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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Geometric Structure Predicts Per-Example Neighborhood Loss Under PCA Truncation

Dimensionality reduction can preserve the average performance of text embeddings even when a substantial fraction of their dimensions is removed. Aggregate metrics, however, do not reveal whether degradation is distributed uniformly across examples. We study per-example neighborhood stability under PCA truncation acros...

Sriram Loganathan, Gokul Anand, Ragavan Arivazhagan · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Encoding Context into LLM Weights: What Makes It Context?

Longer contexts allow large language models (LLMs) to condition their predictions on more information, but inference costs grow prohibitively with context length. An emerging alternative uses test-time updates to encode context as temporary changes to model weights. However, encoding this information into weights that...

Yue Wang, Qi-Zhou Wang, Feng Liu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Soft Teacher Forcing

Soft tokens have so far been used to replace discrete chain-of-thought in latent reasoning methods. These approaches typically require multi-stage training and, in some cases, auxiliary modules, yet they still underperform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) ontriples. In this paper, we ask whether soft tokens can be used to...

Mohammad Fahes, Cordelia Schmid, Anurag Arnab · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Gluing Local Contexts into Global Meaning: A Sheaf-Theoretic Decomposition of Transformer Representations

Existing interpretability tools do not test whether a representation keeps the same content when only the phrasing changes. We treat each paraphrase pair as a local witness that two activations should agree and build a cellular sheaf over the paraphrase graph; its Laplacian $L_\mathcal{F}$ answers the question on a fro...

Bryce Grant, Peng Wang · 1 citation
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

MENTOR: Procedural Shielding of Tool-Using LLM Agents

Tool-using LLM agents are increasingly used to automate workflows governed by procedural manuals, such as company rules for booking travel or procuring hardware. These manuals are written in natural language for humans and describe general requirements over such complex workflows. Ensuring compliance of LLM agents with...

Ashwani Anand, Ivi Chatzi, Ritam Raha et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Predicting Mental Health Help-Seeking Behaviour on Reddit: A Survival Analysis of Linguistic and Behavioural Signals

Most prior work on predicting mental health help-seeking treats it as post-hoc classification of users already active in clinical communities, which cannot tell whether someone approaching a transition can be identified in advance. We instead frame help-seeking as a time-to-event problem and ask which Reddit users will...

Nisar Ahmed, Ammara Kazmi, Irtaza Bashir Raja et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Know Yourself and Know Your Neighbour: A Syntactically Informed Self-Supervised Compositional Sentence Representation Learning Framework using a Recursive Hypernetwork

Sentence representation learning is still an open challenge in Natural Language Processing. In this work, we propose a new self-supervised framework for learning sentence representations, using a special type of neural network called a recursive hypernetwork. Our proposed model composes the representation of a sentence...

Vasudevan Nedumpozhimana, John Kelleher · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Spectral-Driven Adaptive-Rank Optimizer for Large Language Model Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is reshaping how large language models (LLMs) acquire reasoning capabilities, yet the optimizers used remain largely inherited from teacher-forcing training. This raises a fundamental question: does RLVR induce a distinct optimization geometry that calls for a diffe...

Zhi-Peng Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen · 0 citations
#machine learning Review Oct 2026

Differential Privacy Protected Preference Alignment on Survey Derived Data

Preference alignment enables language models to better reflect human values, but the preference data contains sensitive information, especially when derived from surveys about political beliefs, social norms, religion, gender attitudes, and cultural values. This paper studies privacy-preserving alignment on questionnai...

Xiu-Yuan Qi, Yi Wang, Wen-Jie Wang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

RIFT: Token Influence Follows the Path of Least Resistance

Which context tokens drive a language model's answer? Graph-based tools such as attention rollout and attention flow answer this from a single forward pass, yet their faithfulness in decoder-only models is rarely tested against interventions. We view the layers of a decoder as a causal network whose conductances are at...

Tingan Jin, Shuhang Dong, Haosong Li · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Deep Speech Representations Track Word Timing along a Low-Dimensional Circular Trajectory

Speech timing is fundamental for speech models to recognize words accurately, but how word-timing information is represented in speech models remains underexplored. We study this question using the framework of representational geometry, which investigates whether and how concepts are represented in low-dimensional sub...

Burin Naowarat, Hao Tang, Sharon Goldwater · 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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