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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Whether or Where? Tail Calibration Signals Finite-Budget Reward Hacking in Best-of-N Selection

Best-of-N (BoN) inference returns the candidate with the highest proxy reward, so a larger $N$ tests the proxy's extreme tail more than its average ranking quality. We show that the exact BoN value is a Beta-weighted integral of conditional true reward over within-prompt score quantiles. It follows that BoN depends on...

Cheng Gui, Yihua Shao, Lei Li et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Birth, Death and Diff: Insertion-Based Sequence Generation with Corrections

Insertion-based masked diffusion models enable flexible-length, parallel generation by interleaving mask insertion with token unmasking. However, because their generation decisions are irreversible, aggressive parallel decoding can introduce errors that subsequent steps cannot correct, necessitating conservative decodi...

Durga Prasad Maram, Dhruvesh Patel, Tahira Naseem et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Automated, auditable dating of the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries with language models and astronomical tools

The Babylonian Astronomical Diaries record the sky over nearly six centuries. Many tablets are broken and have lost their date formula. Experts dated many of them one tablet at a time in the standard edition, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia (ADART). They used the recorded sky and other evidence, s...

Lucas Carrit Delgado Pinheiro, Yuan-Sen Ting, Jon Clindaniel et al. · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Oct 2026

MIS-VQA: An Annotation-Driven Surgical Vision-Language Dataset for Complex Surgical Understanding

Modern surgical AI increasingly requires multimodal understanding rather than isolated perception, yet existing datasets remain largely limited to single-task supervision such as recognition or templated question answering. Current medical VQA resources often rely on synthetic templates, lack natural descriptive superv...

M. Hamdy, I. Zouari, Fatmaelzahraa Ahmed et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Entropic Control for Homeostatic Optimization: Pre-empting Catastrophic Forgetting via Dynamic Feedback

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of LLMs suffers from catastrophic forgetting, and prevailing mitigation strategies struggle to reconcile the plasticity-stability dilemma. To address this, we propose Entropic Control for Homeostatic Optimization (ECHO), a closed-loop control framework. By decomposing the KL divergence, we...

Shangxi Wu, Xiaorong Yan, Xiaojun Meng et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Reasoning or Just Prompting? Probing the Mechanism of Latent Chemical Reasoning

Latent reasoning performs intermediate computation in continuous space rather than through explicit tokens, which is particularly appealing in chemistry, where errors in explicit reasoning can propagate to the final answer. Yet if latent states truly constitute an implicit reasoning chain, they should be causally impor...

Kai-Yuan Lu, Jia-Tong Li, Ya-Tao Bian · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Task Success Is Not Enough: Side-effect-Aware Evaluation of Tool-Using Language Model Agents

Tool-using language model agents are usually evaluated by whether they finish the user's task. That metric misses a common failure: an agent can complete the requested work while also taking an unauthorized side-effecting action, such as writing to the wrong object, expanding the scope of the request, or contacting an...

Jia-Ju Huang, Shao-Bin Chen, Xing-Long Liang et al. · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Humans in Space: Can MLLMs Construct Human-Centric Spatial Understanding via Active Exocentric Exploration?

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at zero-shot reasoning, their spatial capabilities are primarily evaluated through static, passive observation. In complex, human-centric scenes, occlusion often hides crucial geometric evidence, and passive benchmarks force models to guess rather than recognize thei...

Tianchen Guo, Tengyue Zhang, Chen Liu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Self-Evolution Reasoner: Continuous Optimization via Policy-Intrinsic Exploration and Exploitation

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enables large language models (LLMs) to continuously self-improve their reasoning capabilities. Compared to RLVR's scalar rewards, recent self-supervised on-policy distillation methods leverage denser supervision signals. However, both paradigms suffer from explorat...

Wenhang Shi, Yiren Chen, Zhe Zhao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Can LLMs Trust Appropriately? Evaluating Calibrated Reliance on Imperfect Partners

Large language models increasingly collaborate with humans and peer AI agents whose contributions may be incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect. Effective collaboration requires calibrated trust, whereby decisions to rely on, verify, or assist a partner adapt rationally as empirical evidence accumulates. We investigate...

Mengdi Chu, Jintao Huang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

How Do Small Coding Agents Use Code Graphs and Embeddings?

Coding agents are given embedding search and code-graph tools on the premise that a repository's structure is something the model lacks and the tool supplies. We test that premise on SWE-bench Verified with small open-weight models, stratifying tasks by a deterministic hop depth (the shortest code-graph path from code...

Saurav Bellam (The University of Texas at Austin) · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Continual Learning Exam: Benchmarking Long-Horizon RSI and Experiential Learning in LLM Agents

Continual learning is the ability of LLM agents to improve over time by acquiring, refining, and applying knowledge from experience while retaining useful prior knowledge. It is essential for agents learning over long time horizons, yet current evaluations largely assess individual task performance rather than improvem...

Haoyu Zhao, Sitian Tu, Yuxuan Huang 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.

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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