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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Decodability Is Not Validity: Evaluating Nuisance Sensitivity in Language Model Concept Probes

Two concept probes can be equally accurate at predicting a concept from a language model's hidden states while their scores contain different mixtures of the target concept and a correlated nuisance attribute. In four target--nuisance settings (two aspect sentiments in CEBaB; occupation and gender in BiasBios; Amazon r...

Ayal Klein · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

English Calibration Erodes Lithuanian in Expert-Pruned Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Expert pruning compresses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models by removing the experts that a calibration set marks as unimportant. Studies of high-resource languages largely find that English calibration transfers well to other languages. We test this for Lithuanian: we pruned four MoE models with REAP, removing 2...

Tomas Rasymas, Povilas Kvedaras · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Latency-Aware Adaptive Best-of-$N$

Test-time compute (TTC) improves language model responses by spending additional computation at inference time, and the right amount of compute depends on the prompt. Adaptive TTC methods allocate compute based on signals of response quality such as observed rewards, often by stopping once the signal exceeds a fixed th...

Alon Jacobson, Qian Xie, Peter I. Frazier · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Recursive Sparse Attention: Million-Token Length Extrapolation at Logarithmic Cost

At context lengths of about 1M tokens, dense attention is costly in prefill and decoding, and training typically relies on long documents, which become scarcer as the target length increases. Most sparse attention methods score all preceding blocks or tokens, so their selection cost per query is $O(L)$ at context lengt...

Ruitian Wang, Xinyu Yang, Minshen Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Unpacking the Compute Efficiency of Strong-to-Weak OPD against GRPO

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts under a frozen teacher's per-token supervision. Does this dense signal reduce the training FLOPs needed to reach a target accuracy compared with reinforcement learning? We systematically compare vanilla reverse-KL OPD with Group Relative Policy Optimizat...

Zeyu Leo Liu, Yang Li, Bo Pang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Gabor Gabor: E-Gaborformer, a Strictly Causal Speech Recognizer with Gabor-Dictionary Convolutions and Delta-Rule Memory

Real-time voice agents need a speech recognizer that never waits for future audio and whose memory per call does not grow with the length of the call. We present E-Gaborformer, a strictly causal encoder that combines Gated DeltaNet-2 recurrent layers with sliding-window attention in a 3:1 ratio, and builds every tempor...

Nir Krakowski, Tamir Cohen, Ohad Zohar et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Learning Dynamics of On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) is emerging as an important paradigm for language-model post-training, combining dense teacher supervision with training on student-generated trajectories. This creates a feedback loop where each update changes the student and thereby the training distribution that generates subsequent upda...

Guan Zhe Hong, Sumeet Ramesh Motwani, Liang Chen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

CoRD: Coupled Rollouts Fill the Blind Spot of On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation trains a student on its own rollouts, so states the teacher would reach but the student does not are seldom supervised. We introduce CoRD (coupled-rollout distillation), which keeps the on-policy loss and moves only the distribution of training states toward the teacher, drawing rollouts from a g...

Guhan Chen, Bohan Li, Jun Rao et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

$D^2$-OPD: Separating Direction and Distance in Extrapolative On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model to match a teacher's next-token distributions on student-generated prefixes. Extrapolative OPD further extends the teacher's log-probability shift relative to a reference policy to construct stronger learning targets. However, existing methods couple extrapolation dir...

Bowen Fang (Columbia University), Dingmin Wang (AWS AI Lab), Hengzhi Pei (Amazon AGI) · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Nov 2026

LowRAM: Low-Rank Keys and Amortised Values for Composable KV Cache Compression at Test-Time

Autoregressive decoding relies on the KV cache, whose memory footprint grows linearly with context length and caps batch size and throughput. Existing post-training methods exploit redundancy across tokens, layers, and feature dimensions, or lower numerical precision. We identify a complementary axis: within each atten...

Teresa Delgado, Hugo Hazard, Martin Benfeghoul et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Octopus: One Brain, Many Branches for Latent-KV Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent LLM systems explore in parallel by spawning sub-agents with isolated context windows, whereas single-agent systems append every search and verification step into one growing trajectory. However, existing multi-agent frameworks duplicate prefix KV caches across branches, exchange findings by re-prefilling te...

Tianming Sha · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Nov 2026

Sonar-MoE: In-Backward Expert Updates for Memory-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Training

Most parameters of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model belong to its experts, and standard training keeps every expert gradient in GPU memory until the optimizer step. This memory grows with the number and size of the experts, so it rises as MoE models scale. We introduce Sonar-MoE, which updates each expert tensor during...

Avni Mittal, Avinash Anand, Ashutosh Kumar et al. · 0 citations

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Microsoft Research Blog Oct 22, 2026

Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations

Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 15, 2026

AI model decodes the language cells use to communicate

A new computational approach reveals how cells communicate to assemble into tissues. This could accelerate stem cell engineering, improve disease models, and inform therapies.

Microsoft Research Blog Oct 15, 2026

Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar

Zero-knowledge proofs can verify computing results without rerunning workloads or exposing sensitive data. Magnetar helps bring them into the mainstream with support for standard programming languages, major speed gains, and quantum-resistant security. The post Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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