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8 stories in the last 3d

Google Research Introduces Retrieve-for-Train (R4T): An RL-Compiled Diffusion Retriever for 12× to 20× Faster Query Fan-Out

Google Research introduced R4T, an RL-trained fan-out pipeline distilled into a 53.9M-parameter diffusion retriever achieving 12x-20x faster query fan-out.

Google Research introduced Retrieve-for-Train (R4T), which trains a fan-out language model with GRPO plus soft PPO regularization, then distills query fan-out into a 53.9M-parameter diffusion transformer that generates all retrieval embeddings in a single non-autoregressive pass. A three-term reward (groundedness 0.6, diversity 0.2 via Vendi Score, alignment 0.2) prevents paraphrastic collapse and reward hacking during training. On the Polyvore dataset, Gemma3-4B R4T-FOLM averaged 49.1 versus 40.9 for Best-of-N, and the diffusion retriever cut fan-out latency from 1.46s to 0.07s at batch size 8, a consistent 12x-20x speedup over autoregressive methods.

MarkTechPost · 7h agoAI research1

FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation

FLAT jointly trains a multimodal encoder with text-to-image and image-to-text decoders, producing flexible-length tokens that hit 83.1 GenEval on T2I after fine-tuning.

FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder with T2I and I2T decoders, combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives. It maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space and uses nested dropout over prefix-K tokens for dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage supports cross-modal retrieval and generation (71.1 GenEval), with task-specific fine-tuning reaching 83.1 GenEval on T2I, 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO captioning, and strong Recall@5 on MS-COCO and Flickr30K.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research1

The Router Within: Eliciting Native Skill Routing from a Frozen LLM

Gavel reads skill-routing signals from a frozen LLM's forward passes with two linear maps, beating retrieval pipelines by up to 21.9 points.

Gavel (Glance And Verdict) shows a frozen agent LLM already contains skill-routing signals in its forward passes, read out via two trained linear maps without loading skill text into context. A glance step scores the full library using mid-layer states and per-skill banks built in one forward pass; a verdict step fuses the model's own likelihood and yes/no judgment as a product of experts. Trained once, it transfers zero-shot to three public benchmarks and SkillTraj (372 simulated agent trajectories); on Qwen3-32B it beats progressive disclosure and retrieve-and-rerank pipelines adding 1.2B-16B external parameters by up to 13.4 points (21.9 mid-rollout).

When LLM judges agree, should we believe them?

Amazon ICML paper uses Ising models to correct correlated LLM-judge votes, beating accuracy-weighted panels by 9-14%.

Amazon Science describes an ICML paper, "Dependence-aware label aggregation for LLM-as-a-judge via Ising models," addressing how correlated judge outputs inflate majority-vote confidence. The unsupervised method models pairwise dependence between judges, learning both reliability and similarity without human reference labels. Tested on relevance, toxicity, and summarization tasks with 10 judge models at temperature zero, it outperformed accuracy-weighted voting by 9% to 14%.

Cognitive Extensions for Dual-Process Language Agents: Memory and Self-Reflection in Interactive Environments

Researchers extend the SwiftSage dual-process agent with adaptive memory and self-reflection modules, improving scores in interactive environments.

The work adds an Adaptive Memory Module (AMM) for salience-gated episodic storage and trigger-driven retrieval, and a Self-Reflection Module (SRM) for bounded execution-time validation and corrective intervention, to the SwiftSage agent. Controlled ablations on ScienceWorld across four configurations show the full system achieves the best mean final score (64.62), success rate (43.17%), and successful-step efficiency (19.33 steps). SRM is the strongest standalone contributor, suggesting execution-time control is the dominant bottleneck while episodic memory helps once the runtime loop is stable.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 19h agoAI research

How Much is a Human Right Worth? ECtHR-NPD: A Benchmark for Predicting Non-Pecuniary Damage Awards

ECtHR-NPD benchmark covers 14,575 European Court of Human Rights cases for predicting non-pecuniary damage awards; LLMs struggle with zero and high awards.

Researchers introduce ECtHR-NPD, described as the first benchmark for predicting non-pecuniary damage awards at the European Court of Human Rights from case information where no statutory formula exists. It contains 14,575 cases with case-level awards in nominal euros, chronological splits, and a protocol separating target construction from model input. Evaluations covering constant predictors, gradient-boosted trees, retrieval methods, fine-tuned encoder LMs, prompted decoder LMs, and knowledge-augmented agents show sophisticated LM approaches do not consistently outperform the strongest feature-based baseline. All model families struggle to identify zero awards and to calibrate high-award predictions, with further degradation on a Challenging test view.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 20h agoAI research

Confidence Comes from Experience: Experiential Confidence Estimation from Reasoning to Agents

XConf estimates LLM confidence from accumulated past episodes, improving calibration and discrimination across nine benchmarks at one-tenth self-consistency cost.

Researchers propose XConf, an experiential confidence estimator that augments current inference with a stored record of the model's graded past episodes, including reflections, stated confidence, outcomes, and lessons. A Recall stage retrieves episodes from similar tasks with similar stated confidence and reads off historical success rates, while a Reflect stage prompts the model to name recurring failure modes and restate confidence. Across nine benchmarks in reasoning, coding, multimodal QA, and interactive agents, and four models from three families, XConf beats or matches ten-sample self-consistency in AUROC on 23 of 24 comparisons with much lower ECE, at a tenth of the generation cost. For selective prediction, abstaining on the 10% least-confident episodes raises delivered success rate by up to 8.7 points on agent tasks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Before You Poll with LLMs: A Deliberative Diagnostic Framework

Deliberative diagnostic shows all five tested frontier LLMs misrepresent human belief shifts after arguments, with GPT-5.1 reversing on outgroup questions.

The Deliberative Polling Diagnostic Framework compares human and LLM persona belief shifts after identical informational interventions, using data from America in One Room (526 personas, 72 questions). All five frontier models tested failed uniquely: GPT-5.1 exhibited partisan reversal (80% on outgroup vs 26% on policy questions), Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Llama 3.3 70B overshot at 5-7x human magnitude, and DeepSeek V3 showed near-zero change (rigidity). The authors term the underlying signature 'self-sycophancy', conformity to the model's internal persona stereotype rather than reasoning from provided information.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research