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natural language processing

9,568 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Surprising Success, Repeated Failure: Entropy-Guided Credit Assignment for Exploration in LLM Reasoning

Entropic Advantage Policy Optimization (EAPO) is introduced, an entropy-guided credit assignment method that treats success and failure asymmetrically and promotes more effective exploration, broadening problem coverage and generating more diverse candidate answers.

Woongyeong Yeo, Minki Kang, Chanuk Lee et al. · 0 citations

BOReFT: Manifold Steering of Language Models for Black-box Optimization

BOReFT is introduced, which learns a compact, low-dimensional space of hidden-state interventions in a frozen language model, and uses this space as the search domain for Bayesian optimization with an external scoring function, and provides a principled new bridge between discrete proposal spaces of LLM-based search an...

Dhruv Agarwal, Rico Angell, Kavitha Srinivas et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Understanding Confabulation and Rethinking Reconstruction in Activation Explanations

A standardized evaluation framework for unstructured NLA explanations is introduced, measuring information recoverable from explanations, contextual support for their claims, and writing quality, and opening up a direction for improving activation-derived training to encourage more informative, supported, and readable...

Gert Lek, Zi-Xuan Xia, Pin-Yu Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Tsubame: Tree Replay for Diffusion-Based Speculative Decoding

Context-aware dynamic trees allocate the speculative decoding budget according to draft path probabilities, adapting their depth and branching to the current context. Under stochastic decoding, however, we find that this structural advantage does not always compensate for the acceptance gains of random sampling paired...

Yepeng Weng, Qiao Hu, T. Yairi · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Learning to Learn from Context: Synthetic Training from Perturbed Public Documents

This work attempts to make use of high-quality public documents with small perturbations and empirically finds that LLMs can successfully generate context-dependent reasoning traces and answers, which are then used to train a student model that substantially improves the performance on CL-bench.

Hao Wu, Yang Xiao, Yu-Song Sun et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Safety Reconstructed: Generative Modeling via Masked Diffusion Builds Strong Safety Guardrails

This work proposes a masked diffusion language model, fine-tuning LLaDA-8B-Instruct with a class-conditional reconstruction objective using LoRA and requiring no architectural changes beyond the base model, which leads on average rank against discriminative baselines trained on stronger backbones across seven held-out...

Gert Lek, Abele Malan, Chao-Yi Zhu et al. · 0 citations

E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Diagnostics Dataset Investigating Linguistic Phenomena in Arabic Natural Language Understanding

E-CONAN diagnostics dataset is introduced, a freely available dataset manually-annotated with coarse-grained and fine-grained categories based on the authors' proposed Arabic hierarchy, which helps NLU designers better understand their models by doing error analysis and in-depth investigation.

Khloud Al Jallad, Nada Ghneim, Ghaida Rebdawi · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

A Cheap Verifier is Good Enough: LLM Post-training is Robust to Erroneous Rewards

This paper compares two low-cost choices retrospectively -- a cost-reducing choice and a balanced choice -- with estimated grading cost reductions and average post-training score gaps of 1-3 points from the best evaluated training verifier, and establishes that verifier choices are interchangeable.

Andreas Lindhardt Plesner, Curtis G. Northcutt, F. Guzmán et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Decoupling Token Roles in Autoregressive Pretraining

Using controlled corruption, this work decouple these two roles and finds a reversal: making a noisy token easier to predict reduces its damage as a target but increases it as context.

Su-Qin Yuan, Runqi Lin, Ke-Yu Lin et al. · 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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