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On the Regularization Landscape for the Linear Recommendation Models

Study shows leading linear recommendation models reduce to nuclear-norm or Frobenius-norm regularization, with two new closed-form low-rank solutions proposed.

The paper unifies top-performing linear recommendation algorithms under a single regularization framework, showing they effectively apply either nuclear-norm or Frobenius-norm regularizers. Nuclear-norm solutions have a rigid structure, are low-rank, and have closed form, while Frobenius-norm solutions are more expressive but full-rank or require hard-to-tune procedures such as ADMM. The authors derive two new low-rank, closed-form solutions that combine the advantages of both regularization families.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

Quantum Feature Engineering for Credit Default Prediction: When and Why IQP Circuits Help Linear Classifiers

Quantum IQP circuit features lift logistic-regression credit-default F1 from 0.462 to 0.517, beating Kernel PCA at an equal feature budget.

Using the UCI Default of Credit Card Clients dataset and five-fold cross-validation, an 8-qubit IQP circuit adds 16 features that raise Logistic Regression F1 from 0.462 to 0.517 (+0.055, p < 0.0001). Kernel PCA, the best classical non-linear alternative, reaches only 0.493 at the same feature count, with the gap surviving Benjamini-Hochberg correction across 12 tests (p = 0.00007). Only the linear classifier benefits, pointing to a linear-expressivity mechanism. Feature selection matters: Random Forest importance-guided selection reaches F1 = 0.523 while maximally uncorrelated features drop to 0.496.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine

A developer reverse-engineers Apple's M1 Neural Engine architecture, mapping compute cores, MAC datapaths, and schedulers to explain the NPU's decline as transformers displaced CNN workloads.

A developer who previously maintained a reverse-engineered Linux driver for Apple's Neural Engine (ANE) published a retrospective deep dive mapping the M1 ANE's full internal architecture: compute, datapath, scheduler, memory, and execution model. The M1 ANE has 16 compute cores with 128 FP16 (or 256 INT8) MAC lanes each, totaling 2048 parallel MAC lanes, using 32-bit Q16.16 fixed-point accumulation with FP16 readout and an accumulator that saturates at 2^15. The author argues the ANE's dataflow was architected around the predictable reuse patterns of 2017-era CNN workloads (dating to the A11 Bionic), which autoregressive transformer decode broke, limiting its usefulness for general ML. With Apple's M5 folding ANE cores into GPU cores to tout LLM performance, the post frames this as the beginning of the end for the standalone NPU.

Kalman Delta Networks: Uncertainty-aware Associative Memory

Kalman Delta Networks add uncertainty tracking to linear-attention associative memory, improving perplexity and downstream accuracy at 750M and 1.3B scales.

Kalman Delta Networks reformulate recurrent associative memory in linear-attention models as a linear-Gaussian state-space model, allowing the Kalman gain to weight each residual write by accumulated evidence and observation reliability; Delta-rule updates emerge as a special case lacking covariance tracking. Two scan-compatible approximations, Diagonal KDN (online mean-field variational inference) and Isotropic KDN (one uncertainty scalar per head), produce Mobius-map uncertainty recurrences enabling associative scans with logarithmic parallel depth. Controlled pretraining at 750M and 1.3B parameters consistently improves perplexity and mean downstream accuracy over state-of-the-art linear-attention models.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1

Kalman Delta Networks: Uncertainty-aware Associative Memory

Researchers propose Kalman Delta Networks, adding Kalman-filter uncertainty tracking to delta-rule linear attention, improving perplexity and accuracy at 750M and 1.3B parameters.

The paper introduces Kalman Delta Networks (KDNs), which reformulate recurrent associative memory in linear-attention models as a linear-Gaussian state-space model where the Kalman gain weights each write by accumulated evidence and observation reliability. Two scan-compatible approximations, Diagonal KDN via online mean-field variational inference and Isotropic KDN with a single uncertainty scalar per head, enable associative scans with logarithmic parallel depth. Delta-rule updates are shown to be a special case of this formulation. KDN variants consistently improve perplexity and mean downstream accuracy over state-of-the-art linear-attention baselines in controlled pretraining at 750M and 1.3B parameters.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Shuffling is Not Enough: Breaking Permutation-Based Model Confidentiality in Hybrid FHE Inference

Attack breaks permutation-based model confidentiality in hybrid FHE inference, recovering all ResNet-20 linear layers exactly with d+1 queries per layer.

The paper shows output-permutation plus noise fails to protect model confidentiality in hybrid FHE inference: d+1 admissible queries recover an exact permutation-invariant summary of a d-input linear layer, and shuffle-model DP amplification premises cannot hold under correctness-bounded noise. The authors recovered all linear layers of a Safhire-style ResNet-20 end-to-end from TFHE transcripts with zero error, using 5,712 total queries. Exact per-layer recovery was also confirmed on pretrained ImageNet-scale CNNs and ViT-B/16. Leaked layer spectra enable model fingerprinting, lineage attribution, and improved logit-based extraction, while suppressing them destroys inference utility.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998 – Hugo Vergnes

Independent developer Hugo Vergnes trained a 3.8B-parameter Llama-style model to 0.384 CORE on 65B tokens for $998 in 43 hours on rented B200s.

Hugo Vergnes trained little-lm, a 3.848B-parameter decoder-only LLM, on 65.3B tokens in 43 hours for $998 using rented NVIDIA B200s, scoring 0.384 on the CORE benchmark and beating nanochat d32 (0.310) at similar cost. The Llama-style architecture uses RMSNorm, RoPE, GQA with 24 query and 8 KV heads, relu-squared MLPs, QK-norm, and ResFormer-style value embeddings that account for 19% of parameters. Key wins included the Muon optimizer for matrix parameters, a trapezoidal learning-rate schedule with linear cooldown, FP8 training plus vocabulary padding for roughly 33% throughput gains, and the ClimMix dataset over FineWeb-Edu. The project, inspired by Karpathy's nanochat, was built as a config-driven YAML framework for small LLM training.

Proximity Gaps for Gabidulin Codes and Applications

Researchers prove proximity-gap bounds for rank-metric and Gabidulin codes, enabling the first polynomial commitment scheme framework based on rank-metric error-correcting codes.

The paper proves every linear rank-metric code admits a proximity gap for deltas up to (d-1)/(3n) with error at most q^(e+1)/q^m, and improves the gap to (d-1)/(2n) for Gabidulin codes with error at most 10q^(n-1)/q^m, matching bounds for Reed-Solomon codes. A constructed infinite family of constant-rate Gabidulin codes shows the (d-1)/(2n) bound is tight, and a counterexample establishes a lower bound on the error at the d/(3n) gap. Applications include an IOPP for interleaved Gabidulin codes adapted from the Ligero IOPP and a q-linearized polynomial commitment scheme adapted from Ligero-based PCS, reportedly the first PCS framework based on rank-metric codes.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

OpenVDN/vdn-minimax-h3 — new model trending #12 on Hugging Face

OpenVDN releases VDN-H3, an open hybrid-attention video model on MiniMax H3 that renders a 14.4-second 768p clip in 11.23 seconds on 8 B200 GPUs.

VDN-Minimax-H3 (VDN-H3) adds a frame-wise linear attention branch plus two LoRA adapters to MiniMax H3, distilled into 8-step and 50-step variants. It generates 768p, 14.4-second clips in 11.23 seconds on 8 B200 GPUs (90.5 seconds on one H200) using 8 denoising steps. Weights (about 82 GB total, including the 72 GB H3 base), the optimized inference stack, and training code are fully open-source under the MiniMax H3 Community License, which excludes the EU, UK, Korea, and US.

Hugging Face trending models · 14d agoModel release1

Quantile-based Loss Filtering for Outlier-Robust Stochastic Gradient Descent

Quantile-k-Loss SGD filters corrupted component losses by quantile sampling, proving linear convergence while outperforming standard and min-k-loss SGD.

The paper proposes Quantile-k-Loss SGD (Q(k)L-SGD), a loss-filtering framework for finite-sum optimization with corrupted components that samples k losses per iteration and updates using an index from the lower empirical q-quantile. The authors prove linear convergence under standard convexity, requiring sample size to scale with the number of corruptions, plus a complementary small-sample probabilistic analysis. Experiments on polynomial regression, regularized logistic regression, and hinge loss show intermediate quantiles often outperform both standard SGD and min-k-loss SGD.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

[AINews] NVIDIA buys HuggingFace for $13B, as OpenAI publishes their HF incident retro

Z.ai released open-weight GLM-5.3-Flash (320B/18B active, 1M context, MIT) while Nvidia confirmed buying Hugging Face for $13B.

Z.ai formally launched GLM-5.3-Flash, the model previously previewed as Ox Alpha: 320B total parameters with 18B active, a 1M-token context window, natively multimodal, MIT-licensed, and claimed on par with Claude Opus 4.8 on coding. Artificial Analysis scored it 57 on its Intelligence Index at $0.09 per task, roughly 7.5x cheaper than GLM-5.3, and it scored 84.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Nvidia's $13B acquisition of Hugging Face (~80x its $150M ARR) was confirmed, nearly double its initial $7B January offer. The roundup also notes Qwen shipping an impressive Flash model on Chinese chips as part of a broader open-model narrative.

Latent Space · 20d agoModel release1

Large Language Models Develop Belief State Geometry In-Context

Probing six open-source LLMs on HMM-generated data shows belief states are linearly decodable (R² 0.83–0.99), suggesting in-context learning approximates Bayesian prediction.

Researchers prompted six open-source LLMs with data from 40 hidden Markov models selected for non-trivial belief structure and probed residual-stream activations for belief states (posteriors over hidden states). Belief states were linearly decodable with peak R² values of 0.83–0.99 across HMM/LLM combinations, spanning early to late layers. Patching and steering the probe-identified subspace preserved downstream prediction quality while control interventions degraded performance substantially, establishing functional relevance. The results provide representation-level evidence that in-context learning approximates optimal Bayesian prediction over a context-inferred generative model.

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

Sakana AI Researchers Introduce PC-ALM, a Layer-Local Alternative to Backpropagation That Trains 1000-Layer Networks

Sakana AI's PC-ALM adds per-layer Lagrange multipliers to predictive coding, matching backprop on networks up to 1000 layers with layer-local updates.

Sakana AI researchers propose Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding (PC-ALM), a training method that keeps every update layer-local while recovering backprop-aligned credit signals. The team proves multipliers converge to exact backprop adjoints in linear networks and trains 1000-layer residual MLPs on MNIST within about 2 points of backprop accuracy. PC-ALM matched backprop across a width/depth grid from 8 to 128 on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST where standard predictive coding failed in deep, narrow networks, and improved over PC on ResNet-18 with CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet. An MIT-licensed JAX reference implementation reproduces the results on CPU.

MarkTechPost · 1d 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).

An Open-Source End-to-End FHE Implementation for Privacy-Preserving Llama 3 8B Inference

Odin runs Llama-3-8B fully homomorphic encrypted inference on a single H100 in 366 seconds, a 4.51x speedup over THOR.

Odin is an open-source end-to-end GPU CKKS implementation for privacy-preserving Llama-3-8B inference that co-designs ciphertext packing with model execution. A feature-major cross-layer layout unifies residual connections and layer interfaces, while transient intra-operator layouts serve linear projections and attention, avoiding intermediate repacking of QK^T softmax outputs. Minimax polynomial approximation with input-range control reduces polynomial degree and multiplicative depth for nonlinear ops. With 128-token input, Odin evaluates all 32 Transformer layers on one NVIDIA H100 80 GB in 366.4 s using 58.9 GiB peak memory, versus 1651.9 s for the THOR baseline, a 4.51x speedup.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra

Cognition released SWE-2, a coding model post-trained from Kimi K3 that scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, near Fable 5.1 at 64% lower cost.

Cognition introduced SWE-2, its most advanced coding model, post-trained from the 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 base model. It achieves 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, 73.0% on DeepSWE 1.1, and 92.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, beating Grok 4.6 and SWE-1.7 while matching Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol at a fraction of the price. The company says it scaled reinforcement learning to the multi-trillion-parameter regime for the first time, using Pareto-informed cost penalties that train all reasoning-effort levels in a single run, tripled RL environments, and NVFP4/FP8 quantization-aware training. SWE-2 is available today in Devin Desktop and CLI, with rollout on Devin Web and Fusion.

Hacker News · AIupdated · 5h agofirst · 6d agoModel release 11 sourcesHN 58↑ · 15 comments1

Canonical Color as a Lens into Concept Decodability in Vision Encoders and VLMs

Probing study shows vision encoders make canonical color linearly decodable from grayscale images and tie it to object identity.

Researchers use canonical color as a controlled testbed for measuring conceptual (not just visible) information in vision encoder representations. A dataset of objects with canonical colors was built, and probes on both color and grayscale images show canonical color remains decodable even when color is removed from the input, linked to predicted object identity. Extending to full VLMs, they find post-training has a surprisingly large effect on color decodability in the vision encoder.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research1

Grouped Value Attention: Efficient KV Caching via On-Demand Key Reconstruction

Grouped Value Attention stores grouped values and reconstructs content keys via a learned linear map, cutting KV-cache size about 45-47% versus GQA.

GVA stores only grouped values and reconstructs content keys with a learned linear map absorbed into the query at decode time, while a small shared decoupled RoPE channel preserves positional information via a separately cached positional key. At 350M parameters trained on 30B FineWeb-Edu tokens, the 16-dimensional positional variant scores 44.18 average accuracy across five tasks versus 44.36 for GQA and 43.88 for MLA. Custom decoding kernels are in development with an open-source release planned.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Machine Unlearning as Private Retroactive Algorithms

A cs.CR paper defines private retroactive algorithms, showing machine unlearning is a data-maintenance problem and giving DP constructions for linear statistics, clustering, histograms.

The paper argues that machine unlearning's requirement to emulate retraining from scratch carries no meaningful privacy semantics against adversaries observing sequences of releases, recasting it as a data-maintenance question addressed by retroactive algorithms. It defines private retroactive algorithms, combining retroactivity with differential privacy under continual observation. Constructions achieve privacy and retroactivity at no asymptotic cost over privacy alone for linear statistics, clustering, and histograms, alongside impossibility results.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

Viggle/Viggle-Animate — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

Viggle released Viggle-Animate, a 33.1B MiniMax-H3 finetune replacing video characters from one repainted frame, rendering 124 frames in 26 seconds on one GPU.

Viggle-Animate replaces the character in a video using only a driving video and one of its own repainted frames, with no pose estimator, segmentation mask, face tracker, or text encoder. It is a 33.1B full finetune of MiniMax-H3's ref2va transformer, jointly distilled with DMD across two teachers split by noise level, so rendering takes three forward passes per clip. On a B200 GPU it renders 124 frames in 26 seconds, 6.1x faster per clip than Wan2.2-Animate-14B in matched comparisons. The method assumes no person-specific representation, so it generalizes beyond humans; a demo, research write-up, and ComfyUI nodes are available.

Hugging Face trending models · 15d agoModel release

Recognition-Refusal Misalignment in LLMs: Why Models Answer Structurally Unanswerable Questions

A linear hidden-state direction encodes question impossibility in 1.7B-70B LLMs, but misalignment with the safety-refusal pathway explains why models answer unanswerable questions.

The study examines why instruction-tuned LLMs from 1.7B to 70B parameters answer structurally unanswerable math and code questions instead of abstaining. A single linear direction in the hidden state separates answerable from impossible prompts, showing models represent impossibility before generation, but this direction is nearly orthogonal to the canonical safety-refusal direction. Generation-time steering along the recognition direction changes invalidity-aware behavior dose-responsively, and the geometry is present even at the pretraining endpoint, indicating a routing failure rather than an encoding failure.

Hugging Face daily papers · 18d agoAI safety & security

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 · 13h agoModel release

GAUGE: A Formal Framework for Measuring Cryptographic Security under Heterogeneous Adversary Cost Models

GAUGE frames cryptographic security as profiles over adversary cost models, certifying a ranking reversal between ML-KEM-512 and AES-128 from a 4–5% memory pricing shift.

GAUGE represents cryptographic security as a function over admissible adversary cost models (a security profile), proves profiles are piecewise-linear and concave, and establishes a rating trilemma when two profiles cross. A polynomial-time linear-programming procedure certifies whether the ranking of two schemes is robust, reverses under admissible models, or is genuinely incomparable. Applied to NIST post-quantum standards, the framework certifies a ML-KEM-512 versus AES-128 ranking reversal from a 4–5% shift in memory pricing and measures lattice-sieving cost drift of 9.79 bits per year over eight years. A hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 handshake reduces combined-break probability twenty-fold at a 2.3 kilobyte cost.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Task-Directed Residual AddUNet:Perfect-Reconstruction Routing for Full-Rate Representations

Paper recasts additive U-Net skip structure as a perfect-reconstruction filter bank and adds full-rate residual routing for task-directed representations.

The work proves a constrained additive U-Net's survivor-skip structure is exactly equivalent to a critically sampled perfect-reconstruction filter bank, and removes complementary-subband restrictions via a full-rate formulation. A Residual Full-Rate PR architecture routes task-irrelevant or redundant structure away from the task pathway while guaranteeing exact reconstruction without invertible operators, a matched synthesis bank, or a learned decoder. On TIMIT, the front-end improves test PER from 28.60±2.09% to 25.76±0.41% with recognizer and training held fixed.

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

Implementation of Machine Learning Workflows with NVIDIA cuML, RAPIDS, GPU Benchmarking, Explainability, Clustering, and Model Inference

Hands-on tutorial implements NVIDIA cuML and RAPIDS to GPU-accelerate scikit-learn-style ML workflows with benchmarking, clustering, and inference.

The tutorial demonstrates NVIDIA cuML as a GPU-accelerated machine learning framework, using cuml.accel to speed up unmodified scikit-learn scripts with zero code changes and the native cuML API for CuPy/cuDF interoperability. It benchmarks CPU versus GPU implementations of PCA, K-Means, nearest-neighbor search, logistic regression, random forests, and DBSCAN on datasets up to 200,000 samples with 64 features. It also builds GPU pipelines with UMAP, t-SNE, and HDBSCAN, validates GPU-generated SHAP explanations, uses the FIL library for forest inference, and covers model serialization and GPU/CPU portability.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI tools & infra

Benign Loss Landscapes Can Coexist with Worst-Case Hardness

Theory paper shows tree tensor networks contain worst-case hard targets yet benign loss landscapes, with difficulty arising from degenerate saddles.

The paper studies tree tensor networks (TTNs), which generalize deep linear networks and Tucker decompositions and embed arbitrary read-once Boolean formulas. It proves that every local minimum that is minimum-norm is global for every realizable target, so bad local minima do not distinguish typical from worst-case problems. Instead, learning difficulty arises from high-order degenerate saddle points caused by rank-deficiency, illustrated via a parity function case study, linking landscape geometry to computational hardness.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

Hunting Vulnerabilities Using Frontier Models

Okta used frontier AI models GPT-5.5 Cyber and Mythos via OpenAI and Anthropic programs to scan millions of code lines for vulnerabilities.

Okta describes using frontier AI models, including GPT-5.5 Cyber Preview (TAC) and Mythos Preview, through OpenAI's Daybreak Cyber Partner Program and Anthropic's Project Glasswing to hunt vulnerabilities across its product codebase. The team built a custom Python orchestrator with strong isolation, vendor-agnostic model support, and four distinct scanning pipelines executed as isolated Codex or Claude Code sessions with progressive context loading to reduce context bloat. Human experts and AI agents worked both autonomously and in paired hunts, and Okta reports the best results when humans and agents taught each other.

Okta Security · 8d agoResearch

The Price of Sparsity: Sufficient Conditions for Sparse Recovery using Sparse and Sparsified Measurements

Researchers derive sufficient sample-size conditions for recovering sparse binary signals from sparse Gaussian measurements, quantifying an information-theoretic threshold of order slog(p/s)/log(ds/p).

The paper studies support recovery of sparse binary signals from noisy linear measurements. For sparse Gaussian designs, the authors identify sufficient minimal sample sizes for maximum-likelihood recovery in the high-SNR regime d*s/p -> infinity, yielding an information-theoretic threshold of order slog(p/s)/log(ds/p) that makes the price of measurement sparsity explicit. They also show a regime where the sample-complexity loss from sparsity is only logarithmic while computational gains are nearly linear, and prove that for independently sparsified dense Gaussian designs a sample size of order p/ψ² suffices for support recovery at any fixed error level.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Optimal Rates for Agentic Networked Information Aggregation

Researchers close the Kearns–Roth–Ryu gap for agentic networked information aggregation, proving excess error is constant up to depth M^2 then Θ(M^2/D).

The paper studies a networked learning model where agents in a DAG each see only a subset of features and pass only their predictions forward. It sharpens the earlier lower bound to Ω(√(M/D)) for depth below M^2 and constructs M-covered paths of depth D ≥ M^2 achieving Ω(M^2/D) excess error, establishing the correct rate for both regression and logistic classification. It also shows excess error contracts geometrically along the path for any fixed distribution, ruling out a single instance that witnesses polynomial lower bounds at every depth.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye

METR analysis finds AI accelerating cyber vulnerability discovery, while SPADE self-play environment generation improves Qwen3 reasoning benchmark scores at 30B scale.

Import AI 470 discusses a METR research note reporting differential acceleration from AI: major acceleration in reported cyber vulnerabilities (cURL, OpenSSL, Firefox, Microsoft, NVD, OSV), minor acceleration in mathematics, and no measurable acceleration in AI-research optimization benchmarks. It also covers SPADE, a self-play framework from a multi-university team (University of Washington, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and others) that co-evolves executable training environments and agent capability using Environment Designer and Reasoning Agent roles with hint-based regret rewards. Trained on Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, Qwen3-8B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 via GRPO (400 rollouts of 25 environments), SPADE lifted the 30B-A3B game-environment suite average to 58.3, +8.1 over base, and improved tool-use results across backbones. The issue also references Hawkeye for building better GPU kernels.

Import AI · 23d agoAI research

NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Delivers Leading Performance in MLPerf Inference v6.1 Debut

NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 debuts in MLPerf Inference v6.1 with up to 3.7x higher throughput than GB300 NVL72 and 99% scaling efficiency at 288 GPUs.

In its first MLPerf Inference preview submission, NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 achieved up to 3.7x higher throughput than GB300 NVL72 on Qwen3-VL and 2.5x on DeepSeek-R1. A 288-GPU GB300 NVL72 submission across four racks reached 99% scaling efficiency on the DeepSeek-R1 offline benchmark. Software optimizations delivered up to 1.6x gains over v6.0, leveraging TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, Dynamo, disaggregated serving, and NVFP4 precision.

Agent Harness vs Agent Framework vs MCP: Which Layer Owns the Loop, State, Tools, Permissions, and Recovery

Architecture explainer separates agent harnesses, frameworks, and MCP by which layer owns the loop, state, permissions, and recovery.

The article distinguishes agent harnesses (OpenAI Codex, Claude Agent SDK), which own the execution loop, sandbox, permission model, and recovery; frameworks (LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Microsoft Agent Framework), which supply composable primitives; and MCP, a stateless JSON-RPC wire protocol governed by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation since December 2025. An ownership matrix maps the execution loop, state, tool transport, permissions, recovery, sandboxing, and multi-agent orchestration to each layer. The 2026-07-28 MCP specification made the protocol fully stateless, retiring the initialize handshake and session headers.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoAI research1

When Agents Slow Down: Understanding LLM Agents' Test-Time Strategies via Elo-per-token Analysis

Elo-per-token analysis shows LLM agents' marginal gains drop below independent sampling at scale; parallel sessions beat one long session.

The paper proposes Elo-per-token analysis, using a Bradley-Terry model to measure how agent performance scales with token budget on open-ended tasks with continuous scoring. Across four agents and four benchmarks with sessions up to 100M tokens, agents initially convert tokens to Elo faster than independent sampling but eventually slow below the linear-in-log-compute reference. The authors define a scaling inflection point and show that splitting 100M tokens across parallel sessions on FrontierCS Polyomino Packing gains +264 Elo over one long session and +355 over ten short sessions. Human contestants on shared AtCoder Heuristic Contest tasks improve superlinearly, indicating headroom over current agents.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research3· 2 reads

Decoy Direction Optimization: A Post-Hoc Defense Against LLM Abliteration

Researchers introduce Decoy Direction Optimization, a cheap weight-editing defense that blinds refusal-direction ablation attacks against open-weight LLM safety guardrails.

Refusal Feature Ablation bypasses safety guardrails in open-weight LLMs by projecting out a linear refusal direction, often with high attack success rates. Decoy Direction Optimization injects a high-magnitude nonlinear decoy into MLP neurons so attackers' contrastive estimators ablate a harmless orthogonal feature instead. Evaluated across six model families, DDO keeps ASR below 10% under standard RFA and on Llama-3-8B-Instruct reduces Heretic weight-level attack ASR from 88.7% to 18%. It costs 30 to 450 times less per configuration than trained defense baselines.

Cognition Releases SWE-2: A Kimi K3 Post-Trained Coding Model That Matches Fable 5.1 on FrontierCode at 64% Lower Cost

Cognition released SWE-2, an RL post-trained coding model from Kimi K3, scoring 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main and available only inside Devin.

Cognition released SWE-2, its most capable coding model, post-trained with reinforcement learning from Moonshot AI's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 base. It scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, within 1 point of Fable 5.1 at 64% lower cost, and RL reportedly adds 5-6 points over the K3 base on many benchmarks. It is the first Cognition model with selectable reasoning-effort levels all trained in a single RL run using Pareto-slope-matched cost penalties. There are no open weights and no standalone API; it runs only inside Devin (Desktop, CLI, with Web and Fusion rolling out), free for paid tiers through October 10, 2026.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoModel release1

Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases

Real-SWE benchmark tests coding agents on licensed private enterprise codebases; top model Fable 5.1 resolves only 38.8% of tasks.

Real-SWE is a new benchmark evaluating frontier AI coding agents on tasks drawn from private production codebases licensed from real companies, spanning billing, tax calculation, and cross-service migrations. Fable 5.1 with Claude Code leads at 38.8% resolution rate (pass@1 over eight runs), followed by GPT-6 Astra Codex CLI at 33.8% and Gemini 3.8 Flash Gemini CLI at 31.2%. Tasks use native harnesses and realistic tooling including Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Linear; median reference solutions edit 11 files versus 6 for DeepSWE and FrontierCode.

[AINews] DeepSeek v4.1-Flash: 763B-P8B-D16B novel causal Encoder–Decoder architecture with vision marks the Return of the Whale

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash, an open-weight 763B-parameter model with a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture, 1M context, vision input, and MIT license.

DeepSeek launched V4.1-Flash, an open-weight MIT-licensed model using a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture with 763B total parameters and asymmetric active parameters: 8B for prefill and 16B for decode. It supports 1M-token context and text+image input, priced at $0.30 per 1M input and $1.20 per 1M output tokens with a 50% off-peak discount. Artificial Analysis scored it 40 on its Intelligence Index, above DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, and Vals ranked it the #1 open-weight model ahead of Kimi K3. Baseten shipped day-0 support and Ollama began rolling it out to paid subscribers.

Latent Space · 4d agoModel release 7 sources1

Rethinking Heterogeneous System Disaggregation for Subquadratic Attention

SQD disaggregates LLM inference by quadratic versus subquadratic attention layers, improving energy efficiency up to 56% on heterogeneous systems versus GPU-only baselines.

SQD (SubQuadratic Disaggregation) splits decode not by operator type but by quadratic versus subquadratic attention, matching their distinct arithmetic intensity and memory footprints. For sparse attention LLMs it separates top-k selection (requiring full KV indexing) from top-k attention plus FFN; for linear and sliding-window models it separates dense attention layers from subquadratic layers plus FFN. On an adjusted 8xB200 heterogeneous proxy, tokens-per-joule improves 53% on GLM 5.2, 31% on Nemotron 3 Ultra, and 56% on Gemma 4 31B. A Rubin plus LPX analytical model shows 1.2x-1.5x tighter achievable latencies and up to 3.6x higher throughput versus attention-FFN disaggregation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark

MAxBench evaluates multinomial concept recovery methods, finding affine subspaces steer most reliably but none consistently beats prompting.

MAxBench is a geometry-agnostic evaluation framework for multinomial concept representations in language models, based on sampling from recovered concept representations. It compares 10 localization methods covering 5 geometry types across 6 concepts and 4 models. Findings show affine subspaces steer more reliably than rank-one or linear subspaces due to better non-zero offsets, manifold steering is competitive where applicable, and no method consistently outperforms prompting.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

DynSHAP: Towards Explainable Dynamic Survival Analysis

DynSHAP extends SHAP explainability to dynamic survival analysis, treating time-feature pairs as Shapley players for longitudinal clinical predictions.

DynSHAP adapts marginal SHAP estimators to dynamic survival analysis by treating time-feature pairs as players in the Shapley game, handling longitudinal irregular inputs and functional survival outputs. Temporal DynSHAP learns linear feature dependencies over time and addresses them with conditional sampling. On synthetic data with ground-truth attributions it recovers temporally dependent features more accurately than marginal estimators, and it produces faithful attributions on two real-world clinical datasets across two DSA architectures.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research