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17,191 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Uncertainty Quantification in Pairwise Difference Learning for Classification

Instead of learning a mapping from instances to outcomes in the standard way, the key idea of pairwise difference learning (PDL) is to learn a function that takes two instances as input and predicts the difference between the respective outcomes. Given a function of this kind, predictions for a query instance are deriv...

Mohamed Karim Belaid, Maximilian Rabus, Eyke H\"ullermeier · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

When Is Muon Optimal? Radial Fragility and Minimax Geometry

Muon replaces a matrix gradient by an approximate polar factor and has shown strong empirical performance in neural-network training. The Isotropic Curvature Model (ICM) provides a curvature-based explanation for this update by asking when gradient orthogonalization minimizes a one-step local-loss surrogate. We investi...

Ao Xu · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Review Oct 2026

Trajectory-Level Speculation with Semantic Verification for Tool-Using Agents

SpecAgent is introduced, a collaboration protocol that turns the strong model from the author of each step into a reviewer of steps drafted by a weak model, suggesting that a strong model need not author every step of an agent: reviewing grounded drafts retains most of its quality while cutting both latency and memory...

Zi-Lin Wang, Yinhong Liu, Chao Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

V-SHARE: Provable Convergence Guarantees for Advantage-based Algorithms

In reinforcement learning, advantage-based value-learning methods, unlike standard Q-learning, share information across actions by decomposing the action-value function into a state-dependent value component and action-specific advantages. While this mechanism has proven effective in both tabular and deep reinforcement...

Kintan Saha, Hamed Masoudi, Xinyi Sheng et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Multi-Reward Hacking: From Aggregation-Induced Drift to Trust-Anchored Defense

To improve task performance while encouraging desirable response properties, LLM post-training often combines a primary reward (e.g., correctness) with auxiliary rewards (e.g., brevity or efficiency). However, how these rewards are aggregated can critically affect training outcomes. We show that symmetric aggregation,...

Yu-Shu Li, Jiin Woo, Xiao-Xiao Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Memorilla: Latent Semantic Memory for LLMs

Memory enables large language models (LLMs) to use information beyond their parameters, such as past user conversations, long documents, or an agent's earlier actions. For a frozen LLM, access to this accumulated knowledge is limited to what a memory system places in its context window. However, gathering and combining...

Adibvafa Fallahpour, Parsa Idehpour, Vignesh Kothapalli et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Does On-Policy Distillation Need to Complete Every Rollout?

On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher knowledge to a student through feedback on student-generated rollouts, but generating complete rollouts and computing per-token teacher feedback are computationally expensive. Existing truncation methods save computation by stopping rollouts early. However, they do not com...

Zheng-Xin Zhang, Mao-Sen Tang, Ning Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Behavioral Compositionality of Sparse Autoencoder Representations

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) represent model activations with sparse, linearly decoded features, but the downstream effects of those features need not compose additively. We introduce SAE Additivity Residuals (SAR), which measure the behavioral variation left unexplained above a chosen interaction order. Under independen...

Haotian Ma, Ziye Mei, Frederic Sala · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Fractional Power-of-Two Quantization for Efficient and Effective Multiplier-Free LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) demand efficient inference, where the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations in linear projections dominate compute and energy cost. Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces this cost by mapping weights and activations to low-bit integers. Power-of-Two (PoT) weight quantization promises effic...

Sunghyun Wee, Geunjae Choi, Hyeonjin Kim et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

System1-Arena: Which Decisions Can Be Left to System 1?

The largest System-1 models match or exceed fast closed LLMs in non-agentic accuracy, with better-calibrated probabilities at one-quarter of the latency, and a reasoning LLM is the most accurate, at about 70x the cost of a fast LLM.

Tian-Yu Chen, Xin-Yang Liu, Ru-Yi An et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Representation Redistribution in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into sparse features, but prompt transformations designed to preserve the underlying request can redistribute activity across them. A feature change observed on one transformed prompt need not recur, and even a recurring change need not affect a downstream...

Zi-Ye Mei, Hao-Tian Ma · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Judging the Judges: Confidence and Disagreement in Rubrics as Rewards

Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) extends reinforcement learning to non-verifiable domains by using an LLM judge to score responses against a structured rubric. Prior work has focused on improving the rubric or strengthening the single judge, with comparatively little attention to how different single or multiple judges might b...

Michael Tian-Yue Liu, A. Harrington, Trevor Darrell et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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Microsoft Research Blog Nov 3, 2026

Learn the rules: The hacker mindset

Research Manager Mike Walker reflects on a career spanning hacker culture, cybersecurity, and AI, sharing lessons about trust, teamwork, leadership, and why solving difficult problems requires curiosity, judgment, agility—and an understanding of the rules. The post Learn the rules: The hacker mindset appeared first on Microsoft Research.

Google DeepMind Blog Nov 3, 2026

Agentic cheminformatics with Google Antigravity

Learn how Google Antigravity and our Cheminformatics Skills accelerate drug discovery workflows, search compounds, and propose novel rigidified macrocycles.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 28, 2026

Making machines that can listen

Professor Paris Smaragdis develops computers with superhuman hearing for applications like speech recognition, music understanding, and environmental monitoring.

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