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Algorithms & Theory

<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Hi everyone. So I built a CNN modle using MobileNetv3 then converted it into TFLite. It performed well during training but once I integrated it into my application, it is making large errors. From flutter, the camera stream sends frames and those are processed before the model makes predictions, but it is still quite large. Is there any way I can solve this? This is my code to preprocess and resize the image (224 x 224 x RGB):</p> <pre><code>import 'package:came

<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>​</p> <p>I'm working on a system to estimate whether code committed to a repository was generated with AI coding tools.</p> <p>My current approach is based on Git/commit-level signals such as AI-related commit trailers, commit metadata, LOC changes, number of files changed, addition/deletion patterns, etc.</p> <p>The problem I'm running into is confidence and calibration.</p> <p>For example, a commit containing 500+ new lines isn't necessarily AI-generated. A de

arXiv:2608.18085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can express diverse personality traits in open-ended text generation. However, it remains unclear whether they can do so in a goal-directed dialogue without compromising task completion, and whether adapting to the user's personality improves the interaction quality. We study these questions in task-oriented dialogue (TOD), where a system helps a user accomplish a goal via multi-turn interactio

arXiv:2608.18089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction-tuned models often refuse harmful requests in English but comply with the same requests in Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, and Hausa. This suggests that the refusal mechanism is present in the residual stream but fails to activate for low-resource inputs. Recovering it normally requires labelled target-language data and retraining, neither of which is available at scale for most African languages. We introduce Latent Space Refusal Anchoring (LSR-A

arXiv:2608.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM-as-a-judge systems become increasingly widespread, self-preference in LLMs -- the tendency to favor one's own outputs -- raises growing concerns about evaluation reliability. However, it has been studied predominantly on generated text, where stylistic features and response quality are inevitably conflated. As a result, existing measurements cannot separate genuine self-preference from these confounds. We address this by changing the object

arXiv:2608.18093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Abliteration, the removal of refusal capabilities from large language models by projecting weight matrices orthogonal to an extracted refusal direction, has emerged as a prominent safety concern through its ability to bypass post-training alignment using only a small set of contrastive prompts. We find that existing defenses commonly overlook the cause of abliteration; that is, how easily the refusal direction can be extracted. To hinder this proce

arXiv:2608.18095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, these advancements come with increased vulnerabilities, notably through backdoor attacks that pose severe security threats. This thesis addresses two critical dimensions of Trustworthy AI and Efficient Multimodal Representation Learning: (1) security through analyzing, detecting, and designin

arXiv:2608.18097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present FrenchNews-7, a cross-publisher France-based French-language news editorial desk classification benchmark combining a large multi-outlet corpus, a URL-derived seven-class taxonomy, and a fine-tuned CamemBERT classifier. Labels are assigned via a hybrid pipeline combining publisher URL slugs with LLM annotation for structurally ambiguous cases, audited through an inter-rater study (2 humans + 2 LLMs; pairwise $\kappa \geq 0.766$, human--h

arXiv:2608.18098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key-value (KV) caching is essential for efficient autoregressive inference in transformer based dialog systems, yet existing strategies treat all cached entries uniformly or apply coarse eviction heuristics that fail to adapt as dialog topics evolve. We propose Fractional Decay KV-Cache (FD-KVC), a novel algorithm that maintains a dual-channel scoring mechanism for each cached KV pair: a cumulative attention channel that tracks aggregate importance

arXiv:2608.18100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems now shape how hundreds of millions of people learn about cultures other than their own. When someone asks one of these systems about the Middle East, they do not receive neutral facts. They receive a representation shaped by the frameworks embedded in training data, and that data is overwhelmingly Western and English-language. This paper asks whether that representation is Orientalist in Said's sense: whether it denies agency to Middle E

arXiv:2608.18102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has intensified the demand for principled methods to distinguish human from machine-generated text. Watermarking provides a promising avenue, yet existing detectors exhibit sharp performance deterioration under multiple paraphrasing and when applied to shorter texts. We introduce Pattern Stability Score (PSS), a novel detection framework that leverages local statistical features and stability

arXiv:2608.18103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Mechanistic elucidation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) compound formulas remains a central challenge in the modernization of TCM. Conventional approaches, including data mining and network pharmacology, are insufficient for achieving deep integration between classical TCM theory and modern scientific research. In addition, direct question-answering using general-purpose artificial intelligence large language models is limited by

arXiv:2608.18105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: StocksTalk is a voice-enabled conversational system for transforming spoken financial screening requests into executable and validated structured queries over real-world market data. The system combines streaming speech recognition, retrieval-augmented constraint extraction, schema-grounded LLM-based SQL generation, rule-based validation, and human-in-the-loop verification within an interactive dashboard. Unlike traditional template-driven financia

arXiv:2608.18106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models tend to overconfidence, giving assertive answers when the evidence suggests hedging or abstention. Using controlled reasoning scenarios that manipulate logical necessity and possibility, we study this behavior in Qwen3-4B, across three ways to express uncertainty: verbal epistemic markers, abstention, and numeric confidence scores. Our results confirm this tendency toward overconfidence, particularly when the model is prompted

arXiv:2608.18107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) systematically discriminate in candidate evaluations based on applicant name ethnicity and/or institutional prestige and geographic location. Three factorial experiments are reported (4,320 API calls, four LLMs, five professional domains). Study 1 (3x4 design) finds a statistically robust institution-tier gradient of +0.297 points on a 10-point scale (95% bootstrap CI: +0.175 to +0.422), while nam

arXiv:2608.18108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are being incorporated into sensitive and important decision-making processes across nearly all fields. While prior work studies model bias around inputs and scenario framing, models can also behave in unexpected and undesirable ways due to context accumulated over their deployment. In this work, we study a medical example in which a model is asked to assign resource-allocation probabilities to two people given brief clinical

arXiv:2608.18115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Token-level hallucination detectors score each token independently from a single signal, and fail exactly when the generating model is confidently wrong. This paper instead treats hallucination as a temporally extended span and detects it by sequence labeling: each token is scored from a 33-dimensional feature stream that fuses text statistics, Natural Language Inference (NLI) entailment, and language model surprisal, with no access to model intern

arXiv:2608.18116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models enable zero-shot classification through natural language prompts, but performance is sensitive to prompt formulation, especially in specialized domains. Zero-shot Prompt Ensembling (ZPE) addresses this by weighting prompts by discriminative signal, yet its behavior under domain shift remains unexplored. We evaluate ZPE in the agrifood domain using CLIP and SigLIP across four datasets and four prompt pools, spanning in-distrib

arXiv:2608.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are typically built through a multi-stage pipeline consisting of cross-modal alignment, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and preference optimization. This pipeline assumes that adapting an LLM to a new modality requires extensive task-specific supervision. However, pretrained LLMs already possess strong reasoning and instruction-following abilities. As LLMs evolve rapidly, an important question remains: can we

arXiv:2608.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modal auxiliaries such as must, should, and have to mark necessity and obligation within the contexts of speaker authority and interpersonal stance. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) reproduce contemporary human patterns of deontic modal usage. Across three primary corpora, an external benchmark, two controlled replications, and a naturalistic eleven-model replication, AI-generated text consistently underuses positive deontic modals (

arXiv:2608.18158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs have been increasingly used to catch data quality issues automatically, but we know very little about how consistent these judgments actually are. This study tests an LLM on two e-commerce data quality tasks, entity matching and brand mislabeling, against rule based baselines and human verified ground truth, under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting. On entity matching while using the Abt Buy benchmark (2,194 labeled pairs), a simple rule ba

arXiv:2608.18164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on text-based adversarial prompts, potentially overlooking vulnerabilities arising from alternative input representations. This work examines emoji-augmented prompts as a test case for this gap, evaluating 50 prompts across four open-source LLMs (Mistral 7B, Qwen 2 7B, Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3 8B). Results show substantial variation in robustness: Gemma 2 9B and Mistral 7B exhibit non

Cross-lingual knowledge transfer is critical for building high-performing multilingual language models for languages with insufficient training data. When target language data is scarce, the knowledge required for many downstream tasks involving scientific reasoning, commonsense inference, and world knowledge must be acquired primarily from the high-resource language, making effective knowledge transfer essential. Existing methods for improving such cross-lingual knowledge transfer require large

As language models scale, the amount of data they require grows – yet many target data sources, such as low-resource languages or specialized domains, are inherently limited in size. A common strategy is to mix this scarce but valuable target data with abundant generic data, which presents a fundamental trade-off: too little target data in the mixture underexposes the model to the target domain, while too much target data repeats the same examples excessively, yielding diminishing returns and ev

Code-switching (CS), alternating languages within the same utterance, poses significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) due to limited CS training data. This paper applies an iterative pseudo-labeling training approach to CS-ASR for the first time, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging unlabeled data to improve CS-ASR performance. The approach comprises three phases: pseudo-label generation, two-stage bilingual model training, and iterative improvements. It begins by ge

<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I trained three LLMs from scratch in raw PyTorch then post-trained each one with SFT and then GRPO. Same process every time: same synthetic arithmetic curriculum, same reward function, same hyperparameters, same KL coefficient.</p> <p>Pre-training went as expected, the val loss went down as the model got more modern techniques (V1 to V2) and bigger (V3 being the biggest). However, GRPO hurt both V2 and V3 and I'm not sure why.</p> <p><strong>Setup</strong></p> <

<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I’ve been looking at a fairly basic question in weight-space learning that I don’t think gets separated cleanly enough:<br/> Why does reading semantics directly from neural network weights work pretty well when the networks share an initialization, but collapse when the networks are fitted independently?<br/> The usual explanation is parameter symmetry. Permute hidden units, flip equivalent signs, etc., and two parameter vectors can represent the same function w

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI’s recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight.…

arXiv:2608.16890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical trial programming -- transforming study protocols into analysis-ready datasets under CDISC standards -- is a bottleneck in regulatory submissions, yet LLM-based code generation fails catastrophically on this task: across 11 single-shot attempts with five frontier models, none produces a valid subject-level analysis dataset. We introduce GxP-Agent, a multi-agent system that encodes regulatory process ordering as a directed acyclic graph (DA

arXiv:2608.16891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI systems request tool actions that can modify files, send messages, launch jobs, or change workflow state. This shifts the safety problem from harmful text generation to harmful operational side effects. Prompt-level governance can shape model behavior, but it does not create an execution boundary. We introduce Aegis, a runtime governance system that treats model outputs as action proposals and mediates them through a trusted decision lay

arXiv:2608.16956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: API buyers purchase a dated contract, not a model name alone: the contract includes the requested and served model, reasoning-effort term or its omission, output rail, service product, prompt, and price schedule. We study the reasoning-effort term through a registered paired contrast of Sonnet 5 with explicit high effort against the same model with effort omitted, using 30 AIME 2026 items and five calls per item. Every paid attempt was assigned one

arXiv:2608.16977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems are increasingly capable of contributing to mathematical research. In research practice, frontier-model reasoning is a limited resource, and expert mathematical review is even more sharply constrained. Allocating these scarce resources well is therefore central to making AI-assisted mathematical discovery efficient. In most current AI-for-math workflows, human effort is concentrated at the beginning and end, in selecting suitable researc

arXiv:2608.17007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills can specify procedural and resource obligations for tool use, and language models instantiate them as concrete programs. However, when models turn this guidance into code for existing tool interfaces, even a semantically correct program may load an entire input and exceed the memory available to one tool call. We present SkillEffect, a checked-lowering runtime for computations with a recoverable source relation, an audited bounded impl

arXiv:2608.17053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A bounded agent may obtain information for a decision from its own past, from peers, or from both sources. Retaining task-relevant history can reduce later communication, while a peer message can supply what memory lacks. Under limits on both resources, how should an agent allocate its information budget? Given a fixed task and decision rule, the memory and message rate pairs attaining a performance threshold form an achievable region under specifi

arXiv:2608.17067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As text-to-image generative models advance, they raise critical safety concerns, particularly the generation of Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content such as violence and nudity, further exacerbated by red-teaming adversarial attacks. Existing defenses predominantly operate under white-box assumptions, relying on text encoder optimization, weight editing, or inference-time intervention, and fundamentally cannot scale to proprietary models. Black-box alt

arXiv:2608.17071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present KernelArc, a multi-agent framework for autonomous GPU kernel optimization across heterogeneous workloads. Strategy-specialized agents run in parallel and coordinate through conclusions-only shared memory, a deterministic benchmark guard, and read-only cross-agent state with plateau-triggered drafting. We evaluate \kernelarc{} on NVIDIA H100 and B200 GPUs using category-representative SOL-ExecBench workloads. The resulting implementations

arXiv:2608.17124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combining the answers a large language model (LLM) samples for a question into one decision is a test-time information fusion problem, usually solved by majority voting. Voting is unreliable on difficult questions, where the sampled answers share correlated errors, so the wrong answer can win and drawing more samples makes the decision worse. Selecting a candidate by reading a correctness signal from the model's hidden states is a promising alterna

arXiv:2608.17128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personal AI system needs a model of the user's goals, constraints, and ongoing commitments to plan and act on their behalf, and the quality of that model is bounded by what the system can observe. Broader observation does not by itself improve assistance because a bounded system must select and compress information for the task at hand. We argue that this observation bottleneck has a cooperative structure: the system builds a partial model of the

arXiv:2608.17150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To effectively collaborate with users on knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) must perform information calibration: matching content to a user's evolving understanding and cognitive capacity. Yet user simulators used to evaluate and train LLMs do not explicitly model user knowledge so they neither produce realistic interactions across knowledge levels nor reflect how interactions unfold as that knowledge evolves. To close this ga