Skip to content

Category

natural language processing

9,568 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents

This paper recast context compression as a causal decision preservation problem over discrete interaction units and introduces FOCUS, a training-free context compression framework that operates entirely at test time that requires no offline data collection or fine-tuning.

Shantanu Dixit, Anson Bastos, Xu-Chao Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Rational Clarification by Assistive Agents via Value-of-Information Reasoning

Users of language-based assistive agents often make ambiguous requests. In response, an assistant can either directly act on its interpretation of the request --- risking misalignment with the user --- or ask a clarifying question. Which option is the most safe and helpful? A common approach is to ask questions that mi...

T. Nguyen-Hien, Y. Teh, Wee-Sun Lee et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Solving Without Stopping: On-Policy Distillation at Small Scale

On-policy distillation, where a student learns from a stronger teacher's feedback on its own outputs, is a common way to pass reasoning to smaller models. We analyze what it transfers at small scale, distilling Qwen3-8B into Qwen3 4B, 1.7B and 0.6B students, in thinking mode (reason at length, then end the reasoning an...

Hong-Yang Li, Yi-Ming Zhu, Xiao Li et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Asking for What Was Never Requested: Horizontal and Vertical Proactivity in Agents

An agent that uses tools typically responds to what the user explicitly asks, yet completing the task may require information the user never requested. Work on proactive agents mainly studies whether and when an agent should act on its own, not what information it should pursue. We study a distinct axis of proactivity:...

Ido Levy, Asaf Yehudai, Segev Shlomov et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Harness Evolution as Learning: Approximation, Generalization, and Optimization Limits of Self-Improving Personal Agents

This work introduces a preference-oriented benchmark and systematically characterize the capabilities and limitations of personal agents associated with these three dimensions of harness evolution, offering a unified perspective on the limits of personalization through harness evolution and inform future harness design...

Ze-Yu Gan, Zi-Xuan Gong, Yong Liu · 2 citations

SIPO: Unifying Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Self-Distillation

This work proposes self-instructing policy optimization (SIPO) with a contrastive self-teacher to provide dense credit, and demonstrates that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without an external teacher or additional generation.

Zhenrui Yue, Hui-Min Zeng, Yue-Qi Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Can Agents Design Libraries for Agents?

LibraryDesignBench is introduced, a two-phase benchmark in which an agent implements a full-featured library from a specification that defines required capabilities and potential use cases without prescribing the design.

Gabriel Orlanski, Alex L. Zhang, Avi Trost et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Transformers Stop Thinking Too Early, and a Tiny LoRA Fixes It

Pretrained transformers use little of their depth to follow references in context. Thirteen base models reliably follow only 1.4-3.6 lines, and extra pretrained loops add little. A task-trained rank-8 LoRA at one early layer extends this computation with all model weights frozen. Qwen3-8B improves from 15.5% to 99% exa...

Ze-Hao Jin, Rui-Xuan Deng, Jun-Ran Wang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

OTROPE: Optimal Transport-based Robust Off-policy Evaluation for Large Language Models

The Optimal Transport-based Robust Off-Policy Evaluation (OTROPE) is proposed, a likelihood-free evaluation that performs distributional correction in a semantic space via optimal transport to align labeled behavior-policy samples with unlabeled target-policy samples, yielding a doubly robust-style evaluation.

Lin-Er Xiang, Wen-Bo Zhang, Heng-Rui Cai · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Principled Thoughts for Latent Recursive LLM Systems

REST (REpresentation-Supervised Thoughts), a training objective that turns four properties of a valid thought representation into differentiable losses added to CE, instantiate in latent single-agent and multi-agent systems, without architectural changes or added parameters at inference.

Fahd Seddik, F. Fard · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

GeoOutageBench: Benchmarking Ambiguity-aware, Ontology-grounded Geospatiotemporal KGQA for Multimodal Power Outage and Resilience Analysis

GeoOutageBench provides a design principle and foundation for assessing LLM-KG systems that support real-world infrastructure resilience analysis and provides user-configurable evaluation of three important, highly coherent yet less studied tasks.

Ethan Frakes, Amy Kvien, Rishabh Kundu et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

See all →
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.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.