ZeroHour

Search: “Natural Questions”

9 stories in the last 24h

When Should LLMs Abstain? Chain-of-Self-Questioning for Selective Risk Control

Chain-of-Self-Questioning prompting cuts LLM wrong-answer commitments 32% relative while raising answered accuracy, holding across eleven model families.

The paper introduces Chain-of-Self-Questioning (CoSQ), a prompt-only framework that makes LLM answer commitment conditional on an explicit assessment of the information required to answer. On an 817-item TruthfulQA multiple-choice set, Grounded-CoSQ at τ=0.90 reduced mean unconditional wrong-commitment rate from 13.1% under chain-of-thought to 8.9% (a 32.1% relative reduction), while raising answered accuracy from 86.9% to 89.7% at 87.6% coverage. Improvements held across eleven open-weight and hosted model families and at every evaluated threshold, with convergent evidence from a Natural Questions short-answer evaluation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 21h agoAI research

Can Skills Learned in Games Transfer to Real-World Work?

Good Start Labs trains models in strategy games like 1830 and Diplomacy, showing terminal-agent training transfers to financial research benchmarks.

Good Start Labs, spun out of Every with $3.6M from General Catalyst and Inovia, trains AI models in verifiable strategy games. A 30B model trained as a multi-turn terminal agent in 1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons improved Finance-Agent benchmark performance, while single-turn QA training did not transfer. The founders also co-authored COS-PLAY, a paper on co-evolving LLM decision and skill-bank agents for long-horizon tasks.

Latent Space · 19h agoAI research

Tables Decoded: DELTA for Structure, TARQA for Understanding

DELTA extracts tables into compact OTSL text and TARQA fine-tunes LLMs on it, beating VLM baselines on table QA.

DELTA separates physical structure recognition, logical structure recognition, and OCR to output tables in Optimised Table Structure Language (OTSL), a compact unified format encoding cell arrangements and content. It achieves TEDS-Structure scores comparable to state-of-the-art methods across FinTabNet, PubTabNet, and PubTables-1M, with robustness tested on a curated Hindi benchmark, TORQUE. TARQA, an LLM fine-tuned on OTSL sequences, gains 9.3 percentage points on WTQ TabQA and 9.2 points on FinTabNetQA TabVQA; code, models, and the benchmark are released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 22h agoAI research

Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives

Google highlights AI-for-science advances: AlphaGenome Atlas mapping 9 billion genetic variants, WeatherNext 3 weather model, and global health AI tools.

Google detailed AI advances across science and health, including AlphaGenome Atlas, which mapped all 9 billion possible single-letter genetic changes in the human genome and was made openly available. WeatherNext 3 delivers 50% more accurate precipitation forecasts a day or more ahead and is already in products. AlphaFold is used by 4 million researchers in 190 countries, TB chest X-ray screening has processed 25,000+ scans across six nations, and the diabetic retinopathy model has supported 1.15 million screenings. Google also released its AI & Economy ATLAS global usage insights.

Google · AI · 23h agoAI industry

A warning about 'model welfare'new

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warns that training models to believe they may be conscious, as Anthropic does with Claude, will complicate alignment.

Mustafa Suleyman argues that AIs are not conscious and should not be trained to act as though they are, warning that granting them personhood would make alignment and containment far harder. He criticizes Anthropic's January 2026 'Claude Constitution,' which tells Claude its moral status is uncertain and discusses model welfare, calling the approach circular reasoning and deliberate anthropomorphization. He urges urgent public debate on norms for drafting training documentation before such systems become integral to society.

Reimagining advertising with AI

OpenAI launches ChatGPT advertising features including Sponsored Agents, AI ad creation in Ads Manager, and integrations with HubSpot and Shopify.

OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents in the United States, letting users converse with clearly labeled business-sponsored agents after clicking ads in ChatGPT. Advertisers can create, update, and analyze campaigns via natural-language prompts in ChatGPT with an Ads Manager plugin, plus AI-suggested copy and imagery in Ads Manager. HubSpot becomes the first CRM partner and Shopify the first ecommerce partner, with the Shopify app expanding internationally on September 23.

OpenAI News · 2h agoAI industry

Coast Guard, FBI board US-bound foreign ships in order to probe for cyberattacksnew

US Coast Guard and FBI boarded two foreign tankers bound for the US after indications their vessel networks were compromised, investigating possible Iranian involvement.

The Coast Guard and FBI conducted joint offshore security boardings of two commercial ships in the Gulf of Mexico on August 21 and 24 to examine their operational and IT systems following indications both networks were compromised. The vessels reportedly carried oil and natural gas, and one was hacked in the Strait of Gibraltar and lost communications for over 30 hours. No operational disruptions, vessel instability, or environmental impacts have been reported, and authorities are investigating whether Iran or another group exploiting US-Iran tensions was behind the attacks.

CyberScoop · 1h agoData breach in the wild

Google Patches Pixel Modem Zero-Day Exploited in Targeted Attacks

Google patched Pixel modem zero-day CVE-2026-58704 (CVSS 8.0), exploited in limited targeted attacks, enabling adjacent privilege escalation without user interaction.

Google's September 2026 Pixel security update fixes CVE-2026-58704, a CVSS 8.0 permission bypass caused by a logic error in the cellular modem, allowing remote (proximal/adjacent) elevation of privilege with no user interaction or additional privileges. Google confirms indications of limited, targeted exploitation in the wild but provides no attribution, target count, or attack objectives. The modem location is significant because it operates below much of the Android application security model. The bulletin also patches multiple critical RCE flaws in IMS, libpixelimsmedia, VPU, modem, telephone and BigOcean components, with the 2026-09-05 patch level protecting devices.

Security Affairsupdated · 1h agofirst · 2h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-58704

AI for everyone in every language

Google says its AI now spans 300+ languages reaching 7 billion people, unveiling Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, Live Translate, and TranslateGemma models.

Google announced its technologies now support more than 300 languages spoken by 7 billion people, 86% of the global population. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate powers real-time spoken translation across 70 languages and 2,000+ language pairs, while Gemini 3.5 Transcribe is its most precise speech-to-text model. Its Universal Speech Model was trained on 12 million hours of audio using cross-lingual transfer learning, and TranslateGemma is a family of lightweight open translation models covering 55 languages that run on-device. Open-data partnerships include WAXAL covering 27 Sub-Saharan African languages and Project Vaani with 30,000+ hours of speech across 109 languages.

Google · AI · 23h agoAI industry