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small language model

3,366 papers

#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

A Refresh Interval Does Not Fully Specify a Refresh Schedule: Learning-Rate-Dependent Placement in Kronecker-Preconditioned Language Model Training

Kronecker-preconditioned optimizers recompute a cached curvature eigendecomposition only periodically, and implementations and adaptive methods control this through the refresh frequency. We show that frequency leaves part of a schedule free: at a fixed number of refreshes, when they occur changes held-out loss at the...

Xin-Yu Wang, Zhi-Wei Zhai, Yu Gu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Teacher-Guided Tool Learning for Small Language Models via Bidirectional KL Constraints

External tools can extend the capabilities of small language models (SLMs), enabling their deployment in resource constrained environments. However, their limited capabilities make it difficult for SLMs to discover effective tool use behaviors through reinforcement learning alone, while direct teacher supervision suffe...

Hao-Xuan Gao, Qin-Wen Luo, Xiang Chen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Revisiting Error Feedback for Model Quantization

We study causal error-feedback coefficients as design variables for model quantization. Modeling instantaneous quantization errors as independent, zero-mean variables with a common fixed variance, we formulated a metric-dependent trace problem for designing feedback coefficients. The formulation resembles fixed-order G...

Wai-Yiu Keung, Chi Cui, Wing-Kin Ma et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Back-Translation Still Matters: Leveraging Monolingual Data for Low-Resource Machine Translation with LLMs

Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLMs) are effective on many tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. For machine translation of low-resource languages, the obvious options are few-shot prompting and fine-tuning on a small parallel set. We ask: what if moderate amounts of low-resource monolingual data are also availa...

Divyanshu Bathla, Parag Singla, Jitin Singla · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

DPOison-VL: Clean Preference Poisoning in Vision-Language Direct Preference Optimization

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a widely adopted approach for aligning vision-language models (VLMs), yet the security of multimodal preference data remains largely unexplored. Existing preference poisoning attacks either corrupt explicit supervision signals or require visible triggers, making them dete...

Cheng-Tao Jian, Kai Yang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Readout Scaling Shapes Sparse Feature Recovery

Readout scaling changes what a sparse autoencoder (SAE) learns, but the benefit of removing it depends on the data. We use readout-canonicalized decision-space (RC-DS) coordinates to remove singular-value gains while preserving retained decision information. At a fixed readout condition number, changing the generating...

Brain Xiao, Sarah Wilson · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Evaluating the Causal Faithfulness of SHAP as a Candidate Attribution Method for SAE Features

Sparse autoencoders decompose language model representations into interpretable features, but feature interpretation in this literature remains predominantly correlational. Attribution methods offer more direct estimates of feature influence, yet their faithfulness to actual causal effects has not been systematically e...

Samuel Xie, N. Al Moubayed · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Revisiting the 16x Pretraining Compute Gap between Diffusion and Autoregressive Language Models

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have attracted wide attention for their fast, parallel decoding, but they are believed to be far less efficient to train than autoregressive language models (ARMs): a widely cited study reports that a DLM needs roughly 16x the training compute of an ARM to match its likelihood, a figure...

Guang-Han Wang, B. He, Zhan Shi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Rethinking Activation Functions: Reducing Bias Can Improve Learning

Many widely used activation functions, including ReLU, GELU, Swish, and Sigmoid, produce predominantly positive outputs, resulting in a nonzero post-activation mean that we term activation bias. Despite its ubiquity, the effect of activation bias on learning dynamics remains poorly understood. Using controlled models,...

Zi-Rui Peng, Helen Zheng, Zi-Ming Liu · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Jevolution: A Framework for Studying Communication and Collective Dynamics in AI Agents

Experiments with remote decision-making agents depend on more than the policy: the world may change during inference, the simulator determines which actions are available, and births and immigration alter who can act. We present Jevolution, an instrumented spatial predator-prey framework that makes these dependencies e...

Xi-Ru Huang, N. Hooda, Utkarsh Gupta · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Target-ESS Tempered Policy Optimization (TETPO): Smooth Variance Control via Bridge Importance Sampling

Asynchronous reinforcement-learning post-training of large language models is computationally efficient but inherently off-policy: the learner updates on rollouts generated by a stale policy, while correcting this mismatch requires importance weights that can be extremely heavy-tailed. A small number of trajectories ma...

Shayan Mohajer Hamidi, Kayhan Behdin, Wen-Hui Zhu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

RealityBench: Simulated Environments to Evaluate a Vision Language Model's Ability to Document Human Physical Work

Augmenting worker capabilities in the physical world through guidance has been a decades-long goal for AI agents. One key supporting capability is to understand what the worker is doing, seeing through the human's camera or smart glasses, and assist them in documentation. Despite advances in vision language models, the...

Andrew Perrault, Anmol Takiar, Dominik Wienecki et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 23, 2026

Q&A: How AI came to model the “messy” human mind

Assistant Professor Benjamin Lindquist studies how engineers deliberately injected randomness into early AI, giving rise to deep-learning models that sometimes hallucinate.

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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