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natural language processing

9,568 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Understanding Helpfulness and Harmless Tension in Reward Models

Reward models (RMs) are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback, enabling the alignment of large language models with human values such as helpfulness and harmlessness. However, these alignment goals can conflict, leading to interference when optimised jointly. We refer to this conflict as alignme...

Eshaan Tanwar, Pepa Atanasova · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning through continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing approaches are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to analyze mechanistically. We introduce SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework that addresses both challenges...

Jiayu Yang, Chao Chen, Shengen Wu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyond

The rapid advancement toward long-context reasoning and multi-modal intelligence has made the memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache a dominant memory bottleneck for efficient deployment. While the established per-channel quantization effectively accommodates intrinsic channel-wise outliers in Key tensors, its ef...

Zunhai Su, Rui Yang, Chao Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Dynamic Skill Lifecycle Management for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Large language model agents increasingly rely on external skills to solve complex tasks, where skills act as modular units that extend their capabilities beyond what parametric memory alone supports. Existing skill-based RL methods assume external skills either accumulate as persistent guidance or internalized into the...

Junhao Shen, Teng Zhang, Xiaoyan Zhao et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

ErrOPD: When Does On-Policy Distillation Transfer Teacher Errors?

A distilled student can copy its teacher's mistakes along with its skills. On-policy distillation (OPD), used in recent post-training recipes, has the teacher grade every token of the student's own outputs. Which teacher errors does it pass on? We build ErrOPD, a testbed whose teachers are fine-tuned to close a JSON li...

Xin Li, Hao Jiang, Annan Wang et al. · 0 citations

TopoCurate:Modeling Interaction Topology for Tool-Use Agent Training

This work proposes TopoCurate, an interaction-aware framework that projects multi-trial rollouts from the same task into a unified semantic quotient topology that explicitly captures how tool invocations and environmental responses drive the divergence between effective strategies and failure modes.

Jin-Luan Yang, Yuxin Liu, Zheng-Yu Chen et al. · 3 citations · ⚡1

From Topology to Retrieval: Decoding Embedding Spaces with Unified Signatures

Upperological Signatures is presented for characterizing the structure of embedding spaces and finds that it outperforms individual metrics in downstream performance prediction and reveals novel insights into representational similarity that challenge the global claims of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis.

Florian Rottach, William Rudman, Bastian Rieck et al. · 5 citations · ⚡1
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Probing the Geometry of Color Representations in Multilingual Language Models

Do multilingual language models learn a universal internal geometry for color, and is it perceptually grounded or primarily linguistic? We decompose color representations into two geometric axes: (P1) alignment to perceptual color space, and (P2) cross-lingual symmetry. Analyzing layerwise embeddings across models and...

Pablo Loyola, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Andr\'es Hoyos-Idrobo · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Geometric Structure Predicts Per-Example Neighborhood Loss Under PCA Truncation

Dimensionality reduction can preserve the average performance of text embeddings even when a substantial fraction of their dimensions is removed. Aggregate metrics, however, do not reveal whether degradation is distributed uniformly across examples. We study per-example neighborhood stability under PCA truncation acros...

Sriram Loganathan, Gokul Anand, Ragavan Arivazhagan · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Encoding Context into LLM Weights: What Makes It Context?

Longer contexts allow large language models (LLMs) to condition their predictions on more information, but inference costs grow prohibitively with context length. An emerging alternative uses test-time updates to encode context as temporary changes to model weights. However, encoding this information into weights that...

Yue Wang, Qi-Zhou Wang, Feng Liu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Soft Teacher Forcing

Soft tokens have so far been used to replace discrete chain-of-thought in latent reasoning methods. These approaches typically require multi-stage training and, in some cases, auxiliary modules, yet they still underperform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) ontriples. In this paper, we ask whether soft tokens can be used to...

Mohammad Fahes, Cordelia Schmid, Anurag Arnab · 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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