AI News Today

arXiv:2608.11350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied agents are increasingly built as systems around foundation models, where performance depends not only on model weights but also on the skills, context, action interfaces, and execution harness surrounding the model. While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning can adapt agents to new environments, they require additional data, rewards, and training runs; meanwhile, many train-free code-centric approaches rely on programmable rob

arXiv:2608.11352v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sign language translation has achieved strong results with Transformer architectures, yet recent improvements largely rely on scaling model capacity at the cost of increased computation. We propose a parameter-efficient alternative that improves expressiveness without increasing model size. Rather than scaling capacity, we focus on enhancing the update dynamics of iterative refinement decoders, where each refinement step corresponds to one internal

arXiv:2608.11408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior white-box studies show that large language models can retain latent traces of target knowledge after unlearning, even when the knowledge is no longer expressed in their outputs. However, existing audits remain limited to one-off diagnostics: it is unclear whether these residual signals can predict future recovery under continued training or serve as reliable optimization targets. Resolving this gap is essential to determine whether internal a

arXiv:2608.11426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The lack of diversity in LM content is widely attributed to the alignment process, but how and where exactly in the pipeline this collapse begins is unknown. We argue that output homogeneity is likely learned during the pretraining phase, and only \emph{revealed} or magnified during the alignment process. Specifically, we find that semantic convergence is observed from the first alignment stage--the instruction-tuning phase (SFT)--suggesting that h

arXiv:2608.11460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model-powered agents are increasingly used in the workplace via human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration. In this new era of work, it is important to understand the kinds of prompting traits that contribute to task success. Moreover, we need to uncover key skills required for modern professionals and inform educators on how to foster these skills among students. Existing guidelines for human-AI collaboration are built from ei

arXiv:2608.11534v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In medical imaging, the clinical value of Computed Tomography (CT) lies not only in depicting current disease status, but crucially in enabling longitudinal comparison of serial scans to determine disease evolution, a process that underpins response assessment, recurrence detection, and ongoing patient management. Yet, despite this central role of temporal comparison in clinical decision-making, existing medical foundation models remain largely con

arXiv:2608.11552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for language models are typically evaluated on single-turn outputs, where uncertainty is attached to one generated answer. For LLM agents, however, the unit of observation is an interactive trajectory, where the model can ask clarifying questions, call tools, update state, and make intermediate decisions whose errors propagate to the final outcome. We study whether three common families of single-turn UQ meth

arXiv:2608.11573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving effective self-correction, where models verify and correct their own mistakes, remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose Self-Fix Step-DPO (SFS-DPO), a reinforcement learning based, two-stage framework for step-level self-verification and self-correction. The first stage strengthens step-level reasoning via step-level preference optimization, while the second stage explicitly trains models

arXiv:2608.11624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persuasion is a core dynamic of natural language communication, shaping how large language models (LLMs) update beliefs, resolve disagreements, and reach decisions. As LLMs increasingly debate, advise, and think collaboratively with humans and each other, resistance to harmful persuasion becomes a core requirement for reliable behavior. Yet we show that this requirement is far from met: a single targeted persuasive argument is enough to collapse mo

arXiv:2608.11629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audio transcription is a critical bottleneck in language documentation. While multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models like Whisper offer solutions, field linguists often lack the expertise to utilise them. We present Easper, an open-source, no-code workflow enabling linguists to iteratively fine-tune ASR models via cloud resources directly from ELAN annotations. Deploying ASR also raises a cold start problem: deciding which recording

arXiv:2608.11649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As users increasingly turn to Large Language Models (LLMs) for information and advice on political matters, particularly during election periods, the political preferences expressed by these systems have become a matter of public interest. Prior research has shown that interactions with LLMs can influence users' political attitudes and choices, raising questions about how these models themselves evaluate political actors. In this paper, we investig

arXiv:2608.11657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Semantic Lenia, an artificial life framework that transforms Large Language Model (LLM) inference from a static optimization problem into a continuous dynamical system within the macroscopic logit space. By establishing a non-linear homeostatic feedback loop to dynamically balance semantic attraction and syntactic repulsion, we demonstrate the emergence of "Autonomous Semantic Solitons" -- macroscopic dissipative structures that avoid

arXiv:2608.11660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across natural language tasks, yet they are trained on static corpora and their knowledge quickly becomes outdated in a fast-changing world. This motivates knowledge editing (KE), which updates specific knowledge in an LLM without changing unrelated others. Recent works move from structured knowledge triples toward unstructured KE (UKE), where the edit is a free-form passage that may state

arXiv:2608.11694v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A benchmark score comes from a single phrasing of each problem. That single phrasing is treated as if it stood for the whole space of ways the same problem could be asked, but it does not. We show that rephrasing a problem while keeping its meaning and answer fixed routinely flips a model's answer in both directions, so some failures become successes and some successes become failures. We call this drift. BenchDrift generates meaning-preserving var

arXiv:2608.11715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) for API calling degrades in multilingual settings. A common failure occurs when a model selects the correct tool but generates argument values in an inconsistent language, which we term Argument Language Mismatch (ALM). Although semantically correct, such outputs are operationally invalid and not captured by standard API-calling metrics. We revisit post-training strategies for mitigating ALM and find

arXiv:2608.11735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often shift their outputs in response to implicit demographic cues even when users never state a demographic identity. Previous work has documented this behavior, but the connection between these behavioral changes and the model's internal activations remains unclear. Using matched cued and neutral conversations across five LLMs, we establish that a localized internal activation signal tracks changes in recommendations,

arXiv:2608.11742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for substantially faster inference through parallel decoding. Existing parallel decoding schedulers typically commit positions only after they meet a per-position criterion, overlooking how early commitments may benefit subsequent decoding. We identify a ripple effect in dLLM decoding: proactively committing a

arXiv:2608.11753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial text is produced and interpreted within a market environment, yet financial text classifiers almost always receive text alone. We study whether financial time series are useful as an additional input on the task of classifying sentences from Federal Reserve communication as hawkish, dovish, or neutral. Our system, \lfts{}, extends the \lf{} architecture with this modality: a small voting network combines three independently trained compon

arXiv:2608.11758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong generalization and reasoning abilities due to large-scale multimodal pre-training. However, fine-tuning these models on downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where newly learned task-specific knowledge degrades previously acquired capabilities. This issue arises because gradient updates for new tasks overwrite parameters critical to prior knowledge, limiting the practical de

arXiv:2608.11767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model answers an interventional question, the computation it must perform depends on the type of evidence the query requires. We report a decoupling in how a transformer organizes causal knowledge: slot-by-type structure induced by type-level supervision organizes routing, yet remains functionally decoupled from answer readout. We establish this with a typed mechanism library -- discrete mechanism slots partitioned by evidence type,

arXiv:2608.11772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair. Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure. This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incomp

arXiv:2608.11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aggressive quantization disproportionately harms multilingual capability: in the sub-4B INT3 GPTQ regime, we measure 2-4x larger perplexity degradation on non-English languages than on English. We propose Language-Conditional Dequantization (LCD), a post-hoc method that attaches per-language rank-2 LoRA corrections to the linear layers of an already-quantized model, adding 0.12% parameters per language and training in under 20 minutes on a single G

arXiv:2608.11787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating actionable financial advice from business records demands that models integrate numerical reasoning, domain knowledge, and sound judgment, while avoiding recommendations that could harm the business. Direct supervision is difficult: historical decisions are not necessarily optimal, and high-quality free-form labels are expensive to obtain. We formulate financial advice generation as a reinforcement learning problem and fine-tune an open-

arXiv:2608.11788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual pre-training (CPT) has been widely adopted as a method for domain adaptation in large language models. However, CPT has consistently been accompanied by challenges, such as the difficulty of acquiring large-scale domain-specific datasets and high computational costs. In this study, we propose a novel method called Test-Enhanced Learning for Language Model Enrichment (TELLME) to alleviate these issues. TELLME leverages the TestEnhanced Lea

arXiv:2608.11822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing body of work reports that language models represent task-relevant latent structure that they fail to use. Whether such structure, once located, can be converted into behavior is a separate question that is rarely tested end to end. We submit the complete pipeline -- detect, localize, and release -- to a fully preregistered stress test on a 25.7M transformer trained on causal-evidence discrimination, where a known suppression phenomenon (l

arXiv:2608.11879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running conversational agents increasingly rely on a memory system to avoid resending the whole conversation each turn, yet how much that costs to serve has received little systematic benchmarking. We compare three memory systems (Mem0, Hindsight, and Mastra Observational Memory) against two reference strategies -- a fixed-size rolling window and resubmitting the full transcript -- across two backbones and conversations of up to 400 turns, pai

arXiv:2608.11919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models on limited hardware is increasingly a scheduling problem across GPU compute, host memory, PCIe transfer, and storage bandwidth. Existing offloading systems reduce GPU residency, and MegaTrain shows that a CPU-master layer-streaming executor can train large models on a single GPU, but fixed checkpointing and placement heuristics still leave communication exposed on the critical path. We propose LazyTrain, an optimizati

arXiv:2608.11922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.4769 to 0.5148 over the retriever's top-ranked passage, with no gold answers. Yet this lowest-entropy rule, which prior entropy-based selectors adopt, fails in a specific and consequent

arXiv:2608.11947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiple-choice benchmarks are widely used to evaluate large language models, but MCQ scores conflate knowledge with sensitivity to option order, which makes them unreliable measures of model knowledge. In this paper, we test whether preventing a model from seeing option labels while committing to an answer removes positional influence and, in turn, improves performance. We evaluate two different strategies for mitigating bias. The first uses a gen

arXiv:2608.11981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a more efficient alternative to traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), offering promising potential in resource-constrained scenarios. Existing approaches to building SLMs typically follow two paths: training compact models from scratch, or compressing larger pre-trained models using methods such as pruning, quantization, or distillation. As language models become increasingly integrated into real-wor

arXiv:2608.12008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) may generate fluent but incorrect answers, making uncertainty quantification important for reliable question answering. However, heuristic uncertainty scores cannot perfectly distinguish correct predictions from incorrect ones, and directly applying a fixed uncertainty threshold provides no statistical control over the error rate among accepted answers. To address this limitation, we propose A-CRC-QA, a post-hoc calibra

arXiv:2608.12018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regional dialectal variation poses a fundamental challenge to natural language processing (NLP) in Bangla, where over 240 million speakers communicate across diverse regional variants that diverge significantly from Standard Colloquial Bangla (SCB) in phonology, morphology, and lexicon. Contemporary neural machine trans- lation (NMT) architectures and large language models (LLMs) predominantly as- sume a homogeneous language distribution, resulting

arXiv:2608.12062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing dialogue systems capable of engaging in multi-turn, goal-oriented conversations remains a significant challenge, especially in specialized domains with limited data. This research proposes a novel framework called Preference Tree Optimization (PTO), designed to iteratively improve agent models in such dialogue systems, by generating preference data using a method called Preference Tree with Look-Ahead. Focusing on Motivational Interviewi

arXiv:2608.12113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The same event can be reported from different perspectives depending on the experiences, background, and beliefs of the writer or speaker. A variety of NLP areas engage with perspectives, spanning from text analysis to algorithm optimization. A wide range of operative concepts (such as stances, sentiment, frames, and arguments) has been used to capture perspectives in texts, however the precise relationships among those concepts remain unclear. Arg

arXiv:2608.12138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose large language models (LLMs) have recently been reported to match or exceed specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks, but such comparisons draw on a narrow set of systems and on benchmarks developed largely in high-income settings. We evaluate VITA, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system purpose-built for contextual knowledge retrieval in India and other low- and middle-income (LMIC) settings. VITA retrieves from a

The best way to learn is by shipping product to users in production, and that's why we don’t treat our interns as temporary guests. Every intern at Vercel is expected to operate like a core part of our engineering team from day one. This past winter, we welcomed a small cohort of those interns to our headquarters in San Francisco. Over an intense four months, they contributed to some of our most important products: the CDN, v0, financial infrastructure, AI Gateway, and more. They shipped feature

Article URL: https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-Graphics-128-bit-Server-Grade-Thunderbolt/dp/B0GKFHSPN8 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281626 Points: 5 # Comments: 3

Article URL: https://openai.com/index/how-enterprises-put-ai-to-work/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281467 Points: 3 # Comments: 0

Article URL: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/502120/examples-for-the-use-of-ai-and-especially-llms-in-major-mathematical-development Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281393 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

We just released the first public results from the Agent Memory Leaderboard (AML). The first evaluation focuses on Text Memory across two tracks: - Open-source Methods - Commercial Products 136 teams registered, and 69 representative memory frameworks completed the first evaluation. Commercial Products — Text Memory: 1. MemoraX — 58.02 2. MemOS — 45.89 3. NTES-MEMORY-SMART — 44.21 The benchmark uses a common evaluation framework and a clearer system boundary: Memory system: Add → Search Benchmar