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natural language processing

9,568 papers

#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Reflective Prompt Optimization of a Deep-Research Agent: A Topic-Disjoint, Multi-Seed Protocol for Measuring Transferable Gains and Prompt-Level Overfitting

Prompt optimization is an attractive alternative to reinforcement learning for adapting language-model agents, since it is cheap and produces human-readable artifacts. On factual tasks, however, it carries a failure mode that scalar-reward reinforcement learning does not. An optimizer that reads the training examples c...

Elias Lumer, Sahil Sen, Vamse Kumar Subbiah et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Oct 2026

One Model to Loop Them All: Elastic Latent Recurrence for Language Models

A latent recurrent language model applies a shared block of layers repeatedly, so one checkpoint can trade inference compute for accuracy by changing the loop count. At one loop, however, such models typically fall well short of a non-recurrent model of the same size, a one-loop tax that makes a separate non-recurrent...

Faisal Ladhak, Shantanu Acharya, Santiago Akle Serano et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

CLUE: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Unsupervised Event Type Induction and Annotation

Event ontology is the foundational framework for defining events in a dataset. Event type induction generally involves domain experts who define guidelines for creating event types and their names based on the dataset's domain and scope. However, this process is resource-intensive in terms of annotation costs and is pr...

Pratik Maitra, Lauren Kwon, Qi Li · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Oct 2026

Contextual Correction of Parallel Drafts for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by using a lightweight drafter to propose multiple tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by the target model. Recent diffusion-based drafters make this paradigm particularly attractive: deep attention-based neural backbones provide strong predi...

Roy Eisenstadt, Harel Lidar, T. Gonen et al. · 0 citations

SWE-Duel: Towards a Self-Scaling Arena for Coding Agents

Within one model family, tasks written by the newest version defeat a fixed-reference solver far more often than those of older versions (42.9% vs. 4.0%), giving preliminary evidence that task difficulty scales with task authoring capability.

Wei Minn, Zhensu Sun, L. K. Shar et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Weight Clustering Reveals the Importance of Relative Rank in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) contain billions of parameters, but many exact weight values are not essential. We apply scalar $K$-means clustering to pretrained models, replacing each weight matrix with only 16--64 shared values. For Llama~3.1-8B-Instruct and SmolLM2-135M, this preserves strong accuracy without retraini...

Borja Aizpurua, Sukhbinder Singh, Rom\'an Or\'us · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

S-Space: Exploring Spatial Workspace in Multimodal Language Models

Multimodal language models (MLLMs) exhibit promising spatial reasoning capabilities, yet the internal mechanisms supporting them remain poorly understood. We uncover S-Space, a linear representation subspace in which object-token representations encode continuous coordinates along horizontal, vertical, and distance axe...

Zhi-Yuan Shi, Xiang Li, Xing-Zhuo Guo et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Does Financial Speech Need Continual Learning Regularization? A Study of EWC and mini-KFAC on Earnings Call ASR

Earnings call transcription presents a realistic continual learning scenario where Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are updated with new recordings but risk catastrophic forgetting of previously learned financial speech patterns. Adapting Whisper-small from a general-domain speech corpus to the Earnings22 ben...

Thai Quoc On, Homayoon Beigi · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Overcoming Data Imbalances with Expert Selection Biases

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become the standard architecture for frontier LLMs. The multiple parallel experts in each transformer block theoretically enable expert specialization according to categories such as domains, languages, or modalities during pretraining. However, when data is imbalanced across catego...

A. Tarun, Clara Meister, Antoine Bosselut · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Taking Tokenization off the Host for Agentic LLM Serving

GraphTok is presented, a GPU tokenizer that runs the entire encoding pipeline, from pre-tokenization through byte-pair encoding (BPE) merging to token-ID assembly, as one replayable CUDA graph.

Mohammad Siavashi, Pascal Schwinte, A. Banaei et al. · 1 citation
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Do Prompt Optimizers Break Requirements They Are Not Scored On? A Preregistered Study

Prompt optimizers rewrite a prompt to raise one target metric, but prompts also state requirements the metric does not score, such as an output format, citations, or abstention. In a preregistered study, we run GEPA, MIPROv2, and TextGrad on HotpotQA, SQuAD 2.0, and IFEval and count per-item violations of unscored requ...

Sangdo Han, Moonsoo Kim · 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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