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small language model

3,317 papers

#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Why On-Policy Distillation Sometimes Fails: Vanishing Learning Signals

A local recovery guarantee for teachers sufficiently close to the initial student in a shared parameterization under regularity conditions is proved, offering a conditional explanation for the success of self-RL teachers in the authors' experiments.

Lei Zhao, Qi-Chao Zhao, Bo-Wen Zuo et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Spectrally Targeted Muon

The Muon optimizer orthogonalizes each update matrix, setting all of its singular values to one, and has proven highly effective for training large language models. It remains unclear, however, whether this success comes from amplifying small singular directions that gradient descent neglects or from suppressing large,...

Vishrut Goyal, Rohan Ramkumar · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

KDFP: A first-principles approach to knowledge distillation in large language models

Knowledge distillation is an established technique for improving the capabilities of small, efficient student models by training them with the representations of larger, more capable teacher models. Much of the recent work in the distillation of large language models (LLMs) has focused on distilling abilities learned d...

Ryan Swift, Konstantinos Psounis · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

From Surface to Depth: Towards Cognitive Appraisal Reasoning in Multimodal Emotion Understanding

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly incorporate explainable reasoning for emotion understanding. However, reasoning based mainly on observable affective cues can reduce emotion understanding to superficial cue-label associations, giving rise to the Clever Hans effect. Such shortcuts become unre...

Jia Li, Yi-Chao He, Yang-Chen Yu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

GRPODropout: Less is More for Online Reinforcement Learning Rollouts

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as GRPO substantially improve large language model reasoning but often suffer from policy entropy collapse: the loss of sampling diversity weakens exploration and limits further improvement. Existing methods address this issue either through algorithm-level interventions, such a...

Hexuan Deng, Zi-Hao Yan, Xue-Bo Liu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

MAP4CS: A Multi-dimensional Data Pruning Framework for Efficient Code Retriever Fine-tuning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a cornerstone in software engineering for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with domain-specific knowledge. However, adapting retrievers to evolving code repositories remains challenging due to the noise and redundancy inherent in massive code corpora. Standard fine-...

Yuxuan Chen, Ming-Wei Liu, Guang-Sheng Ou et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

LTBD: Learnable Trust-Boundary Delimiters for Prompt Injection Defense

Large language models (LLMs) perform remarkably well on complex tasks, yet remain highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in external data can override user intent. Existing defenses remain limited by model fine-tuning requirements, vulnerability to adaptive attacks, or reli...

Lu-Man Zhao, Ming-Hui Xu, Yue Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Adapting English Quality Classifiers for Multilingual LLM Pretraining Data Selection

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining highlight the role of high-quality training data in improving performance. While model-based filtering has proven effective in selecting high-quality subsets from web-scale corpora, especially for high-resource languages, low-resource languages face challenges d...

Vinko Sabolcec, Bettina Messmer, Yassine Turki et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Rethinking Contrastive Loss in CLIP Post-training: A Complementary Framework with Frozen Text Encoder

CLIP serves as a foundational vision-language model and the de facto vision encoder for downstream VLMs such as LLaVA. Post-training offers a lightweight route to refine CLIP, but recent work argues that the standard contrastive loss is unsuitable for post-training due to catastrophic forgetting under small batches, mo...

Zi-Dan Wang, Ya-Qian Li, Xiao-Kai Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

MetaEncoder: Exploring the Limit of Bi-Encoders for Multimodal System One Decision Making with Natural Language Interface

This work introduces MetaEncoder, which fine-tunes a pre-trained Muse-Glimmer 30B decoder into an instruction-following decision-making encoder, and employs a bi-encoder architecture trained via unidirectional contrastive learning for request-candidate alignment.

Jian-Peng Cheng, Guang-Yu Sun, Aashu Singh et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Review Oct 2026

How to post-train on a surrogate: Envelope sampling mitigates reward hacking

This work proposes envelope sampling, a theoretically-grounded method for judge recalibration that seeks to minimize an upper bound on the regret of the post-trained model under the assumption that the human reward and re-calibrated reward lie in an $L^2$ ball around the judge.

Sanjit Dandapanthula, Shuvom Sadhuka, Samir Khan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

PIVOT: Perplexity-Informed KD-to-RL Transition Scheduling for Vertical-Domain Few-Shot Distillation

Vertical-domain few-shot classification remains challenging for small language models, as limited supervision makes it difficult to acquire domain-specific decision knowledge. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) can improve teacher-guided adaptation by supervising student-generated rollouts, while GRPO-based reinforcement lea...

Heng Li, Yong Zhang, Ning Cheng et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 23, 2026

Q&A: How AI came to model the “messy” human mind

Assistant Professor Benjamin Lindquist studies how engineers deliberately injected randomness into early AI, giving rise to deep-learning models that sometimes hallucinate.

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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