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17 stories in the last 30d

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

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

Understanding the Privacy-Preserving Potential of HTTP/2 Against Webpage Fingerprinting

Researchers show HTTP/2 features can emulate website fingerprinting defenses like FRONT and Tamaraw with tunable privacy-overhead trade-offs.

An arXiv paper demonstrates that application-layer defenses such as HTTPOS, LLaMA, FRONT, ALPaCA, and Tamaraw can be emulated through HTTP/2 features at both the client and server side, including proactive resource suggestion, multiplexing, and flow control. The authors propose a unified evaluation blueprint that calibrates defense parameters per dataset, combines practical attacks with information-theoretic leakage estimators, and measures overheads to map each defense's privacy-overhead trade-offs.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

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 · 10d agoAI research

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

What Does an LLM-Agent Leaderboard Rank Actually Compare?

A methodological study shows close LLM-agent leaderboard rank gaps on SWE-bench and similar benchmarks often do not support superiority claims.

The paper defines an estimand-aware pairwise procedure for comparing agents, checking common support and applying explicit uncertainty rules and practical margins. Across SWE-bench, AgentRewardBench, and tau2-bench, close rank differences are frequently unresolved, and proxy labels or utility rules can change which system is selected. The authors argue a leaderboard score summarizes a released evaluation but does not by itself justify pairwise superiority conclusions.

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

Google's new AI model predicts the future from sales data, weather, and discount schedules

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330M-parameter multivariate time series forecasting model that tops Gift-Eval, FEV-Bench, and Time benchmarks and is on Hugging Face.

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330-million-parameter Transformer-based time series forecasting model trained on more than one trillion real and synthetic data points. It works zero-shot and adds multivariate support, ingesting related series, historical-only covariates, and known future events such as discount schedules and weather forecasts, while filling all future time steps in a single one-shot pass. Google reports first place among pretrained forecasting models on Gift-Eval, FEV-Bench, and Time, ahead of Amazon's Chronos-2, the Toto-2.0 family, and its own TimesFM-2.5. Weights are available on GitHub and Hugging Face, with BigQuery integration planned in the coming weeks.

The Decoder · 4d agoModel release2

Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster

TypeSafe AI launches Jev, an early-access 'System One' model delivering calibrated structured outputs claimed 40-400x faster and cheaper than LLMs.

TypeSafe AI, founded by former OpenAI researcher Diogo Almeida, released its first 'System One Model' called Jev in early access. Jev forgoes string generation and is trained with Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions (RLCD) to produce type-safe structured values with calibrated probabilities. The company claims 70-500ms response times (40-200x faster), input pricing of $0.042 per million tokens, and free output tokens via a parallel sampling architecture. Target use cases include AI-powered workflows, real-time applications, and verification/guardrail tasks.

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

TGOPD verifies teacher reliability per prompt before on-policy distillation, outperforming vanilla OPD across math, code, and instruction benchmarks.

Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD) estimates teacher reliability from verifier-scored teacher probes and routes each prompt either to dense on-policy distillation or to verifier-grounded GRPO, avoiding misleading updates from confidently wrong teachers under mode-seeking reverse KL. Across 4B and 35B students in mathematics, code, and instruction following, TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD in all six single-domain settings and achieves higher seven-benchmark averages under multi-domain training. It also raises teacher-node GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in the measured 4B single-domain run by reusing idle teacher capacity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

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

OFAC Sanctions Chinese Scam Platform Xinbi Guarantee

US Treasury's OFAC sanctioned Chinese scam-platform Xinbi Guarantee, which processed $24bn+, and froze $52.8m in linked cryptoassets.

OFAC sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language marketplace connecting Southeast Asian scam centers and transnational crime syndicates to merchants offering financial services, technology and crypto exchange. Treasury estimates over $24bn processed since 2022, while TRM Labs estimates over $36bn, with daily inflows nearly doubling between May and December 2025. Two supporting entities were also sanctioned: SafeW Technology (Singapore) and Anwen Technology (Cambodia, maker of XinbiPay). The US Secret Service and Elliptic froze $52.8m in linked cryptoassets, and the marketplace now appears offline with its Telegram channels deleted.

Infosecurity Magazine · 6d agoPolicy & legal1

U.S. Disrupts Xinbi Guarantee Scam Marketplace, Freezes $52.8 Million in Crypto

US DOJ and Treasury disrupt Xinbi Guarantee Telegram scam marketplace, sanctioning it and freezing $52.8M in USDT across 52 wallets.

The DOJ seized Xinbi Guarantee's Telegram channels and cryptocurrency wallets while OFAC sanctioned the marketplace, freezing $52.8 million in USDT from 52 wallets and bringing the Scam Center Strike Force's total restrained funds to roughly $938 million. Elliptic, which worked with the Secret Service, estimates Xinbi has processed $30 billion in transactions since around 2022, serving pig-butchering scam operators and links to North Korean hackers, Jin Bei Group, and Prince Group TCO. The strike force dismantled 13 scam compounds in Madagascar, seizing over 3,200 devices and interviewing roughly 400 arrestees, with about 30 Chinese compound leaders repatriated to China. After Tether froze funds, Xinbi began converting remaining USDT into the USDD stablecoin.

The Hacker News · 7d agoPolicy & legal

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%.

Will AI kill us all within the next decade?

Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger says he personally estimates a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

A Wall Street Journal report says concerns are rising inside AI labs that competition is pushing companies toward self-improving models that could spiral out of human control. Anthropic's Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger publicly endorsed researcher Jacob Coxon's warning, giving a personal estimate of a greater than 10% chance of AI causing human extinction within a decade, driven by recursive self-improvement. Hubinger described the risk from current models as low, focusing his concern on future systems with far greater autonomy. The piece argues for safeguards such as independent testing, limits on high-risk autonomous uses, transparency, and accountability.

Malwarebytes Labs · 6d agoAI safety & security

[AINews] GPT-6 Astra: OpenAI’s biggest LLM launch of all time

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its new flagship model, claiming state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, math, and cybersecurity capabilities.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra as its new flagship model, describing it as its most intelligent and aligned model with state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, and math/science capabilities. Pricing is $10/$50 per 1M input/output tokens standard ($20/$100 fast tier), rolling out first to limited organizations, then ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise, the API, and AWS. OpenAI claims 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and 100% on ExploitBench. Artificial Analysis scored Astra 67 on the Coding Agent Index and 61 on the Intelligence Index, behind Claude Fable 5.1, and the system card drew attention for reporting decreased chain-of-thought monitorability despite alignment gains.

Latent Space · 12d agoModel release3

Why The Vulnerability Backlog Is About To Get Worse

Recorded Future analysis says AI-driven vulnerability discovery and faster weaponization will grow the triage backlog while shrinking defenders' response windows.

Disclosed vulnerabilities rose from roughly 21,000 in 2021 to nearly 50,000 in 2025, while Recorded Future assessed only 446 as actively exploited in 2025. VulnCheck found nearly 29% of 2025 KEV entries were exploited on or before CVE publication. The authors argue AI-assisted discovery and automated exploit development will multiply credible reports, cut disclosure-to-exploit time toward minutes, and force re-evaluation of medium-severity flaws as exploit-chain components.

Recorded Future · 21d 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 · 4d agofirst · 6d agoModel release 10 sourcesHN 58↑ · 15 comments1

One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

Interconnects argues a frontier-lab researcher's safety resignation went viral via media coordination, reigniting AI existential-risk discourse.

The essay analyzes why researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation over AI safety risks went viral, aided by a Wall Street Journal exclusive, advocacy-group amplification, and Daniel Kokotajlo's same-day Joe Rogan appearance. It notes Evan Hubinger's >10% extinction-risk figure and criticizes existential-risk discourse for conflating very different meanings of the term. The author assigns near-zero probability to complete extinction but argues concrete risks such as cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and bio-risks merit debate. It also rejects recursive self-improvement forecasts, proposing 'lossy self-improvement' where models excel at math and code but remain limited elsewhere.

Interconnects · 6d agoAI safety & security