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17 stories in the last 3d

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Coding Agents Have Converged: Why the SWE-bench Leaderboard Can No Longer Order Its Top Entries, and What to Measure Instead

Audit of 254 SWE-bench submissions finds top coding-agent entries statistically inseparable, so small leaderboard gaps no longer establish rank.

The paper audits 254 SWE-bench submissions across four splits without running models. On Verified, the top two entries each resolve 396 of 500 instances, and exact paired McNemar tests separate none of the 29 adjacent top-thirty pairs at alpha=0.05. Within-model scaffold score ranges reach 29.8 percentage points, versus an 8.8-point spread among the top thirty. The authors release a five-step audit protocol and recommend reporting comparison-set-specific resolution and model-scaffold provenance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

Observational Indistinguishability and Integrity Blind Regions in Hybrid Quantum-Classical Workflows

Framework formalizes integrity blind regions in hybrid quantum-classical workflows, validated across 3,600 label interventions with conformal detection rules.

The paper presents a claim-relative evidence and reference framework for integrity of hybrid quantum-classical workflows, distinguishing structural blind regions caused by observational indistinguishability from finite-batch statistical misses. Experiments over 3,600 label interventions show exact label-path invariance for feature and prediction views. The geometry-aligned construction detects 343 of 2,700 conclusion-changing interventions using the conformal rule and 1,183 of 2,700 with the uncorrected union, with executed conformal clean false-action rates of 0.048-0.059.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

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%.

Hacker News · AI · 2d agoAI researchHN 41↑ · 23 comments

USN-8772-1: AOM vulnerabilities

Ubuntu USN-8772-1 patches four libaom flaws (CVE-2026-56208 to CVE-2026-56211) that could cause heap overflow, arbitrary memory writes, or code execution.

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-8772-1 fixes a heap buffer overflow in libaom's first-pass statistics buffer handling in Look-Ahead Processing mode (CVE-2026-56208), potentially causing denial of service or arbitrary code execution. Three additional flaws in spatial and temporal layer ID validation in the SVC encoder controls (CVE-2026-56209, CVE-2026-56210, CVE-2026-56211) allow arbitrary memory writes, out-of-bounds heap reads, or code execution. Users should apply the updated packages.

Ubuntu Security Notices · 9h agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-56208CVE-2026-56209CVE-2026-56210+1 CVEs

Nums AI Releases Causilo: A Tabular Foundation Model That Tops TabArena Among Single Models

Nums AI released Causilo, an Apache-2.0 tabular foundation model achieving the highest single-model Elo (1794) on TabArena for classification and regression.

Nums AI released Causilo 1.0.1, a pretrained in-context learning tabular foundation model for classification (up to 10 classes) and regression, with Apache-2.0 code and research-only weights on Hugging Face. It achieved the highest single-model TabArena Elo of 1792.9 overall, beating TabFM (1764.4) and EXAONE Tabular (1758.8), and a maintainer re-run placed it 3rd of 88 including system entries. It also ranked first by CRPS, R² and RMSE on ScoringBench across 101 datasets, and was fastest on fit and predict versus TabICLv2 and TabPFN-3 on an H100 GPU at 8.15 GiB memory. The model was pretrained only on synthetic data, uses cross-attention to keep cost linear in feature count, and version 1.0.1 adds quantile outputs via 999 native quantiles.

MarkTechPost · 14h agoModel release

AI labs have a data trust problem that their policies haven't solved

Nvidia, Palantir, and Booz Allen restrict Anthropic's Fable over data-retention distrust, exposing gaps in AI labs' customer data policies.

Nvidia limits Anthropic's Fable to non-sensitive work and runs its own Nemotron models for internal tasks, while Palantir blocks Fable deployment until Anthropic grants irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees, and Booz Allen bans it for proprietary cybersecurity work. John Schulman and researcher Sarah Hooker explain that labs can still extract customer IP from metadata, user traces, and synthetic data even under zero data retention. The trust crisis crystallized around Tristan Buckmaster's accusation that OpenAI's Codex absorbed his Navier-Stokes drafts, though OpenAI later stated his prompts could not have influenced its model.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

SEMA-GUARD: Semantic and Graph-Based Vulnerability Detection in Assembly Code

SEMA-GUARD uses semantic analysis and graph neural networks to detect vulnerabilities in assembly code, achieving 85.1% accuracy on a Juliet-derived benchmark.

SEMA-GUARD is a framework that detects vulnerabilities in compiled programs when source code is unavailable, targeting malware, firmware, and embedded systems analysis. It enriches control flow graphs with low-level execution semantics including stack manipulations, memory accesses, and data flow. Evaluated on a Juliet Test Suite set compiled to assembly and split into function-level chunks, it achieves 85.1% accuracy and an F1 score of 0.801, outperforming purely statistical or structural approaches.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch1

What must happen for AI’s trillion-dollar gamble to pay off

Hyperscalers need 2.7x productivity gains by 2030 to justify nearly $1.1 trillion in AI data center spending, or risk bankruptcy and capital misallocation.

Wharton finance professor Jessica Wachter estimates hyperscaler AI expenditure will reach nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027 and that a 2.7x productivity increase is needed to break even by 2030. AI revenues of roughly $150-200 billion this year fall far short of about $750 billion in annual spending, with total investment from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle potentially exceeding $5 trillion over four years. Alphabet reported its first free cash flow deficit (about $5.9 billion) since its 2004 IPO due to AI infrastructure costs. Researchers warn that failed demand could make the buildout the largest capital misallocation in history, with depreciating GPU chips risking stranded assets.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Not All Relations Are Equal: Relation-Balanced and Calibrated Graph Learning for Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection

RECAL improves provenance-based APT detection with relation-balanced masked graph learning and calibrated errors, reaching 99.99% F1 on DARPA E3 datasets.

RECAL is an unsupervised framework for provenance-based intrusion detection that uses relation-balanced masked graph learning to capture rare interaction patterns, addressing statistical heterogeneity where relation frequencies differ by roughly 140,000X in CADETS. It calibrates reconstruction errors against each relation's benign error distribution to produce comparable anomaly evidence and reduce false alarms. On three DARPA E3 datasets, RECAL achieves F1 scores of 99.99%, 99.93%, and 99.99%, outperforming the best baseline on each dataset, and reduces mean false positive rate by approximately 105X, 4X, and 41X versus the lowest-FPR baseline.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Implementing a White-Box Undetectable Backdoor for Random Fourier Features

Researchers implement Goldwasser's CLWE-based undetectable backdoor for Random Fourier Features models in numpy/scipy, confirming practical realizability with no detectable differences from clean models.

The paper provides an end-to-end implementation of the Goldwasser et al. white-box undetectable backdoor for models trained with the Random Fourier Features algorithm, using only numpy and scipy. It derives two samplers for the core GP_d(b_k) distribution: a rejection-sampling proxy and an exact closed-form sampler verified against its analytic form. Statistical indistinguishability tests covering weight-space and functional black-box comparisons found no detectable difference between backdoored and clean models across sparsity ratios. The underlying lattice hardness reduction was not reproduced, and the work demonstrates the threat is realizable with commodity scientific-computing tools rather than specialized cryptographic infrastructure.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Bridging Control, Inference, Transport, and Thermodynamics: From Theory to Applications in Learning

Review connects control theory, optimal transport, probabilistic inference, thermodynamics, and machine learning via free-energy optimization under constraints.

The review unifies five fields: control theory, optimal transport, probabilistic inference, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and machine learning. The common conceptual thread is optimization of free-energy-like functionals under dynamical or statistical constraints. Selected applications are presented in reinforcement learning, variational inference, and generative modeling. The tutorial-style text assumes no prior familiarity and begins from physics principles.

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

Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?

Amazon researchers explain why ML research agents avoid benchmark overfitting, attributing generalization to compressibility of successful strategies.

Amazon Science summarizes the paper "What fits (into few tokens) doesn't overfit: Compression and generalization in ML research agents," which investigates why benchmark hill-climbing loops, whether run by human communities or LLM research agents, do not produce rampant overfitting. The explanation formalizes Occam's razor via a counting argument: successful ML strategies are highly compressible, so short descriptions lack room to memorize benchmark data and must capture real structure. LLM-based agents, being resettable and controllable, allow this hypothesis to be tested empirically.

Hacker News · security · 2d agoAI researchHN 21↑ · 3 comments

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

Hacker News · AI · 2d agoAI industryHN 41↑ · 13 comments1

How Fyxer built an AI executive assistant people trust

Fyxer details its OpenAI-powered AI executive assistant, orchestrating 30-50 specialized models trained on 500,000+ hours of assistant workflows.

OpenAI published a case study on Fyxer, whose AI executive assistant orchestrates 30-50 specialized OpenAI models trained on more than 500,000 hours of annotated executive assistant workflows. The system uses supervised fine-tuning, LoRA, and Direct Preference Optimization on user edits, and 53% of AI-generated email drafts are accepted as written. Fyxer's annual recurring revenue grew from $1 million to $32 million during 2025.

OpenAI News · 2d agoAI industry

Who gets to define the rules for AI?

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez attacks big-lab antitrust exemption proposals as cartel behavior that lets incumbents write AI safety rules.

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez argues that proposals from large AI labs—particularly Anthropic's roadmap requesting antitrust exemptions for safety coordination—amount to a cartel letting incumbents define rules for everyone else. He draws parallels to the 1975 SEC NRSRO credit-rating designations and the EU's 1985 Motor Vehicle Block Exemption, where safety justifications produced incumbent-protecting market structures. Gomez supports independent review of highly capable AI systems but disputes who writes the standards, who conducts review, and who participates. He also warns AI cyber offense is getting cheaper faster than defenses are improving.

Hacker News · AI · 2d agoAI policyHN 41↑ · 29 comments

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

Exploration-guided prompt scaffolding rewrites training prompts by Exploration Potential Score, boosting multimodal RL post-training accuracy up to 11.5%.

The paper proposes dynamically adapting the training prompt distribution during online RL post-training of multimodal LLMs using the Exploration Potential Score (EPS), a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility computed from on-policy statistics with no additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, a teacher model generates scaffolded rewrites that preserve task intent while making training more informative. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, the method achieves up to 9.7% relative in-domain improvement plus 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Enabling Creative Exploration for Vibe Design Agents

Separating design-direction exploration from code generation via structured specifications broadens UI alternatives without destabilizing output.

The paper proposes an inference architecture for vibe design agents that makes design direction an explicit intermediate decision: a Verbalized Sampling-inspired pre-pass proposes structured design specifications with typicality scores, an external selector samples one, and a downstream generator realizes it under fixed settings. Across 168 prompts with 1,255 paired comparisons per temperature, theme sampling broadens selection coverage and screenshot variation, with LLM-judge preferences varying across interventions and prompt complexity. An online experiment with over 300,000 tasks found the code-export increase statistically uncertain, though negative feedback events decreased alongside modest operational costs.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research