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17,191 papers

#machine learning Review Oct 2026

Ranking Is Not Deciding: Benchmark Shortcuts and Operating-Point Collapse in Query-Time RAG Poisoning Defenses

Query-time filters that screen each retrieved document before it reaches the generator are the dominant published defense against retrieval-augmented generation poisoning, and they report near-perfect detection on domain benchmarks. We show that this performance is predicted by how the poison set was built rather than...

P. Kumar, Arvin Sahaym · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Grounding on Request: Learning Modality Control in Vision-Language Models

When an image and its caption disagree, can a user reliably control which one a vision-language model (VLM) follows? Accuracy alone cannot answer this question, since a model might give the correct answer from parametric knowledge without following the requested evidence. We therefore evaluate modality grounding contro...

M. Dassen, Alexander Martin, Andrew Yates et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Implicit Beliefs as Scalable Process Rewards for Strategic Persuasion

Training large language models (LLMs) for multi-turn strategic persuasion faces two coupled obstacles: (i) realistic simulation of psychologically grounded persuadees, and (ii) dense, faithful supervision for credit assignment in strategic dialogues. Outcome-only rewards are sparse and uninformative about which convers...

Minqian Liu, Yuexi Shen, Heajun An et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Propensities Please: Exposing Alignment-Faking LLMs using Synthetic Document Finetuning

Alignment evaluations aim to assess whether large language models would engage in dangerous misaligned behaviour. Misaligned and evaluation-aware models might engage in alignment faking, where they pursue a hidden goal, but conceal this behaviour when they suspect effective oversight such as during training, evaluation...

Ardy Haroen, Florian Lorkowski, Samuel Nellessen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Speculative Forking: Turning Idle Wait into Parallel Exploration for Repository Environment Setup

Before developers can use a software project, they must first get it to run. This often requires installing the right language runtime, system packages, build tools, and test commands. Recent LLM-based agents automate environment setup by inspecting a repository, writing setup scripts, running them, and repairing the r...

Yuling Shi, Mingchu Zhong, Zhensu Sun et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Lessons from Luck: Do LLM-Written Lessons Carry Chance into an Agent's Next Decision?

Self-improving agents write lessons from the outcomes of their runs; when outcomes are noisy, a lesson can carry chance into later decisions. We measure one link of this chain in a registered study. In 256 synthetic worlds, each a recurring task with two interchangeable tools of recorded reliability, a scripted previou...

Kazuki Nakayashiki · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Can Language Models Learn While They Think? Testing Gradient Adaptation Across Architectures

Letting a language model take gradient steps on the text it is reading, known as dynamic evaluation, lowers its loss on the rest of the document. Its behaviour on hybrid linear-attention architectures, on diffusion language models, and on standard long-context benchmarks has not been measured. We measure it. With one S...

Surya Saka · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Evolving to Match Capabilities: Improving Harness Self-Evolution via Skill Adaptation

Harness self-evolution offers a practical route for LLM agents to improve from execution experience without updating model parameters. Its effectiveness depends on whether models can successfully act on the guidance provided by their harnesses. However, we find that harness benefits are not uniform across model capabil...

Zhi-Hao Yang, Haojin Wang, Jun-Cheng Wu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

UMAS: System-Level Uncertainty Quantification for Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are a promising paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet they remain prone to hallucinations and erroneous outputs. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for assessing system reliability, but existing methods are largely designed for single-agent set...

Han Li, Jinhao Duan, Xiao-Shuang Shi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

When Agents Collude: Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation for Mitigating Strategic Deception in Multi-Agent Systems

While recent advances in autonomous agents enable them to coordinate on increasingly complex tasks, prior work shows that this growing capacity for coordination can create safety risks, including collusion, in which agents jointly pursue misaligned actions while concealing the true basis of those actions from oversight...

Eric Onyame, Runtao Zhou, Kowshik Thopalli et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Skip the Compressor: Coding Agents Fix More Issues When They Pick Whole Files

A coding agent works on repositories that can be far larger than its context window can hold. Prompt compressors and retrievers offer solutions to this problem, but patching an issue needs two things at once: the files that must change, and their code exactly as written, since the model must reproduce the lines it edit...

Xiaocong Yang, Rishit Chatterjee, Himanshu Udupi et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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Microsoft Research Blog Nov 3, 2026

Learn the rules: The hacker mindset

Research Manager Mike Walker reflects on a career spanning hacker culture, cybersecurity, and AI, sharing lessons about trust, teamwork, leadership, and why solving difficult problems requires curiosity, judgment, agility—and an understanding of the rules. The post Learn the rules: The hacker mindset appeared first on Microsoft Research.

Google DeepMind Blog Nov 3, 2026

Agentic cheminformatics with Google Antigravity

Learn how Google Antigravity and our Cheminformatics Skills accelerate drug discovery workflows, search compounds, and propose novel rigidified macrocycles.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 28, 2026

Making machines that can listen

Professor Paris Smaragdis develops computers with superhuman hearing for applications like speech recognition, music understanding, and environmental monitoring.

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