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[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 Spaceupdated · 5h agofirst · 5d agoModel release 4 sources1

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 · 1h agoAI research

Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face published a tutorial on training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models using the Sentence Transformers library.

Hugging Face's blog walks through training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models with Sentence Transformers. Multi-vector approaches store multiple vectors per document to support late-interaction retrieval. The post is a practical guide for developers building retrieval pipelines with the library.

Hugging Face Blog · 22d agoAI tools & infra1

RelightFormer: Feed-forward Generative Transformer for Multiview Object Relighting

RelightFormer is a feed-forward generative transformer for photorealistic single- and multi-view object relighting, trained on a 90K-object dataset.

Researchers introduce RelightFormer, a feed-forward generative transformer adapted from a video foundation model that performs direct image relighting without explicit intrinsic property estimation. The architecture injects target environment maps via a latent illumination module with cross-attention and uses permutation-invariant positional encodings for unordered multi-view inputs. Training relies on the newly constructed Laval Objaverse Dataset (LOD) with 90K objects and 39K unique illuminations, and the model shows state-of-the-art quality with strong zero-shot generalization across single-view, multi-view, and novel-view relighting.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says disabling ranked feeds cuts engagement up to 50%, amid Australian legislation that would force platforms to offer algorithm opt-outs.

Meta's Adam Mosseri told an Australian press briefing that users switching to chronological feeds see engagement fall by as much as 50% and satisfaction drop sharply, arguing ranked feeds deliver a better experience. Australia's draft Digital Duty of Care bill would require platforms to prompt users to disable algorithmic ranking. The EU's Digital Services Act Article 38 has required very large platforms to offer a non-profiling feed option since 2023, with modest adoption. Meta also faces a social media harms trial in which Instagram's addictive design is at issue.

Evaluating Time-Series Foundation Models and Multimodal Dietary Context for CGM Forecasting

Study finds zero-shot time-series foundation models underperform on CGM forecasting; fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt cuts RMSE up to 18.4% and dietary context adds signal.

The paper evaluates time-series foundation models for continuous glucose monitoring forecasting across eight public datasets covering Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and non-diabetes populations. Under a unified protocol, zero-shot foundation models did not consistently outperform baselines like Elastic Net and PatchTST, but lightweight fine-tuning did, with fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt reducing RMSE by 6.5%-18.4% in the T1D cohort and 8.6%-18.2% in the non-diabetes/T2D cohort. A residual-based fusion framework adding dietary context from CGMacros reduced overall RMSE by about 3% and postprandial RMSE by about 15% versus CGM-only baselines.

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

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.

The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.

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

FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

FreeFlow is a bias-free hierarchical transformer achieving state-of-the-art optical flow results on Sintel, KITTI-2015, and Spring benchmarks.

FreeFlow replaces task-specific inductive biases like correlation volumes and iterative warping with a single feed-forward encoder-decoder combining window, shifted-window, and reduced-resolution global attention. It reaches 0.68/1.48 EPE on Sintel Clean/Final, 3.23 Fl-all on KITTI-2015, and 3.192 1px on Spring. The architecture scales consistently from small to large variants and remains memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Multi-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face details building and using multi-vector late-interaction embedding models with Sentence Transformers for retrieval workloads.

Hugging Face published a guide on multi-vector, late-interaction embedding models (ColBERT-style) supported through Sentence Transformers. The post covers how practitioners can build and use these models for retrieval and RAG pipelines. It is a developer tooling and technique write-up, not a security advisory.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 18, 2026AI tools & infra1

Introducing OlmoEarth embeddings: Custom embedding exports from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysis

AllenAI's OlmoEarth Studio adds custom embedding exports to support downstream geospatial analysis workflows.

A Hugging Face blog post from AllenAI introduces OlmoEarth embeddings, a feature allowing custom embedding exports from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysis tasks. Only the title was available, so no benchmark or performance details are provided. OlmoEarth is Ai2's open geospatial AI model family.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 12, 2026AI tools & infra

Mask Forcing: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion Distillation via Dual-Noise Masking Rollout

Researchers propose Mask Forcing, a dual-noise masking rollout that mitigates mode collapse in autoregressive video diffusion distillation.

The paper targets over-saturation and over-smoothing in autoregressive video diffusion models distilled via Distribution Matching Distillation, attributed to reverse-KL mode-seeking behavior. Mask Forcing perturbs the student self-rollout with random masks along spatial and temporal axes, injecting cleaner tokens that act as denoising guidance for noisier tokens. Experiments show improved visual quality across multiple distillation methods without using real video data or extra post-training stages.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

RegionFed: Federated Learning for Personalized Query Understanding in Heterogeneous Retail Environments

RegionFed is a gradient-level federated learning framework enabling personalized retail query understanding while matching centralized accuracy with differential privacy.

RegionFed is an architecture-robust federated learning framework for personalized query understanding that operates at the gradient level, using the l2 conflict between regional and global gradients to diagnose heterogeneity and control personalization. Existing parameter-level personalized FL methods collapse on transformers, falling below 10% accuracy on T5, while RegionFed deploys unchanged on T5-Small, T5-3B, RoBERTa, and CNNs. RegionFed-Meta achieves 92.27% across Amazon ESCI, Amazon Reviews, and LEAF-FEMNIST, within 0.23 percentage points of the centralized upper bound, with epsilon-approx-0.60 differential privacy.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research1

The Frontier AEO Tracker: What Astra Chooses (and every other frontier model, and what you can do about it)

Latent Space launches an AEO tracker scoring 7 frontier models' product recommendations across 161 categories, revealing generational bias flips.

Latent Space built a tracker measuring Answer Engine Optimization by running 6 prompt variations across 7 frontier models with search enabled over 161 product categories, scoring first choices, alternatives, mentions, and anti-recommendations. It found 28 categories with a universally dominant primary choice and observed soft biases, such as models favoring their own lab's coding agents. Analysis of Anthropic's Sol→Astra and Opus→Fable generations showed newer models consulting fewer sources and being less likely to change answers when questions are paraphrased.

Latent Space · 9d agoAI research

Fine-tuning a 350M Model for Better Structured Outputs in 100 GRPO Steps

Hugging Face guide fine-tunes a 350M-parameter model with 100 GRPO steps to improve structured output reliability.

A Hugging Face blog post demonstrates fine-tuning a 350M-parameter model using GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) with TRL over 100 training steps. The stated goal is more reliable structured outputs from small language models. No article body was available, so details beyond the title are limited.

Hugging Face Blog · 14d agoAI tools & infra

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Training a coding model to paint watercolours with TRL and OpenEnv

Hugging Face tutorial trains a coding model with TRL and OpenEnv to paint watercolours through generated code.

A Hugging Face blog walkthrough uses the TRL reinforcement learning library and the OpenEnv environment framework to train a coding model. The target task is generating code that produces watercolour-style drawings, serving as a hands-on reinforcement learning training example. No article body was available in the feed, so specifics are limited to the title.

Hugging Face Blog · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

Async GRPO with LoRA across HF Jobs: a bucket, a proxy, and no NCCL

Hugging Face blog describes running async GRPO reinforcement learning with LoRA across HF Jobs using a storage bucket and proxy instead of NCCL.

A Hugging Face blog post titled 'Async GRPO with LoRA across HF Jobs: a bucket, a proxy, and no NCCL' explains an asynchronous Group Relative Policy Optimization training setup using LoRA adapters distributed across Hugging Face Jobs workers. The architecture coordinates training through an object storage bucket and a proxy server, removing the need for NCCL collective communication. No full article text was available at classification time.

Hugging Face Blog · 7d agoAI tools & infra

Eliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation

OPRD distillation enables weak-to-strong generalization by amplifying verifier-supported policy updates, outperforming existing RL and distillation methods with fewer student updates.

On-Policy Reverse Distillation (OPRD) evaluates a weak teacher's policy shift relative to its reference policy on student rollouts and amplifies the verifier-supported component of the student's policy gradient. This rescaling preserves the stationary points of policy optimization while letting the student learn beyond the teacher's capacity ceiling. In successive model transfer and multi-teacher distillation, OPRD achieves higher performance with fewer student updates than existing RL and distillation approaches, and response-style analysis shows students remain closer to verifier-RL-trained models than to their weak teachers.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Making Knowledge Distillation Cheap Enough to Run at Scale

Hugging Face blog by Multiverse Computing describes techniques making knowledge distillation cheap enough for large-scale training.

A Hugging Face blog post from Multiverse Computing (CAI) presents methods for reducing the cost of knowledge distillation so it can be run at scale. The post is aimed at practitioners compressing large models into smaller, cheaper ones for production use.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 10, 2026AI research1

.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison demos a .blend URL viewer built with GPT-6 Astra in Codex and ChatGPT Images 2.5 generating Blender models.

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Images 2.5 to generate a Faberge egg concept image themed after the TV show Pluribus, then had Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) execute a Blender local skill to build a 3D model from it. He published the result as a .blend URL viewer tool and continues experimenting with agentic Blender workflows. The post is a hands-on demo of AI-driven creative tooling rather than a security or release announcement.

Simon Willison · 7d agoAI tools & infra

MInTRL: Off-policy Intervention can boost On-policy RL

MInTRL injects sparse judge corrections into on-policy RL rollouts, expanding exploration beyond on-policy sampling while preserving learnability on math and code benchmarks.

Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning periodically has a judge-intervention policy replace erroneous suffixes of the current policy's output with short corrections, then returns control, keeping trajectories largely on-policy. Training uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective that removes the need for importance sampling. Across math and code benchmarks it consistently beats standard on-policy and off-policy baselines, remains effective with self-intervention, and performs best at moderate intervention intensity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

DataFlex-RL: An Evaluation Platform for RLVR Data Policies

DataFlex-RL benchmark of 13 RLVR data policies on Qwen2.5-7B finds none reproducibly beats uniform sampling under matched GRPO training.

DataFlex-RL is an evaluation platform comparing rollout-selection, reweighting, and mixture data policies for RLVR under a common GRPO recipe. Across 13 configurations and 12 matched seeds with Qwen2.5-7B-Base on 12 math, logic, and science benchmarks, uniform GRPO improved domain-balanced accuracy by 7.76 points, but no alternative policy achieved a statistically significant improvement. A corrected 12-seed Llama-3.1-8B-Base extension found no consistent winner, and math-heavy evaluation summaries were negatively correlated (-0.33) with domain-balanced summaries.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison · 12d agoAI research

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research1

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.

Robot Visions: Breaking reCAPTCHA at Zero Cost and Zero Shot

Researchers defeat Google reCAPTCHA using free local models CLIP and OWLv2, achieving 92.6% per-session success at zero cost.

The paper taxonomizes Google reCAPTCHA challenges into Type A (independent tiles) and Type B (4x4 grid) and builds zero-shot, training-free solvers from open-source local models. CLIP solves 58% of Type A challenges and OWLv2 43.5% of Type B, while an end-to-end automated solver succeeds on 92.6% of 500 real-world sessions. The authors also show a non-technical adversary can solve challenges using natural-language instructions to a commodity AI assistant, collapsing the attacker skill floor and suggesting visual challenge CAPTCHAs have reached the end of their useful life.

arXiv cs.CR · 19h agoAI safety & security

VC-Attention: Value Smoothing and Softmax Casting for Low-bit Attention

VC-Attention is a training-free low-bit attention method for diffusion transformers, achieving 1.46-1.59x kernel speedups on datacenter GPUs with higher fidelity.

VC-Attention is a training-free low-bit attention framework for diffusion transformers that pairs V-Smooth value smoothing via lightweight online clustering with ExpCast-FP8, which maps log-domain scores directly to E4M3 FP8 probability codes and eliminates the FP32 softmax exponential. It is implemented for B200, B300, H200, RTX PRO 6000, and RTX 5090 GPUs. Across Wan2.2, LongCat-Video, HunyuanVideo-1.5, and MiniMax-H3, it improves fidelity over low-bit baselines and speeds attention 1.46-1.59x over BF16 FlashAttention-4 on datacenter Blackwell and Hopper GPUs and 2.3-3.6x on workstation cards, with 1.13-1.70x faster end-to-end clip generation.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 6h agofirst · 3d agoAI research 2 sources

[AINews] Fal’s H3 Max Live breaks the infinite videogen barrier

Fal post-trained MiniMax H3 into a 'Max' variant with 35x-faster inference, enabling faster-than-realtime AI video generation and infinite streams.

Fal post-trained MiniMax's H3 model into a 'Max' variant and optimized it for its in-house inference engine, achieving roughly 35x the speed of the official endpoint. The optimization enables faster-than-realtime video generation, demonstrated by an infinite interactive AI-generated stream productized by levels.io. The roundup also notes Meta Muse Code's general availability with an SDK, open DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp weights, GLM-5.3-Flash's strong agentic cost/performance rankings, and Tencent's 770B-parameter Hy4 Preview MoE with 49B active parameters.

Latent Space · 16d agoAI industry