An instrument for spotting the next edtech opportunity — generated ideas, each traced to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library — the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2511.05933v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning at the expense of knowledge. We challenge this narrative by showing that reasoning models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned versions on pure knowledge recall tasks. These gains do not reflect newly acquired information, but rather an improved procedural skill in navigating and searching existing knowledge hierarchies within the model parameters. Structured prompting, which explicitly guides models through hierarchical traversal -- recovers most of the instruct-reasoning gap across five model families. A controlled RL experiment on unseen, non-extractable facts improves recall of held-out frequent but previously inaccessible facts, ruling out simple data exposure. On depth-stratified retrieval tasks, reasoning models exhibit superior traversal as retrieval depth grows. Layerwise activation analysis further shows that while factual repres
arXiv:2510.23842v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most state-of-the-art sign language models are trained on interpreter or isolated vocabulary data, which overlooks the variability that characterizes natural dialogue. However, human communication dynamically adapts to contexts and interlocutors through spatiotemporal changes and articulation style. This specifically manifests itself in educational settings, where novel vocabularies are used by teachers, and students. To address this gap, we collect a motion capture dataset of American Sign Language (ASL) STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) dialogue that enables quantitative comparison between dyadic interactive signing, solo signed lecture, and interpreted articles. Using continuous kinematic features, we disentangle dialogue-specific entrainment from individual effort reduction and show spatiotemporal changes across repeated mentions of STEM terms. On average, dialogue signs are 24.6%-44.6% shorter in duration t
arXiv:2510.04584v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large audio language models (LALMs) have primarily been assessed using a multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) framework. However, subtle changes, such as shifting the order of choices, result in substantially different results. Existing MCQA frameworks do not account for this variability and report a single accuracy number per benchmark or category. We dive into the MCQA evaluation framework and conduct a systematic study spanning three benchmarks (MMAU, MMAR and MMSU) and four models: Audio Flamingo 2, Audio Flamingo 3, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B-Instruct, and Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct. Our findings indicate that models are sensitive not only to the ordering of choices, but also to the paraphrasing of the question and the choices. Finally, we propose a simpler evaluation protocol and metric that account for subtle variations and provide a more detailed evaluation report of LALMs within the MCQA framework.
arXiv:2509.22193v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distilling reasoning traces from strong teacher models has become the standard recipe for building capable small language models. Yet reasoning traces are 5-20$\times$ longer than standard instruction fine-tuning (IFT) outputs, meaning every practitioner who chooses reasoning distillation implicitly forgoes training a larger IFT model on the same compute budget. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile remains unaddressed. We study it with a controlled experiment: a single teacher generates paired IFT and reasoning outputs for identical prompts by toggling only its reasoning mode, isolating supervision format as the sole variable. Training students at five scales (0.5B to 14B) and evaluating on 18 benchmarks, we find that at matched FLOPs, IFT lies on or near the Pareto frontier across the majority of configurations. Reasoning reaches the Pareto frontier only on open-ended tasks at 7B and above. Even there, a sequential curriculum mixing
arXiv:2507.06457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading to hybrid architectures that combine linear and full attention layers. Despite extensive hybrid architecture research, the choice of linear attention component has not been deeply explored. We systematically evaluate various linear attention models across generations - vector recurrences to advanced gating mechanisms - both standalone and hybridized. To enable this comprehensive analysis, we trained and open-sourced 72 models: 36 at 340M parameters (20B tokens) and 36 at 1.3B parameters (100B tokens), covering six linear attention variants across five hybridization ratios. Benchmarking on standard language modeling and recall tasks reveals that superior standalone linear models do not necessarily e
arXiv:2504.09910v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising technique for applying LLMs to proprietary domains. However, retrieved documents may contain sensitive knowledge, posing risks of privacy leakage in generative results. Thus, effectively erasing private information from retrieved documents is a key challenge for RAG. Unlike traditional text anonymization, RAG should consider: (1) the inherent multi-document reasoning may face de-anonymization attacks; (2) private knowledge varies by scenarios, so users should be allowed to customize which information to erase; (3) preserving sufficient publicly available knowledge for generation tasks. This paper introduces the privacy erasure task for RAG and proposes Eraser4RAG, a private knowledge eraser which effectively removes user-defined private knowledge from documents while preserving sufficient public knowledge for generation. Specifically, we first construct a global knowledge graph to id
arXiv:2606.26050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Midway through an ordinary pretraining run, a small language model learns the pronoun-gender rule: cued with a girl's name ("Sue cried because"), it resolves the next pronoun to she, generalizing to held-out probes (0.94 by step 925). By step 3,500 the same model scores near zero on the same probes, although the rule's evidence is still in the training data. We call this within-run reversal natural ungrokking: the corpus decides, with no trace in the loss curve, which learned rules a model keeps. Which rules survive is predictable from one corpus statistic: how often the training stream shows the rule winning. Across un-intervened runs (two corpora, three budgets, three seeds), support frequency decides a rule's fate; the data-to-parameter ratio only modulates how deeply a doomed rule falls. The same emerge-then-collapse dynamics appear in public Pythia checkpoints, collapse depth ordered by model scale as predicted. The forgetting is a
arXiv:2606.26041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task. To systematically study this problem, we introduce OCR-Robust, a benchmark designed for evaluating OCR reasoning robustness under visual perturbations. It contains 812 samples across two complementary subsets: OCR1.0, covering documents, scene text, receipts, handwriting, and mathematical content, and OCR2.0, focusing on charts, geometry diagrams, and tables. To enable efficient yet informative evaluation, we conduct a pilot study over 18 candidate perturbations and select 5 representative types at 3 severity levels each based on their impac
arXiv:2606.25996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Autodata, a general method that enables AI agents to act as data scientists who build high quality training and evaluation data. We show how to train (meta-optimize) such a data scientist agent, so that it learns to create even stronger data. We describe the overall formulation, and a specific practical implementation, Agentic Self-Instruct. We conduct experiments on computer science research tasks, legal reasoning tasks and reasoning with mathematical objects, where we obtain improved results compared to classical synthetic dataset creation methods. Further, meta-optimizing the data scientist agent itself delivers an even larger performance uplift. Agentic data creation provides a way to convert increased inference compute into higher quality model training. Overall, we believe this direction has the potential to change the way we build AI data.
arXiv:2606.25777v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We initiate a resource-aware theory of \textit{language generation in the limit} under the minimal constraint of space efficiency. In our framework, a learner observes an adversarial positive stream from a target language $K$ and must eventually output a hallucination-free hypothesis language $L \subseteq K$ while omitting at most $\Delta$ strings of $K$. We focus on $\mathcal{C}_{s,k}$, the collection of languages recognized by DFAs with at most $s$ states over an alphabet of size $k$, as the natural hypothesis class for memory-bounded learners. In the exponential-space regime, we prove that a learner can exactly identify the target $K$. Under a stricter memory budget, we characterize the strongest possible generation guarantees. In particular, we present a streaming algorithm using $\mathrm{poly}(s,k)$ space that converges to a hypothesis with generation gap $\Delta = O(k^{2s-2})$. Moreover, the learned hypothesis captures every strin
arXiv:2606.25760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computer-use agents turn vision-language model (VLM) predictions into executable GUI clicks, so reliable uncertainty estimates are essential for rejection, calibration, miss-severity ranking, and spatial safety regions. Yet evidence on post-hoc uncertainty quantification (UQ) for these agents is fragmented across isolated model and dataset pairs, leaving it unclear whether UQ rankings stay stable when the agent, benchmark, or observable interface changes. We present Argus, a cross-regime benchmark for post-hoc UQ in single-step executable GUI grounding: a 27-method open-weight matrix over 4 VLM agents and 4 datasets, plus an 8-method closed-source matrix across 3 frontier vendors where logits, hidden states, and attention maps are unavailable. Evaluated methods span logit-based scores, sampling and consistency measures, hidden-state and density estimators (Mahalanobis, SAPLMA), attention-based scores, P(True) and verbalised-confidence p
arXiv:2606.25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy. Although useful, output-level evaluation is expensive, sensitive to judge choice, and easily tied to fixed question banks. We propose **SafeVec**, a white-box evaluation procedure that measures safety from internal representations rather than generated answers. **SafeVec** first extracts layer-wise refusal directions from a safety-aligned reference model, then selects stable layer windows where safe and unsafe behaviors are separable, and finally scores a target model by measuring whether its hidden states align with these refusal directions under unsafe and jailbreak prompts. The resulting metric, **RAS** (**R**efusal **A**lignment **S**core), maps representation-level refusal alignment to a calibrated 0-100 safety score. Across `Llama`, `Gemma`, and `Qwen
arXiv:2606.25721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate model outputs through malicious retrieved documents. Existing detection methods typically rely on auxiliary classifiers or additional LLM-based verification, introducing substantial computational overhead. We present TRACE, a lightweight detection framework that identifies poisoning attacks by tracing answer-related tokens through token influence attribution. TRACE first discovers recurrent high-influence keywords across retrieved documents and then performs a secondary verification to confirm their influence on model predictions. Experiments on three QA benchmarks and six LLMs demonstrate strong detection performance while simultaneously uncovering attacker-specified target answers.
arXiv:2606.25533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for enhancing large language models with external knowledge. By coupling retrieval mechanisms with generative models, RAG systems improve factual grounding and adaptability across domains. However, integrating retrieval pipelines introduces new security and privacy risks that extend beyond conventional language modeling threats. Sensitive information may be exposed through retrieval indices, query logs, context construction, or federated updates, while adversarial manipulation of knowledge bases can undermine trust in generated outputs. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of privacy and security challenges across RAG systems deployed in centralized, on-device (Micro-RAG), federated, and hybrid paradigms. We present a unified taxonomy of threat surfaces spanning the retrieval, context construction, and generation stages and systematically analyze attack
arXiv:2606.25530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software performance optimization is a notoriously complex and manual task. Despite the growing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code refinement, we still lack benchmarks that capture how optimization actually happens in real-world codebases. Existing frameworks often oversimplify the problem by focusing on isolated functions or a single performance metric, missing the critical trade-offs between execution time and memory footprint, the inherent noise of the measurement environment, and the variability introduced by different input data and execution conditions. We address this by introducing SWE-Pro, a repository-level benchmark derived from 102 expert-written optimizations from open-source projects. Unlike previous benchmarks, SWE-Pro pairs each task with parameterized tests to evaluate runtime, peak memory, and Time-Weighted Memory Usage (TWMU) across varying input data and execution conditions under noise-aware measurement co
arXiv:2606.25524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reach high accuracy in mathematical reasoning, but individual traces on the same problem diverge; some arrive at the correct answer while others fail. Prior work analyzes failure at the step, chunk, or sentence level, or at tokens where failure has already occurred. Neither identifies the precise token that triggers the shift toward failure. We introduce the cliff token, a token where the token-wise potential drops significantly under an adaptive threshold that scales with the local token-wise potential, based on a one-sided two-proportion z-test. Across seven models and three mathematical reasoning benchmarks (GSM1K, MATH500, AIME 2025), cliff tokens act as failure triggers; deleting the first cliff token and resampling recovers pass@64 to 1.0, while keeping it limits recovery to between 0.71 and 1.00. We further introduce a cliff taxonomy of deterministic, uncertain, and sampled-off cliffs, defined by gree
arXiv:2606.25460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in sequence modeling have significantly improved ASR systems, bringing them close to human-level recognition accuracy and enhancing robustness across diverse acoustic conditions and languages. In contrast, Forced Alignment has not experienced comparable progress, and traditional HMM-GMM frameworks remain widely adopted and highly competitive. To address this gap, we propose an end-to-end, fully differentiable neural architecture specifically designed for phoneme alignment. The model consists of an encoder that processes the input signal and a decoder that produces alignment decisions. The encoder is structured into two complementary branches: one dedicated to phoneme identity verification and the other to phoneme boundary detection. The decoder is implemented as a trainable module based on differentiable soft dynamic programming. The entire system is optimized end-to-end using a novel contrastive loss that encourages cle
arXiv:2606.25450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional evaluations measure a learning algorithm's final performance on an i.i.d. test set, reducing learning to a single aggregate score. This approach obscures a fundamental question: to what extent does learning from a specific example generalize to others? Such per-sample generalization, akin to learning by analogy in human cognition, captures how far the knowledge extracted from one example can transfer, yet remains invisible to standard benchmarks. We introduce the Generalization Spectrum, an evaluation framework designed to expose this hidden dimension. For each training example, we construct a controlled suite of test variants arranged by increasing transfer distance, from exact recall to implementation transfer across languages, context transfer under complete narrative re-framing, category-matched in-domain problems, and an unpaired baseline. By tracking performance across these distances, we reveal not just whether an alg
arXiv:2606.25447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-integrated LLM agents are often wrapped within a harness: the scaffolding that determines which tools are exposed, how they are described, and what auxiliary information accompanies each per-step observation. While agents are routinely post-trained, this scaffolding is typically treated as a fixed engineering detail, with design effort limited to the training-free regime. Moreover, existing post-training algorithms assume a static environment, even though tool environments and tasks often shift upon deployment. To address this gap, we extend $\texttt{ALFWorld}$ (i) to treat the harness as a controllable design dimension and (ii) to support evaluation under task and tool environment shifts. Building on this, we systematically analyze how the harness design influences post-training in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We empirically show that harness-aware post-training not only improves in-distribution per
arXiv:2606.25444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Connecting a pre-trained speech encoder to a Large Language Model (LLM) is the standard architecture for building Speech LLMs. However, a structural misalignment exists between the encoder and the LLM. Unlike encoders based on automatic speech recognition, which often produce representations in separate language-specific spaces, LLMs operate within a unified language-agnostic space. A mechanism is required to align the encoder's language-specific representations with the LLM's shared space. We argue that speech translation provides a principled way to achieve this. Unlike monolingual transcription, translation requires the model to bridge different languages and learn language-agnostic representations. We experimentally evaluate the impact of incorporating translation objectives into speech encoder pre-training. Our results demonstrate that translation-enhanced pre-training improves cross-modal integration and leads to superior performa
arXiv:2606.25436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dialogue systems based on large language models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in recent years. However, dialectal variation remains a major challenge, particularly for systems that process spoken input. LLM-based speech language models (SLMs), which integrate LLMs with speech processing components, show promise for spoken language tasks, yet their ability to comprehend dialects has not been sufficiently studied. Moreover, it remains unclear how the dialectal understanding of the base LLM affects SLM performance. This study investigates the dialectal robustness of both LLMs and SLMs using Japanese dialects as a test case. We define robustness as the ratio of performance on dialectal versus standard inputs, enabling fair comparisons. Our experiments show that SLM robustness correlates with that of their text-based counterparts. Furthermore, training with dialectal data and fine-tuning the speech encoder each improves robustness in SL
arXiv:2606.25424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant improvements in speech quality. However, modeling sharp prosodic transitions and rapid pitch variations in expressive speech remains challenging. Existing diffusion-based TTS decoders commonly utilize periodic nonlinearities such as Snake activation function to capture harmonic structures, but this activation funcation provides limited adaptability when modeling abrupt amplitude and frequency variations. In this paper, we investigate the role of oscillatory inductive bias in diffusion-based TTS decoders and introduce an adaptive oscillatory nonlinearity that enables controllable periodic modulation while maintaining signal stability through a linear bypass component. We refer the resulting TTS system as OscillaTTS. Experiments on the LJSpeech and Emotional Speech Dataset show consistent improvements across objective and subjective evaluations, indicating improved mode
arXiv:2606.25369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled. Here we introduce Sarashina2.2-TTS (https://github.com/sbintuitions/sarashina2.2-tts), a Japanese-centric LLM-TTS system that tackles these challenges through a dual approach: data strategy and evaluation methodology. First, we scale training to approximately 361k hours of speech, incorporating a balanced mix of Japanese and English data. Furthermore, we design a targeted data augmentation pipeline covering all 2,136 Joyo (regular-use) kanji designated by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs to efficiently address kanji polyphony disambiguation. Second, we introduce the Joyo Kanji Yomi Benchmark (https://gith
arXiv:2606.25307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid growth of the number of academic papers, systematically evaluating the difficulty of research and its relationship to academic impact offers important significance for research topic selection and resource allocation. However, current studies lack quantitative assessments of research difficulty and its correlation with academic impact. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation system for research difficulty, incorporating factors such as academic collaboration, content, and references. Taking the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a case study, we extract both internal and external features from academic papers, compute multiple research difficulty indicators. We assign their weights using the entropy weight method and perform a weighted sum to obtain the research difficulty score of academic papers. This paper uses the citation frequency of academic papers to measure academic impact. To validate our appro
arXiv:2606.25246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising capabilities in medical image analysis by jointly understanding visual and textual information for tasks such as Visual Question Answering. However, existing hematology vision-language resources remain predominantly English centric, limiting their applicability in multilingual healthcare environments. This challenge is releveant generally to South Asia and specifically to Pakistan, where Urdu is widely used despite healthcare information and digital medical systems being largely dependent on English. To investigate this gap, we conducted a survey among healthcare professionals, which revealed substantial language mismatches between clinical documentation and patient communication, emphasizing the need for multilingual healthcare technologies. To address this limitation, we introduce WBCMor VQA, a clinically validated bilingual English, Urdu morphology aware VQA benchmark for leukemia an
arXiv:2606.25207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) is essential for maximizing machine learning model performance, and its core challenge is sample efficiency: finding strong configurations within a limited budget. Because every HPO tool relies on a surrogate prior that imparts its own inductive bias, individual tools struggle once problems become sufficiently diverse and drift from these priors. Motivated by the reasoning and generalization capabilities of LLMs, recent work has explored using LLMs for HPO and reports improved per-iteration performance. Yet these methods share two limitations with a common origin: they use the LLM as a single-tool replacement evaluated by iteration count. (i) Deployed in place of prior tools, the LLM is itself constrained by its pretraining objective to one family of inductive-biased proposals; this single-source setup still fails to handle the full diversity of problems. (ii) Per-iteration evaluation ignores that, in r
arXiv:2606.25206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term robot deployment requires a compact and scalable memory that preserves fine-grained visual semantics, grounds observations in space and time, and enables efficient storage and retrieval. In this paper, we propose RAVEN, an agentic memory system for long-horizon robotic question answering and navigation. RAVEN stores visual embeddings with pose and time in a vector database, and grounds retrieval in a spatial map to answer queries and navigate to goals. By operating directly on visual embeddings, RAVEN avoids lossy image-to-text captioning and enables accurate semantic, spatial, and temporal retrieval at scale. Across several simulated and real-world video question-answering benchmarks, RAVEN consistently surpasses caption-based memory systems and matches frontier VLMs on long-horizon tasks at 10$\times$ lower retrieval cost. Finally, we instantiate RAVEN on a Unitree Go1 robot for the task of long-horizon navigation for natura
arXiv:2606.25191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent document assessment for retrieval-augmented generation is computationally expensive, driving practitioners toward smaller, deployable models whose assessment mechanisms remain poorly understood. We conduct a controlled study of training-free interventions on 7B-9B instruction-tuned models across diverse QA benchmarks, revealing a sharp dichotomy in how models benefit from assessment. For weaker baselines, the dominant mechanism is per-document isolation. Astoundingly, assessment-free isolation matches full multi-agent assessment, demonstrating that resolving multi-document context confusion, rather than scoring quality, drives outsized gains of up to 50 percentage points. Conversely, for strong baselines where scoring quality matters, we introduce Reasoning-Score Coupling, a label-free perturbation probe that classifies scoring behavior. Integrating these findings, we propose MADARA, a model-adaptive routing architecture. Cr
arXiv:2606.25039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering governing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) from data is a central challenge in modeling dynamical systems across scientific domains. Existing approaches cast discovery as a static inference problem over fixed datasets, assuming that the observed trajectories are sufficiently informative. However, dynamical systems evolve over large state spaces, and limited data can make multiple equations observationally indistinguishable, leading to identifiability gaps and the recovery of incorrect governing equations. To address this, we introduce LLM-ACES, or LLM-guided Active Closed-loop Equation Search, a closed-loop framework that jointly optimizes symbolic hypothesis construction and adaptive data acquisition. In LLM-ACES, a large language model (LLM) proposes operator priors that partition the large search space into distinct regions, within which candidate equations are fit to the observed data. The disagreement among these c
arXiv:2606.25013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Today's reasoning models use thinking tokens to attain stronger performance on benchmarks than their instruction-tuned counterparts. It is also generally believed that this more "deliberative" mode should improve alignment and safety, by providing the model a safe space to consider whether its planned answer to a request violates its safety principles. We present evidence that this intuition is not always correct. Across frontier open-weight reasoning models spanning GPT-OSS, Qwen, Olmo, and Phi families, we find that the eventual refusal/compliance outcome is already strongly predictable via a trained head on the first token's hidden representation ($0.84$-$0.95$ AUROC and $\sim88\%$ balanced accuracy for predicting refusal/compliance) before any visible thinking. The thinking process turns out to be more akin to prefix completion than to deliberative revision, with the final outcome rarely changing after the first $\sim20\%$ of thinki
arXiv:2606.25010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws for transformer language models predict smooth improvements in pretraining loss with increasing parameters, but downstream capabilities such as in-context learning are known to emerge abruptly past a certain model scale. In this paper, we show that emergent capabilities arise stochastically throughout training, with larger models acquiring them earlier on average. We demonstrate that the emergence of capabilities such as pattern completion and indirect object identification corresponds to the abrupt learning of task-relevant attention patterns. To isolate this phenomenon, we train transformer models on synthetic linear map and cellular automata datasets, and we show that the difficulty of learning attention patterns depends on context length and pattern sparsity. Moreover, scaling the number of attention heads improves learning efficiency on our synthetic tasks, while increasing the head dimension yields diminishing
arXiv:2606.25008v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how pre-training loss decays as power laws with training time, model size, and compute. This position paper argues that the exponents of these power laws are fixed by generic mechanisms: a one-third time scaling due to the strong nonlinearity of Softmax, an inverse width scaling due to representational superposition, and an inverse depth scaling due to ensemble averaging of Transformer layers. These mechanisms are robust to a wide range of data structures and architectural details, placing current large language models in a universality class with fixed exponents. The coefficients, however, are expected to be sensitive to data and architecture details, and directly determine practical quantities such as the optimal model shape and the compute-optimal frontier. We therefore argue that understanding the coefficients is the key to near-term performance improvements, and that a closer examination of the current
arXiv:2606.24984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning representations that remain robust across centuries of variation in handwriting is a key challenge in diachronic representation learning. Taking one of the longest continuously used writing systems, ancient Greek, as a case study, we introduce three datasets for diachronic representation learning: Hell-Char, a curated training set spanning the 3rd-1st centuries BCE, and two evaluation sets, PaLit-Char (2nd-5th c. CE) and Med-Char (9th-14th c. CE). To address the challenges of symbolic variation, scarce data, and systematic degradation, we propose: a similarity-weighted supervised contrastive loss that biases embeddings using dynamically estimated inter-class similarities, and a lacuna-driven augmentation scheme that simulates realistic manuscript corruptions. Trained with these strategies, both a lightweight CNN and a pretrained ResNet achieve strong recognition performance and produce embeddings that more coherently separate c
arXiv:2606.24976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation-model agents in multi-step, open-ended environments frequently suffer from compounding errors, where early mistakes contaminate long-horizon trajectories. While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) succeeds in deterministic domains, agents in subjective tasks like persuasion experience severe problem drift and sycophantic conformity. We identify semantic leakage in standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a reproducible trigger for these failures, as standard RAG prioritizes vocabulary overlap over logical necessity. To eliminate this leakage, we introduce Taxonomic Strategy RAG (TS-RAG), a systems intervention that routes strategies through a discrete categorical bottleneck to decouple argumentative structure from topical content. Zero-shot, cross-domain evaluations demonstrate that TS-RAG significantly improves the transfer of abstract logic where standard semantic retrieval collapses. Crucially, TS-RAG acts as a "capability br
arXiv:2606.24975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: PaTH Attention showed that replacing RoPE's position-indexed rotations with accumulated data-dependent Householder reflections yields strong length extrapolation, though performance degrades at extreme context lengths. We ask whether this depends on Householder-specific structure or reflects a general property of accumulated transformations along source-to-query paths. We study a simpler variant keeping RoPE's block-diagonal SO(2) rotations but replacing position-indexed angles with accumulated token-dependent ones. It shows the same pattern: improved extrapolation then degradation at long contexts. We prove the result extends to accumulated orthogonal transformations satisfying certain regularity conditions: their products become incoherent after finitely many steps, suppressing attention to distant tokens. Accumulated rotations of queries and keys create a finite mixing window independent of context length; per-token suppression learn
arXiv:2606.24954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vibration-based health monitoring of rotating machinery requires reliable fault diagnosis under operational data constraints, yet condition assessment remains challenged by structural scarcity of fault events and heterogeneous sim-to-real gaps in digital twin-generated signals. Each fault type generates impulses with distinct periodicity, amplitude modulation, and spectral character, making feature-space discrepancies fundamentally heterogeneous across fault classes. Existing domain adaptation methods apply a class-agnostic global transformation that cannot close all fault-specific gaps without distorting inter-class separability, while uniform source-target mixing introduces distributional noise into the data-abundant Normal class. These limitations stem from treating a sequential, state-dependent alignment problem as a one-shot optimization. Each corrective transformation simultaneously reshapes all class distributions, creating state
arXiv:2606.24937v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI is a comprehensive practitioner's reference for building autonomous AI systems. The book covers the full stack from first principles to production deployment, organized around a central thesis: building great agentic systems requires understanding every layer of the pipeline, not just one. The book opens with the LLM substrate -- transformer architecture, GPU systems, training and fine-tuning (SFT,LoRA, MoE), model compression, and inference optimization -- treated as essential foundations rather than the primary focus. It then develops the alignment and reasoning layer: reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), PPO, DPO and its variants, GRPO, reward modeling, and RL for large reasoning models including chain-of-thought and test-time scaling. The second half is devoted to agentic AI proper. Topics include agentic training and trajectory-based RL, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG and Agen
arXiv:2606.24897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biomedical text mining, scientometrics, and the construction of training corpora for biomedical large language models (LLMs) all assume that the abstract text returned by a bibliographic API faithfully reproduces the published abstract. This pre-registered audit (OSF osf.io/269b5) tests that assumption for four widely used public APIs (PubMed E-utilities, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) against PubMed Central (PMC) JATS XML as a common ground truth. From a complete enumeration of the PMC Open Access subset for 2024 (about 700,000 records), a simple random sample of 4,000 English-language research articles was drawn; for each, we recorded whether Unicode characters from four pre-specified classes present in the JATS abstract (typographic punctuation, mathematical/scientific symbols, Greek letters, special whitespace) were preserved by each API. Two systematic, deterministic losses met the pre-registered criterion (upper 95% CI boun
arXiv:2606.26083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems-OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash-on tasks where the words and the delivery patterns both convey meaningful information. Across three consequential scenarios, all four systems act on the words rather than the voice. They end calls with crying callers who insist nothing is wrong, approve wire transfers authorized in frightened voices, and enroll callers whose agreement is clearly sarcastic. Surprisingly, this is often not a failure of perception. When asked directly, three of the four systems reliably identify the distress, fear, or sarcasm they later ignore when making decisions. We observe a similar pattern when these realtime voice systems estimate accent and age, as their responses frequently follow the biases of the words rather than the acous
arXiv:2606.26079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs. A Bayesian item-response model separates ordering noise from per-facet bias, and a same-ordering control estimates the decoder-stochastic floor for observed flips. We find that none of the 18 MLLMs we audit are order-invariant: screened per-facet panel-mean flip rates span 24-50%. A Gemini same-ordering control at temperature 0 estimates a substantial ordering excess over a same-input decoder-noise floor in verified cells. Capability predicts but does not eliminate flips; the best model still flips on 13.4% of trials. In our Gemini
arXiv:2606.26062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can a statistically significant, large-effect-size finding in computational social science be entirely an artifact of the measurement instrument? We present a case where the answer appears to be yes. Analyzing 85 interviews across four public intellectuals (2016--2026), we find a robust negative-affect/emphatic-certainty lexical co-occurrence pattern under keyword-based scoring ($r = 0.72$--$0.93$, $p < 0.01$ for all four speakers). Replacing keyword counting with LLM-based zero-shot semantic classification on the complete diarized corpus (32,625 sentences) dramatically reduces this correlation: Dalio's $r = 0.851$ drops to $r = 0.206$, with two speakers showing negative $r(\text{neg}, \text{emphatic})$ and one showing null. In contrast, the LLM reveals a strong negative-hedging coupling across speakers -- Rogoff's $r(\text{neg}, \text{hedged}) = 0.875$ ($p = 0.001$) and Zeihan's $r(\text{neg}, \text{hedged}) = 0.722$ ($p = 0.008$) -- con
arXiv:2606.26040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI translation of literary works is increasingly common. While the content may be rendered adequately, we do not know enough about how readers experience it in terms of immersiveness and literary effect, aspects poorly captured by automatic machine translation metrics or human evaluation targeting fluency and adequacy. We ask 15 avid readers to compare recently published human translations (HT) to machine translations (MT) generated with an agentic large language model (LLM)-based pipeline, for 15 recent novels in French, Polish, and Japanese and translated into English. Readers evaluated approximately 8K-word excerpts in two conditions: immersive reading of the whole excerpt (30 comparisons) and close reading of 386 aligned HT-MT chunk pairs (772 comparisons), with two readers per book and in alternating order of presentation. Overall, readers find MT "fine", but prefer HT (slightly at excerpt-level 19/30, more clearly at chunk-level 522
arXiv:2606.26036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-time data poisoning during fine-tuning poses a significant threat to large language models (LLMs) deployed for abstractive text summarization, where small task-specific datasets exert disproportionate influence on model behavior. In this setting, adversaries manipulate fine-tuning data to induce persistent summarization failures, such as biased or harmful summaries, while preserving standard evaluation metrics. We present a unified post-hoc defense framework for detecting and remediating fine-tuning-stage poisoning in summarization models across the machine learning supply chain. Our experiments show that in white-box settings, poisoned document-summary pairs exhibit abnormally high training influence, enabling detection via influence-function analysis with semantic consistency checks. In black-box settings, poisoned models display two to three times greater sensitivity to semantics-preserving perturbations, enabling behavioral a
arXiv:2606.26027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool use enables large language models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks, and recent agentic reinforcement learning (RL) methods show promise for enhancing model capabilities. However, RL alone often leads to instability or limited gains in tool-use tasks. In our experiments, some models exhibit catastrophic collapse, where performance abruptly drops and tool-invocation structures fail. The analysis reveals that these failures stem from unexpected probability spikes in specific control tokens, disrupting structured execution, yet the underlying tool-use capability remains intact, merely obscured by specific formats. To address this, we systematically investigate a diverse set of supervisory signals, including off-policy supervision, hint-based guidance, erroneous example supervision, and others, applied under both synchronous and interleaved training schemes. We find that interleaving supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with RL substantially impro
arXiv:2606.26015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text detoxification, the automated detection and mitigation of abusive and harmful content, is essential for ensuring the safety of online communities and protecting users. However, low resource languages such as Tatar have received little research attention. In this paper we present Tatoxa, a novel state-of-the-art system for text detoxification in the Tatar language. Comparative experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms existing open source and proprietary commercial LLMs on key quality metrics. We also introduce a new dataset for text detoxification in Tatar, designed for fine tuning and evaluation in low resource settings. Finally, cross lingual transfer experiments indicate that transfer from other languages, including the culturally close Russian, performs significantly worse than training on native Tatar data even when a large Russian corpus is available.
arXiv:2606.26003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech and language technologies are still heavily biased toward high-resource languages, limiting their applicability to dialectal and low-resource settings such as Algerian Dialect. This language presents additional challenges including lack of standardized orthography, frequent codeswitching with French, and scarcity of annotated speech resources. This paper addresses the problem of building a complete speech-to-speech conversational system for Algerian Dialect. We propose a modular pipeline integrating automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and text-to-speech synthesis within a unified architecture. This work is the continuation of our previous work on Algerian dialectal conversational systems Bechiri and Lanasri [2026], extending it from text-based dialogue modeling to full speech-based interaction. We constructed dedicated datasets for ASR, NLU, and TTS in the telecom
arXiv:2606.25990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As multimodal conversational systems increasingly engage in spoken interaction, their ability to navigate paralinguistic social cues has become a critical bottleneck for natural human-AI communication. However, existing evaluations of machine emotional intelligence assess reasoning exclusively through isolated text or passive acoustic perception, overlooking the complex cross-modal reasoning required for active, multi-turn dialogue. We introduce \textsc{SpeechEQ}, a comprehensive framework designed to evaluate the sociolinguistic reasoning of Speech-Language Models (SLMs). The framework includes a validated dataset of 2,265 dialogues across 15 Emotional Quotient (EQ) subscales grounded in EQ-i 2.0 theory, along with a multi-turn evaluation protocol measured by our proposed Spoken EQ (SEQ) score inspired by human EQ assessments. Experiments show limitations in how both existing Speech Emotion Recognition and end-to-end Speech-Language Mode
arXiv:2606.25987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) attain remarkable surface fluency on code, yet they neither formally guarantee the syntactic validity of their output nor leverage the hierarchical structure defining the target language. While existing constrained-decoding frameworks address the former, they operate under rigid assumptions that preclude critical lexical mechanisms -- including context-sensitive lexing, maximal-munch tokenization, and keyword extraction -- and only approximate vocabulary masking, sacrificing completeness. For the latter, code LLMs typically inject grammatical structure via predetermined policies rather than learning which structural information to expose. In this work, we introduce Weave of Formal Thought (WoFT), a paradigm uniting rigorous syntactic validation with learned structural representations. First, we present a formal engine and constrained decoder that is sound and complete with respect to the full Tree-sitter speci
arXiv:2606.25935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Was this person ever at that place, and if so, when? Answering such questions from noisy, multilingual historical documents is the central challenge of HIPE-2026, the third edition of the HIPE evaluation series. Moving from named entity recognition and linking (HIPE-2020, HIPE-2022) to reasoning about relationships between entities, HIPE-2026 targets two temporally grounded relation types: $at$, indicating that a person was present at a location at some point prior to a document's publication date, and $isAt$, indicating presence contemporaneous with that date. This paper presents the results of the evaluation campaign, which confronted 17 participating teams with the challenges of historical language variation, OCR noise, and indirect contextual cues across three languages: French, German, and English. The datasets include historical newspaper text from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as a surprise-domain generalization s
arXiv:2606.25821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as an increasingly influential paradigm as they offer a strategic balance between parameter scalability and computational efficiency. However, low-resource languages, which suffer from a scarcity of high-quality training data, often have their tokens routed to different experts than those predominantly activated by high-resource inputs, which limits cross-lingual expert sharing. This cross-lingual routing divergence consequently hinders their efficacy in multilingual contexts. To address this issue, we propose SARA (Semantically Anchored Routing Alignment), a framework designed to transfer specialized capabilities from high-resource languages as anchors to low-resource languages. SARA explicitly aligns the routing distribution of multilingual inputs with high-resource semantic anchors using a symmetric Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence constraint. Unlike traditional distillation meth