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natural language processing

9,568 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Entertain, then Cancel: How Thinking Makes Reasoning Models Read Some and Or Literally

When a speaker says ``some students passed'', listeners infer that not all of them did. Reasoning models now let users decide how long a model thinks before it answers, but we do not know what extra thinking does to such everyday inferences. We study this directly: we keep a model's weights fixed, change only how much...

Zhizhuo Kou, Jian Yang, Pengfei Hao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Who May Release an Agent's Promise? Standing over Commitments in Multi-Party Chat

When an assistant serving a team makes a promise to Alice, who may cancel it? We call this standing: only the creditor (the person owed) or someone the creditor or operator policy authorizes may release a commitment, regardless of rank. In a controlled chat environment we vary who cancels and separate two errors: unaut...

Lan Wei, Bingyu Shen, Jiaqi Tang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Kolab: Benchmarking Human-Agent Collaboration in Long-Horizon Workflows

When humans collaborate with AI agents on long-horizon tasks, what happens to the agents' contributions? For solving long-horizon tasks, humans place greater importance on ongoing interaction with AI agents (e.g., revising plans) than on an agent's ability to complete the task in a single attempt. However, most agentic...

Shirley Anugrah Hayati, Patricia Anugrah Setiani, Ruizi Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Planning Commitment of LLM under Partial Observability

LLM-based planning agents commit to plans of different lengths before interacting with a partially observable environment. Some aggressively commit to a long plan based on assumptions about unobserved states, while others conservatively plan only over what they have observed. Both behaviors emerge implicitly in pre-tra...

Cassie Huang, Zhanwei Cao, Yeawon Lee et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

MemComposer: Learning to Assemble Memories for LLM Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Agent memory enables large language model (LLM) agents to reuse past experiences without updating their parameters. However, semantic similarity alone does not guarantee memory usefulness: downstream performance depends on how memories are selected and presented to the agent. We propose MemComposer, a memory composer t...

Yi-Xuan Xie, Xue-Qiang Xu, Xin-Yi Fan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Athanor: An Agent-Native System for Autonomous Post-Training Research

Recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems build stronger AI systems, is one promising route to superintelligence. We study a weaker form that can be measured today: frontier agents post-training a small raw base model with public data, as a test of their research potential. We build Athanor, an open agent-native...

Yufa Zhou, Yichen Wang, Jiakun Fan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

LEV: Thinking Fast and Deep with Looped Decision Models

Decision models answer typed questions about an input with one probability per option, computed in a single forward pass without generating text. Like the fast System 1 of dual-process theory, they answer at once, but their depth is fixed at training time, so they spend the same computation on easy and hard questions....

Dingjie Song, Zhiling Yan, Yuxuan Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

SkillNEO: Non-Elitist Evolutionary Optimization of Agent Skills

Agent skills turn procedural knowledge into reusable artifacts, allowing LLM agents to accumulate and refine expertise through experience. Building on this, skill evolution iteratively improves skills using execution feedback. However, improvement may require several interdependent edits, so low-reward versions can sti...

En-Ze Ma, Chun-Yu Miao, Yan-Kai Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Evolving Together, Failing Apart: The Skill-Policy Co-evolution Trap in Self-Improving Agents

Skill-policy co-evolution, in which an agent's policy model and its skill bank improve each other during training, is a promising paradigm for self-improving agents. Current evaluations score the co-evolved policy on the final bank it trained with (the delivered bank). After deployment, however, skills may be rewritten...

Yu-Jie Feng, Xiao-Bin Wang, Jin-Luan Yang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Confidence-Calibrated Inference Expansion for Evaluator-Guided Test-Time Reasoning

Evaluator-guided reasoning presents a local control problem at every step: trust the current answer, return a fallback, or spend more inference. We formulate this choice as a compute-aware three-action controller, scoring terminal actions by predicted answer success and expansion by a rollout-based continuation-success...

Wei-Da Liang, Kenji Kawaguchi · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

A Self-Improving Agent that Grows its Own DSL: Oracle-Free Operator Induction for Exact Question Answering

A self-improving agent has to decide which new skills to keep, and in practice it keeps whatever earns a high reward, convinces a judge model, or compresses its library, even when the skill is wrong. That is fine until the answers have to be exactly right: over a table of transactions, a total is either right or wrong....

Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Yi-Rou Ge, Yi-Xi Li et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

When Reasoning Traces Conflict with Evidence: How Answer Configuration Shapes Evidence Following

A reasoning trace retained at answer time plays two roles: it can raise accuracy, and it can compete with the current evidence when the two disagree. We disentangle these roles by crossing verified evidence versions with the traces generated from each and answering from the same traces and evidence under two configurat...

Shaoang Li, Yanhang Shi, Jian Li · 0 citations

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Microsoft Research Blog Oct 22, 2026

Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations

Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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