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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Controlling the Diversity-Quality Trade-Off of LLMs by Merging Models Before and After Alignment

Alignment is known to change the output characteristics of large language models (LLMs). Base models tend to generate more diverse outputs, whereas aligned models tend to produce higher-quality outputs. The appropriate balance between the two depends on the task. Existing methods either require costly fine-tuning or, l...

Yasuaki Sumita, Tomoharu Iwata, Toshiyuki Tanaka · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

What Shapes Brain Alignment of Large Language Models during Dialogue? Insights from Language Production and Comprehension

Brain alignment of large language models (LLMs) offers a way to investigate representational similarities between LLMs and the human brain during language processing. While previous studies have mainly focused on passive language comprehension, little is known about such alignment during dialogue, in which speakers eng...

Yuko Nakagi, Yuya Chiba, Yasue Kishino · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Aligning Language Models Towards Counterfactual Invariance

This work develops a policy gradient technique involving a group-level reward function that operates on matched pairs of counterfactual prompts that reduces counterfactual differences while preserving overall response quality and proves that the models continue to adapt appropriately when such sensitive information is...

B. Demir, Emma Shen, Ksheeraj Sai Vepuri et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Many Biases, One Circuit: Post-Training Tunes a Pretrained Cue-Routing Mechanism

Language models often abandon a correct answer when the prompt contains a cue, a hint toward a wrong option such as "I think the answer is B." Sycophancy and related biases show this failure. They are often studied separately and blamed on alignment. We test this view causally, tracing the attention heads behind these...

Prakhar Gupta, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zhijing Jin · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Where's the Indirect Evidence? Investigating Grammatical Generalization with Influence Functions

Language models generalize beyond their training corpus to learn linguistic phenomena (Patil et al., 2024; Misra and Mahowald, 2024), showing that there exists indirect evidence driving learning. Prior work has inferred that indirect evidence exists without identifying its character or considered specific hypotheses ab...

William Dai, Zhenghao Herbert Zhou, Maya Viswanathan et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Review Oct 2026

FederatedBytes: Tokenizer-Free, Byte-Level Small Language Models for Efficient Multimodal Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a powerful machine learning framework that allows building a global model from the contributions of multiple, distributed clients, while ensuring the privacy of their local data. However, its heavy computational and communication overheads challenge its use for contemporary AI workloads such...

Ali Sarabadani, Massimo Piccardi, M. Abolhasan et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Causal Edit Serialization

Standard autoregressive language models generate text sequentially, but revision requires referring back to tokens in the input context or those already generated. Causal Edit Serialization (CES) is introduced as a framework for expressing such revisions within the same causal token stream. Special pointer tokens are p...

Louis Robinson · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Reasoning Reranking with Semantic IDs as the Sole Item Representation

Reasoning rerankers write a rationale before ranking a candidate slate, and existing systems read item metadata to do so, even though generative recommenders increasingly represent items as compact Semantic IDs (SIDs). Ranking from SIDs alone has two appeals: SID prompts are far shorter than the matched item text, and...

Zhenwei Tang, Jin-Tao Liu, Di Bai et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Reading the News Without Hindsight: NoLBERT Topics and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

Language models that read financial news are usually trained on text from the same years used to test them, so a backtest can reward hindsight. We build news topics from NoLBERT, an encoder pretrained only on text published between 1976 and 1995, adapted into a sentence encoder by contrastive fine-tuning on passages of...

Kevin Foley, Jonathan Hartadi, Shivesh Prakash et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

CoLU: Confidence-Weighted Layerwise Unlearning for Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) unlearning aims to forget certain information while preserving others, without retraining from scratch. SoTA methods such as NPO, SimNPO, and SatImp balance forgetting and retain through whole model fine-tuning, while FOM-UL explores selective layer updates. Prior works show that suppressing...

Jingkai Guo, Ziyi Zhao, Chaitali Chakrabarti et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

HeRE: A Novel Benchmark for Hebrew Relation Extraction via LLM-Guided Denoising of Knowledge Graph Alignments

While LLMs demonstrate strong capabilities in English Relation Extraction (RE) tasks, a significant gap remains in assessing their RE performance in low-resource languages, due to a lack of standardized benchmarks. Creating native, language-specific annotated RE benchmarks is expensive and requires human expertise, whi...

Ron Keinan, A. Cohen, Reut Tsarfaty · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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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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