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small language model

3,445 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Backdooring Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used not only to interpret language models but also to intervene on their internal representations. We show that this creates a supply-chain attack surface: a maliciously modified SAE can induce attacker-chosen behavior when inserted into the forward pass of an otherwise unch...

E. Ahlers, Daniel Passon, Tobias Kiecker et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Nexus: An Execution Fabric for AI Agents Across Cloud, Edge, and Devices

Language-model agents are evolving into long-running services that interact with models, tools, computers, mobile devices, and distributed environments. Existing agent frameworks simplify reasoning and tool invocation. However, cloud-centric designs face three limitations: centralized execution increases failure impact...

C. Chang, Jia-Lin Zhou · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

G-CARB: Graph-Localized Conformal Agent Risk Budget for Compositional Harm

Small language model (SLM) agents need safety controls that track consequences across tool calls with little monitoring overhead. A private read, for example, becomes a leak when a later action sends that data outside the system. We introduce CARB (Conformal Agent Risk Budget), which calibrates when to stop an agent us...

Zi-Jun Yu, Yu-Tong Gu, Vahid Partovi Nia et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

IRSTD-Agent: Agentic Infrared Small Target Detection via Zoom-Guided Interaction Learning

Infrared small-target detection plays an important role in maritime monitoring and aerial surveillance. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer promising capabilities for visual understanding, existing MLLM-based approaches struggle to precisely localize infrared small targets. In this paper, we propose...

Jia-Wen Xi, Yu Zhang, Tian-Yi Zhao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Grammar-Guided Code Watermarking with Green Temperature

Large language model watermarking embeds detectable statistical signals during decoding, but the resulting changes to token probabilities can degrade generation quality. This trade-off is particularly important for code, where small changes in token selection can break syntax or alter program behavior. Existing code wa...

Hyundong Jin, Hyeseon An, Soohan Lim et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

HERA: Harness-Environment Co-Evolution for Reliable Agentic Abstention

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of acting in complex tool-use environments, yet they often fail to recognize when tasks are infeasible and no valid solution exists. Recent work has formalized this reliability gap as the problem of agentic abstention, and existing approaches typically optimize...

Hang Luo, Bing-Bing Wen, Guang Yang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

ImproveAnyTask: An Autonomous Post-Training Harness for Iterative Model Self-Improvement

Adapting general-purpose large language models to specific tasks requires substantial human effort in designing data and training strategies. Sustaining improvement is especially challenging because model updates change the error distribution, requiring strategies to be continually refined. We introduce ImproveAnyTask,...

Xing-Bo Yao, Xiao-Man Wang, Zheng-Wu Lei et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Do Small Language Models Learn to Negotiate? A Controlled Scaling Study of RL-Trained Sellers

LLM agents are starting to own the full customer experience. Soon, LLMs may be selling and buying on behalf of companies and customers respectively. Small models are more cost-efficient at scale, but can reinforcement learning train them into competent sellers? We train four Gemma 4 checkpoints (2.3B to 31B effective p...

Pedro Tabacof, Sagar Joglekar · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

A Testable Theory of Atomic Features

We develop and test a theory of language model representations in which there exist atomic features. Our main theoretical insight is that in such a model, sparse dictionaries (e.g., SAEs) of increasing size recover an increasing prefix of the most prevalent atoms in the training data. This"recovery principle"yields thr...

Kenny Peng, Jon M. Kleinberg, Nikhil Garg · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Sibyl: An Efficient Small-large Model Collaboration Framework for Long-horizon Tasks

Small language models (SLMs) offer a promising foundation for on-device agents through low-latency, resource-efficient inference, yet limited reasoning and planning capabilities constrain their performance on long-horizon tasks requiring multi-step interaction with the environment. Step-level collaboration between SLMs...

Zhe-Wei Fang, Yu-Xin Zhang, Zhen-Wei Shao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

SpecFold: Folding Multi-Branch Redundancy for Faster Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) generate text through iterative block denoising, and multi-branch speculative decoding accelerates this process by verifying a main branch together with multiple draft branches in a single forward pass. While prior DLLM acceleration methods primarily exploit temporal redundancy a...

Chung-En Ho, Wei-Yu Sun, Cheng-Jhih Shih et al. · 0 citations

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