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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Why Does Structured Output Fail? An Empirical Study of Prompt-Enforced Pydantic Schemas Across Nine LLMs

Pipelines that require structured outputs from hosted language models often specify a Pydantic schema in the prompt, validate the response, and retry when validation fails. Although native structured-output modes provide an alternative, application-side validation remains important for enforcing custom constraints. Yet...

Amit Verma · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Counterfactual Test-Time Augmentation for Shortcut Removal in Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) can exploit shortcuts, i.e., correlations present in training data that may not hold at test time. This can lead to poor predictions when correlations shift. Most existing solutions for removing shortcuts operate at training time, requiring labeled training data, model weight access, and si...

Katie Matton, R. Picard, John V. Guttag et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Intervention-Certified Amplification: A Validity Gate for $\sigma$-Weighted Post-Training

Hybrid post-training often mixes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), using training-side signals to set each sample's balance. Such signals characterize the anchor data and policy, but not whether the emphasized behavior helps in the target task and evaluation setting. This mismatch can reacti...

Leiyue Chen, Meng Wei, Xuefeng Hu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Review Oct 2026

Ranking Is Not Deciding: Benchmark Shortcuts and Operating-Point Collapse in Query-Time RAG Poisoning Defenses

Query-time filters that screen each retrieved document before it reaches the generator are the dominant published defense against retrieval-augmented generation poisoning, and they report near-perfect detection on domain benchmarks. We show that this performance is predicted by how the poison set was built rather than...

P. Kumar, Arvin Sahaym · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Grounding on Request: Learning Modality Control in Vision-Language Models

When an image and its caption disagree, can a user reliably control which one a vision-language model (VLM) follows? Accuracy alone cannot answer this question, since a model might give the correct answer from parametric knowledge without following the requested evidence. We therefore evaluate modality grounding contro...

M. Dassen, Alexander Martin, Andrew Yates et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

EnvLunch: The Environment as a Free Lunch for Learning to Interact

For agentic data analysis, language-model agents often require a large number of annotated tasks to learn how to interact effectively with executable environments (i.e., databases). While high-quality annotated tasks require heavy manual effort, an executable environment already provides rich interaction structure and...

Wei Liu, Min Gao, Ya-Li Du et al. · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Whispers from the Neighbors: Rethinking Caption Consensus as Inference-Time Evidence for Vision-Language Retrieval

An image is rarely described only once. Retrieval benchmarks and many collections attach several captions to each picture, yet dual encoders still judge every image-caption pair in isolation. We ask what these neighboring captions contribute when a frozen encoder consults them at inference time. Fusing image similarity...

Khang Nhat Hoang Vo, Belal Shoer, Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

The Hitchhiker's Guide to System 1 Models: Fast Decision-Making Beyond LLMS

Large Language Models excel at reasoning and generation but their autoregressive, token-by-token inference makes them unnecessarily slow, expensive, and poorly calibrated for the many routine decisions (routing, gating, scoring, classification) that modern AI systems require at sub-second latency. A growing class of mo...

Haggai Roitman · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Open access Oct 2026

PathKGen: Pathology Knowledge Assisted MLLM for Explainable Histopathology

Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis serves as the fundamental method for the clinical diagnosis of cancer in digital histopathology. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled state-of-the-art (SOTA) automated histopathology report generation. However, MLLMs reason purely through distribution...

Nadun Rajapaksha, Sandun Herath, Devnith Wijesinghe et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Meta-CLIP: Metadata-Conditioned Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Disease Inference

Medical vision--language pretraining learns transferable representations from paired images and radiology reports, yet differences in scanners and acquisition protocols can impair transfer. Existing approaches primarily enrich clinical semantics, leaving structured acquisition information in DICOM headers underused. We...

Haozhe Luo, Nirosh Sivanesan, Shelley Zixin Shu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Jointly Modeling Preferences and Imperfect Decision-Making in Large Language Models

Do preferences Large Language Models (LLMs) express in standard elicitation tasks predict their strategic behaviour? LLM agents interacting with humans and other AI systems face potentially conflicting objectives, such as individual welfare, group welfare, and environmental concerns. Prior work characterizes LLM prefer...

Axel Abels, Elias Fern\'andez Domingos, Tom Lenaerts · 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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