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The Router Within: Eliciting Native Skill Routing from a Frozen LLM

Gavel reads native skill-routing signals from a frozen LLM's forward passes with two linear maps, beating retrieve-and-rerank pipelines by up to 21.9 points on Qwen3-32B.

Gavel (Glance And Verdict from a frozen LLM) elicits skill routing from a frozen agent LLM using two trained linear maps that read mid-layer states, keeping all skill text out of context. A glance step scores the full library against compact per-skill banks built in one forward pass at installation; a verdict step resumes shortlisted skills' forward passes and fuses likelihood and yes/no judgments as a product of experts. It transfers zero-shot to three public benchmarks plus SkillTraj, a new benchmark of 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 on written tasks and 21.9 when skills are needed mid-rollout.

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

NCP-ArchPreview Technical Report: Moving towards Latent Space Language Models through Next Concept Prediction

An 8.9B-parameter latent-space language model using next-concept prediction matches OLMo-3-7B pretraining loss with only 51.3% of the training tokens.

NCP-ArchPreview augments next-token prediction with Next Concept Prediction over a product-quantized concept vocabulary built from hidden states, trained jointly end-to-end. The 8.9B model was trained on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, the largest latent-space language model demonstration to date. It consumes 51.3% of the tokens to reach OLMo-3-7B's final pretraining loss and outperforms it by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a 5.99-point GSM8K gain. The learned latent space also enables lightweight domain adaptation via a 17M-parameter VQ module and improves speculative drafting accepted length by 4.17%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

The 2026 PNPL Competition: Word Classification and Efficient Cross-Subject Generalisation in LibriBrain100

The 2026 PNPL competition releases LibriBrain100, a MEG speech dataset with 32 extra subjects, targeting word classification and cross-subject BCI generalization.

The 2025 PNPL competition on non-invasive speech decoding from MEG achieved F1-macro scores of 95.6% for speech detection and 73.6% for phoneme classification, built on LibriBrain's ~50 hours of single-subject data. The 2026 edition extends this with LibriBrain100, adding 32 subjects (~40 minutes each) plus ~80 hours of within-subject data. Two tracks target within-subject word classification at scale and cross-subject generalization with subject-specific fine-tuning shrinking from ~40 to ~20 to ~10 minutes, aiming at clinically feasible non-invasive BCIs for people with profound paralysis.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

CanvasAnneal injects teacher reasoning traces into diffusion canvases during curriculum RL, improving diffusion LLMs on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2.

CanvasAnneal is a curriculum-guided reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models that addresses exploration bottlenecks in standard RL. It warm-starts exploration by injecting teacher-generated reasoning traces into the initial diffusion canvas, then gradually removes this guidance so the model generates reasoning trajectories independently. Across mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, it improves over standard diffu-GRPO on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2 and accelerates reward improvement, though gains are task-dependent.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

From Parameters to Answers: How LLMs Retrieve and Use Their Internal Knowledge

Interpretability study traces how Qwen, Llama, and Gemma route query information and internal knowledge across layers when answering questions.

Researchers used layerwise interventions on hidden states to separate query-routing signals from target knowledge in language models, testing Qwen, Llama, and Gemma on country-continent questions with varied answer types. A pair-conditioned request direction strengthens before interventions alter downstream knowledge, opening a causal window while answer-supporting content is still forming. Trajectories differ by model: Gemma shows a partially overlapping mid-layer routing profile, while Llama has no sustained routing-effect window under the same gates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

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 · 1d agoAI research

Competence-Gated Pooling of Language Models and Priors for Event Forecasting

Paper proposes a competence gate pooling language model forecasts with external priors, improving Brier score from 0.0771 to 0.0732 across 2,357 binary questions.

The paper defines a language model's relative competence as its marginal value beyond an available external forecast, and derives conditions under Brier loss where model disagreement improves that forecast. A competence gate estimates domain-level source weights from resolved outcomes, shrinks uncertain estimates toward a global weight, and recalibrates the pooled forecast. Across 2,357 resolved binary questions and five language models, it improves the external baseline from 0.0771 to 0.0732 Brier and beats global forecast combinations, though it defers to the market on ForecastBench. Across four Qwen models, verbal confidence failed to identify when the model outperformed the external forecast, while outcome-estimated competence supported better abstention.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Diffusion Models and Concept Formation

Paper argues diffusion models implicitly form Cobweb-like concept hierarchies, with a basic level emerging at intermediate noise levels.

The authors draw a formal correspondence between diffusion models and Cobweb, a classic incremental concept-hierarchy learner, noting both are hierarchical Bayesian density models with Gaussian prototypes. Modes of the diffusion model's noisy marginals form a hierarchy whose basic level sits at intermediate noise, where class identity commits. The correspondence is tested on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST via mode-finding. Diffusion is reframed as a cognitive model of concept formation.

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

The Semantic Bottleneck: Leveraging Semantic Representations for Non-Invasive Speech Decoding

Researchers introduced Brain2Semantics2Text, decoding sentence meaning from non-invasive MEG brain recordings via a semantic bottleneck, improving on prior Brain2Text methods.

The paper proposes Brain2Semantics2Text, a non-invasive speech decoding method that maps sentence-level magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses into a semantic embedding space and inverts those embeddings into natural language. Motivated by evidence that high-level semantic representations are distributed across cortex and evolve on slower timescales, the approach targets meaning rather than phonemes or words, avoiding the need for word-level alignment. The authors report improved sentence-level results compared to prior non-invasive Brain2Text methods despite the low signal-to-noise ratio of neural recordings.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research2

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

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

Safety for Whom? Refusing the Right Subset of a Topic, Not the Whole Topic

Multiverse Computing's Hugging Face post argues language models should refuse only the relevant subset of a topic instead of over-refusing whole subjects.

A Hugging Face blog post by Multiverse Computing examines refusal granularity in language models, arguing models should refuse the relevant subset of a topic rather than the entire topic. No full article text was available for additional technical detail.

Hugging Face Blog · 8d agoAI safety & security

Verifiable by Construction: Claim-Level Evaluation of Verbatim Citation in Clinical Question Answering

Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.

The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.

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

Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics

Anthropic published updated Claude consumer system prompts, including changes steering the model away from reproducing song lyrics, likely over copyright concerns.

Anthropic publishes system prompts for Claude.ai and Claude mobile apps, including historic revisions, and has reorganized them into an index with per-model pages such as the Haiku 4.5 page showing the original October 15, 2025 prompt and an updated January 18, 2026 version. The latest consumer prompt strongly discourages reproducing song lyrics, a behavioral constraint likely tied to copyright considerations. Prompts for Claude Cowork and Claude Code are not included in the published set.

Simon Willison · 14d agoAI safety & security

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models for One-Step Language Modeling and Reasoning

DBTM achieves one-step text generation via a time-independent transport map trained directly from data, removing pretrained teacher distillation.

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models (DBTM) build a time-independent flow whose autonomous transport map provably carries any point in ambient space to a fixed point on simplex vertices in a single step. The fixed-point property is characterized by a conservation equation whose residual can be minimized directly from data, eliminating the need for a teacher flow, distillation, and time conditioning. A partial-context interpolant extension turns additional function evaluations into refinement steps rather than ODE integration steps. On language modeling and reasoning tasks, DBTM's one- and few-step generation improves quality and accuracy over discrete diffusion and continuous flow baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers · 22d agoAI research

LLaDA-UI: Bringing Block-wise Diffusion to Vision-Language GUI Agents

LLaDA-UI, a 16.7B block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent, outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and beats Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six GUI benchmarks.

LLaDA-UI is a 16.7B-parameter MoE-based, block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent built on the LLaDA2.0-mini-base diffusion language backbone with a native-resolution vision encoder. It uses a two-stage pipeline: general multimodal pre-training followed by GUI-agent supervised fine-tuning on mobile, desktop, web, and grounding data. It substantially outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six reported GUI benchmarks, establishing block-wise diffusion as a practical paradigm for latency-sensitive multimodal agents.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMsnew

An arXiv paper claims a method that breaks the 1.58-bit barrier for ternary large language models.

The arXiv preprint 2609.16338, titled 'Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs,' presents research on ternary-weight large language models, which use roughly 1.58 bits per weight. The source text contained only the title and Hacker News engagement data (56 points, no comments), so further technical details are not available.

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 · 29d agoAI tools & infra1

Characterizing Language Generation in the Limit: Finite Witnesses and a Separation-Width Hierarch

New work characterizes language generation in the limit via finite witnesses, proves a full separation-width hierarchy, and formalizes all results in Lean.

The paper fully characterizes when language generation in the limit is possible for arbitrary families over a countable universe: each target must admit a finite positive witness such that targets activated by any finite sample share an infinite common intersection. It defines positive separation width and proves every level of the resulting hierarchy occurs, with countable families admitting singleton witnesses and unions of families with infinite common cores requiring unbounded finite witnesses. The characterization, a universal normalization, and a diagonal capture lemma are machine-checked in the Lean proof assistant, with the development maintained on GitHub.

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

unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF — new model trending #21 on Hugging Face

Qwen released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an experimental 125B-parameter open-weight MoE previewing the Qwen4 architecture, with Unsloth shipping optimized GGUF quants.

Qwen released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an experimental open-weight preview of the architecture planned to underpin Qwen4. The model has 125B parameters with 6B activated, 512 experts (10 routed plus 1 shared), Qwen Sparse Attention (QSA), Gated DeltaNet, Gated Residual, and n-gram embeddings, with 262,144-token native context extendable to 1,000,000 tokens. Unsloth provides Dynamic 3.0 GGUF quantizations, and multi-token prediction (MTP) delivers 1.3-1.7x faster inference via llama.cpp or Unsloth Desktop.

Hugging Face trending models · 21d agoModel release1

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

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

LimiX-2: A Contextual Mechanism Network Towards General Structured-Data Intelligence

LimiX-2 scales Contextual Mechanism Networks pretrained via context-conditional masked modeling, beating tabular foundation models on TabArena, TALENT, and BCCO benchmarks.

LimiX-2 is a new tabular model in the LimiX family, developed through model and data scaling guided by previously established scaling laws under the Contextual Mechanism Networks (CMNs) paradigm. It is pretrained with Context-Conditional Masked Modeling (CCMM) on synthetic datasets generated by structural causal models spanning diverse graph structures, functional mechanisms, and observation processes. It outperforms dataset-specific models and tabular foundation models on TabArena, TALENT, and BCCO, and its feature attention encodes direct causal relationships, enabling accurate causal skeleton recovery.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research1

LongAgent: History-Guided Agentic Search for Longitudinal Outcome Prediction

LongAgent autonomously searches variable sets and temporal windows to predict longitudinal medical outcomes, beating the strongest non-agent baseline on synthetic data.

The paper proposes LongAgent, an agent-based method that searches over combinations of variable sets, temporal windows and aggregation functions for outcome prediction on heterogeneous medical longitudinal data. It uses a history memory of previous searches and numerical evidence to guide exploration. On synthetic data it achieves mean RMSE 1.7376, improving over the best non-agent baseline by 0.0151 (95% CI [0.0045, 0.0260]; p=0.0273), and performs comparably to the best baseline on a real clinical dataset.

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

Pre-Whitening and BCJR Posterior Distillation for Bi-LSTM Detection in Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling

Study shows nested-window Bi-LSTM architectures do not improve faster-than-Nyquist detection; pre-whitening plus BCJR distillation cuts bit error rates.

Across roughly 260 controlled trainings, processing nested intersymbol-interference windows in separate recurrent branches never significantly beat a plain Bi-LSTM at matched parameter budgets. The authors attribute the limitation to the observation model rather than architecture, and instead pre-whiten inputs and distill BCJR soft posteriors into the network. With 3.4% more parameters, the method reaches 1.05x the BCJR bit error rate at compression factor 0.8 and 1.89x at 0.7, improving to 1.47x with a wider whitened window.

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

AgentGrad: Intervention-guided Prompt Optimization for Multi Agent Systems

AgentGrad introduces intervention-guided prompt optimization for LLM multi-agent systems, achieving state-of-the-art results with 2.5x faster optimization.

AgentGrad is a prompt optimization framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems that addresses limitations in textual gradient extraction and aggregation. It uses sequential intervention to identify the agent whose prompt modification resolves a given failure, then applies agent-level supervision and semantic gradient clustering to build generalized gradients. Experiments report state-of-the-art performance across five MAS benchmarks and a 2.5x average reduction in wall-clock optimization time versus the next-fastest baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

A*-Thought-V2 compresses chain-of-thought into latent tokens using geometric hidden-state dynamics, cutting computation while improving accuracy on Qwen models.

A*-Thought-V2 models chain-of-thought as a hidden-state trajectory and interleaves explicit text with continuous latent tokens, compressing steps whose transitions deviate from the question-to-solution direction. Trained via stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing with soft multi-modal supervision, it was evaluated on Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.6-27B across six benchmarks. Reported results include up to 2.6% average accuracy gain, up to 50% shorter responses, 2.29x higher Accuracy per Computation Unit, 94.6% faster preprocessing, and up to 80.3% faster training.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Quoting Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss argues AI collapses code-writing and review costs, leaving product discovery and precise definition as the core of software engineering.

Simon Willison quotes Laurie Voss's essay "We are all Product Engineers now," which argues that AI is collapsing the cost of writing code and will likewise collapse the cost of reviewing, fixing, and operating it. Voss contends the remaining work is finding out what people want, defining it precisely, and making software pleasant to use. He expects the amount of software to grow without limit because demand has no ceiling, making product-definition skills the whole job. No specific models, tools, or incidents are named; this is career and industry commentary.

Simon Willison · 2d agoAI industry

Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM Agents

Researchers introduce Procedural Graphs, self-evolving (procedure, relation, procedure) structures guiding LLM agent tool use and planning.

Procedural Graphs organize procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets to guide LLM agent actions, addressing drift such as lost objectives, out-of-order tool calls, and repeated unproductive steps. At each decision step the framework localizes the active node and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level situational guidance. An LLM refiner edits graph topology by contrasting failed with successful trajectories, and across datasets, task types and LLMs the approach outperforms memory-based baselines and matches or surpasses hand-designed graphs.

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

Building Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning

Tiny Aya L2-Thinker, a 3.35B model, achieves over 93 percent in-language reasoning across 60 languages via optimized multilingual data mixing; weights released.

The paper studies L2 reasoning, the ability to reason consistently in the language of the user's prompt, approached through SFT data composition and scheduling. Tiny Aya L2-Thinker (3.35B) achieves an in-language reasoning rate above 93 percent across 60 languages on six benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, instruction following, open-ended generation, and cultural reasoning. Findings show generalization to held-out languages comes from broader language coverage, multilingual non-reasoning data, and a strong English reasoning backbone, suggesting reasoning is language-agnostic and transferable without per-language supervision. Model weights and multilingual reasoning data are publicly released.

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