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natural language processing

9,568 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Function-Vector Heads Are Two Populations: Writers and Cancellers in In-Context Learning

In-context learning lets a language model perform a task specified by examples in its prompt. Function vectors capture task information in a compact activation assembled from attention-head outputs. Across two rule families and three Pythia models, we find two opposed functional populations among candidate function-vec...

Han-yu Wang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Machine Learning for Coding Retail Product Names to Consumer-Price Categories: A Rule-plus-Bag-of-Words Pipeline with Reliability-Weighted Human-in-the-Loop Labeling

Price statistics increasingly draw on scanner, web-scraped and receipt data, whose product descriptions are short, noisy and carry no standard product code, so each item must be coded to a consumption classification such as COICOP. National statistical offices already report that lightweight text classifiers are adequa...

Vladimir Beskorovainyi · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Flip-Flop Consistency: Unsupervised Training for Robustness to Prompt Perturbations in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce inconsistent answers when faced with different phrasings of the same prompt. In this paper, we propose Flip-Flop Consistency ($F^2C$), an unsupervised training method that improves robustness to such perturbations. $F^2C$ is composed of two key components. The first, Consensus...

Parsa Hejabi, Elnaz Rahmati, Alireza S. Ziabari et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

RFG: Self-Improving Diffusion Large Language Models with Reward-Free Guidance

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, yet further improving them typically requires costly post-training with additional data and supervision. We ask whether a post-trained dLLM can improve itself at inference time without additional training, data, or reward models. This req...

Tianlang Chen, Minkai Xu, Jure Leskovec et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Logit-Gap Steering: A Forward-Pass Diagnostic for Alignment Robustness

RLHF-style alignment trains language models to refuse unsafe requests, but how much operational margin does this refusal rest on? We introduce the refusal-affirmation logit gap: the difference between the top refusal-token logit and the top affirmative-token logit at the first decoding step. This single scalar quantifi...

Tung-Ling Li, Hongliang Liu · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Studying the Soupability of Documents in State Space Models

We investigate whether hidden states from Structured State Space Models (SSMs) can be merged post hoc to support downstream reasoning. Inspired by model souping, we study document souping, a strategy where documents are encoded independently, and their representations are pooled, via simple operations like averaging, i...

Yasaman Jafari, Zixian Wang, Leon Bergen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Two Calls, Two Moments, and the Vote-Accuracy Curve of Repeated LLM Inference

Repeated sampling can improve LLM accuracy, and quantifying the gains from additional calls is essential for allocating test-time compute. We study binary decisions, a fundamental setting where repeated answers to the same question are aggregated by majority vote. We show that two independently sampled responses per ex...

Yi Liu · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Mar 2026

Aligning the Query Space: Greedy Information Projection for Language Model Data Selection

Greedy Information Projection is presented, a query-aligned method that requires only candidate embeddings and a score signal from LLM judgments, metadata, or intrinsic geometry, and which matches or surpasses full-data fine-tuning using small instruction and reasoning subsets.

Victor Ye Dong, Kuan-Yun Lee, Jia-Mei Shuai et al. · 2 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Systematic Hazard Sampling: Minimal-Variance Inference for Discrete Diffusion and Flow Models

Uniform-noise discrete diffusion and flow models generate sequences non-autoregressively through iterative, context-dependent token replacements. However, these models are typically formulated as time-inhomogeneous continuous- or discrete-time Markov chains (CTMC/DTMC), sampled using independent Bernoulli change decisi...

Seunghwan Jang, Wonje Jeung, SooJean Han · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

EfficientXpert: Efficient Domain Adaptation for Large Language Models via Propagation-Aware Pruning

Deploying domain-specialized large language models on resource-constrained hardware motivates reducing both adaptation cost and the number of retained weights. LoRA lowers adaptation cost but leaves a dense backbone, while separate pruning can discard weights that become important during adaptation. We propose Efficien...

Songlin Zhao, Michael Pitts, Zhuwei Qin · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

ufakzeka-karar: An Open Turkish Typed-Decision Model with Order-Invariant Option Scoring

ufakzeka-karar is an open Turkish decision model with 182,494,466 parameters. Given a Turkish text and questions of a fixed answer type (a choice, a level on an ordered scale, or yes or no), it returns a temperature-scaled probability for every option and an expected error that serves as a "not sure" signal, without ge...

Sait Furkan Teke (ufak AI) · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Reading the Mood: Emotion-Guided Book-to-Music Recommendation via CGANs and LLMs

Background music that matches the mood of a text has been shown to make readers feel more immersed and improve their reading experience, motivating recommender systems that pair books with mood-matched music. In this direction, we present Sentiment Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Cross Domain Recommendation (S...

Manousos Linardakis, Georgios Alexandridis · 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.

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