Language models are aligned to avoid using protected attributes such as race, ethnicity, and gender to inform their responses. Therefore, they increasingly refuse or hedge when such attributes appear in a prompt. However, if a system must decide how much to learn from what people tell it, it is costly to refuse valuabl...
Christian Arnold, Ernesto Calvo, Guadalupe Gonzalez et al.· 0 citations
Do people who speak different languages organize concepts in similar ways? This question lies at the heart of the Sapir--Whorf hypothesis and debates about linguistic relativity. Shared basic meanings, however, need not imply shared relations among them. We compared relations among 196 basic concepts across 81 language...
Guardrail models are increasingly used as safety layers for LLMs and agentic systems, but most are trained on fixed prompt or response interfaces and become unreliable when the same safety case appears as a conversation, agent trajectory, multi-agent trace, or policy-conditioned input. We propose UniGuard, a training f...
Viet-Thanh Pham, Thuy-Trang Vu, Junae Kim et al.· 0 citations
This paper studies the local geometry of semantic meaning in large language models. Current representation analyses ask whether meanings are close in embedding space, or whether linear probes separate semantic classes, but they do not characterize the within-concept local geometry: what is invariant across realizations...
Andr\'es Daniel Godoy Ortiz· 0 citations
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Text embedding and text generation are two of the most useful capabilities of modern large language models, yet they are typically provided by separate specialized models (an embedder and a generator) trained with incompatible objectives and deployed side by side in retrieval-augmented generation and agent systems. Rec...
Yang Liu, Zhi-Qiang Yuan, Shu-Dong Huang et al.· 0 citations
Large language models (LLMs) deployed in mental-health contexts can be evaluated for safety failures, but the resulting judgments are often difficult to inspect or explain. Common approaches to improving safety rely on prompt engineering, LLM-as-a-Judge, and Constitutional AI. In this work, we describe a clinician-led...
Chenhan Lyu, Kit Wislocki, Sarah Elizabeth Stoeckl et al.· 0 citations
While there is increasing evidence that words are stored in the mental lexicon with some phonetic detail, there are open questions about exactly which phonetic details are stored and whether they are functionally relevant for spoken word recognition. Word-level phonetic cues, such as word duration, provide an appropria...
Xiaomeng Zhu, Megan Niu, Jason Shaw et al.· 0 citations
Existing datasets on cultural knowledge have been typically created by human annotators familiar with each culture. However, the process requires considerable human effort, presenting a significant challenge to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce WikiOriginQA, a QA dataset automatically constructed by...
Kento Haneda, Yosuke Kishinami, Ryo Fujii et al.· 0 citations
Singular-value spectra encode important structure in transformer feed-forward projections, yet their causal role in downstream behavior remains underexplored. We study post-hoc spectral smoothing and spiking interventions on the up_proj and down_proj matrices. Positive perturbation stretches deviations from the geometr...
Large language models increasingly act as controllers in structured decision pipelines, yet their decisions are still executed by autoregressive text decoding. Hierarchical RAG is one such setting: at each frontier of a document tree, an LLM commits to $b$ of $k$ sections under an input-dependent action grammar, execut...
Zehao Lin, Qian-Feng Shen, Xi-Xuan Hao et al.· 0 citations
Coding-agent benchmarks often describe a task in natural language but grade it with tests taken from the upstream project. Passing those tests can require information the description never states: a constant's name, a module path, an exact message. We call this a specification-oracle gap: where it exists, a benchmark a...
Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the standard for building information exchange in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), is increasingly queried through large language models (LLMs) using natural language. Evaluating these systems at scale is difficult because free-text answers require costly human or LL...
Rabindra Lamsal, Sisi Zlatanova, Xuesong Shen· 0 citations
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.
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· microsoft.comOct 15, 2026
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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