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natural language processing

1,413 papers

#natural language process... Preprint Jun 2026

ALEE: Any-Language Evaluation of Embeddings via English-Centric Minimal Pairs

A large-scale empirical study across a diverse set of embedding models and 275+ languages spanning three parallel datasets, exposing persistent gaps in cross-lingual semantic representation that track language prevalence in training resources and subword tokenization.

Andrianos Michail, Stylianos Psychias, Michelle Wastl et al. · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Aug 2026

LookBack: Where and How to Score LVLM Responses via Visual Reference Usage

LookBack, a training-free LVLM response scoring method that augments token likelihood with visual lookback score, a lightweight measure of how strongly each response token refers to image tokens, consistently improves Best-of-$N$ selection over existing baselines with negligible additional overhead.

Beomsik Cho, Jinhyeong Kim, Dongseok Lee et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Book Open access Aug 2026

Caduceus: MoE Foundation Models for Unifying Biological and Natural Language

This paper introduces Caduceus, a family of MoE-enhanced foundation models built with a hierarchical pre-training paradigm to jointly integrate biological and natural language, and incorporates a multi-task instruction tuning phase, enabling robust protein parsing and natural language question answering.

Mingze Yin, Yiheng Zhu, Jialu Wu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation

Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency. While unique weights across layers preserve functional specialization---from input-grounding to abstract refinement---they incur a substantial memory footprint. Conversely, standard depth-sharing enforces uniform transformations that collapse representational diversity and degrade modeling quality. We introduce Gated Recurrent Transformer, a recurrent depth transformer where fixed-depth prelude and coda blocks bracket a single shared core iterated R times. Inspired by gated recurrent neural networks, we employ a lightweight projection and an elementwise update gate---conditioned on the hidden state, the fixed prelude output, and noise resampled at every step---to modulate the recurrent update. This allows the model to specialize the input to the same few layers across recurrences, rather than requiring many unique layers to achieve functional diversity. Under an isoFLOPS constraint, a 3-layer Gated Recurrent Transformer matches the accuracy of a 12-layer GPT-2 Small baseline with similar training and inference FLOPs, and leads MoR and heavy-tail depth sampling in all nine scale-by-budget cells; at medium and large scale it approaches dense quality at the standard token budget and overtakes it at medium scale once that budget is doubled. Under an isoPARAMS constraint, deeper recurrence achieves a 2.76 validation loss versus 2.84 for a non-recurrent counterpart at matched parameter and data budget. Our results demonstrate that adaptive depth reuse is a principled strategy for trading parameters for quality: at large scale, 63% fewer parameters and 59% less peak decoding memory for a 10% increase in compiled generation latency.

Amr Hegazy, Amr Alanwar, Mostafa Elhoushi · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Jul 2026

Constitutional Midtraining: Content Presence Drives Alignment Gains

Post-training alignment is often shallow, eroding under fine-tuning. It remains untested as to whether constitutional midtraining interventions can produce durable alignment when cleanly isolated from post-training. We build a 394M-token constitutional corpus from Anthropic's Constitution and apply constitutional midtraining at 120B scale, where principled, values-based content is inserted into midtraining. A 2x2 design (curriculum ordering x deliberative reasoning) was used to produce four constitutionally midtrained conditions, plus a control, which were evaluated on self-generated and established benchmarks including alignment under pressure, value conflict resolution, blackmail, and emergent misalignment. All models were evaluated across three stages: post-midtraining, post-SFT, and post-benign fine-tuning. Constitutionally midtrained models outperformed the control on alignment generalization and durability, notably on blackmail: SFT instilled a blackmail propensity in all models, but constitutional midtraining blunted it, with the advantage surviving benign fine-tuning (-17.5pp). This durability did not extend to settings that required active resistance to in-context pressure or conflict, where the advantage attenuates after SFT. The presence of constitutional content at midtraining also mattered more than its structure, and constitutional midtraining incurred no capability cost, on average, at any stage (MMLU, ARC-Easy, piqa, GSM8K). A modest amount of constitutional content at midtraining could therefore yield broad, persistent alignment gains, offering a cheap, complementary addition to SFT-centered pipelines. Code, data, and models are available.

Desiree Cho, Cameron Tice, Bernie Hogan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Turning Off-Policy Tokens On-Policy: A Plug-in Approach for Improving LLM Alignment

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models (LLMs) follows a efficient paradigm of "rollout then update", which inevitably results in off-policy training data. To resolve this, Importance sampling (IS) is proposed, while the token-level ratios compound over long sequences, causing severe variance exploded. A natural idea is "transferring" these off-policy token into on-policy token, so that the importance scores for correction are unnecessary. Following this idea, we propose Selective Importance Sampling (SIS), which is inspired by rejection sampling. Concretely, SIS implements by viewing off-policy model as proposal distribution, and implement a token-level rejection test: accepted tokens are viewed as on-policy, so that receive unit importance score, while rejected tokens retain the standard IS correction. Our proposed SIS is theoretically proved reducing the gap between token-level and sequence-level off-policy gradient estimators. The SIS acts as a plug-in that only modifies the importance ratio in the policy loss, adding negligible wall-clock overhead, and can be combine with a vast vary of RL post-training algorithms. Experiments on dense and MoE LLMs across math and agent benchmarks show that SIS consistently improves all objectives, while providing substantially stronger robustness under off-policy data.

Yu Li, Xiuyu Li, Mingyang Yi et al. · 0 citations

Convergent Evolution: How Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representations

This paper identifies two different routes through which models can acquire geometrically separable features: they can learn them from complementary co-occurrence signals in general language data, including text-number co-occurrence and cross-number interaction, or from multi-token addition problems.

Deqing Fu, Tianyi Zhou, Mikhail Belkin et al. · 3 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Why Does Self-Distillation (Sometimes) Degrade the Reasoning Capability of LLMs?

Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading performance. We trace this degradation to the suppression of epistemic verbalization - the model's expression of uncertainty during reasoning. Through controlled experiments varying conditioning context richness and task coverage, we show that conditioning the teacher on rich information suppresses uncertainty expression, enabling rapid in-domain optimization with limited task coverage but harming OOD performance, where unseen problems benefit from expressing uncertainty and adjusting accordingly. Across Qwen3-1.7B/8B, DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-7B, and Olmo3-7B-Instruct, we observe performance drops of up to 40%. Our findings highlight that exposing appropriate levels of uncertainty is crucial for robust reasoning and underscore the importance of optimizing reasoning behavior beyond merely reinforcing correct answer traces.

Jeonghye Kim, Xufang Luo, Minbeom Kim et al. · 0 citations

SimulRAG: Simulator-based RAG for Grounding LLMs in Long-form Scientific QA

SimulRAG, a simulator-based RAG framework with a generalized retrieval interface that translates between text and simulator parameters/outputs, is proposed, which improves informativeness and factuality over the strongest adapted RAG baselines, while UE+SBA enhances claim-level efficiency and quality.

Haozhou Xu, D. Wu, M. Chinazzi et al. · 3 citations

From tech blogs

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 27, 2026

Looking beyond natural sequences

A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 20, 2026

Paving the way for greener ammonia production

New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.