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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

HaloBlock: Faster and Better Decoding for Diffusion Large Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their bidirectional attention and arbitrary order decoding. However, there are two issues in dLLMs inference: the decoding difficulty is dominated by the tokens on the right side of the block, and the block-wise decoding inheren...

Zhaohui Zheng, Chenhang He, Jinrui Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Evaluating the Causal Faithfulness of SHAP as a Candidate Attribution Method for SAE Features

Sparse autoencoders decompose language model representations into interpretable features, but feature interpretation in this literature remains predominantly correlational. Attribution methods offer more direct estimates of feature influence, yet their faithfulness to actual causal effects has not been systematically e...

Samuel Xie, N. Al Moubayed · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Cross-Lingual Transfer of Evil Vectors Is Directionally Asymmetric

Persona vectors are linear directions in the residual-stream activations of LLMs that encode behavioral traits and enable fine-grained control over model behavior. Among them, the evil persona vector is particularly relevant to understanding harmful behavior, jailbreak vulnerabilities, and the unlearning of harmful kno...

Juann Kim, Min-Ku Kang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Diff Diffusion: Predicting Edit Paths with Diffusion Models for Efficient Code Editing

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are appealing for code generation because they can update many tokens in parallel, yet many are optimized for sequence synthesis rather than edit prediction. This setting is poorly matched to modern AI-assisted IDEs, where edit prediction must infer the next code change from rece...

Xiaolong Xu, Hao Jiang, Bo Jiang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Checking the Checkers: A Synthesis of Verifier Noise and Robustness in RLVR

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a principal recipe for improving the reasoning of large language models (LLMs). It rests on the assumption that the checker scoring each response is itself correct. In practice, rule-based checkers reject correct answers in unexpected formats, unit tests...

Savyasachi Gupta, Aniruddha Srinivas Joshi · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Efficiently Learning To Reason or Not to Reason: Root-token Policy Optimization for Adaptive Thinking

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by externalizing explicit reasoning traces before producing the answer, yet suffer from overthinking challenge that allocates uniformly heavy computation to queries of varying difficulty. While proprietary models mitigate this via opaque routing, open-source LRMs...

Taehyeon Kim, Hyunsoo Lee, Youngsoo Jang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Auditing Failure Attribution: Label Predictability and Judge Behavior

Failure-attribution benchmarks ask an LLM judge which step or agent caused a failure. A high score should mean the judge checked the faulty step against the run (a cross-step check). However, spurious signals (surface cues) that predict the annotation can produce a high score. In this paper, we propose four tests to se...

Tianyang Xu, Jing Gao · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

SkillScreen: High-Recall Screening of Malicious Agent Skills with Decision Models

Agent skills turn natural-language instructions into actions, creating a security challenge: legitimate automation and malicious behaviour can look deceptively similar. A practical screen must catch nearly every attack while keeping the review load manageable. We present SkillScreen, a compact decision model trained to...

Jerrold Huang, Junwei Quan, Saiyue Lyu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

LatentRiskBench: Measuring State-Dependent Risks in Enterprise Agents

Enterprise agents face safety risks that cannot be determined from individual actions alone. Existing safety benchmarks largely evaluate action-local risks, overlooking failures whose safety depends on workflow state. In such state-dependent risks, the same action may be safe in one context but violate policy in anothe...

Jingyue Cong, Estrid He, Zhuang Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

DeltaTTG: Training Multi-Turn Agents with a Token-to-Go Progress Meter

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for multi-turn agents relies on sparse terminal rewards that say little about individual steps. Within-group step comparisons depend on reliable state matching and sufficiently diverse sampled outcomes, while direct step scoring may require costly external evaluator...

Xu-Yan Ye, Xiyan Fu, Sheng-Da Fan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

RELAY: Selective Self-Distillation with Adaptive Hand-off for Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning

Rubric-based reinforcement learning grades a response against many written criteria but collapses them into one reward, which discards the detail the rubric carries and gives no GRPO reward gradient when a group's responses tie. A frozen teacher that reads the rubric as privileged context provides token-level supervisi...

Kunwang Zheng, Xinyu Sun, Yu Cao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Tanawpamana: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Philippine Cultural Heritage Sites

The Tanawpamana Dataset is introduced, a repository of Philippine heritage site images with metadata based on the Talapamana registry of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts of the Philippines, comprising 4,046 tasks designed to evaluate models'recognition and knowledge of heritage sites.

Ivan Yuri De Leon, Hiroki Ouchi, S. Sakti · 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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