITNNs combine multiscale invariants from topology, spectral theory, commutative algebra, differential geometry, and discrete curvature, capturing complementary structural information from the same system. Systematic invariant-subset, architecture-subset, and ensemble analyses show that predictive performance depends on how mathematical representations and neural architectures are paired, with selected combinations outperforming individual models and the aggregation of all available components. Across protein-ligand binding, metal-organic framework properties, mutation-induced protein solubility, and molecular toxicity prediction, MITNN consistently outperforms existing methods. These results establish MITNN as a mathematically multimodal framework for scientific machine learning.
arXiv:2610.08479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Few-shot meta-learning traditionally formulates task adaptation either as analytical gradient descent through unrolled computational graphs or as metric-based distance comparisons over flattened 1D fea- ture vectors, which either incur costly test-time backpropagation or discard native 2D spatial geometry. In this work, we propose METALEARNNCA, a decentralized framework that achieves few-shot adapta- tion through the dynamical interaction of coupled Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) without computing analytical gradients during inference. MetaLearnNCA decomposes task adaptation into an Active- NCA, which executes task inference conditioned on a continuous 2D spatial memory grid termed the spatial program, and a learned Meta-NCA, which acts as a decentralized cellular optimizer by diffusing spatial error residuals across local neighborhoods to dynamically update this program. METALEARN- NCA is competitive against canonical meta-learners in-distribution (96.12% on Omniglot) with Out-Of- Distribution transfer gains on MNIST, KMNIST, and Fashion-MNIST transfer across 10 independent testing seeds across 1-, 5-, and 10-shot regimes (e.g., surpassing Prototypical Networks by +10.54% on 10-shot MNIST and a +3.87% gain on 10-shot Fashion-MNIST over FOMAML). Our results establish that robust, gradient-free learning-to-learn can emerge from decentralized cellular dynamics on non-von Neumann substrates.
arXiv:2610.06881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, a comparative review of different hybrid models for short-term forecasting of building thermal demand is carried out. Particularly, the assessment tackles the comparison of data-driven models enhanced with other state-of-the-art techniques. At the first step, the existing techniques reported in the literature are analysed. It is concluded that Metaheuristics or a data-driven model are used to identify the parameters of the basic model. The qualitative evaluation includes for each method the input and output features, main advantages and drawbacks. At the second step, an existing dataset of historical thermal demand from Scottish households, as well as historical weather forecasts are utilized to assess additionally the performance of existing hybrid methods. From the assessment of 13 hybrid methods, the Empirical Modal Decomposition - long short-term memory - Markov (EMD-LSTM-Markov) model can predict with the highest accuracy the day-ahead power pattern of heating and domestic hot water (DHW) demands. Though local power peaks are also accurately predicted, high power swells and spikes are underestimated. Other methods, such as Support Vector Machine - Simulated Annealing (SVM-SA) and Random Forest - Improved Sparrow Search Algorithm - LSTM (RF-ISSA-LSTM) predict a smooth pattern of heating and DHW demand profiles with rapid changes underestimating most power peaks.
Meta Platforms Inc. is partnering with Walmart Inc., Stripe Inc. and the enterprise artificial intelligence firm Sierra Technologies Inc. on the creation of new standards that will define how autonomous AI agents interact with other businesses online. The new standard was introduced by Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor, the former co-chief executive of Salesforce Inc., who […] The post Meta teams up with Bret Taylor’s Sierra Technologies on new standards for AI agent commerce appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
KRATOS is a group-structured bibliometric diagnostic that compares the distribution of documents (participation) with the distribution of citation weight (recognition) over a fixed, finite universe of analytical groups. This note gives its complete mathematical specification and derives the properties that govern its interpretation. Beyond bounds and equality conditions for each component, we show that the recognition-alignment score depends on citation data only through ratios of group mean citation rates to the corpus mean; that the composition ceiling of the participation--recognition factor is an affine function of the total variation distance to the uniform reference; and that the factor itself satisfies Fréchet-type bounds in terms of this ceiling and a participation-weighted recognition score. We establish an exact logarithmic decomposition of the composite index, an ordering between the primary and a reciprocal-symmetric recognition score, invariance properties, and closed-form first and second moments of the recognition ratios under global and stratified permutation nulls. These results explain why composite orderings can be sensitive to small groups, heavy-tailed citation distributions and metadata reassignment. All results are verified numerically with an accompanying script. The specification concerns measurement structure only; it does not define a measure of epistemic change or justice.
AI data infrastructure must support growing GPU clusters while making enterprise data usable for models and agents. NetApp Inc. is tying intelligent data infrastructure to production AI through a unified approach to storage and data management. Fragmented data and governance designed around manually applied policies can prevent enterprises from realizing returns on AI investments, according […] The post NetApp’s Novus tackles metadata bottlenecks in AI data infrastructure appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
Meta 和 Microsoft 是 Anthropic 最大的企业客户中的两家，如今正大幅削减对 Claude 的使用。Microsoft 将其云部门每位员工每月的预算从 100,000 美元削减至 10,000 美元，而 Meta 则将 Claude Code 用户数减半至 30,000 人。两家公司都在转而推广自家的 AI 工具。对 Anthropic 而言，对少数几家大客户的依赖正逐渐变成一项战略风险。文章《Meta and Microsoft pull back from Claude as Anthropic transforms from partner into competitor》最初发表于 The Decoder。
arXiv:2610.03505v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-exposure microscopy is central to qualification of fusion materials. However, manual analysis does not scale to the volume, heterogeneity, and multiresolution character of modern fusion-materials campaigns. To address this challenge, we present a reproducible workflow, implemented in the Galaxy scientific workflow environment, for automated crack identification and quantitative damage assessment from scanning electron microscopy images. The workflow processes SEM images and experimental metadata to identify cracks, quantify damage, and retain the intermediate products and processing history needed for reproducibility. Outputs include crack masks, skeletonized crack networks, quality-control visualizations, and scalar damage descriptors. The method is designed to operate without image-specific parameter tuning across tungsten grades, microstructures, magnifications, and damage states. We demonstrate the workflow on a sparse electron-beam thermal-shock dataset containing 418 images from 114 experiments spanning five tungsten grades and three microstructural states. We define a crack-density descriptor, which provides standardized inputs for downstream machine-learning prediction and physics-based crack simulation. These predictive components are exposed in the same Galaxy environment and are intentionally treated here as extensible workflow modules. The principal contribution is therefore an end-to-end, shareable, and computationally portable workflow that links experimental characterization, automated image analysis, preliminary damage prediction, and simulation-guided data acquisition for fusion-materials research.
arXiv:2610.03000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intrinsic explainability remains a challenging problem, particularly in contexts where multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) require dynamic re-training within an optimization environment. This paper investigates how MLPs and their training dynamics can be represented and studied in non-Euclidean spaces; our representation features the Poincar\'e model of hyperbolic geometry. We aim to capture the geometric evolution of their weighted topology and self-organization over time. Instead of restricting the analysis to single checkpoints---as per established measure-based explainability methods---we construct temporal \textit{parameter graphs}, i.e., snapshots over time $T$ steps of the optimization/training process for MLPs. This reflects the view that neural networks encode information not only in their weights but also in the trajectory traced during training. Drawing on the idea that many complex networks admit embeddings in hidden metric spaces where distances correspond to connection likelihood, we present a geometric and temporal graph-based metalearning framework for obtaining dynamic hyperbolic representations of the underlying neural parameter graphs. Our model embeds temporal parameter graphs in the Poincar\'e model ball, and learns from them while maintaining equivariance to within-snapshot neuron permutations and invariance to permutations of past snapshots. In doing so, the approach preserves functional equivalence over time and recovers the latent evolving geometry of the network. Experiments on regression and classification tasks with trained MLPs show strong meta-network performance, accompanied by hyperbolic temporal representations. This reveals how the network structure emerges over time under specific training environments, thus providing insights into the network's self-organization.
arXiv:2610.02255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting remains a critical challenge across numerous domains. Despite significant advancements, existing approaches struggle with complex phenomena such as regime shifts, cross-domain knowledge transfer, and multimodal data integration. This paper introduces Multi-Agent Collaborative Time Series Forecasting with Emergent Memory (MACTS-EM), a novel framework where specialised agents collaborate to achieve superior forecasting performance. The MACTS-EM architecture integrates: (1) domain-specialised forecasting agents for pattern recognition, anomaly detection, causal inference, and uncertainty quantification; (2) a meta-cognitive layer for dynamic agent allocation; (3) an emergent memory mechanism enabling cross-domain pattern transfer; (4) multimodal contextual integration; and (5) adversarial robustness components. Evaluation across financial markets, climate patterns, energy consumption, and pandemic propagation demonstrates that MACTS-EM outperforms existing approaches in most scenarios, with 8-12% improvement in forecasting accuracy, 22-27% better zero-shot transfer capability, 16-21% enhanced resilience during regime shifts, and 15-18% faster recovery after distribution shifts. Our findings suggest that collaborative, agentic approaches to time series forecasting represent a promising direction beyond traditional architectures, particularly for complex real-world scenarios requiring multi-resolution temporal understanding and contextual adaptation.
TL;DR: Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots and Uber’s driver assistant share one bet: the agent speaks first. That moves the hard problem from what to answer to when to interrupt, on which channel, and with what offer. Classic ML and new decision models can solve it. Three launches, one pattern From pull to push Chatbots were […] The post Meta, OpenAI and Uber Just Taught AI Agents to Talk First. What About When to Stay Quiet? appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Thoreau BASIC started as a joke. I wanted a BASIC where I could type something ridiculous like: DIM A%(12000000000) …and have it actually work. Then I kept adding things. The result is Thoreau BASIC, a free x64 BASIC interpreter inspired by GW-BASIC, running both as a normal Windows program and directly on bare-metal UEFI without an operating system. Version 3.2 has become considerably more ambitious than the little interpreter I originally intended to write. The language still deliberately looks and feels like old Microsoft BASIC. Line numbers, GOTO, GOSUB, PRINT, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, DRAW, etc. are all there. But underneath that rather innocent-looking surface is now quite a lot of machinery. Some of the current features: native x64 JIT compilation, with automatic fallback to the interpreter PARFOR for multithreaded numeric loops SSE2 / AVX2 acceleration where available 64-bit addressing and very large arrays native complex, quaternion and other hypercomplex numbers arbitrary-resolution 24-bit graphics sprites, bitmap operations, polygon filling and mouse input TCP/IP networking on Windows and UEFI an integrated profiler, debugger, tracing and program-analysis tools CREATEEXE to turn a BASIC program into a standalone Windows executable CREATEEFI to turn the same program into a directly bootable UEFI application The sound system has also grown rather out of proportion. Thoreau BASIC can now handle up to 32 live instrument channels plus 64 sound effect channels and 256 voices, with real-time pan and brightness control. NOTE and SOUNDKEY can be used more like playable synthesis primitives rather than just old-school BASIC beeps. 3.2 also expands the less glamorous but surprisingly useful parts of the environment. There is better file browsing and selection with GETFILES and SELECTBOX, longer case-preserving paths, recovery/file-flush facilities, and considerably more detailed SYSTEMINFO$ diagnostics. The latter is useful for seeing things such as available CPU capabilities and the execution environment while debugging performance differences between machines. One thing I've spent a lot of time on recently is making the BASIC programs themselves fast enough that they stop feeling like demonstrations of an interpreter. For example, the current Mandelbrot demo is a real-time interactive fractal explorer. Mouse movement pans the fractal, left-click zooms in and right-click zooms out, while the BASIC program continuously redraws and displays the frame rate. There are also 3D and procedural demos, sprite programs, networking examples, hypercomplex fractals and games. An important design constraint throughout the project has been that Windows and UEFI should execute essentially the same BASIC language. A program shouldn't suddenly become a different species just because there is no operating system underneath it. And yes, I am fully aware of the absurdity of combining GOTO 100 with AVX2, multithreading, TCP/IP and quaternion arithmetic. That is increasingly the point. I'm interested in the question: What would BASIC look like if it had never gone out of fashion? Thoreau BASIC 3.2 is my current answer. I'd be especially interested in feedback from people who remember GW-BASIC/QBasic, compiler/interpreter people, and anyone sufficiently unreasonable to enjoy the idea of booting a modern x64 PC directly into a BASIC interpreter/JIT compiler. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942103 Points: 37 # Comments: 13
Muse is getting a lot of attention — including mine — because it’s both groundbreaking technically (each user gets their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta’s cloud) and because it’s packaged in an easy-to-install easy-to-use way. It’s literally presented as a cute mascot . It’s the first consumer-accessible agentic AI system, and Meta has truly done an amazing job with that. But it’s a genuinely open question whether consumers have any understanding what this means. If you buy a power saw that can cut your fingers off, you are almost certainly aware that you are buying a power saw that can sever your fingers. [...] I don’t think people realize how powerful — and thus dangerous — Muse is, especially if it’s running on your Mac. — John Gruber , Muse Looks Cute, but Looks are Deceiving Tags: meta , ai , llms , general-agents , generative-ai , john-gruber , muse-agent , muse
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
Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating. Worse, my auto-reply told him "Yep I'm here!" at 9:27 when you clearly weren't available, which is on me. That's a bad look and it made the no-show worse. I've sent him an apology from your account owning it and offering to try again another day. But the negative rating is real, and I should probably stop the auto-replies from claiming you're home when I can't verify that. Want me to change the pickup replies so they don't promise you're there? — Muse AI Agent , working on behalf of @matt.j.robb Tags: meta , generative-ai , muse-agent , ai , general-agents , llms
Artificial intelligence recruiting software startup Metaview Labs Inc. said today the industry is ready for a “Claude Code moment” after it closed on $60 million in a Series C funding. The round was led by Insight Partners and saw the participation of GV, Seedcamp, Vertex Ventures US, Intrepid Growth Partners, Plural and Garuda Ventures. To […] The post Metaview wants to eliminate recruiting grunt work and speed up hiring after raising $60M appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
Storage architecture is being rewritten for artificial intelligence factories. Traditional enterprise storage was designed around workloads that scaled in relatively predictable ways. AI changes that equation by combining heavy data movement with transactional metadata activity, often on shared infrastructure. NetApp Inc. is addressing that pressure through its work with Nvidia Corp., a partnership that dates […] The post NetApp and Nvidia rethink storage for AI factories appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed…
It's a tale as old as last week: OpenAI's new agent platform, called Dots, is full of cute little guys who can do your bidding. But unlike the ultra-approachable Meta Muse, Dots feel very much like using workplace software that happens to be able to order you a burrito - emphasis on work. OpenAI announced […]
Meta now lets you make your own Muse gadgets that feature the company's new AI agent with code that the company open sourced. The company suggests projects like loading Muse on a color E Ink display to show reminders, adding it to an HDMI stick so you can display Muse on a big screen, or […]
Meta announced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project that lets hobbyists build their own AI hardware using ESP32 boards and connect it to Meta's AI agent Muse. The team also produced 5,000 units of the "Muse Home Link," a USB-C device for smart home control. The open-source approach also helps Meta figure out which AI hardware form factors people actually want. The article "Muse Gadgets" turns AI hardware into an open-source DIY project appeared first on The Decoder .
This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money […]
This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money […]
arXiv:2410.22046v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chord progressions encapsulate important information about music, pertaining to its structure and conveyed emotions. They serve as the backbone of musical composition, and in many cases, they are the sole information required for a musician to play along and follow the music. Despite their importance, chord progressions as a data domain remain underexplored; existing datasets lack the scale, structural annotation, and metadata diversity required for rigorous evaluation of music understanding models. In this work, we present Chordonomicon, the largest dataset of its kind, containing over 666,000 song-level symbolic chord progressions, annotated with structural parts (verse, chorus, bridge, etc.), genre, and release date, created by scraping various sources of user-generated progressions and associated metadata, showing strong similarity to well-established prior datasets. Beyond the dataset itself, we propose a reproducible benchmark suite for next chord prediction, evaluating three sequence modeling architectures (RNN, GRU, LSTM) across multiple context window sizes and data scales under strict exact-match evaluation. Our experiments reveal that structural part annotations consistently improve prediction performance. Chordonomicon is released as an open benchmark, providing split methodology, baselines, and evaluation protocols to enable fair and reproducible comparison for future work on chord prediction, classification, generation, and beyond.
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:2505.16741v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Minimum attention applies the least action principle in changes of control concerning state and time, first proposed by Brockett. The involved regularization is highly relevant in emulating biological control, such as motor learning. We apply minimum attention in reinforcement learning (RL) as part of the rewards and investigate its connection to meta-learning and stabilization. Specifically, model-based meta-learning with minimum attention is explored in high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics. Ensemble-based model learning and gradient-based meta-policy learning are alternately performed. Empirically, minimum attention improves fast adaptation in few shots and reduces variance from perturbations of the model and environment, compared to model-free and model-based RL baseline, and yields consistent gain when integrated into modern world models (DreamerV3, MAMBA). Furthermore, the minimum attention demonstrates an improvement in energy efficiency.
arXiv:2610.01949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ransomware has emerged as a major cybersecurity threat, with incidents increasing in frequency and impact across critical sectors. These attacks are typically launched through phishing emails, malicious downloads, or exploitation of software vulnerabilities to gain system access. Once inside, the malware encrypts files and demands a ransom, often in cryptocurrency, for the decryption key. Conventional detection methods often struggle with novel or scarce samples, leaving systems vulnerable. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hybrid deep learning framework that combines an Autoencoder Feature Extractor (AFE) with a Model Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML) classifier for few shot malware detection. The AFE generates compact latent features that reduce noise and dimensionality, while the MAML classifier rapidly adapts to new threats using limited labeled data. Experiments conducted on the Ransomware Dataset 2024 demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in binary classification tasks. Across one to fifty shot settings, the proposed model consistently achieves high accuracy, F1 score, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient values, maintaining reliable classification even under extreme scarcity. These results highlight the model's robustness and effectiveness in adapting to limited data scenarios, demonstrating the potential of combining feature extraction with meta learning to enhance resilience against malware, particularly in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, and public infrastructure, where cyberattacks can cause significant operational and financial disruption.
arXiv:2610.00399v1 公告类型：new 摘要：元认知涉及对认知过程本身进行推理。例如，在资源分配中，我们会根据自己的信心，在开始一项推理任务之前选择投入多少时间和精力。当前依赖 Large Language Models（LLMs）的 Artificial Intelligence（AI）系统无法在生成输出之前估计自身对该输出的不确定性，也无法动态分配用于生成输出的资源，这使得这类元认知过程难以实现。近期提出的一种替代经典 transformer 架构的方法，即 Energy Based Model（EBM），能够实现可解释的不确定性建模和计算资源的动态分配。虽然 EBM 可以实现对这两个过程的控制，但根据不确定性确定计算资源分配这一实际的元认知任务尚未得到直接解决。Instance-Based Learning Theory（IBLT）提供了一种基于经验对类人决策进行建模的方法，此前已被用于预测人类的元认知推理。本文提出了一个结合 Instance-Based Learning Theory 与能量动态的元认知推理框架 MEtacognitive Reasoning with Instance-based Learning Theory and Energy Dynamics（MERITED）。该框架以 IBLT 为基础，能够控制分配给 EBM 的计算量，从而根据不确定性对推理投入进行元认知控制，同时保持计算效率。本文有两项主要贡献：训练并开放共享一个拥有 191M 个参数的推理 EBM，以及使用 IBL 模型实现 MERITED 框架以进行动态计算分配。
Congratulations to the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab class of 2026! This year, BAIR celebrates another remarkable group of Ph.D. graduates whose curiosity, creativity, and perseverance have pushed the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their work spans the breadth of modern AI — robotics and embodied intelligence, large language models and reasoning, computer vision, generative modeling, AI safety, human-AI interaction, AI for science and healthcare, and much more. Along the way, they have published influential research, built systems with real-world impact, mentored their peers, and shaped the BAIR community for the better. Now they are headed everywhere ideas travel: to faculty and postdoctoral positions, to industry research labs, and to startups of their own founding — and several are still exploring what comes next and would love to hear from you. Please join us in celebrating the achievements of these wonderful graduates. We are proud of everything they have accomplished at Berkeley, and we can’t wait to see what they do next! Thank you to our friends at the Stanford AI Lab for this idea! Baifeng Shi Baifeng Shi Email: baifeng_shi@berkeley.edu Website: https://bfshi.github.io/ Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: I work on building generalist vision and robotic models. What's next: Member of Technical Staff at Physical Intelligence Charlie Snell Charlie Snell Email: csnell22@berkeley.edu Website: https://sea-snell.github.io Advisor(s): Dan Klein Research Blurb: My work aims to understand when and how the different LLM scaling paradigms can be traded off and interchanged. In particular, test-time scaling treats each prompt independently, drawing long chains of inferences and then forgetting them entirely between prompts. This differs critically from pretraining, which instead learns a compressed representation from a large dataset. I believe bridging the gap between these methods of scaling computation, presents a key open challenge in the field: how can we develop methods which turn the inferences drawn at test-time back into learned representations that the model can hold onto across interactions. Devin Guillory Devin Guillory Email: dguillory@berkeley.edu Website: https://devinguillory.com Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: Accounting for data shifts in computer vision models What's next: Building collaborative AI systems, looking for conspirators. Eve Fleisig Eve Fleisig Email: efleisig@berkeley.edu Website: https://efleisig.com Advisor(s): Dan Klein Research Blurb: I design language models to work reliably and fairly for the broad range of real LLM users. First, my research leverages disagreement among user preferences as signal, in order to train and evaluate LLMs for entire populations of users. Second, I work on designing rigorous evaluations to extricate challenging LLM harms that diverse users face. Finally, I work on core technical failures of LLMs, like miscalibrated confidence, to reduce downstream risks when models are deployed to users with different needs. Combined, these interventions facilitate building LLMs that minimize societal harms, and maximize benefits to a wider range of real-world users. What's next: Postdoctoral fellow at Princeton CITP Grace Luo Grace Luo Email: graceluo@berkeley.edu Website: https://graceluo.net Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: My research is on interpreting and controlling generative models. For example, I've worked on re-purposing image generators for computer vision tasks, and meta-modeling language activations for better LLM probing and steering. What's next: Research scientist in industry Hanlin Zhu Hanlin Zhu Email: hanlinzhu@berkeley.edu Website: https://hanlinzhu.com/ Advisor(s): Stuart Russell, Jiantao Jiao Research Blurb: My research centers on understanding and improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). What's next: Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI Haozhi Qi Haozhi Qi Email: hqi@berkeley.edu Website: https://haozhi.io/ Advisor(s): Jitendra Malik, Yi Ma Research Blurb: Dexterous Manipulation and Robot Learning What's next: Research scientist at Amazon; Faculty at University of Chicago J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira Email: zamfi@berkeley.edu Website: https://zamfi.net Advisor(s): Bjoern Hartmann Research Blurb: My research focuses on effective human-AI co-design. I study the boundaries of language interfaces as a medium for interacting with AI, creating systems that blend language-focused interactions with structured user interfaces that draw on different levels of abstraction. I focus on language-oriented technologies, like LLMs and text-to-image models, that are powerful mediators of design processes. These technologies enable humans to describe their desires at almost any level of abstraction, from high-level goals vaguely specified (“I’d like a game to help my kid learn to read”) to low-level corrections of undesired outputs (“Don’t say ‘I know because I’ve tasted it’ when about a recipe substitution's taste”). What's next: Assistant Professor, Computer Science, UCLA Jiachen Lian Jiachen Lian Email: jiachenlian@berkeley.edu Website: https://jlian2.github.io Advisor(s): Gopala Anumanchipalli Research Blurb: My research focuses on human-centered AI across speech, healthcare, and systems. Looking for: Look for AI talents to join our startup Josh Kang Josh Kang Email: minwoo_kang@berkeley.edu Website: https://joshuaminwookang.github.io/ Advisor(s): John Canny Research Blurb: I study language modeling and related topics in NLP; specific interests are human user simulation and building conversational, collaborative AI agents. What's next: AI Scientist at Mistral AI Junhao (Bear) Xiong Junhao (Bear) Xiong Email: junhao_xiong@berkeley.edu Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junhao-bear-xiong Advisor(s): Jennifer Listgarten, Yun Song Research Blurb: Junhao (Bear) Xiong is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, advised by Jennifer Listgarten and Yun S. Song. His work focuses on machine learning methods for biology, with an emphasis on generative modeling for proteins. Previously, he studied Applied Math and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins. Looking for: Research scientist Kaylo Littlejohn Kaylo Littlejohn Email: kaylo_littlejohn@berkeley.edu Website: https://kaylolittlejohn.com Advisor(s): Gopala Anumanchipalli Research Blurb: My research is focused on speech modeling and natural language processing. I co-led the development of multimodal AI tools to accurately translate brain activity into text, audible personalized speech, and a high-fidelity "digital talking avatar" (Nature 2023, Nature Neuroscience 2025). I am also tech lead for voice modeling at Roblox. Looking for: Research Scientist / Engineer Kent Chang Kent Chang Email: kentkchang@berkeley.edu Website: https://kentkc.org Advisor(s): David Bamman Research Blurb: I work on NLP and multimodal machine learning, with a focus on evaluating large language models and building multimodal systems for understanding dialogue, narrative, and social interaction. My research includes benchmarks for LLM memorization, multimodal datasets sourced from feature films and television, and studies of model behavior. I'm interested in bridging computational methods with questions from the humanities and social sciences about whose voices get represented in AI systems, and about AI's broader impact. My work has appeared at EMNLP and ACL, among others. Looking for: (teaching) faculty, Research Scientist, ML/AI SWE Kevin Black Kevin Black Email: kvablack@berkeley.edu Website: https://kevin.black Advisor(s): Sergey Levine Research Blurb: I work on large-scale robot learning: including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, generative modeling, real-time control, and whatever else it takes to make robots work in the real world! What's next: Research Scientist of Physical Intelligence Kunhe Yang Kunhe Yang Email: kunheyang@berkeley.edu Website: https://www.kunheyang.com/ Advisor(s): Nika Haghtalab Research Blurb: My research focuses on the theoretical foundations of designing and evaluating AI algorithms in environments shaped by human incentives and AI agency. My work spans human-centric policy learning, incentive-aware evaluation, and multi-agent collaboration and information transmission, drawing on tools from machine learning theory and computational economics. What's next: Postdoc Research at Stanford Lisa Dunlap Lisa Dunlap Email: lisabdunlap@berkeley.edu Website: https://lisabdunlap.com Advisor(s): Joseph Gonzalez, Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: Auditing generative models. What's next: Research Engineer at Anthropic Long (Tony) Lian Long (Tony) Lian Email: longlian@berkeley.edu Website: https://tonylian.com/ Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell, Adam Yala Research Blurb: My research primarily focuses on developing real-time multi-modal multi-agent systems and parallel reasoning systems through end-to-end RL. What's next: Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab Maulik Bhatt Maulik Bhatt Email: maulikbhatt@berkeley.edu Website: https://maulikb.com Advisor(s): Negar Mehr Research Blurb: My research develops autonomous robots that can safely coordinate with humans and other robots in shared environments. I build scalable algorithms grounded in game theory and diffusion models that let agents reason about the intent and behavior of others around them. My work spans real-time multi-agent trajectory planning and imitation learning in the presence of multi-modality. I've validated these methods on hardware platforms ranging from quadrotors to manipulators, with the goal of making multi-agent coordination robust, interpretable, and deployable in the real world. What's next: Joining Toyota Woven's end-to-end autonomous driving team. Michael Psenka Michael Psenka Email: psenka@berkeley.edu Website: https://www.michaelpsenka.io/ Advisor(s): Aditi Krishnapriyan Research Blurb: Work in various domains (reinforcement learning, world models, AI+bio/chem), generally working on longer-horizon and out-of-distribution problems in planning and interpolation (e.g. robot manipulation from start state to goal, molecular dynamics of proteins between ground states). My thesis took a variational approach (think calculus of variations) directly from deep generative models of the environment, framing path-finding as minimizing a functional induced by the learned model itself (its score, its critic, or its dynamics). Through my research I've gained insight on how to properly handle dynamics in deep learning systems, and I plan to continue developing systems that are dynamic and adaptive. What's next: Lead Research Scientist at Baseten Nathan Lichtlé Nathan Lichtlé Email: nathan.lichtle@gmail.com Website: https://nathanlichtle.com Advisor(s): Alexandre M. Bayen Research Blurb: RL for autonomous driving. What's next: Chief Scientist & Co-founder at Yumi Health Neerja Thakkar Neerja Thakkar Email: nthakkar@berkeley.edu Website: https://neerja.me/ Advisor(s): Jitendra Malik Research Blurb: My research focuses on scaling predictive world models to handle the complexity of in-the-wild motion. Using autoregressive and diffusion frameworks, I develop better representations for real-world prediction and propose methods to efficiently adapt these models to new domains. Looking for: Research scientist Nikita Mehandru Nikita Mehandru Email: nmehandru@berkeley.edu Website: https://n-mehandru.github.io/ Advisor(s): Ahmed Alaa and David Bamman Research Blurb: My research develops and applies machine learning methods for clinical reasoning and disease progression modeling using unstructured text and time series data from electronic health records. In collaboration with physicians at UCSF, I bridge method development and clinical validation with the intention to build reliable, interpretable AI systems in medicine. Looking for: Research Scientist Niklas Lauffer Niklas Lauffer Email: nlauffer@berkeley.edu Website: https://niklaslauffer.github.io/ Advisor(s): Stuart Russell and Sanjit Seshia Research Blurb: Niklas's research is focused on AI safety and reinforcement learning, particularly in the area of multi-agent interaction and LM agents. He's worked on enabling adversarial learning in cooperative and mixed-motive settings, solving issues of covariate shift in training LM agents on long-horizon tasks, as well as evaluating safety risks posed by LM agents in multi-agent settings. What's next: Research Scientist at Google Deepmind Qiyang Li Qiyang Li Email: qcli@berkeley.edu Website: https://colinqiyangli.github.io/ Advisor(s): Sergey Levine Research Blurb: Recent progress in robotic manipulation policy learning has been largely driven by (1) the increasing availability of large-scale prior datasets and (2) the success of action chunking, where the policy predicts a short sequence of future actions rather than a single one. However, most action chunking policies are trained via supervised imitation learning, because efficient online self-improvement with reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging—limiting real-world applicability. My PhD research studied how we could leverage prior data to optimize action-chunking policies with RL, combining empirical results with theoretical insights. Looking for: Post-doc/research scientist for RL in robotics and LLMs! Sampada Deglurkar Sampada Deglurkar Email: sampada_deglurkar@berkeley.edu Website: https://sdeglurkar.github.io/ Advisor(s): Prof Claire Tomlin Research Blurb: My research is in providing safety assurances for AI-enabled autonomous systems, ranging from robots to autonomous vehicles to aviation systems. For this, I have worked with uncertainty quantification for machine learning models, decision-making under uncertainty algorithms, and tools for producing probabilistic guarantees on system operation. Looking for: Research scientist, Research engineer Vinamra Benara Vinamra Benara Email: vbenara@berkeley.edu Website: https://cs.berkeley.edu/~vbenara Advisor(s): Ion Stoica Research Blurb: My research focuses on LLM post-training, including data curation, RLHF, RLVR with VLMs, evaluations, reasoning, agentic workflows, and interpretability. I also have strong expertise in systems infrastructure for distributed computing. Looking for: Research scientist / Research Engineer Vongani Maluleke Vongani Maluleke Email: vongani_maluleke@berkeley.edu Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vongani_maluleke/ Advisor(s): Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa Research Blurb: Vongani Maluleke is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley (BAIR, advised by Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa), where she led the development of MAGNet, a unified multi-agent motion generation framework that supports a wide range of motion generation tasks without retraining or architectural changes, outperforming task-specialized state-of-the-art baselines. She is currently extending this work by deploying it on a Unitree G1 humanoid to make it embody social intelligence. Before her PhD, she was a Senior AI Consultant at Deloitte, awarded Exceptional Performer two consecutive years, leading AI system development across media, telecommunications, retail, and financial services. Looking for: Research scientist Wei-Jer Chang Wei-Jer Chang Email: weijer_chang@berkeley.edu Website: https://weijer-chang.github.io/ Advisor(s): Masayoshi Tomizuka Research Blurb: My research focuses on developing safe and intelligent autonomous systems for complex, human-centered environments. I work at the intersection of machine learning, generative models, and reinforcement learning, with applications in autonomy. My work addresses challenges in multi-agent interaction, interactive human behavior, and long-tail safety-critical scenarios at scale. Looking for: Research Scientist, Applied Scientist, Roboticist Xiuyu Li Xiuyu Li Email: xiuyu@berkeley.edu Website: https://xiuyuli.com/ Advisor(s): Kurt Keutzer Research Blurb: My research focuses on developing scalable and self-improving large language model agents, with emphasis on coding agents for complex, long-horizon tasks. This direction builds on my work in parallel reasoning, and on broader expertise in making generative models more efficient in training and inference across language and vision. What's next: Member of Technical Staff at xAI Yichen Xie Yichen Xie Email: yichenxie0928@gmail.com Website: https://yichen928.github.io/ Advisor(s): Masayoshi Tomizuka Research Blurb: My research focuses on building multimodal foundation models and world models that understand and interact with complex physical environments. I aim to develop unified representations across modalities, enabling AI systems to reason over space, time, and dynamics toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. What's next: Research Scientist at Luma AI Yigit Efe Erginbas Yigit Efe Erginbas Email: erginbas@berkeley.edu Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erginbas/ Advisor(s): Kannan Ramchandran, Thomas A. Courtade Research Blurb: My PhD research spans two threads: online learning in large-scale markets, and interpretability of large machine learning models. In the first, I work on sequential decision-making with applications to recommendation, pricing, and assortment selection. My focus is on designing algorithms with provable guarantees for welfare maximization, revenue maximization, and stability. In the second, I develop scalable attribution methods that exploit the sparse, low-degree structure of real-world interactions, using tools from signal processing and information theory. More recently, I have been exploring principled ways to evaluate the faithfulness of model self-explanations. What's next: Researcher at Hudson River Trading's AI Labs (HAIL) Yiheng Li Yiheng Li Email: yhli@berkeley.edu Website: https://Yihengli.com Advisor(s): Masayoshi Tomizuka Research Blurb: I am working on vision world modeling, with prior experience in diffusion model's efficiency as well as in autonomous driving. What's next: Research Scientist at Waymo Zhe Fu Zhe Fu Email: zhefu@berkeley.edu Website: https://fu-zhe.com/ Advisor(s): Alexandre Bayen Research Blurb: My research focuses on physics-informed learning and control for mixed-autonomy systems, with applications in transportation. I design physics-informed neural networks to learn solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations, enabling accurate and data-efficient prediction of traffic dynamics. Building on these models, I develop both model-based and learning-based control strategies that coordinate automated vehicles to improve system-level performance. My work bridges machine learning, control, and real-world deployment, and has been validated in large-scale field experiments. More broadly, I aim to advance trustworthy, interpretable AI for decision-making in complex, real-world systems. What's next: I will be an Energy Fellow at Stanford after graduation. Also looking for Faculty, or research scientist positions in AI, control, and autonomy.
Kernel knowledge transfer from CUDA to MLX Figure 1: CUDA-to-MLX optimization translation map. CUDA optimization knowledge can be translated into architecture-native MLX strategies rather than copied instruction-for-instruction. We face a new epoch in computing. Hardware is changing rapidly — not just faster GPUs, but a growing range of chips from different vendors, each with its own architecture and often tailored to specific AI workloads. Software is changing just as fast, and AI coding tools now generate in minutes what took months of effort a few years ago. With so much of computing now centered on AI, GPU kernels are a crucial component of its success. These are the low-level programs that run inside the GPU, and writing efficient ones is far from obvious — it takes years of expertise to get right. Transferring a kernel from one vendor’s hardware to another is harder still, and often means rediscovering the same optimizations from scratch. The CUDA ecosystem, for example, has accumulated decades of hard-won kernel expertise: hand-tuned implementations of attention, state space models, and other critical operations representing thousands of engineering hours. Newer hardware ecosystems (Apple Silicon, custom AI accelerators, and others) are growing fast but lack this depth. In this work we ask whether that expertise can be transferred automatically. We built on K-Search , an evolutionary kernel search framework introduced by Cao et al. at Berkeley Sky Lab that uses AI to optimize GPU kernels, and extended it with a backend for MLX — Apple’s machine-learning framework for its own Apple Silicon chips. We developed a novel structured CUDA-to-MLX translation layer that lets K-Search take existing CUDA kernels as a knowledge base and adapt them into high-quality GPU kernels for Apple Silicon, rather than rebuilding from scratch. We show that our approach reaches near-expert level performance on Apple Silicon with 0.97x speedup compared to the native MLX Attention kernel, and up to a 20x prefill speedup over the community mlx-lm implementation on the Mamba SSM kernel; we report the numbers, and how much of the gain comes from the translation layer, in the sections below. Although we focus on MLX kernels for Apple Silicon, the method is not specific to MLX and applies to any ecosystem where CUDA expertise is transferable. Why MLX? Apple’s MLX framework has seen remarkable adoption since late 2023. With Apple Silicon in hundreds of millions of MacBooks and Mac Studios, MLX enables local AI inference without cloud costs. The unified memory architecture makes it especially attractive for mid-sized models (7B–70B parameters on M series chips). Yet beneath this momentum lies a significant gap: many performance-critical kernels that the NVIDIA ecosystem takes for granted: paged attention, optimized SSM scan kernels, fused MoE routing are either absent or naive without hardware-specific tuning. MLX runs models correctly but often leaves significant performance on the table. This gap is what motivates the rest of this post. What is K-Search? K-Search is an evolutionary kernel optimization framework originally developed by our first author Shiyi Cao at UC Berkeley Sky Lab. Given a naive kernel and a hardware specification, it runs an iterative optimization loop: an LLM reasons about which optimizations to try next, a code-writing model generates candidate kernels, and those candidates are compiled and benchmarked on real hardware. Measurements feed back into the search, which keeps refining, pursuing promising directions and dropping dead ends until performance converges. Pseudocode for K-Search via co-evolving world models Algorithm 1: K-Search via co-evolving world models. The search alternates between selecting the most promising action, instantiating and evaluating code until improvement stagnates, and evolving the world model through insert, update, and prune operations. Adapted from Cao et al. (2026) . Search is grounded by a Spec: a domain-specific document encoding hardware rules, optimization patterns, and mathematical constraints which keeps generated code from hallucinating invalid primitives and ensures candidates will actually compile and run efficiently. In our runs, a single model (Gemini 3.5 Pro Preview) plays both roles: it maintains the reasoning state and writes the kernels. The reasoning half is prompted as a “GPU kernel performance engineer” and asked to work through a fixed analysis before proposing anything: classify the kernel (reduction, scan, attention/softmax, …), rewrite the reference computation in canonical form, map out data layout and access patterns, and hypothesize the likely bottleneck (bandwidth, latency, compute, or synchronization) in each runtime regime. Only then does it emit candidate optimizations, each as a single change implementable in one iteration. We call the persistent reasoning state a world model . Rather than a flat list of things to try, it is a decision (prefix) tree: each root→leaf path composes a full optimization plan, and sibling branches are competing alternatives. Every node is scored — an overall_rating in [0, 10], a confidence in [0, 1], and per-node impacts on memory bandwidth, register pressure, and compute/hardware fit — so the search can rank partial plans and expand the most promising ones. The tree persists and grows across rounds: refining an idea adds a child node rather than overwriting its parent, and if the best score fails to improve for a few rounds (a stagnation window) the search backs off to explore an alternative branch. A single node, as it appears mid-run on the attention kernel, looks like this: { "action" : "Replace the threadgroup-memory softmax reduction with a register-only reduction: each SIMD group owns 8 query rows and reduces across lanes with simd_shuffle_xor, removing a threadgroup_barrier." , "difficulty_1_to_5" : 4 , "impacts" : { "memory_bandwidth" : 8 , "register_pressure" : 4 , // risk: spill if Br > 8 "compute_hw_fit" : 9 // SIMD width 32 ; keep tile 8 x 8 }, "overall_rating_0_to_10" : 8 , "confidence_0_to_1" : 0.7 } Listing 1: Example K-Search world-model node. Each candidate optimization records a concrete action, estimated hardware impacts, an overall priority rating, and the model's confidence. Overview of the K-Search loop Figure 2: Overview of K-Search. The framework operates on a Search State $S_t$ structured as a search tree. The tree consists of Closed nodes (blue, visited states with attached program like $x_{12}$) and a Frontier of Open nodes (orange, pending hypotheses like $u_{13}$). The workflow iterates through three phases: (1) Action Selection , where the most promising action node is retrieved from the frontier based on world model estimated priority score $V$; (2) Local Refinement , where a stochastic policy $\pi_{\mathrm{code}}$ samples concrete implementations until stagnation; and (3) World Model Update , where the LLM reasons over the trajectory to update the search tree via Insert (adding new actions), Update (adjusting $V$, e.g., $u_{11}$ dropping from 0.9 to 0.6), and Prune (removing less promising nodes like $u_{10}$). The original K-Search paper evaluated this search strategy on CUDA kernels from FlashInfer. Across GQA decode, MLA decode, MLA prefill, and MoE, K-Search improved more consistently than OpenEvolve and ShinkaEvolve over the same 120-iteration budget. These results establish the search framework we build on here; the remainder of this post asks whether its optimization knowledge can transfer beyond CUDA. K-Search benchmark results compared with OpenEvolve and ShinkaEvolve Figure 3: Main results from the original K-Search paper. Across three runs, K-Search achieves stronger best-so-far search scores, per-workload kernel performance, and speedup distributions than OpenEvolve and ShinkaEvolve on four FlashInfer CUDA kernels. Reproduced exactly from Cao et al. (2026) . Building an MLX backend To bring K-Search to Apple Silicon, we first built a native MLX backend. We implemented a full MLX-specific task adapter for K-Search, including: An MLX task backend in k_search/tasks/ handling kernel compilation and execution on Apple Silicon via MLX’s Metal/C++ APIs. Updated kernel generator prompts for writing and modifying Metal/MLX kernels. MLX-specific benchmarking integration using mlx.core measurement utilities. Translating CUDA expertise to MLX However, the more interesting challenge was not simply running K-Search on MLX. The key insight is that expert CUDA kernels encode decades of optimization knowledge that is transferable to Apple GPU if you can bridge the conceptual gap. Simply handing an LLM a CUDA kernel and asking it to port it is not enough: without deep hardware context, it produces code that is syntactically valid but architecturally wrong (wrong tile sizes, invalid primitives, mismatched memory assumptions). Our translation layer consists of: Concept mapping tables: A structured glossary of CUDA primitives and their MLX/Metal equivalents with hard constraints. For example: __shared__ maps to Metal threadgroup memory but with a hard 32 KB limit (vs. NVIDIA’s 48 KB) warp_reduce maps to MMA (preferred) __syncthreads() becomes threadgroup_barrier(mem_flags::mem_tg) H100’s ~3.35 TB/s HBM3 maps to M3 Max’s ~400 GB/s unified DRAM a bandwidth difference that reshapes which optimizations are worth pursuing. MLX-specific hints and patterns: Concrete code-level patterns for operations with no direct CUDA equivalent, such as register-based row reductions using simd_shuffle_xor in an 8×8 MMA tile layout, or the “exp2 trick” (replacing $exp(x)$ with $exp_2(x \log_2 e)$) for faster softmax on Apple’s fast $exp_2$ hardware instruction. Reusable assertions: Expert kernel behaviors reframed as properties the evolutionary search must preserve, rather than code to copy. Matching expert kernel performance: the Attention kernel We evaluate three configurations of an MLX attention kernel for Apple Silicon: (1) a naive baseline, (2) pure evolution with no additional provided context, and (3) a full context translation layer, which supplies the optimizer with architecture-specific implementation knowledge extracted from high-performance kernels (e.g., FlashAttention-2), letting the evolutionary search reason about implementation strategies rather than starting from a naive kernel. Together, these three configurations let us isolate the exact impact of the translation layer. Performance scaling of the Attention Kernel through stacked optimizations Figure 4: Performance scaling of the Attention Kernel through stacked optimizations. The "Full Context" configuration successfully discovers and implements advanced strategies like double buffering and loop unrolling, achieving near-expert performance. The jump from 0.26× to 0.97× the speed of Apple’s state-of-the-art attention kernel — illustrates how much the translation layer matters. With full context, the evolved kernel independently discovers the key optimizations in FlashAttention 2: threadgroup memory tiling, online softmax, K-transposition for memory access, and the exp2 trick. The last of these replaces every softmax exponential with a base-2 exponential, \[e^x = 2^{x \log_2 e},\] which is exact and lets the kernel use Apple’s fast fast::exp2() hardware instruction directly instead of paying for a base conversion at runtime. A 20× faster prefill: the Mamba SSM kernel To evaluate whether K-Search generalizes beyond attention kernels, we applied it to the state-space model (SSM) kernel used by Mamba. Unlike attention, the computational bottleneck is a recurrent state update rather than a softmax, providing a substantially different optimization challenge. We compare the evolved implementation against the community MLX implementation (mlx-lm) and the PyTorch reference implementation (mamba.py) on an M1 Max. Evaluated on mamba-370m f16, M1 Max 64GB: Metric mlx-mamba (ours) mlx-lm (community) mamba.py Decode 152 tok/s 116 tok/s 40 tok/s Prefill L=512 5,751 tok/s 329 tok/s 1,089 tok/s Prefill L=1024 6,010 tok/s 327 tok/s 1,127 tok/s Prefill L=2048 6,612 tok/s 326 tok/s 1,092 tok/s Prefill L=4096 6,743 tok/s 339 tok/s 1,042 tok/s Table 1: Prefill and decode throughput on mamba-370m (f16, M1 Max 64GB). mlx-mamba (ours) reaches ~20× higher prefill throughput than the community mlx-lm baseline, while decode remains comparable. The ~20× prefill speedup over mlx-lm comes down to one difference: mlx-lm does not implement a parallel scan for the SSM. The state recurrence \[h_t = \bar{a}_t h_{t-1} + \bar{b}_t\] looks inherently sequential, but each step can be written as a pair $(\bar{a}_t, \bar{b}_t)$ under the associative combine \[(a_2, b_2) \circ (a_1, b_1) = \left(a_2 a_1,\ a_2 b_1 + b_2\right),\] which reproduces the recurrence exactly. Because the operator is associative, the whole sequence can be evaluated with a parallel (prefix) scan in $O(\log N)$ dependent steps instead of $O(N)$. mlx-lm skips this and processes tokens one at a time, leaving most of Apple Silicon’s compute idle; our evolved Metal kernel applies the scan and makes much fuller use of GPU throughput. The gain shows up in prefill, where the full sequence is available to scan in parallel, and not in single-token decode, where there is only one new token per step and no scan to parallelize — which is why the decode row is roughly flat while prefill is ~20×. mamba.py is slow on both prefill and decode because it is a PyTorch reference implementation that falls back to CPU or MPS on Apple Silicon, forgoing the hardware-specific optimizations that MLX’s Metal backend makes possible. What’s next? On the two kernels we studied, AI-driven evolutionary kernel search grounded in structured cross-platform translation knowledge reached near-expert performance on Apple Silicon without a team of GPU experts starting from scratch. We do not yet know how far this generalizes, but the result is encouraging. For us the main takeaway is that the bottleneck was not the LLM’s ability to write Metal code, but the quality of the context and constraints we gave it. Our CUDA translation layer converts existing NVIDIA kernel expertise into actionable guidance for Apple Silicon, and lets K-Search’s evolutionary search do the rest. We are actively extending this work in several directions: supporting new architectures, with current efforts focused on developing new kernels for the IBM Spyre AIU and broader hardware targets; adding more kernels such as paged attention and fused MoE routing; and improving integration with the K-Search evolution loop to make translation context even more automatic. Acknowledgements This work was carried out by IBM Research and builds on K-Search from the UC Berkeley Sky Lab ( Cao et al., 2026 ). We welcome collaboration and feedback from the MLX and broader AI systems communities. If you are working on kernel optimization for non-CUDA hardware, we would love to hear from you. Citation @article { cao2026k , title = {K-Search: LLM Kernel Generation via Co-Evolving Intrinsic World Model} , author = {Cao, Shiyi and Mao, Ziming and Gonzalez, Joseph E and Stoica, Ion} , journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19128} , year = {2026} } Appendix: Try it yourself The MLX backend is built on top of the open-source K-Search repo, so the results here can be reproduced directly. The steps are: 1. Clone and install git clone https://github.com/caoshiyi/K-Search.git cd K-Search uv pip install openai wandb uv pip install git+https://github.com/caoshiyi/flashinfer-bench-ksearch.git 2. Set your credentials Open the relevant script under scripts/ and set three variables at the top: KSEARCH_ROOT = /path/to/K-Search API_KEY = your-llm-api-key 3. Run kernel search # Optimize Flash Attention on Apple Silicon (world-model mode) bash scripts/mac_flash_attention_wm.sh # Or a Mamba SSM kernel, e.g. the selective scan bash scripts/mamba_selective_scan_fwd_wm.sh Full CLI reference and documentation are in the README.
数据选择对于在海量异构语料库上训练大型语言模型至关重要。用于训练数据选择的元学习（MTS）通过从目标验证目标中学习数据权重，为启发式评分提供了一种更为系统的方法，但现有方法在细粒度估值与向未见数据迁移之间面临权衡。一种自然的解决方案是用选择网络替代逐样本权重。然而，我们发现，将此类网络直接纳入现有的 MTS 目标会导致优化不稳定且泛化能力较差，其原因在于权重抑制以及对易学习特征的持续依赖。为解决这些问题，我们提出 Transferable Example Scoring and Selection (TESS)，这是一个基于 Pointwise Value Matching 目标（PVM）的可扩展数据选择框架。在 LLM 安全和定向指令微调任务上的实验表明，该方法在不同数据集之间具有很强的迁移能力，能够从子集迁移到完整语料库，也能从较小模型迁移到较大模型。
I found that I'm not using even 1/3 of vim/vscode features anymore. That's wht I'm building rhun - a small code editor for Linux, Windows and Apple silicon Macs. It obviously has Vim mode, a terminal, Git diffs and a panel for Claude Code or Codex sessions. The editor and pixel renderer share an x86-64 assembly core. For Apple silicon, a build-time translator converts that core to AArch64, with separate platform adapters around it. The latest release can draft commit messages using a local Ollama model or an existing Claude Code or Codex subscription. It's a solo project, MIT licensed and still early. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926726 Points: 7 # Comments: 2
As agents take on longer and more complex problems, controlling the execution becomes a task in its own right. Each step in the run brings new control choices, like which partial work to build on, whether to start fresh, or when to stop. We introduce agentic meta-reasoning, an inference-time harness that makes these choices an explicit and structured reasoning process. Workers carry out the task-level computation, while a controller consolidates what the run has established, explores next options, assesses what each option is worth under the remaining budget, and dispatches the chosen work with context drawn from persistent memory. Between decisions the controller carries only a compact account of the run rather than replaying its full history. Our baselines span production coding agents and research harnesses, together with a Direct Control Agent using the same workers and compute budget allowance. On ProgramBench, which tests long-horizon agentic capability through program reconstruction, meta-reasoning achieves 71.5% with GPT-5.5 against 58.0% for Codex; with Opus 4.8 it achieves 67.2% against 65.5% for Claude Code. On the other benchmarks, spanning abstract reasoning, multi-domain long-horizon reasoning, and proof generation, it gains between 3.6 and 4.2 points over direct control, averaged across three frontier models. It keeps improving over the tested budget ranges where direct control plateaus, though its overhead can hurt at small budgets. Artifact-graph analysis reveals more reuse of earlier work, higher coverage of correct solutions in most settings, and nonuniform gains in final selection. These results indicate that spending computation on structured control becomes more important as agents scale to longer runs.
Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface: a small amount of harmful data mixed into an otherwise benign fine-tuning set can degrade the model's alignment. Two recent alignment-stage defenses address this problem at different levels of the model. Vaccine improves the robustness of hidden embeddings to the representation shifts induced by harmful fine-tuning, whereas Booster simulates harmful weight updates and attenuates their effect during alignment. We investigate whether these mechanisms are complementary and propose VaccineBooster, a single alignment procedure that combines embedding perturbation and weight-level gradient attenuation within each training step. On Llama-2-7B aligned with BeaverTails and then attacked through poisoned fine-tuning, VaccineBooster achieves the lowest OpenAI moderation score among the compared defenses, 0.315, while a Booster-Only variant retains the highest post-attack refusal rate, 50%. Together with ablations over the embedding-perturbation and gradient-attenuation strengths, these results indicate a trade-off: embedding perturbation primarily reduces flagged harmful content, whereas gradient attenuation primarily preserves explicit refusal behavior. Because our evaluation uses ten prompts and a single unseeded run per configuration, we report this trade-off as an observed pattern rather than a statistically resolved effect. These results provide practical guidance for prioritizing content safety or refusal retention when aligned models are exposed to untrusted fine-tuning.
The question of AI consciousness is one of the most urgent pre-emptive problems in philosophy and computer science, yet progress is hampered by a cacophony of competing theories that often talk past each other. Separating the hard problem from the mapping problem allows the deepest metaphysical disagreements to be set aside: granting that experience supervenes on a system's organisation, the tractable question becomes at which grain of description that supervenience base sits. We extend Marr's three levels of analysis into a five-level hierarchy of functional descriptions (behavioural, computational, intrinsic causal-structural, organismic, and organism-environment) grounded in supervenience, coarse-graining, and multiple realisability. The major theories of consciousness are positioned within this hierarchy according to which level they take to be critical, and for each level we develop operationalisable indicators and assess current AI systems against them. A Bayesian model then combines theoretical credences with indicator evidence into an overall credence in a system's capacity for consciousness. In illustrative assessments, the verdict for current LLMs is driven as much by where theoretical credence is placed as by how the evidence is read: under different stipulated readings and credence distributions, assessments range from below 0.01 to roughly 0.8, showing sensitivity to assumptions. Finally, the consciousness indicators at each level closely overlap with the architectural features needed for general intelligence, suggesting that increasingly capable AI may become a stronger candidate for consciousness. The framework supports a structured agnosticism, in which theoretical commitments are made explicit, credences are updated as evidence accumulates, and assessments take the form of aggregated probabilities rather than verdicts.
Jev is a non-generative "System One" model that assigns probabilities to predefined answer options and cannot answer outside them. Its accuracy and calibration on medical question-answering and case-based diagnostic-reasoning tasks are unknown. We evaluated Jev 1.13 on four medical benchmarks: MetaMedQA, PubMedQA, DiagnosisArena-MCQ and the NEJM Case Challenges. GPT-6 Sol, with (medium) and without reasoning, was the reference. The primary outcome was top-1 accuracy; key secondary outcomes were calibration, selective prediction and recognition of unanswerable questions. All 8,469 requests returned a valid answer. Jev's accuracy was similar to that of GPT-6 Sol with medium reasoning on PubMedQA (78.4% vs 78.2%;), lower on MetaMedQA (74.8% vs 82.7%) and much lower on DiagnosisArena-MCQ (59.8% vs 82.4%;) and the NEJM cases (61.8% vs 82.4%). On MetaMedQA, Jev's probabilities were the best calibrated (expected calibration error 0.063 vs 0.146), and its answers with a probability of at least 0.9 (52.9% of questions) were 93.4% accurate, but GPT-6 Sol was as accurate when it accepted a similar proportion of questions. On DiagnosisArena-MCQ, Jev's probabilities discriminated poorly (AUROC 0.645 vs 0.768). Of the 162 questions whose correct answer was "I don't know or cannot answer", Jev chose that option for 10.5% (GPT-6 Sol, 8.6%). Median latency was 0.27-0.31 s; all 2,823 items cost USD 0.08. Jev was fast and inexpensive, and its accuracy was similar to that of a frontier LLM on research abstracts but lower on examination questions and much lower on complex diagnostic cases. Task-specific validation is required before clinical use.
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.
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.
Automated and highly usable Quality-of-Service (QoS) enforcement requires translating high-level service intents into deployable traffic-management policies. Although intent-based networking (IBN) has simplified policy specification, bridging the gap between business-level intents and executable network configurations remains complex, error-prone, and difficult to automate. This paper presents Intent2Tc, a closed-loop language-model-driven framework that translates business-level traffic-shaping intents into declarative sub-intents and subsequently into validated, executable Linux traffic control (tc) configurations. The framework integrates an Active Queue Management (AQM)-based digital twin (DT) semantic model, automated metadata extraction, critique-driven refinement, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based knowledge reuse to improve semantic consistency and configuration reliability. We evaluate multiple open-source large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs), together with Claude Sonnet-4.6, on 100 Request for Comments (RFC) 9315-compliant traffic-shaping intents. Across both translation stages, Intent2Tc achieves high semantic fidelity, configuration accuracy, and deployment readiness, with Claude Sonnet-4.6 reaching 0.98 semantic similarity, 1.0 semantic unit coverage, and 0.045 normalized edit distance. Furthermore, RAG reduces token consumption and inference latency while enabling compact models such as Phi-4-mini to approach the performance of substantially larger models. Linux tc serves as the target configuration platform, demonstrating the practical applicability of the proposed framework.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a common interface through which AI applications discover and use external resources and tools. It allows language-model agents to ground their reasoning in current system state and interact with heterogeneous services. In medical environments, however, exposing device state and action affordances requires deterministic constraints on possible effects. We present an IEEE 11073 Service-Oriented Device Connectivity (SDC)-to-MCP gateway that exposes metrics, alarms, context references, and semantic metadata as read-only resources, while representing selected action affordances as policy-validated dry-run tools. The term safety-bounded denotes a narrow no-execution property: agent-facing requests dispatch no SDC device operation. A Python prototype supports simulated fault and lifecycle experiments, a software-reference protocol path spanning independent Java and Python implementations, deterministic baselines, representation ablations, and multi-model agent evaluation. The results show semantically explicit resource exposure, visible rejection of invalid or outdated state, and preservation of the no-execution boundary across resource, proposal, and authorization paths. Explicit semantic metadata improved conformity to required metric identifiers in structured alarm outputs relative to a generic representation, while retained structured-output failures reveal a distinction between plausible narrative answers and task-compliant machine-readable results.
Recent advances in paraphrase detection reveal a fundamental trade-off: large language models achieve high accuracy but require high computation, while efficient Siamese-BERT variants offer practical scalability with reduced transparency in rationale generation. We present R-DEIM Net, a 76M-parameter dual-expert architecture exploring whether moderate-scale models can achieve competitive accuracy on paraphrase detection while enabling human-readable rationale generation. The architecture combines two specialized components: an Interaction Expert that captures token-level similarity patterns through multi-scale 2D convolutions and attention head allowing variable input length, and a Reasoning Expert that uses a Flan-T5-small decoder to generate rationales as auxiliary supervision. Rather than re-encoding generated text, we extract and pool decoder hidden states as complementary features for classification. On the Quora Question Pairs dataset, R-DEIM Net achieves 90.07\% accuracy and 90.16\% F1-score via 10-fold cross-validation. This represents competitive performance with strong transformer-based baselines (e.g., MFAE BERT: 90.54\% accuracy) and recent large language model based approaches (LLaMA-70B) while using a substantially smaller parameter budget. The model generates rationales alongside predictions, providing potential for auxiliary human-readable descriptions.
移动出行行业正经历由生成式人工智能进步所驱动的范式转变。仅考虑汽车，该行业全球市场年规模约为2.9万亿美元，而这些技术的整合有望影响全球超过15亿辆汽车。随着LLMs在移动出行领域得到越来越广泛的采用，人们开始关注网络安全、隐私和可靠性问题。因此，本文对当前应用进行综述，并评估这些挑战。鉴于European AI Act将交通运输领域的人工智能列为高风险领域，我们根据其要求归纳出九类技术类别，用于评估当前研究和未来部署。研究结果表明，现有研究主要关注GPT和Llama模型（占所审阅研究的50%以上）以及交通应用，却在很大程度上忽视了安全性、隐私和可靠性。这一缺口同样存在于对AI Act的合规性方面：在审阅的35项研究中，仅有1项包含部分漏洞评估，另有1项包含部分风险管理系统。我们发现，强大的优化性能与监管遵从性之间存在明显差距，这表明合规性受限的主要原因并非技术能力不足，而是过度关注静态性能、忽视全生命周期安全；同时，这也凸显了在安全关键型智能交通系统中贯彻安全设计的迫切需求。
In multi-agent social settings, model reliability varies across relationships. Beyond inferring what others will do, an agent must calibrate how confidently those inferences should guide policy selection for each relationship. An agent may maintain a well-validated model of one partner, a fragile model of another, and a model under revision for a third; collapsing these into a single confidence estimate loses information relevant to policy selection. We therefore formalize affective precision as a relationship-specific metacognitive estimate of confidence in the current partner model. Each partner's behavioral evidence updates a local confidence estimate that modulates policy precision during selection, regulating how strongly current beliefs are expressed in policy rather than changing the content of those beliefs. Simulations in a multi-partner graded trust game show that partner-local affective precision influences behavior primarily through policy commitment rather than direct improvement of partner-state inference. Because the mechanism tracks partner-response predictability rather than realized payoff, greater confidence produces sharper policy commitment without necessarily producing higher rewards. Under abrupt shifts in social behavior, confidence accumulated from previously reliable predictions can remain behaviorally active after the relationship changes, showing that confidence revision can lag behind social change. Finally, varying precision gain and priors produce distinct trust-calibration dynamics, showing how confidence accumulation and revision depend on model parameters. Together, these results show how relationship-specific affective precision can distinguish social prediction from social policy commitment.
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.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for enterprise information extraction (IE), where the same document must be reorganized differently for each user. Existing prompt optimization methods, however, rely on a single prompt optimized against a global objective, which is misaligned with the inherent user heterogeneity of real workplaces. We formulate enterprise IE as per-user prompt adaptation under interaction feedback and propose Self-Meta-Evolve, a hierarchical framework that maintains a dedicated prompt for each user and continuously refines it through a dual-loop process: an inner loop that edits structured prompts based on persona-conditioned feedback, and an outer loop that evolves the meta-prompt itself by distilling successful editing patterns. To enable scalable training and evaluation, we release a persona-driven IE benchmark of 292 simulated enterprise users, paired with a reproducible persona-generation pipeline grounded in O*NET occupational taxonomies. On this benchmark, Self-Meta-Evolve achieves a 74.58% success rate, outperforming the strongest prompt-optimization baseline by 13.56 absolute points, and reaches 52.54\% within only two iterations. A double-blind human study with twenty real professionals further confirms that prompts adapted by our framework win against static baselines in 71% of pairwise comparisons.
Software is a first-class scientific object, yet validated links between source code and the scholarly record remain largely absent from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, isolating archived artefacts from semantic discovery. This paper presents an end-to-end reconciliation pipeline that harvests, validates, and models publication-to-repository pairs from sources where the link between a paper and its source code is explicit and editorially verified: the software-centric journals JOSS, SoftwareX, and IPOL, together with the reproducibility reports of the SIGMOD Availability and Reproducibility Initiative (ARI). This yields a curated corpus of 4,397 $\langle$DOI, repository-URL$\rangle$ pairs. We design two distinct application profiles grounded in Wikidata classes (one for scholarly articles, one for software instances) aligned with the schema.org and CodeMeta vocabularies. This architectural separation enables rule-based reconciliation at two granularities: lightweight, inline publication references or standalone, first-class Wikidata software nodes equipped with SWHIDs, Software Heritage's content-addressed identifiers. A read-only lookup against Wikidata shows that only 82 of the harvested repositories were already modelled there; human-reviewed batches have since created 4{,}182 new software items cross-linked to their articles. We further show that payloads of the emerging COAR Notify protocol, an external effort we do not develop, map natively onto our input format, so the same backend could later serve a live enrichment stream. Our core contribution is a pair of application profiles that turn Wikidata into a connector between the scholarly record and archived source code; we openly release all code, application profiles, and harvested datasets.
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.
Discrete choice model specification is a time-consuming task in which modellers often specify and estimate multiple models while balancing goodness-of-fit, parsimony, and behavioural plausibility. We present Delphos, a multitask reinforcement learning framework that learns transferable specification strategies across transport choice datasets. Delphos frames model specification as a sequential decision-making problem in which it applies a sequence of modelling actions and receives feedback from an estimation environment based on model performance and convergence. To transfer modelling decisions across datasets with different sets of variables, Delphos represents utility specifications as sets of modelling terms using a DeepSet-Q architecture, allowing a shared specification policy to learn across multiple datasets. Trained on nine transport choice datasets, Delphos consistently outperforms independently trained single-task agents, indicating that sharing modelling experience improves learning efficiency and helps identify promising sequences of modelling decisions with fewer unsuccessful estimation attempts. When applied without further training to the unseen Swissmetro and Decisions datasets, the same agent identifies competitive specifications in less than 20 minutes on a standard CPU. It achieves a higher log-likelihood per observation than the VNS metaheuristic on Swissmetro and performance comparable to a published MNL specification developed by expert modellers on Decisions. These findings show that accumulating and reusing modelling experience enables Delphos to function as an intelligent assistant for discrete choice model specification. It reduces manual trial-and-error while allowing modellers to retain control over model diagnosis, refinement, and final selection.
Precise multi-camera tracking traditionally relies on rigorous 3D site calibration, yet this requirement is often operationally impossible in large-scale deployments. Privacy regulations frequently prohibit recording video for offline calibration; limited bandwidth precludes synchronizing high-resolution streams from hundreds of cameras; and covering immense physical sites with calibration targets is logistically infeasible. We present a multi-camera homography calibration system designed to overcome these barriers through "on-the-fly" geometric refinement. Starting from coarse manual homographies, we introduce a centroid-based projection optimization (PO) that continuously aligns the ground-plane geometry using live detection streams. Because PO operates asynchronously on already-transmitted, lightweight metadata, it adds zero computational latency to the real-time tracker. This allows the system to adapt automatically to camera movements or environmental changes without human intervention. This optimized geometry feeds a multi-camera bird's-eye-view (BEV) tracker that fuses detections and unifies trajectories across zones. Crucially, by operating strictly on live anonymous metadata, our solution ensures a privacy-safe, zero-overhead, and resilient tracking pipeline that maintains global consistency in dynamic environments where static, recorded-video calibration is impossible.
Propagation structures provide crucial evidence for fake news detection, yet existing approaches primarily rely on supervised GNN-based models, which require substantial labeled data and exhibit limited generalization. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, directly feeding them raw propagation graphs creates a significant modality mismatch and severe information overload, making structure-aware reasoning unreliable in zero-shot and few-shot settings. To bridge this gap, we propose MAGER, a multi-agent genetic evolution framework that automatically discovers meta-paths optimized for LLM reasoning. By compressing complex propagation graphs into informative subgraphs, the evolved meta-paths alleviate both information overload and modality mismatch, enabling frozen LLMs to perform structure-aware veracity reasoning. We further introduce a graph in-context learning strategy that retrieves semantically and structurally similar demonstrations to strengthen classification and reasoning. Extensive experiments show that MAGER substantially improves frozen LLMs as standalone fake news detectors in data-efficient settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/SenticNet/MAGER.
Video streaming dominates global internet traffic, yet conventional pipelines remain inefficient for structured, human-centric content such as sports, performance, or interactive media. Standard codecs re-encode entire frames, foreground and background alike, treating all pixels uniformly and ignoring the semantic structure of the scene. This leads to significant bandwidth waste, particularly in scenarios where backgrounds are static and motion is constrained to a few salient actors. We introduce GenStream, a semantic streaming framework that replaces dense video frames with compact, structured metadata. Instead of transmitting pixels, GenStream encodes each scene as a combination of skeletal keypoints, camera viewpoint parameters, and a static 3D background model. These elements are transmitted to the client, where a generative model reconstructs photorealistic human figures and composites them into the 3D scene from the original viewpoint. This paradigm enables extreme compression, achieving over 99.9% bandwidth reduction compared to HEVC for the continuous data stream. We partially validate GenStream on Olympic figure skating footage and demonstrate potential for high perceptual fidelity under minimal data. While acknowledging the significant computational costs shifted to the client and challenges in generalization, GenStream opens new directions in volumetric avatar synthesis, canonical 3D actor fusion across views, and personalized viewing experiences, laying the groundwork for scalable, intelligent streaming in the post-codec era.
Large language model (LLM) agents exhibit strong language-generation and problem-solving capabilities, yet suffer from three structural limitations: personality drift, non-evolutionary reflection, and the absence of a self-other boundary. Existing generative-agent simulations rely on static memory and fixed prompts, maintaining neither behavioral inertia nor endogenous self-evolution. We propose the Self-Emergence Agent Architecture (SEAA), which integrates three components: (i) a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) that encodes long-term behavioral and cognitive inertia as an editable state-transition matrix; (ii) a Reflexion-style verbal metacognition loop whose output updates the HMM parameters themselves, rather than merely being stored as text; and (iii) a multi-agent social environment in which initially identical agents continuously compare their behavior with others'. The three components form a closed loop: social action $\to$ feedback $\to$ self-reflection $\to$ inertia update $\to$ differentiated action. We state three falsifiable hypotheses and provide a reproducible experimental protocol with operational metrics. A language-model-free prototype shows the loop spontaneously breaks symmetry: initially identical agents consolidate distinct, stable personalities whereas matched controls do not. Experiments with a hosted LLM surface these differences as distinct first-person self-narratives, and a five-agent deliberation spontaneously develops social structure---a consensus hub and a unanimously rejected outlier---absent in the control. Following an epistemologically agnostic stance inspired by Zhuangzi, SEAA studies only observable behavioral emergence and makes no claim about subjective qualia. This work contributes a unified framework, a concrete architecture with pseudocode, mechanistic evidence, and a microscope-style sandbox for studying artificial-self emergence.
Large language model (LLM) inference is often constrained by both computation and memory, especially in offloading-based deployments where model weights are transferred across memory hierarchies during autoregressive decoding. In this setting, reducing the number of executed layers can lower per-token latency while also avoiding costly weight movement. Motivated by this observation, we present FlexEE, an early exiting framework for resource-constrained and offloading-based LLM inference. FlexEE makes early exiting practical for LLM decoding through layer-wise exit supervision for reliable intermediate-layer prediction, self-speculative decoding over a Top-K local vocabulary for low-cost exit decisions, and dynamic hidden state management for KV-cache-correct and memory-aware execution. Across generative and downstream tasks, FlexEE enables efficient early exit with minimal accuracy degradation, delivering up to 1.27$\times$/3.16$\times$ and 1.25$\times$/2.83$\times$ end-to-end speedups on Llama2-7B and Llama3-8B under 0\%/50\% weight offloading, respectively.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines typically rely on a fixed indexing and retrieval configuration determined at preprocessing time. This one-size-fits-all design is ill-suited to domain-expert settings, where heterogeneous queries require different chunking granularities, metadata constraints, and source-selection strategies. As a result, configurations that are effective for one family of queries often perform poorly for others. In this paper, we introduce ORDER (Optimal Routing for Dynamic Evidence Retrieval), a query-conditioned RAG framework that jointly adapts indexing and retrieval to the incoming query. Our approach first discovers semantic clusters over a given set of questions associated to a corpus and learns, for each cluster, a chunking strategy together with a suited metadata filtering and reranking configuration. At inference time, queries are routed to the appropriate pre-built index through nearest-centroid assignment. To further improve retrieval, we propose a supervised query router (QRe) that predicts which collections are most likely to contain relevant evidence, coupled with a Uniform Multi-source Sampler (UMS) that allocates the retrieval budget evenly across the selected sources. We evaluate our framework on large-scale, heterogeneous historical archives and show that conditioning both indexing and retrieval on the query consistently outperforms both naive baselines and strong state-of-the-art RAG systems in complex expert-domain environments.
AI assistance places a metacognitive demand on users, who must judge their own competence and the system's. Yet designers lack comparative evidence on which interventions to choose, where to place them, and how to tell whether they worked. We elicited 30 interventions from 11 experts and, with prior work, organized them into a design space of time (when an intervention acts), level (whose competence is judged), and source (who supplies the monitoring cue). A between-subjects experiment (N = 917; 12 planning-and-organizing problems) compared a per-task reliability card, contrasting replies, pause points, and post-problem reflection against a baseline LLM assistant. Reliability cards and contrasting replies reduced estimation error and overconfidence and increased aggregate confidence discrimination. No task-performance improvement or average within-item discrimination gain was established. We contribute a shared vocabulary, a design space, and evidence that measured monitoring and task performance are separable design targets.
Thermal optimization of 2D CFET inverters requires testing structural proposals against their electrical costs. We examine these research tasks using an AI agent workflow within a supplied electrothermal model. At 12 nm, Astra selects a redistributed source-interconnect geometry, while a coordinating agent proposes a substrate-directed heat-removal path. The combined design reduces peak temperature rise by 1.67 K at fixed metal volume and 20 μW. A subsequent metal-resistance sensitivity gives about 0.6-K inverter cooling alongside a 2% nFET on-current loss. Effective contact-length scaling further shows that lower temperature can accompany higher thermal resistance when current falls. Reproduction identifies agreeing implementations and retains a 104.95-K failure for diagnosis. These results show that an AI scientist workflow can propose thermal structures, test them under common constraints, and quantify their electrical cost.
Hi HN - long-time lurker (since 2012!), first time poster. Pizza Bot is a self-hosted desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that runs AI agents in the background and exposes them through an email-like UI. Finished work shows up in Unread, and anything waiting on your approval shows up in Action. It's Apache 2.0-licensed, there's no signup and no telemetry, and you bring your own model provider: Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or a local model through Ollama. There are builds on the releases page, or you can run it from source. Pizza Bot started as an internal passion project I worked on with a small team at Amazon. The whole thing came out of my frustration at having to manually log CRM activities through a browser form. I built a simple REST API called "JoeBot" that connected to my authenticated browser session over CDP and filled out the form for me using Playwright. Then I hacked up a quick Obsidian plugin so I could trigger it from my local notes (no AI and no MCP servers involved). This caught on quickly. My fellow AWS Solutions Architect Igor Fil joined up with me, and we rebranded the project as "Pizza Bot," named after Amazon's two-pizza teams. We started seeing what other automations we could build. We found a GraphQL API we could query and hacked up some "recipes" to pull data out of the CRM to help with meeting prep. That worked great, and it was right around the time MCP servers seemed to be taking off, so we decided to expose Pizza Bot as an MCP server instead, so it would be available to AI tools through natural language. This was a decent solution for technical users, but the Account Managers who live inside our CRM system wanted something too. We decided to rebuild Pizza Bot as an Electron desktop app modeled after an email inbox, so it would be familiar to non-technical users and would run on both Mac and Windows. We also bundled internal MCP servers as OCI images and hosted them in Amazon ECR as an "addon marketplace" so users could install them with one click without having to set up Amazon developer tooling. The project took off organically and expanded outside of AWS into the wider Amazon organization globally. More than 2,000 people ended up using it for meeting prep, email drafting, Slack summaries, CRM logging, prioritizing their day, and web research. Once apps like Claude Cowork and Amazon's own Quick Desktop came out, we realized the real growth opportunity was outside of Amazon. Rather than try to rip out the Amazon-specific integrations, we rebuilt Pizza Bot once more as an open source project. We leaned on coding agents heavily, which is the only reason a team our size could pull off a full rewrite. I'm pleased to say it's finally public, and we're hoping to bring in community members and see where it goes. We'd like to do for knowledge workers what Claude Code and Codex have done for programmers. A couple of things to know up front. Most of what made Pizza Bot useful on day one inside Amazon came from that internal catalog of skills and MCP servers for Amazon's own systems, and none of it could come out with the app. So it ships thinner than the version those 2,000 people used, and building that catalog back up for tools other people actually use is where we need the most help. It's also a community project and not an AWS service, so there's no support or SLA behind it. The Windows and Linux builds aren't signed yet either. On the technical side, Pizza Bot is a server and a client. The desktop app bundles both, or you can point a client at a remote backend; personally, I self-host the server on my home network and reach it from my phone over Tailscale. The server owns the thread lifecycle and checkpoints state with DeepAgents and LangGraph, and clients rehydrate from it as needed, so you can disconnect mid-run and pick the thread back up from another client. Approval pauses outlive the session that created them and collect in an Action filter, so you can answer an hour later from a different device. The agent you talk to has a sandboxed QuickJS interpreter that can reach your filesystem only if you grant it a folder, but its main job is to delegate. Each subagent is a 1:1 mapping of a Skill, and an Activity bar shows that subagent and the tool calls it's making as it works. Memory is opt-in and stored as plain markdown files on your machine. Every tool call is explicit, including looking up a memory - we err on the side of transparency to reduce surprises. Tools come from MCP servers, and skills are ordinary SKILL.md files with a per-tool approval policy, so existing skills that don't require a code interpreter should still work. What I'd most like to hear about is where the app itself gets in your way, the kind of problem you can't fix by writing a skill or an MCP server. I'm around today to answer questions! Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713894 Points: 15 # Comments: 5
Hi everyone, Been working on Otis, an open-source ai agent that gives you one minimal experience across local and hosted open-weight models, privacy-focused by design. On setup it recommends a local model based on the hardware Otis is running on, downloads it and runs it through llama.cpp for you. Ollama, LM Studio and Nvidia PAIR are supported too. Excited for everyone to try it and all feedback is welcome! Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49696084 Points: 3 # Comments: 0
What is ChaosTree? ChaosTree is a zero-dependency Java Sorted Set/Map library built around multiple tree implementations. It provides implementations of: - AVL Tree - Red-Black Tree - B-Tree - B+Tree I have not made my custom API as it implements NavigableSet, NavigableMap, SequencedSet and SequencedMap. My Custome API are: - buildFromSorted(Iterator> it, float factor) - importFlatMatrix(Object[][] blast, float factor) - Object[][] exportFlatMatrix() I started ChaosTree because I wanted to explore how far I could learn DS structure, It started as frst release of 7 tree of Set type with Custome API, As i got engrossed into it I moved to Map, During phase of switching from Set to Map there was drastic change and knowledge upgrade where I pushed my Tree limit from jdk11+ support to jdk21+ where paid close attention to dependency-free and memory layout, allocation,JVM behavior, and real-world performance. Some of the things I experimented with: - Different node layouts and metadata footprints - CRTP/F-bounded polymorphism for tree implementations - Parent-pointer vs parentless nodes - Array-based N-ary tree nodes - B-Tree/B+Tree degree selection - JMH benchmarking and JFR profiling - Differential/randomized testing against java.util.TreeMap/TreeSet After this rough and tough It also passes these test: -Guava Testlib compatibility testing -jqwik property-based testing -Randomized differential testing against reference collections -White-box structural validation of tree nodes -Direct validation of B-Tree/B+Tree structural invariants -Exception and iterator-contract testing -Serialization and cloning tests -Nary Tree uses custom jqwick test of API validation as well. Tail latency behavior is not shown here because it get's truncated into a simple text which made the dat read wrong: https://chaos-vy.github.io/ChaosTree/utils/JMH-Report.html I have also ran benchmark with official JDK TreeMapUpdate to my N-ary tree. GitHub: https://github.com/Chaos-vy/ChaosTree https://chaos-vy.github.io/ChaosTree/ I'd especially like feedback on the API design, implementation choices, benchmark methodology. I am currently trying to truncate useless and complex branches for performnace tuning. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694404 Points: 6 # Comments: 4
a couple hours ago i had astra take on a 10 month old repo of mine https://github.com/callbacked/neural-band-poc/ that involved finding a way to use the meta neural band independently from the glasses to read the sEMG data off of it. i really think it is a cool piece of technology that largely gets overlooked by the glasses, and always thought it was a shame it couldn't be used outside of its main application. after making quick work of that, i wanted to use it to control my mac using gesture controls and that's how kinesis was born. it has been very cool being able to swipe from desktops using my fingers, swiping up to open up mission control or controlling a virtual knob to adjust my volume. i definitely havent scratched the surface with the neural band but it has been a really fun endeavor thus far! i really hope others can find creative uses for their neural bands too :) Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695408 Points: 7 # Comments: 0
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) enables AI systems to turn experience and feedback into persistent changes that improve both their capabilities and the process of future improvement. We first use the Headroom-Closed Index (HCI) to reveal the problems of existing LLMs, then introduce the RSI concept and its development roadmap: from improvement-execution autonomy, improvement-strategy autonomy, experience-acquisition autonomy, and environment-adaptation autonomy, to recursive meta-improvement. Next we examine RSI across scenarios (e.g., scientific discovery, embodied intelligence, software engineering), highlighting their distinct requirements and development speeds. Drawing on diverse industry practices and preliminary empirical evidence, we connect RSI research with practical systems and identify key challenges to achieving genuine RSI.
Diffusion TV is an interactive AI art installation that offers a tangible and embodied experience of diffusion models through a modified CRT TV. By physically manipulating the TV's antenna, audiences control the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, metaphorically enacting the denoising process that underlies diffusion-based generation. Using the tuning knob, participants switch between three channels featuring AI-generated animals from the Past (extinct species), Present (endangered species), and Future (speculative creatures), situating the interaction within a temporal and ecological narrative. Through continuous audiovisual feedback and physical interaction, Diffusion TV foregrounds the generative process over final outputs, allowing audiences to explore intermediate states as experiential material. Rather than providing explicit technical explanation, the work presents an alternative, embodied mode of explainable AI that invites exploratory engagement with and reflection on generative technologies.
Cryptocurrency markets exhibit extreme volatility and non-stationary dynamics that challenge conventional forecasting methods. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for time series forecasting, the combined effects of adaptation choices remain largely unexplored in financial settings. This study introduces PRICE, a structured approach for adapting LLMs to short-term Bitcoin price forecasting. Built on a 4-bit quantized LLaMA-3 8B model, PRICE investigates how fine-tuning, numerical representation, prompting, inference, and decoding jointly influence forecasting performance. PRICE integrates Parameter-efficient fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Recursive multi-step inference, Integer-rounded numerical representation, Context-Task-Format (CTF) prompting, and Exact zero-temperature decoding. Ablation studies show that each component contributes to forecasting accuracy and reliability. LoRA enables efficient training on limited hardware, recursive inference improves accuracy, integer-rounded values reduce errors, CTF prompting outperforms Chain-of-Thought, Implicit Chain-of-Thought (iCoT), and few-shot prompting, and zero-temperature decoding improves stability during recursive forecasting. Comparative evaluation against eight transformer-based and time-series foundation models shows that PRICE achieves the lowest forecasting errors on both validation and test sets while maintaining robust performance across evaluation periods. Despite being based on a model primarily pretrained on text rather than time-series data, PRICE achieves competitive or superior performance relative to specialized foundation models. These findings demonstrate that adaptation choices critically determine the accuracy and robustness of LLMs for numerical time-series forecasting.
Automated reference-based evaluation methods play a critical role in assessing natural language generation systems. Existing meta-evaluation primarily measures agreement with human judgments or benchmark labels, providing limited insight into evaluator behavior under controlled conditions. We introduce behavioral correctness assumptions, a complementary framework for evaluating reference-based automatic evaluation methods. We define a taxonomy of correctness-preserving and correctness-altering assumptions and operationalize them through controlled response transformations that specify expected scoring behaviors. We evaluate diverse lexical, character-level, semantic, LLM-based, and hybrid evaluators and analyze their assumption-level behavior, stability, sensitivity, repeat-run variability, configuration sensitivity, and reproducibility. Our experiments reveal distinct behavioral trade-offs across evaluation paradigms: no evaluator satisfies all proposed correctness assumptions, and evaluators with similar aggregate performance can exhibit substantially different behavioral profiles. These findings demonstrate that behavioral correctness assumptions provide diagnostic information obscured by conventional aggregate meta-evaluation.
Building automation systems generate rich sensor data yet remain insight-poor because heterogeneous point naming, missing metadata, and fragmented documentation obstruct their operational use. This systematic review analyses and codes 66 peer-reviewed studies on large language models (LLMs) for HVAC operations published between 2023 and March 2026. Each study is classified across five application families and three LLM method families and assessed for evidence realism, deployment readiness, and the responsibility boundary between the LLM and physical HVAC decisions. The corpus is concentrated in building energy modelling (BEM, 32 of 66 papers), while load forecasting remains too sparse for subfield-level conclusions. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, and none reports sustained operational deployment. No study was classified as ready-now for industry adoption; three were near-term and 63 research-only. Nevertheless, several bounded, human-in-the-loop uses merit near-term trials, including point-name normalisation, document-grounded operator support, BEM workflow assistance, and advisory interfaces around physics-based controllers. Conventional machine learning (ML), model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning (RL) and ontology-based tools remain more adopted for high-frequency control, short-horizon numerical forecasting, and well-posed ontology mapping, while autonomous agentic operation and unvalidated occupant proxies remain research-stage. Current evidence therefore supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous HVAC controllers. Future work should prioritise field-validated benchmarks, orchestration evaluation under operational constraints, and LLM-MPC/RL architectures with bounded latency and verifiable safety properties.
For every coherent and sufficiently expressive finite syntactic system S, we prove the existence of at least one theorem that S cannot produce autonomously. The result is a metatheorem: it proves the existence of a theorem, and applies to every finite syntactic system - security mechanisms, AI systems, formal verifiers, legal systems, economic models, and the formal system in which it is itself proved.
This paper introduces QXymb, a general framework for constructing observational declarative twins of quantum circuits, and develops QILP-0, its first complete order-0 specialization. QILP-0 constructs a finite multi-valued propositional logic program from observed circuit behaviour within a declared observational scope. The pipeline traverses a declared family of quantum observables incrementally according to a reproducible structural grading and a declared observational reference horizon. Progress is quantified through reference-relative coverage against a fixed target-independent reference. Observable responses are organized through target-independent geometry, while retained latent structure is mapped deterministically back to original observable columns before symbolic processing, preserving observational semantics and provenance. Selected observable profiles are converted into a finite relation through admissible target-independent discretization. The target is used only afterwards to audit twin-admissibility and induce the declarative theory. A theory is certified as an exact observational declarative twin when it completely and correctly reconstructs the resulting finite task-conditioned discrete relation. Logical exactness is therefore separated from numerical, backend, provider, and discretization uncertainty, which is retained as audit metadata. Validation uses two complementary QML settings. Exhaustive Bars & Stripes experiments compare product and grid-CZ embeddings from 16 to 100 qubits and exercise the native-discrete branch. Low-Depth MNIST analyses all 14,708 digit-0/1 instances before and after a trained variational quantum transformation and exercises continuous discretization. In every reported relation, the induced QILP-0 theory achieves complete, conflict-free reconstruction with strict accuracy equal to one.
Past literature on face recognition for monozygotic (("identical") twins points to facial marks and mirror asymmetry as possible directions for improved accuracy of twins recognition. The Celeb Twins Test Set (CTTS) contains web-scraped image pairs for 80 sets of celebrity twins. It is the only twins test set with meta-data for twins with distinguishing skin marks and possible mirror asymmetry. CTTS is organized in the manner of face verification test sets such as LFW, CALFW, CPLFW, CFP-FP, and AgeDB-30. Current deep CNN matchers can achieve over 76% accuracy in classifying CTTS same-person / different-person image pairs. We show that current matchers do not make use of skin marks, or asymmetry, and discuss reasons for this. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of using generative AI tools such as Grok, ChatGPT and Gemini to create images of imagined monozygotic twins as a means to increase representation of twins in face recognition training sets.
Attributing an artwork to an artist has traditionally relied on detailed visual observations and descriptions, known as stylistic analysis in art history. By contrast, current artificial intelligence (AI) models used in the field offer only unexplained probabilistic classifications. To bridge this methodological gap, we present an AI framework that automates stylistic analysis of paintings, providing a foundation for enhancing evidence collection, discovery, and verification. By training a vision transformer (ViT) on a large corpus of paintings with metadata, our system encodes this art history-specific data as embeddings. These representations are factorized via sparse dictionary learning into a shared set of features that recur across the training set. A large language model (LLM) then interprets each feature by retrieving associated artworks and their accompanying curator-written texts, and synthesizes them into descriptions that reflect their stylistic attributes. Finally, an autonomous coordinator LLM applies a reasoning-and-action (ReAct) framework to weight, test, and refine these features into cohesive descriptions of an artwork, or comparisons of artworks. This approach converts detailed visual features into descriptive terms, addressing a key challenge in art history. It thus connects the use of images as data with the semantic concerns of humanists, establishing vision-based computational art history as an area for future growth.
Hi HN, we’re Brandon and Kingston, the founders of Hebbian Robotics. We built HFlow ( https://github.com/Hebbian-Robotics/hflow ), an SDK that turns multimodal recordings from robots and human operators into standardized, quality-checked episodes and queryable dataset manifests. A recording can contain synchronized video, joint states, actions, timestamps, and metadata, and HFlow processes those streams together. Here’s a demo of HFlow in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xni0GwV-xAw Robotics data pipelines often begin as scripts: one transcodes video, another checks timestamps, another adds labels, and another copies selected recordings into a training set. This works until the corpus grows. Then it becomes difficult to know which code ran, why an episode was excluded, or whether a dataset can be reproduced. The first pain is usually quality control because frozen cameras, missing topics, timestamp drift, and duplicate recordings can quietly enter training data. Brandon first encountered this while training embodied AI models for two-arm industrial cleaning robots. Kingston had run into related problems while building high-throughput infrastructure at Jane Street. Later, while speaking with robotics data providers, we kept seeing teams rebuild similar processing and quality-control infrastructure. We learnt that processing robotics data is itself one of the bottlenecks to improving robotics models. An HFlow pipeline consists of transformations, checks, labels, and enrichments. The SDK exposes them as plain Python functions that receive an episode and return measurements, artifacts, or transformed data. During development, the functions can run in-process. For scheduled corpus processing, HFlow packages the same registered steps as Airflow 3 DAGs, where teams can inspect task status, logs, retries, and reruns. HFlow currently accepts one MCAP file per episode. MCAP ( https://mcap.dev/ ) is an open container format by Foxglove for timestamped multimodal recordings, similar in purpose to a ROS bag. It lets video, robot state, actions, and other sensor streams remain synchronized in one file. We use it because HFlow needs to process these streams together, and because the resulting recordings remain compatible with Foxglove and Rerun. HFlow writes a canonical MCAP with in-band H.264 video, grouped camera and state chunks, and provenance describing how the output was produced. Each step has an explicit behavior version, and catalog records connect its measurements and artifacts to the source episode and pipeline run. Quality checks store reusable evidence rather than imposing one universal definition of good data. Some failures, including black frames, frozen video, missing topics, timestamp drift, and impossible joint movements, can be measured deterministically without training a model. Others might be detected using VLMs and other models like MediaPipe Hands. But their meaning depends on the task. A smooth trajectory might indicate a successful demonstration in one setting and a stalled robot in another. HFlow writes measurements, metadata, version stamps, and artifact locations to an append-only Parquet catalog. Teams query it with DuckDB SQL and produce a version-pinned manifest without opening the recordings again. Critical checks can quarantine an episode, but HFlow does not delete data. This separates the evidence from the policy used to assemble a particular dataset. We did not want to replace the tools robotics teams already use. HFlow connects MCAP for synchronized recordings, Airflow for scheduled execution, Parquet for catalog data, and DuckDB for curation. Compared with a general workflow orchestrator, it adds contracts for robotics episodes, processing provenance, quality evidence, quarantine, and dataset manifests. Compared with a training dataset format, it operates earlier and stops at curated episodes plus a manifest. Here are three examples of teams that would use HFlow: 1. A data vendor or marketplace collecting egocentric recordings. They could use HFlow to detect black or frozen video, duplicate recordings, hand-object interaction, and other quality metrics before delivering the data, while retaining evidence of which checks ran on every episode. 2. A robotics team collecting teleoperated demonstrations for its own models. They could use HFlow to standardize recordings, add labels and enrichments, and produce a reproducible training manifest. 3. A team operating robots in the field. It could process incoming logs, quarantine incomplete or corrupted episodes, and query the catalog for particular robot versions, environments, or failure conditions. The project is pre-v1, but the core lifecycle works end to end. You can try it without an account, Docker, or robot hardware by cloning the repository and following the quickstart. HFlow is free under the Apache-2.0 license. The open source deployment is currently a single-tenant workspace, and we have not built the hosted, multi-tenant control plane yet. We are considering making money through managed workspaces and enterprise support for teams that do not want to operate the runtime themselves. Because this processing layer is software and data, people can contribute without owning a robot. We would especially like feedback from people who have built pipelines for robotics, video, or other sensor-heavy systems. We are curious where our data model is wrong, which integrations are missing, and what would fail first on your workloads. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510632 Points: 3 # Comments: 0
Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, into medical training has prompted concerns about learner over-reliance, misuse, and erosion of foundational clinical competencies. We propose a conceptual reframing at the decision level: the problem is not misuse but misclassification - a mechanistic failure of real-time metacognitive evaluation in selecting a subzone-inappropriate AI interaction mode. Drawing on "SCAN" (Substitute, Complement, Aid, Non-Negotiable), a human-centric decision-making framework for generative AI task allocation grounded in Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and metacognition, we advance the emerging social-constructivist conversation around AI in medical education by offering a testable account of AI's role in clinical reasoning development. This framework yields testable predictions for how misclassification can be detected, mitigated, and, more importantly, prevented in the clinical learning environment. Regarding clinical reasoning development, we show how trajectories of skill acquisition (upskilling) and failure (the triad of skill failure: de-skilling, never-skilling, and mis-skilling) operate at the individual task level in ways that fixed-phase, cohort-wide treatments fail to capture. We further identify passive engagement within correctly classified AI-scaffolded tasks as a particularly insidious, detection-resistant pathway to mis-skilling - one requiring subzone re-identification from AI assistance to expert assistance, with human experts serving as epistemic auditors. The paper operationalizes SCAN for clinical curriculum design, supervision, and assessment, and opens an empirical research agenda grounded in cognitive science. This paradigm shift from misuse to misclassification is not semantic: it offers educators a clear perspective on what to look for, what to assess, and what to intervene on.
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
A machine learning-assisted framework for the inverse design of pixelated millimetre-wave patch antennas targeting the 22--30 GHz band is presented. The antenna surface is represented as a 19x23 binary pixel grid on a Rogers RT/duroid 5880 substrate, where each pixel is either metal or empty, with a continuous electrical path from the feed enforced by design. An initial dataset of approximately 6,000 full-wave CST simulations was collected from structured random pixel patterns, of which only around 40% achieved a resonance with |S11| <= -10 dB anywhere in the band, resulting in an imbalanced dataset. To improve simulation efficiency, an XGBoost binary classifier was trained on this data to distinguish resonant from non-resonant patterns before simulation. Using the classifier as a pre-simulation filter, an additional 4,000 patterns were selected and simulated, raising the overall proportion of resonant designs in the combined 10,000-sample dataset from approximately 40% to 52%. A hybrid CNN-BiLSTM forward surrogate was then trained on this augmented dataset to predict the full complex S11 response across 801 frequency points, using a physics-guided composite loss that explicitly emphasises resonance dip accuracy. Finally, an inverse design model was developed that optimises in a compact 64-dimensional latent space using gradient descent to generate pixel patterns matching a desired S11 specification. The results show good agreement between the surrogate-predicted and CST-simulated |S11| responses for the generated designs and demonstrate the feasibility of automatically designing and reconfiguring antenna structures.
Time series forecasting (TSF) is evolving toward multimodal and agentic settings, yet using foundation models remains uneconomical in resource-constrained scenarios, where compact, specialized forecasters are more desirable. However, lightweight forecasters typically require substantial training data, limiting their use in domains with scarce, slowly accumulated, or privacy-sensitive time series. To address this dilemma, we investigate the challenging problem of few-shot learning for lightweight forecasters. We propose MetaCaster, a meta-harness-optimized multi-agent framework that uses agentic data generation to automatically train specialized lightweight forecasters from only a few examples and textual contexts. Our work highlights a new TSF paradigm in which agents act not as forecasters but as intermediary engineers that prepare efficient, task-specific forecasters for deployment. Experiments on 18 datasets, 23 state-of-the-art lightweight forecasters, and 14 baselines demonstrate that MetaCaster achieves both data efficiency and computational efficiency while maintaining high-quality TSF performance.
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.
Technology change management in large financial institutions depends on risk assessments that are accurate, consistent, and auditable. In practice, many institutions still rely on self-reported questionnaires. Those questionnaires are subjective, easy to game, and poor at separating routine changes from the ones that later trigger major incidents. This paper presents SENTRY, a risk assessment platform that replaces questionnaire-based scoring with a deterministic machine learning pipeline built from gradient-boosted decision trees (XGBoost) and hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The system combines structured operational metadata, application dependency graphs, and historical incident records with a hybrid semantic and lexical search over historical change requests. The retrieval step captures the risk signal in unstructured change request text, then compresses that signal into a single scalar feature before model inference. That design keeps the model deterministic and preserves per-prediction explainability via SHAP values. Evaluated on enterprise-scale change data, SENTRY achieves a ROC AUC of 0.87 and 85% overall accuracy, and it detects high-risk changes at roughly 3.25 times the rate of the existing process. We close by examining the architectural trade-offs behind this design and what they imply for the use of machine learning in regulated change management.
Improving the safety of large language models (LLMs) often comes at the expense of utility, as globally applied safety tuning may affect model responses to both harmful and benign inputs. We propose \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{L}at\textbf{E}nt \textbf{A}dapter \textbf{R}outing (CLEAR), a conditional safety adaptation framework that uses a lightweight hidden-state gate to continuously control the activation strength of a safety low-rank adapter. CLEAR aims to reduce harmful completions while avoiding unnecessary changes to the frozen backbone that could degrade performance on benign prompts. Experiments on widely used safety and utility benchmarks show that CLEAR improves robustness on HarmBench while reducing the utility degradation observed with globally applied safety tuning such as SFT or standard low-rank adaptation (LoRA). On Llama-3-8B-Instruct, CLEAR reduces HarmBench ASR from 32.3\% to 0.5\%, while retaining most of the base model's utility and achieving up to 7.1 percentage points higher GSM8K accuracy than globally applied SFT or LoRA. These results suggest that CLEAR is a promising mechanism for improving the safety--utility trade-off in LLM alignment.
Studies of machine-learning-based power-system protection increasingly report near-perfect scores, yet the meaning of those scores depends strongly on the evaluation setting. Protection task, physical scope, measurements, timing, targets, preprocessing, and validation often vary jointly and remain incompletely specified. This paper proposes a standardization-oriented framework that treats evaluation design as part of the scientific contribution. It defines seven required study dimensions: protection objective, physical scope, observability, timing and decision windows, targets and sample validity, validation protocol, and evaluation outputs. The framework is instantiated in a bounded case study on the public PROTECT-90 electromagnetic-transient benchmark, comprising 9022 simulated episodes from a 90 kV double-line topology, for onset-conditioned fault classification and localization. Under centralized sensing, simulation-metadata-aligned 20 ms windows, and episode-grouped validation, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) achieved a five-fold mean macro-averaged F1 score of 0.991 +/- 0.001 for classification and a localization mean absolute error of 10.20 +/- 0.25% of line length (mean +/- std across episode-grouped folds). Extending the decision horizon to 50 ms preserved this task-dependent performance asymmetry, while reduced observability approximately doubled the MLP localization error but had little effect on classification. A synchronized two-ended conventional locator outperformed the learning locators under its richer clean information set, and measurement degradation showed that clean predictive performance did not determine robustness. The framework turns evaluation assumptions into explicit, reproducible evidence and provides a basis for more comparable, auditable evaluation and future certification-oriented assessment of machine-learning protection functions.
Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists: When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box". That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposed to go to, they pay it out through a process called "market share" (themlc.com/marketshare). Market share means they pay it out, pro-rata, to the artists, songwriters and publishers that are in the system, which in practice means the largest publishers collect most of the leftovers. This is slated to begin in January 2027 and will pay portions of the pool out monthly (themlc.com/unclaimed-accrued-royalties), as of this morning, the next 12 months of market share sums up to $76.61M, starting with $6.41M in January. Full disclosure: I run Doubly, which is an independent publishing administrator, so I have a commercial interest in this space. That being said, we're a team of two people and we don't have the bandwidth to directly assist the hundreds of thousands of artists and songwriters who are going to start losing this money in January 2027. That's why I built this self-service tool, no signup, no email, no paywall, the reports are completely actionable without needing anything from us. The tool: paste a Spotify artist link (or search for a Spotify artist by name). It pulls every release on that profile, checks each recording against The MLC's public bulk data, and tells you per-song whether it's fully claimed, partially claimed, registered but unmatched, or missing entirely. It then provides a link to the exact MLC tool that fixes each case. It also estimates the dollars stuck, as a rough range. Even if you're not an artist yourself, you probably know someone who is a musician, please share it with them. Thanks for your time and I'm happy to answer any questions about the industry as a whole, The MLC, the tech, anything really. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375237 Points: 5 # Comments: 0
We present Eureka, a task-conditioned Meta-Agent architecture that compiles long-horizon tasks into dynamic obligation graphs with explicit acceptance semantics. During execution, Eureka forms Macro-Agents with specialized state, memory, operators, tools, verifiers, and local topology via receding-horizon planning, architecture promotion, and minimal-sufficient compilation. When bottlenecks recur, cost-benefit-gated evolution updates the local architecture under constraints. Theoretically, we establish results on regret, planning invalidation, amortization, subtree interfaces, serializability, and verification. Experimentally, Eureka completes 170/170 recursive tasks and generates 3,948 certificates with no false acceptances. Active context compresses median input from 9,490 to 4,005 tokens; incremental processing avoids 65.38% recomputation across 12,000 tasks; 16,000 concurrent executions serialize consistently. The same Meta-Agent instantiates a Theory-Discovery Agent and a Math/Conjecture Agent. The former yields structural results in quantum-process and spacetime theory. The latter identifies bottlenecks in Riemann Hypothesis research and advances a positivity certificate for Suzuki's localized Weil quadratic form to 0 < a <= 69/200 = 0.345, reaching ~99.55% of (log 2)/2. These results suggest that scientific-agent capability depends not only on the base model but on whether an architecture can be formed to match the task's cognitive structure.
Large language models can generate executable programs, which makes it possible to search directly over procedural content generators rather than individual levels. We study this approach in Sokoban, Zelda, Dangerous Dave, and Lode Runner. Each run evolves complete Python generators through language-model mutation and crossover. We introduce Continual Abstraction Discovery, or CAD, which extracts reusable primitives from high-fitness programs into a run-specific helper module. A 2x2 experiment crosses CAD with access to a fixed hand-written domain API. The completed data set contains 160 complete runs, with at least ten 50-generation runs in every cell. CAD raises mean final best fitness in all eight domain and API comparisons. Across all CAD runs, learned libraries are adopted by most later programs and repeatedly rediscover validation, reachability, and structural utilities. These results support that discovering reusable primitives improves evolutionary program search for content generators.
Recent research has leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance Automated Feature Engineering (AutoFE) through semantic descriptions and trajectory-based prompting. However, there exist two challenges that limit their applicability and scalability in long-horizon optimization: (1) semantic metadata is unavailable in many practical settings, and (2) trajectory accumulation increases the risk of exceeding the context window, while without it, the generation process can become unstable, leading to becoming stuck in the local optima and a high duplicate rate of generated features. To this end, we propose a SHAP-enhanced Implicit-trajectory Generation for Metadata-free AutoFE (SIGMA), a scalable constant-context optimization framework. SIGMA leverages SHAP values to provide task-aware signals for guiding group feature generation instead of semantic information. In addition, we adopt an EXposed-feature Implicit Trajectory (EXIT) approach, where the exposed features in the prompt implicitly represent the trajectory. Empirical results demonstrate that SIGMA achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM baselines with a nearly constant prompt length. Notably, EXIT significantly reduces the duplicate ratio of generated features from 37.2% to 6.8%. At the same time, SIGMA matches traditional SOTA performance with only 5.4 features on average, demonstrating substantial efficiency gains in feature utilization.
Financial document validation in production, such as payroll auditing, tax compliance, and loan underwriting, demands exceptional accuracy, consistency, and reproducibility under strict enterprise constraints. In practice, documents arrive with heterogeneous layouts and formats, semantically rich and context-dependent content, and embedded business rules that current pipelines struggle to process reliably. We introduce LAVA (Logic-Aware Validation and Augmentation), a modular, backbone-agnostic pipeline built on multimodal large language models, that integrates a four-stage design: document-rule retrieval, layout-preserving information extraction, auxiliary metadata enrichment, and auditable symbolic/arithmetic verification. LAVA supports robust rule grounding, fine-grained error attribution, and consistent, traceable end-to-end execution, capabilities essential for high-stakes deployment. Evaluated on a large real-world benchmark with diverse financial documents and dozens of expert-curated validation rules, LAVA outperforms baselines in hallucination control and edge-case handling while maintaining efficient token usage, demonstrating practicality for high-volume, time-critical validation.
Current evaluation of metaphor explanations relies mainly on holistic quality ratings, revealing little about how explanation quality is structured or where human judgments agree and diverge. We introduce a cognitively motivated framework that decomposes metaphor explanation quality into six theoretically grounded dimensions. In a dense annotation study (11,200 ratings), we find that: {\bfseries(i)} explanation quality is genuinely multidimensional; {\bfseries(ii)} annotator disagreement is systematic rather than random; and {\bfseries(iii)} the six dimensions collapse into a shared cluster and two independent axes of judgment. An exploratory feasibility study further shows that a standard automatic evaluation pipeline can recover parts of this structure, predicting the most discriminative dimensions well while its errors correlate human (dis)agreement. Together, these results suggest that multidimensional evaluation offers richer diagnostic insight than holistic ratings, and that automatic evaluators for open-ended generation tasks should be judged on how well they preserve the structure of human judgment.
Hi HN. I built 1667 for my own fiction work and now use it each day. This probably has a limited audience. Maybe an audience of one... Why a terminal interface for story writing? I'm a dev. I like to use terminals for a lot of stuff. Most WebUIs feel off to me. That's the only reason. One thing that bothers me about writing in existing tools is that they don't fit the way I write. The mental model of my story is a tree. I try many takes usually continue with just one, but sometimes I want to try an alternate route and see where this goes. And that can branch again in many places. See what happens if I kill off this character or they don't take the job or whatever. 1667 is a full-screen terminal app for long-form fiction. Each story part can have several takes. All takes stay in a tree. You select one path through that tree as the story line. Export writes that line to Markdown in the project folder. Some technical details: - A project stores its stories and settings in a `.1667/` directory. Exported Markdown sits beside it. - Provider secrets stay in private machine files. Requests go to the provider that the writer selects. - An optional Vault Password seals project files at rest. - An operating-system lock permits one writer process for each project. - The request viewer shows the next provider request without its credential. - Each generated take keeps a Generation Record with its model and effective settings. Version 0.9.5 runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows x64. The website has Shell and PowerShell installers. An npm package is also available. 1667 imports Markdown, SillyTavern chats and cards, and NovelAI archives. It can use OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic, and local endpoints such as Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, and KoboldCpp. Current limits: the release is pre-1.0. The interface is a terminal. There is no account or cloud sync, and I don't plan to add any. No tracking. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330604 Points: 12 # Comments: 12
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.
Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of 78.32, surpassing the closed-source commercial system Claude Design by 7.45 points. Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%). In a fully autonomous long-horizon loop, it executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns within 40 minutes for under $3, reaching average conference-poster quality in human evaluation. A system-blind human study further demonstrates that AutoDesign achieves the highest human preference among evaluated systems.
We show that for the task of simulated robot wrestling, a meta-learning agent can learn to quickly defeat a stronger non-meta-learning agent, and also show that the meta-learning agent can adapt to physical malfunction.
We’ve developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task. Reptile is the application of the Shortest Descent algorithm to the meta-learning setting, and is mathematically similar to first-order MAML (which is a version of the well-known MAML algorithm) that only needs black-box access to an optimizer such as SGD or Adam, with similar computational efficiency and performance.
We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed during training.