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natural language processing

1,585 papers

#artificial intelligence Review Aug 2026

Reconstruction: A Blind Benchmark for Recovering Research Ideas from Pre-Publication Bibliographies

Reconstruction is introduced, a blind idea-recovery benchmark that withholds the seed paper and all contemporaneous or future literature, and asks models to propose hypotheses that an independent large language model judge matches against the held-out ground-truth idea.

Shaolong Chen, Yanlin Fei, N. Liu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Mechanist: AI as a Scientific Instrument for Discovering the Mechanisms of Intelligence

Mechanist is an agentic system that uses AI as a scientific instrument for the autonomous discovery of mechanisms underlying AI intelligence, and develops a mechanism theory of belief, revealing how models represent world knowledge, form beliefs, infer the beliefs of others, and how these mechanisms emerge during pretraining.

Mengru Wang, Junfeng Fang, Shuofei Qiao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Jul 2026

Train the Model, Not the Reader: Decodability Supervision for Verifiable Activation Explanations

Two audit protocols, the comparison of grounding and truth and the swap to an independent evaluator, and RECAP (Readable Encodings via Co-trained Auxiliary Predictors), linear heads trained alongside the target model to keep designated content decodable are contributed.

Hiskias Dingeto · 0 citations

ChainWorld: Composing Long-Horizon Desktop Workloads from Atomic OSWorld Tasks

ChainWorld, which composes atomic OSWorld tasks into long horizon desktop workloads through directional compatibility search while preserving the source evaluators, is studied, which contains 347 chains of length two to four and compares two renderings of the same task sequence.

Vincent Siu, Manasi Sharma, D. Song et al. · 0 citations

When Audio-Language Models Fail to Leverage Multimodal Context for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

A benchmark built on the Speech Accessibility Project (SAP) dataset is introduced that tests whether diagnosis labels, clinician-derived speech ratings, and progressively richer clinical descriptions improve transcription accuracy for dysarthric speech, finding that current models do not meaningfully use this context.

P. Moure, Niclas Pokel, Bilal Bounajma et al. · 2 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Aug 2026

SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skills

Current AI agents can flexibly invoke tools and execute complex tasks, yet their long-term advancement is hindered by the lack of systematic accumulation and transfer of skills. Without a unified mechanism for skill consolidation, agents frequently ``reinvent the wheel'', rediscovering solutions in isolated contexts without leveraging prior strategies. To address this challenge, we introduce SkillNet, an open infrastructure for creating, evaluating, and organizing AI skills at scale. SkillNet structures skills within a unified ontology that supports creating skills from heterogeneous sources, establishing rich relational connections, and performing multi-dimensional evaluation across Safety, Completeness, Executability, Maintainability, and Cost-awareness. Our infrastructure integrates a repository of over 600,000 skills, an interactive platform, and a versatile Python toolkit. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld show 40% higher average rewards and 30% fewer execution steps across multiple backbone models. Furthermore, SkillNet-Gym benchmarks skill retrieval, utilization, and composition, while SkillNet-Fabric enables task-specific skill routing through lightweight Wikis. By formalizing skills as evolving, composable assets, SkillNet provides a robust foundation for agents to move from transient experience to durable mastery.

Yuan Liang, Ruobin Zhong, Haoming Xu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments

SPADE (Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Executable Environments), a self-play RL framework in which a single LLM plays two roles: an Environment Designer that writes complete, long-horizon training environments as executable code with an OpenAI Gym-style reset()/step() interface, and a Reasoning Agent that learns to act in them.

Bo Liu, Simon Yu, Yiding Jiang et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond Teacher Likelihood: Group-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation for Long-Context Reasoning

Group-relative residual calibration can incorporate verifier outcomes without discarding dense token-level guidance, and demonstrates that group-relative residual calibration can incorporate verifier outcomes without discarding dense token-level guidance.

Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaoan Xu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Jun 2026

Intercepting the Kangaroo: Experimental Astrolinguistics with Constructed Lexicons, Active Probing, and Large Language Models as Informants and Hypothesis Proposers

Astrolinguistics -- communication with minds that categorize reality differently from ours -- has been purely speculative since Freudenthal's Lincos (1960). We make it experimental. Two language models with deliberately incompatible constructed lexicons (one encoding shape, color, and motion; the other fusing color with motion, encoding parity, and lacking shape) serve as informants with complete ground truth, while a fully scripted orchestrator translates between the two category systems. The central failure mode is the kangaroo effect: the silent attachment of a word to the wrong referent -- Quine's indeterminacy of translation, operationalized. Across 400+ simulated and live runs, a protocol combining cross-situational elimination, pre-registered predictive probes, active scene selection, a stricter recovery round, and quarantine produced no undetected mistranslations under the tested conditions and exceeded a passive baseline's coverage (d = 0.62). Injected kangaroo traps defeated naive ostension and pure statistical learning in 100% of runs, while the full protocol intercepted every decoy and, where discriminating evidence is ontologically unavailable, declared Quinean equivalence classes instead of guessing. Under informant noise it degrades gracefully: zero kangaroos persist up to 2% per-word noise; at 10% the protocol predominantly abstains rather than errs. Finally, words outside the scripted hypothesis space (a history-dependent relational term and an XOR contextual homonym) are recovered by a generate-and-test loop in which an LLM proposes rules and the script verifies them: coverage scales with proposer capability (0% ->18% ->72% ->100%) while undetected mistranslations stayed at zero throughout. In the tested conditions, correctness is a property of the protocol; coverage is a property of the instruments.

F. Cordella, M. Cappelli · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Open-MOPD: Diagnosing and Fixing Capability Imbalance in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

Open-MOPD, a principled framework incorporating token-share balancing, gap-aware dynamic budget allocation, and student reward refresh, systematically restore cross-domain balance, elevating headroom recovery from 35.6% to 83.4% in a single deployable student.

Huan Gao, Haohan Chi, Yong Yan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

ReWEIGH the Evidence: Calibrating Token-Level Ordinal Visual Evidence to Mitigate Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

ReWEIGH is a training-free decoding intervention that aggregates vocabulary ranks across visual positions and compares each candidate with a token-specific reference estimated from unlabeled images and applies a bounded penalty only to candidates that fall below their reference.

Jihae Jeong, Junha Choi, Hwanjo Yu · 0 citations

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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.