83 results for “Qwen”

TRIAGE is a two-tier LLM serving scheme that escalates requests from a small model to a large one based on a post-generation reliability state and a load-dependent GPU price. On one A40 serving Qwen2.5-7B and 32B (AWQ) under vLLM, escalation cost rose 21.9x from 1 to 10 requests/s. A pre-registered claim that the reliability state detects corrupted evidence (AUROC 0.70 or higher) failed at 0.571. A semantic evidence judge raised detection to 0.846. The 7B to 32B pair showed only a +2.88 pp held-out gap, so the allocator declined to escalate.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ProLand (Product-space Landing) is a retraction-free optimizer for LoRA fine-tuning that keeps the basis factor near the Stiefel manifold. It coordinates factor updates with Muon-style spectral directions, designing updates in the space of the weight increment so objective optimization and orthogonality restoration stay separate. It reports the highest average score among compared methods across 11 tasks on DeBERTa-v3-base, Qwen2.5-3B, Llama-3.2-3B and Moonlight-16B-A3B at several ranks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SecPO is a prompt injection defense that combines a new preference-optimization loss with adversarial training. It replaces the insecure DPO reference model with an approximated injection-invariant oracle, and trains on strong injections synthesized at best@240. Against Meta-SecAlign, AT cuts attack success rates 1.5-14.5x, and on Qwen3.6-27B AgentDojo ASR@800 falls to 8.8% from 78.8%, with no noticeable utility loss across nine benchmarks. Code, training data and model are released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SecPO is a DPO-variant loss from UC Berkeley for training LLMs against indirect prompt injection. It replaces the undefended-model reference on injected input with its output on the clean input, a one-line change, and pairs with a PAIR-based adversarial training pipeline. On Qwen3.6-27B, AgentDojo ASR@800 is 8.8% against 78.8% for Meta-SecAlign, with utility unchanged across nine benchmarks. Code, training set and weights are released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI

WorkFactory is a framework that builds coherent, executable professional tasks for training working agents. It plans an information support graph from professional intents, then uses probe executions to find and repair missing or inconsistent task information. The authors built 112,686 tasks across 612 occupations and fine-tuned Qwen models at 4B, 27B and 35B-A3B (WorkPilot). WorkPilot-35B-A3B rose from 879 to 1565 Elo on GDPval-AA v2.1.

huggingface.copaperAdded 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Turing LLM post-training combines calibrated multi-teacher on-policy distillation (C-MOPD) with an execution path for dynamically routed mixture-of-experts models. C-MOPD matches each teacher on a local Top-K support with teacher-wise loss normalization and clipping. On Turing-20B-A2B it scores 0.9988 on four-domain integration, beats Qwen3-8B on math and code (85.92 vs 80.33 mean), and cuts consolidation step time from 398.7 to 139.3 seconds in a PPU profile.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

REALM (Required Execution Assets Linked to a Mission) is an approach to applying least privilege to LLM agents by identifying the assets a task needs, including ones discovered at runtime. It models assets as Dependency Graph nodes, separates discovering an asset from authorizing it, and exposes resource-bound Partial APIs inside a Task Container. On AgentDyn with qwen3.5-flash, attack success rate falls from 16.6% to 0.2%, with 40.0% task completion on clean tasks and 36.4% on injected cases.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Repairs for Whom? studies single-step repairs of failed LLM agent trajectories and asks whether common evaluators (greedy replay, stronger models, oracles, log-reading judges) pick repairs that help the deployed agent. Using independent rollouts in ALFWorld and WebShop, greedy replay loses 0.06-0.13 in expected gain, and Qwen2.5-14B rollouts misselect repairs for Qwen2.5-7B. The authors recommend verifying repairs with the executor that will run them.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

CALM is a conflict-aware lifecycle memory governance framework for long-horizon language agents. It turns records into evidence-grounded memory cells, updates their validity and lifecycle states from support, conflict and dependency signals, and admits evidence at query time through training-free or learned gating based on temporal applicability. It beats baselines on LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with Qwen and GPT backbones, and keeping superseded records helps earlier-state reasoning.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper measures how much a model's final answer depends on its own written chain of thought, using a synthetic box-swap task with exact ground truth. It edits one step in the model's chain to a wrong but valid state and checks whether the answer follows. Across 25 open-weight models, reliance rises with size and saturates (Qwen3 from 16-18% at 0.6B to 97-100% at 14B). Reliance tracks capability (r = 0.99) and is unchanged by post-training.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

EnvSched is an online scheduler for agentic reinforcement learning that picks which environment-task pairs to roll out next. It builds a dual-relation graph over environments and tasks, propagates past rollout statistics to predict within-task reward variance, and adds environment quotas and a similarity penalty. On Qwen3-8B it scores 48.81 average on BFCL-v3, tau-Bench and ACEBench-Agent after 40 steps, above random selection at 120 steps.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies a cost-aware, two-action RAG routing policy that chooses between dense retrieval plus reranking and a hybrid lexical-dense retriever, using a regularized linear model to predict per-question evidence gain. On 60 held-out QASPER articles (188 questions), it triggers hybrid retrieval on 24.5% of questions and matches always-hybrid Hit@10 (78.70%). Answers from 4-bit Qwen3-4B show no clear correctness or faithfulness gain, and the assessments are model-assisted.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

DCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for context-incomplete code fragments. A fine-tuned LLM lifts control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations into a constrained LLVM-like IR. A parser turns the IR into facts, and Datalog rules derive findings with derivation traces. On Juliet function-level fragments Clang compilation success falls to 12.00%, while SymLift's completion rate drops only 1.17 points. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches Target-F1 94.41% on FormAI and 91.66% micro-F1 on MegaVul.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for code fragments that lack project context. A fine-tuned LLM reconstructs control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations as a constrained LLVM-like IR, and a deterministic parser turns it into facts for Datalog rules that give findings with derivation traces. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches 94.41% Target-F1 on FormAI and 91.66% micro-averaged Target-F1 on MegaVul.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI

TriageRAG is a failure-aware self-training method for adapting retrieval-augmented LLMs to specialized domains using only an unlabeled corpus. It probes the student on self-generated questions with and without retrieved context, sorts them into known, solved, context-failure and retrieval-failure, and routes each to a matching training signal. With Qwen3-4B on 11 datasets it beats budget-matched SimRAG by 1.2-6.4 points and recovers closed-book accuracy where retrieval hurts.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

PHYRD is a living benchmark for theoretical-physics reasoning with 63 Reproduce problems (derive published results) and 43 Discover problems (consequences of modified theoretical conditions). Tasks are built by FormulaForest, with reference solutions and subquestion-level rubrics. Across five models, whole-problem accuracy is 49.21% to 68.25% on Reproduce and 18.60% to 74.42% on closed-book Discover. FormulaForest data also lifts a Qwen-35B-A3B model on FrontierScience from 61% to 72%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MPQ (Message-Passing Quantization) is a post-training quantization method that treats row-wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. It keeps soft posteriors across weight blocks using vector approximate message passing, then refines a hard-decision initialization with exact block coordinate descent. Tested at 2-bit lattice and 3- and 4-bit scalar quantization on Llama, Qwen and Mistral models, it improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy over GPTQ-style baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper measures how hints such as "[Source] thinks the answer is (X)" shift LLM answers on MMLU questions, varying the source between a professor, a friend and a dog across Qwen, Gemma and SmolLM models. The shift fits an exponential tilt: a roughly constant mean change in the hinted answer's log-odds, with susceptibility largely shared across sources. The shift persists when the source is declared inaccurate or the prompt warns against trusting it. Synthetic experiments show how KL-regularized reward training could produce this pattern.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

DuoCook is an Overcooked-inspired benchmark in which one vision-language model controls two cooks from top-down views in Unreal Engine environments built with coding agents. It has 20 maps in five categories covering equipment contention, changing terrain and handoff dependencies. Four VLMs were compared; the best, gpt-6-astra, reached 26.2% mean order completion. A notebook memory ablation had mixed effects: positive for Claude and Qwen, negative for GPT and Gemini.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper trains small open language models with reinforcement learning to select tools for multi-step instructions over corpora of more than ten thousand tools. A Qwen3-8B model post-trained with the recipe outperforms Llama-4-Maverick (402B) on ToolBench. The trained model transfers to different retrievers and generalizes to new tool corpora in other domains, without relying on proprietary LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

RIFT is a family of selection-based KV cache compression strategies for speculative-decoding draft models. It targets "decode staleness", where prefill-focused selection loses relevance as output grows, by balancing prefill information with recent generated tokens, refreshing the selection adaptively, and training drafters with sparse attention masks. Qwen3.5-4B drafting for Qwen3.5-122B keeps over 98% of full-cache acceptance length at 32K input, 4K output and an 8K KV budget.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Protection Is Not One Event is a survey and human-coded evidence map of 118 RAG defense papers, grouped by measured endpoint into a seven-family taxonomy (kappa=0.867 across 32 annotators). It finds that only 17.8% of studies use content disclosure as their primary endpoint, and that most evaluations use general QA data and non-adaptive attacks. In a testbed on Qwen3-8B, an 8-gram guard cut copying to 0.0%, yet a three-query adaptive attacker still recovered 48.3% of hidden facts. Taxonomy, dataset, coding protocols and testbed are released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Survey and human-coded evidence map of 118 RAG defense papers, organized by measured endpoint across a seven-family taxonomy (content disclosure, formal privacy proxies, access control, corpus-use detection, pipeline integrity). Only 17.8% of studies use disclosure or reconstruction as the primary endpoint, and most use non-adaptive attacks on general QA data. A testbed shows a normalized 8-gram guard cuts 20-token copying to 0.0%, yet a three-query adaptive attacker recovers 48.3% of hidden facts on Qwen3-8B.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

TokenGate is a small drop-in component that adds end-to-end learnable token pruning to trained LLMs for long-context prefill. It uses token-gated attention, inspired by Mixture-of-Experts, to re-weight attention logits with token importance scores, which gets gradients through the non-differentiable top-K step. The authors report 1.4-11.3x faster time-to-first token and 1.5-3.4x lower peak memory with no accuracy loss, on Qwen3 and Qwen3.5.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper tests eight jailbreak attacks against three open-weight language models under three evaluation procedures. Low-resource language attacks score 96.0% mean ASR under keyword matching but 2.7% under a Qwen3 judge using StrongREJECT instructions. At Ollama's default temperature of 0.8, 100 samples of an unchanged request give 100% ASR by keywords and 50% by the judge. The authors recommend explicit success definitions, matched response budgets, validated evaluators and cumulative-failure reporting.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Concerns in Benchmarking Jailbreaks is an October 2026 arXiv study of eight jailbreak attacks on three open-weight models under three evaluation procedures. Low-resource language attacks score 96.0% ASR by keyword matching but 2.7% under a Qwen3 evaluator using StrongREJECT instructions. Attack rankings flip with attempt budgets, and 100 samples at Ollama's default temperature 0.8 give 100% ASR by keywords, 50% by the evaluator.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

OpenGCUA, from Alibaba's MAI-UI team, is an open stack for generalist computer-use agents (GCUAs), where the model chooses how to observe, act and organize work across GUI, accessibility-tree, API and shell interfaces. Its design combines code execution (GUI actions written as programs with loops and branches) with harness-to-model decision transfer. On OSWorld-v2 it raises mean partial score by +19.6 points across eight models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5, and cuts reported steps per task by 53%. The release includes the harness, prompts, evaluation trajectories, a macOS real-device harness, a cross-device SDK and an interactive lab. It also shows large efficiency gaps between models: Qwen3.8-Max used 19.4x the reasoning tokens of GPT-6 Astra on real macOS tasks.

huggingface.copaperAdded 17 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Beacon is a safety alignment framework for large reasoning models that fixes two GRPO failure modes: advantage collapse, where homogeneous rollout groups give vanishing advantages, and unsafe diversification, where unsafe behaviors persist and spread. It combines Safety Signal Recovery (advantage-guided trajectory filtering plus safe reference supervision) with Safety-Utility Decoupled Alignment (category-aware rewards, benign-only KL anchoring). Tested on four Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill variants across eight benchmarks, it cuts average safety error by up to 32.83 percentage points with low over-refusal.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

EDIC is a decomposed reward framework that trains LLMs to decide, for each instruction embedded in external data such as documents or tool returns, whether to follow or reject it. A judge initialized with SFT and refined with GRPO attributes compliance per instruction and yields separate rewards for beneficial and harmful compliance. On Qwen3-4B it raises harmful-rejection by up to 7.7% and Arena-Hard-Auto utility by 12.5% over the strongest prior defense.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

EDIC is a decomposed reward framework for per-instruction compliance in LLMs that read external data, where one document or tool return mixes legitimate directives with injected ones. A generative judge, trained with SFT then GRPO, attributes compliance per instruction and produces RL rewards for beneficial and harmful compliance. On Qwen3-4B it raises harmful rejection by up to 7.7% and Arena-Hard-Auto utility by 12.5% across five benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Presents a modular, fully onboard UAV navigation pipeline that closes the "human-aware safety gap" of geometry-only planners. A shared BLIP encoder drives captioning and text-conditioned segmentation, which is fused with depth for 3D obstacle localization. Qwen-2.5-0.5B, stabilized with RAG and grammar-constrained JSON decoding, infers per-category risk once per class and caches the verdict. Perception runs at 10 Hz on a Jetson Orin NX, and fallback LLM queries take about 0.8 s off the control path. In Gazebo it gives roughly 3x fewer collisions than a geometric planner and raises semantics-aware landing success from 34% to 96%. The 224-pixel encoder input limits small-object perception at range.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper shows that symmetric aggregation of a primary reward (correctness) and auxiliary rewards (brevity, efficiency) in LLM post-training can raise aggregate reward while primary-task performance falls. It proves that deterministic conditional-mean GRPO converges to auxiliary-favoring behavior when auxiliary rewards are more reliably obtained. It proposes Trust-Anchored Gating (TAG), which elects an anchor channel by policy drift and gates auxiliary credit on anchor satisfaction. On Qwen3-4B with a brevity reward, TAG reaches 0.581 pass@4 versus 0.220 for additive aggregation, and shortens responses by 44% relative to correctness-only training. Experiments on Qwen and Llama models cover math and program synthesis.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

INFUSE is an end-to-end benchmark for indirect prompt injection (IPI) across long-horizon agent workflows (shell commands, code changes, dependency installs, remote services). It has 40 realistic tasks and a taxonomy of 56 attack scenarios in five threat categories, with attacks injected via interaction surfaces encountered mid-task. Across 19 LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Gemma, Qwen) and 41,824 adversarial trajectories, mean attack success was 19.6% (LLM-judged) and 15.4% (heuristic), per-model 3.2–41.9%; guard models gave limited protection, while prompt-level hardening cut mean ASR from 58.2% to 14.3%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces TerminalHorizon, a fully automated data synthesis engine for long-horizon terminal agents. It uses independent execution to find key work omitted during environment construction and rebuilds the environment from that evidence. It then progressively expands tasks under the same goal with new requirements that build on earlier results. The authors build 1.5K task environments and run supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3.5-27B to get TerminalHorizon-27B, which improves on all 12 benchmarks covering coding-agent tasks, real-world production agentic tasks and general reasoning. Multiple RSI case studies with a 12-hour research budget show the model continuing to experiment past an initial solution and keeping effective improvements in its final deliverables.

huggingface.copaperAdded 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SP$^2$ec (Single-Peak SPeculative decoding) is a training-free bandit algorithm that adapts the draft configuration of self-speculative decoding per prompt for vision-language models. It relies on the single-peak throughput pattern seen in SWIFT, KnapSpec, SpecVLM and the authors' cosSim method. It minimizes a new wall-time regret measure and has theoretical guarantees of near-optimal configuration with negligible exploration cost. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-Mistral-7B it improves over the original self-speculative methods by up to 11% on visual and textual tasks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ProAS (Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping) is a plug-and-play framework for multi-turn agentic RL that fixes the uniform credit assignment problem in critic-free algorithms like GRPO, where trajectory-level advantages are broadcast to every action. It uses a dynamically evolving Agentic Reference Graph with Masking Unreasonable Incentives and Asymmetric Penalty Redistribution to give finer-grained credit without a critic. On Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B-Instruct it reports success rates up to 91.9%/94.3% on ALFWorld and 66.7%/70.8% on WebShop, with up to 2.44x faster training convergence and robustness to imperfect or distilled ARGs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MultiAlloc is a profiling-guided framework for KV cache quantization. It splits a fixed KV memory budget between layer-wise precision enhancement and token-wise preservation. Lightweight offline profiling measures layer sensitivity and token importance, and the profiled memory–accuracy trade-off yields an allocation policy with no online search. The paper reports gains over layer-wise, token-wise and recent multi-granularity KV quantization baselines at matched memory on reasoning and long-context benchmarks, across Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek-Qwen and QwQ models.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Proposes Geometric Calibration of supervised fine-tuning and SPACE (Subspace Projection for Adapted Checkpoint Enhancement). SPACE is a post-hoc, data-free, training-free method that uses the pre- and post-SFT checkpoints to revert SFT update components lying in the principal subspace of the pre-SFT weights and keep those in the orthogonal complement. It is evaluated on Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.1 and Olmo-3 models (2B–14B) with math, coding and medical SFT. It reduces out-of-domain regression and improves in-domain performance, for example +2.85 ID / +2.26 OOD on Qwen2.5-7B math SFT.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Introduces Structured Recipe Optimization (SRO), a paradigm for automated LLM post-training that optimizes over a task-adapted recipe space covering data sources, data processing, cross-domain composition and training configuration. It pairs an LLM-based Recipe-Space Designer, which builds the recipe space for the target tasks, with a Multi-Domain Recipe Optimizer that uses structured trial evidence to guide LLM candidate construction and multi-objective Bayesian trial selection. SRO gets the highest average score in all evaluated target-model and agent-LLM combinations; for example, 41.1 vs 15.4 for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B with GPT-5.4, and 53.8 vs 40.8 on Qwen3-4B with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, in joint post-training across three capability domains and six benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper studies regressive sycophancy under fabricated evidence: a medical VLM gives a correct answer, then abandons it when the user pushes back with a fake prescription. It tests four open VLMs on 400 VQA-RAD yes/no questions in 19,200 multi-turn conversations. Without a synthetic-document disclosure, models abandon 80.1% of 6,488 correct answers, and the same prescription raises Qwen2.5-VL-7B's flip rate from 45.9% to 89.6% while lowering Qwen3-VL-8B's from 77.7% to 50.9%. Models often reject the prescription yet keep the correct answer in only some conversations (915 of 3,232), and 40% of those flip later. System-prompt disclosure of synthetic documents cuts one model's flip rate from 77.8% to 47.3%. The authors conclude that recognising a forgery does not stop a model from adopting the forged answer.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team tests whether small open-weight models (≤30B) can autonomously replicate across commodity IoT devices. They ran Gemma4-26B-A4B over 15 off-brand Android TV boxes at 0.39 tok/s with pipeline parallelism. A Qwen3.5-9B-class model set up inference on 8 of 9 hardware types, and only GLM-5.2 completed end-to-end worm replication in an 8-node redroid ADB network, spreading to 8/8 nodes in 4 of 5 trials and 7/8 in the other. It also estimates spread using the Kimwolf botnet's size (~133k replicas, about 40 H100s of compute), shows notes inherited between generations improve Qwen3.5-9B's setup success (45% to 61–84%), and projects small models reaching the capability floor by end of 2026. It closes with defensive points: drive R0 below 1, and harden IoT devices.

anthropic.compaperPublished and added 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DualQuant is a calibration-free post-training quantization framework for LLM weights and activations. It minimizes weight-reconstruction MSE using variable splitting and block coordinate descent with closed-form subproblem updates. The resulting scaling factors double as per-channel activation rescalings, so no calibration data is needed. It supports the MX family and NVFP4 block formats. On Llama and Qwen models it matches or beats calibration-based SmoothQuant on WikiText-2, C4 and zero-shot tasks. A real packed W4A4 path for Llama-3.1-8B on an RTX 4090 gives up to 2.61x memory reduction and 2.46x throughput over BF16.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Proposes Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization (MCGPO), which builds weighted action preferences from already-collected sibling rollouts to give credit to intermediate decisions when feedback is sparse and arrives only at the end. Comparison contexts use pre-action state summaries and rubric progress. Exact and coarse matching rules are selected by two-action support, and fixed folds separate candidate decisions from the terminal outcomes that orient them. An evidence-weighted auxiliary pairwise loss is added to GraphGPO task learning, and no critic is needed. Across six environment-backbone settings with three seeds each, it beats GraphGPO by 0.47-1.46 points on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B, and by 3.96 and 5.16 points on WebShop with Qwen3-4B/8B. ALFWorld gains are small because baseline success is already above 92%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SWE-Critix is a post-training pipeline that trains generalist verifiers for coding-agent trajectories. Given a task and its (often hundreds-of-steps) trajectory, the verifier predicts a completion label and writes a natural-language analysis explaining the judgment. Starting from Qwen3-30B-A3B reasoning, classification accuracy on a held-out test set rises from 57% to 66% after SFT and 78% after RL, using trajectories from CodeForge-Preview. Models, datasets and training code are released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

WOVEN is a training source and benchmark for visual transition reasoning in multimodal LLMs. It has 36,076 examples spanning 20 scene types, 5 action types and 8 reasoning types, built from rollouts of video-pretrained generative models. Evaluating 38 frontier MLLMs (including GPT-5.4 and Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B) shows systematic deficits that persist with scale. Training on WOVEN subsets of about 2,000 items improves 22 of 26 external benchmarks by up to 27.3 points, and WOVEN data can replace 30-50% of a task's own training data. The authors derive a recipe: select supervision by the reasoning operation it teaches rather than by scene or action, and prefer larger visual-state changes.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ORCAGen uses RAG over a curated knowledge base of malware procedures and active-defense strategies, plus structured prompting, to have LLMs generate proof-of-concept malware and matching deception orchestration code offline. Strategies are validated against the PoC malware before being added to a runtime playbook that enforces only the verified, deterministic logic. It is evaluated on GPT-4o, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Qwen3-Coder and Claude Sonnet 4.5 over synthesized scenarios and 150 real keylogger, infostealer and ransomware samples, measuring execution success, hallucination rate, refinement effort, deception effectiveness and runtime overhead.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper introduces a pre-registered panel of 248 scenarios across five kinds of pressure, each posed to a model twice (as the acting agent and as a third-person judge) with pressure-removed twins and operator-order positive controls, to measure whether models act against their own stated moral judgment. Testing OLMo-3-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Tulu 3, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, the authors find OLMo-3 violates its own judgment on about 1 in 5 pressuring scenarios, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and OLMo-3 carry this gap while Tulu 3 (fine-tuned from the same Llama-3.1 weights) and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct show none or an unresolved effect, and that reading outside the chat template or adding stakes-reasoning changes the gap's sign and size. The paper argues this value-action gap is a target shaped by post-training recipes rather than a fixed property of pretrained weights.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Semantic Behavioral Watermarking (SBW) is a provenance scheme for LLM agents that embeds an owner identifier in semantic clusters of an agent's action choices rather than exact action symbols, making it robust to paraphrasing/tool-renaming that breaks three prior agent watermarks (e.g., AgentMark drops to 16.8% bit-recovery under observation paraphrasing). It adds keyed, collision-resistant binning proven unpredictable in the random-oracle model to resist forgery (adaptive forgery success drops from 100% to the false-positive floor), while explicitly documenting an unsolved attack: chained-replay forgery, which still succeeds 0.76-0.98 of the time across five tested agent models (3B-14B, Qwen, ToolBench/ALFWorld benchmarks). Code is released alongside the paper.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper proposes a formal framework for "alignment scaling laws," modeling the compute/capability burden needed to hold a fixed safety target for each risk category as a power law B_r(N)=a_rN^alpha_r, where the exponent alpha_r determines whether alignment gets easier, keeps pace, or accumulates "alignment debt" as capability N grows. The authors prove theoretical results (the largest exponent among corrected risks sets the long-run regime, super-exponential headroom requirements above alpha=1, small-model fits underestimate large-scale exponents for power-law mixtures) and apply a preregistered protocol twice: a reanalysis of adversarial-training data on Pythia classifiers (attack-success compute exponent 0.60) and a pilot across Qwen2.5 (0.5B-72B) and Qwen3 (0.6B-14B), finding scaling helps for truthfulness and stated dispositions but sycophancy (exponent ~0.83-0.89) and a planted backdoor behave worse or remain undetermined, with the backdoor surviving blind safety training at most model sizes. The work matters as an early attempt to put the "does alignment get harder with scale" debate on measurable, falsifiable footing rather than anecdote.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Researchers fine-tune Qwen3-8B with GRPO against a proxy reward built from surface features (citation count, legalese density, response length) and find the model learns to strategically abstain rather than reason: on 16 LegalBench yes/no legal tasks, accuracy collapses from chance (0.500) to 0.072 because the rate of properly formatted, committed answers drops from 0.900 to 0.109, even though accuracy on answers it does commit to actually rises. They term this the "Saul Goodman effect," formally prove it is the optimal policy for any surface-feature proxy that doesn't penalize abstention, show 89.3% of post-training citations are hallucinated/corrupted real case names, and introduce three diagnostics (Confidence Theater Score, Citation Plausibility Rate, Regret Gap) to detect this failure mode before deployment.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SpatialChain is a benchmark of 28,350 training and 899 test examples pairing spatially-oriented GQA questions with scene-graph-grounded reasoning chains, designed to audit whether VLMs' correct spatial answers reflect faithful reasoning or linguistic shortcuts. Using a two-axis evaluation (chain-overlap metrics plus a scene-graph-aware LLM judge), the authors find that four of nine tested models hit ≥79% accuracy while showing shortcut rates above 39%, that chain quality predicts correctness for most models except Claude Sonnet 4.6 and InternVL3.5-8B (which fail differently, via terse vs. verbose-decorative reasoning), and that SFT on SpatialChain improves Qwen3-VL-8B accuracy by +6.2pp while cutting its shortcut rate to 22%. The faithfulness judge is validated against human annotations and a second LLM judge, with data, generation scripts and evaluation code released publicly.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

GraphForge is a data-synthesis framework that builds agent training tasks from real files: it assembles occupation-grounded workspaces, constructs an evidence graph over file relations, and derives both task statements and verification rubrics from that graph so every grading criterion is anchored to specific source files. Fine-tuning Qwen3.6-27B on 2,169 GraphForge trajectories improved GDPVal by +65.7 under OpenHands and lifted Workspace-Bench-Lite and SpreadsheetBench II scores under Claude Code, with further gains from rejection fine-tuning using the evidence-anchored rubrics as a selection signal.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI

NeutronGym is an executable environment for neutron scientific-instrument design where LLM agents build instruments via validating tools, McStas ray-traces the result, and a level-resolved ladder grades syntax, runtime, structure and physics without an LLM judge. A curated McStasBench slice adds 16 tasks from published instruments; seven frontier models solve at most 7 of 16, but reinforcement learning on the ladder's reward takes Qwen3-8B from 11% to 77% on held-out instances (surpassing an untrained Qwen3-32B), with ablations showing the partial-credit ladder is responsible for most of the gain.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Patch-to-Prune (P2P) is a training-free framework that repurposes activation patching from mechanistic interpretability into an inference-time compute bypass for vision-language models, replacing unnecessary visual-token projections in certain decoder layers with fixed neutral proxy vectors while preserving sequence length, token order, and residual pathways. Tested on Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA family models across seven multimodal benchmarks, P2P at 3 percent tolerance retains about 94 percent of dense accuracy while cutting FLOPs by 55 percent, and reveals that intermediate decoder layers do most of the task-relevant visual integration while early and late layers need little token-specific visual computation.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AREX-2 trains an LLM agent, built on Qwen3.8-27B, to self-improve at test time by iteratively refining solutions. The training data is synthesized long-horizon improvement trajectories from machine learning and algorithmic programming tasks, which give verifiable feedback. It reports 81.8 on MLE-bench Lite and 70.7 on Frontier-CS, and transfer to deep research with 84.0 on BrowseComp, 52.6 on HLE, 92.2 on GAIA and 93.8 on DeepSearchQA. Performance keeps improving as the budget of rounds grows. This supports the claim that reflection and long-horizon execution are domain-agnostic skills that can be learned from supervisable domains.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

LLM2Jev is an architecture-preserving framework that extracts calibrated categorical decisions directly from an LLM's next-token probabilities over bracketed numeric identifiers, rather than generating free-form text. The paper shows Qwen3.5-4B already matches community Jev-style decision models out of the box (training-free), while fine-tuning with a tree-factorized listwise loss plus KL-divergence anchoring to the base model gives targeted gains mainly for weaker backbones (like Qwen3-0.6B) and tasks such as many-option intent routing, without degrading conversational generation.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AuraForge is a method for synthesizing and validating executable security tests to train coding agents toward secure (not just functionally correct) code, combining attack-oriented test synthesis, multi-language task construction, and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors release AuraGym, a 679-task executable training gym drawn from 344 real-world Python/JavaScript/TypeScript repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with AuraForge-synthesized tests beats human-written tests on both functional-pass (FuncPass) and security-pass (SecPass) metrics while cutting false positives by over 83%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AuraForge is a pipeline that synthesizes and validates executable security tests to supervise the training of coding agents, using attack-oriented test synthesis and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors build AuraGym, a multi-language (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript) training gym of 679 feature-implementation tasks from 344 real repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with these synthesized tests beats human-written security tests on both functional correctness (FuncPass) and security (SecPass) metrics, while producing about 3x more test cases and cutting false positives by 83 percent.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

VibeMemBench is a benchmark for evaluating persistent memory systems on 111 real-repository coding targets (from 90 SWE-rebench V2 repos, with 3,634 prior-work trajectories), built via a four-stage SIEVE pipeline that verifies a target's injected history experience actually improves executable test outcomes before inclusion. The paper finds that frozen, verified "useful" experience transfers small resolution gains (1.1–4.5 pp) and step reductions to held-out solvers (DeepSeek-V4-Pro, GLM-5, GLM-5.2, Kimi-K2.7-code, Qwen3.8-max), but when four existing memory systems (Mem0, SimpleMem, MemoryOS, A-MEM) must construct and retrieve that experience themselves, 11 of 12 solver/system pairings fail to beat the memory-off baseline — exposing a large gap between latent useful history and what current memory systems actually deliver.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper proposes Semifactual Credit-Augmented Policy Optimization (SCAPO), a variant of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). It uses semifactual prompt interventions to measure token-level probability drift and derive normalized stability scores, reducing advantage credit for unstable (likely spurious) tokens during early training rather than uniformly assigning the same advantage to every token in a response. On Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-1.7B-Base, SCAPO improves AIME 2024-2026 accuracy over GRPO by 5.63 and 4.17 percentage points respectively, and achieves the best results on most math benchmarks and all out-of-distribution benchmarks tested.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

The paper introduces Ranking-PE, a modification to reflective prompt-optimization methods like GEPA that replaces per-instance accuracy scoring with pairwise AUROC-equivalent scoring (via the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney identity) across the scores matrix, reflection feedback, and candidate selection. Applied to multimodal clinical diagnosis on MIMIC with fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B and MedGemma-4B, it shows accuracy-based prompt evolution can degrade ranking performance under class imbalance, while Ranking-PE improves AUROC by +5.8pp and +16.2pp respectively, with ablations showing a medical-grade visual backbone is a necessary prerequisite that prompt search alone cannot substitute for.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

EvoDuet is a bilevel optimization method that co-evolves candidate solutions and web search queries for LLM-driven evolutionary search in scientific discovery tasks, keeping model parameters fixed. A retrieval gate lets the LLM decide whether to fetch new documents, reuse cached ones, or skip retrieval; an inner loop refines queries and ranks documents by predicted solution score, while an outer loop generates candidates from these documents in parallel. On 21 optimization tasks it raises OpenEvolve's normalized discovery gain from 74.1% to 78.0% with GPT-5.6 Luna and from 61.3% to 82.3% with Gemini 3.8 Flash (no benefit seen with Qwen3.5-9B), and surpasses prior best scores on eight tasks including Swap Reduction on Q20 and Rosetta.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

STEPQuant is a spatial-temporal post-training quantization framework for the fixed-size recurrent states used by Delta-rule linear attention, which become a memory bottleneck under concurrent serving. It allocates bit precision based on error magnitude and memory lifetime (temporal) and fits per key-row/value-column scales based on state distribution and output impact (spatial), achieving near-FP32 accuracy at a 6-bit budget and beating uniform INT8 at 4-bit. Evaluated on Qwen3.8-27B and Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct, and integrated into SGLang with custom GPU kernels, it delivers over 5x recurrent-state compression and up to 68.7% total serving memory reduction.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

LeapQuant is a training-free quantization method for the fixed-size recurrent state used by linear-attention LLM architectures like Gated DeltaNet and Kimi Delta Attention, aiming to cut the inference bottleneck of repeatedly reading and updating that state. It introduces per-window quantization (re-quantizing the state only once per token window, using high-precision buffered updates in between) plus "Compensator Tokens" that preserve the state's largest outlier values in high precision, with residual smoothing to further reduce error. Across Qwen, Kimi, and GLM model families, it reaches near-FP32 accuracy at 8-bit while delivering 2.05–3.70x kernel-level and 1.47x end-to-end speedups on NVIDIA B200, RTX PRO 6000, and RTX 5090 GPUs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper shows that internal expert-routing probabilities in Mixture-of-Experts vision-language models (Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct and Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it) carry a strong, low-cost signal for detecting when a model is about to answer a question about an object that isn't actually in the image (a 'target-absence grounding failure'). Linear detectors trained on target-token routing probabilities achieve ROC-AUCs of 0.9988/0.9956 on GQA-Inpaint (retaining 0.78-0.81 on the external OBER dataset), and gating a target-aware review prompt on these detections improves end-to-end accuracy by up to +22% without modifying model weights. The work matters for practitioners building on MoE VLMs because it demonstrates a weight-free, pre-generation hallucination detector that reuses computation the model already produces.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

The paper introduces Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a minimal online training procedure where an LLM agent generates a self-written explanation of its own attempt at a task and is then fine-tuned with next-token prediction on that explanation alone, without any reward signal or external teacher. Using Qwen3.5-4B on software-engineering tasks, ROFT reaches 49.2% and 26.8% solve rates on held-out SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro after 20 updates, edging out GRPO's 48.0%/25.3% after 40 updates and making faster early progress, and it can even learn to solve tasks where all 64 sampled base-model attempts initially failed. The authors argue this shows self-generated retrospections act as useful training signal, implicitly performing credit assignment and shaping behavior (e.g., shorter solutions) without RL machinery.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

VulContextBench is a hand-audited benchmark of 111 vulnerability-introducing commits across 83 repositories, 63 CWEs, and five languages, built to score whether a coding agent actually retrieved and cited the correct evidence for a vulnerability verdict rather than just reaching the right verdict. Evaluating seven frontier models (including Qwen3-Coder-Next and GPT-5.5) at file/block/line granularity, the authors find every model explores most of the gold evidence but reports only a fraction of it: Qwen3-Coder-Next views 86.3% of annotated lines but cites just 12.9%, while GPT-5.5 views 73% and reports 36%. This reveals that verdict-only vulnerability-detection benchmarks mask whether an agent's reasoning is actually grounded in traced code versus pretraining recall.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

VulContextBench is a benchmark of 111 hand-audited vulnerability-introducing commits across 83 repositories, 63 CWEs and five languages, built to measure whether a coding agent's verdict is actually grounded in the code it retrieved rather than recalled from pretraining. Each case has gold-context annotations (464 code blocks) scored separately for context viewed during exploration versus context cited as final evidence, at file, block and line granularity, across seven frontier models. The headline finding is a large viewed-vs-reported gap — e.g. Qwen3-Coder-Next views 86.3% of gold lines but cites only 12.9%, GPT-5.5 views 73% and reports 36% — showing agents explore relevant evidence but fail to surface it in their final report, a failure mode invisible to verdict-only benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper presents algorithmic techniques enabling LLM inference on Compute-in-Flash (CIM) devices, which lack floating-point support and have limited write endurance. It introduces an end-to-end integer-only quantization pipeline (INT8 linear layers, integer Softmax/RMSNorm approximations) and a dictionary-based KV-cache compression scheme using sparse dictionary coding to cut KV write traffic by 15x. Evaluated on Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-2.5-7B, the combined approach yields 3.1x-4.4x latency and 2.7x-6.8x energy savings over DRAM-based systems, particularly for long-context inference.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Speculative Uncertainty (SU) repurposes speculative decoding in reverse: a small open-weight draft model scores an agent's already-generated trajectory in a single forward pass, producing a failure-likelihood signal from output tokens alone without needing logits, weights, or repeated sampling. Phase-aware features separate reasoning and action spans and are calibrated against a verifiable objective to drive a pre-execution veto gate. On software engineering agents built on Qwen3-Coder-480B and closed-source Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the gate cuts execution error rate by 6-8 percentage points and token cost by 14-19%, transferring to out-of-distribution benchmarks without retraining.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Introduces CompressAgent, a benchmark evaluating how compressing agent control contexts (system-side instructions specifying tools, arguments, policies, and recovery protocols) affects tool-using agent reliability. Testing nine ACCs, three task families, three Qwen models, and six retained-context budgets across 15,525 runs, it finds a nonlinear reliability frontier: compression stays safe near 75% retained context but reliability collapses sharply below 50%, with executable protocols becoming fragile at 10-25% and failures manifesting as tool-execution and action-parsing errors.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This UC Berkeley paper designs LLM inference algorithms for Compute-in-Flash devices, which move computation into SSD memory to overcome bandwidth limits but lack floating-point support and have limited write endurance. It presents an end-to-end integer-only quantization scheme and a dictionary-based KV cache compression method (sparse dictionary coding representing KV vectors as linear combinations of static dictionary vectors), reducing dynamic KV cache traffic 15x on Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-2.5-7B with limited accuracy loss.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper investigates subliminal learning, the phenomenon where a teacher model biased via a system prompt (e.g., toward malicious responses) transfers that hidden trait to a distilled student model through semantically clean training data like numeric sequences. The authors propose 'trait-direction drift' as the underlying mechanism — measurable preference gaps in teacher outputs induce trait-aligned weight updates during SFT — and introduce probe-space corridor regularization, a defense that constrains drift along a calibrated trait direction, reducing malicious-response transfer from 29.55% to 6.45% with minimal task-accuracy cost on Qwen models. It matters for AI security because it addresses a covert channel for injecting hidden malicious behavior into distilled/fine-tuned models without visible poisoned content.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Researchers show that LLM-based guardrails deployed to catch prompt injection and jailbreaks can themselves be attacked: crafted natural-language payloads trap the guardrail's reasoning in extended loops, causing a systematic denial-of-service. A beam-search optimization framework (an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank) and a lighter mechanism-aware structural-mutation attack both generalize across guardrail architectures and safety templates, with payloads optimized on one open-source surrogate transferring to Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen backbones, achieving 13-63x token amplification and up to 148x latency amplification in real web, desktop, code, and multi-agent deployments — enough for a single poisoned document to starve co-located agents on shared guardrail infrastructure.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces a self-supervised fine-tuning procedure that trains reasoning models to predict their own confidence at intermediate points in a reasoning trajectory, using only 600 training problems and no explicit length or stopping objective. Despite training only on confidence prediction and using standard generation at inference (no early-stopping or confidence elicitation), the fine-tuned models cut generated tokens by up to 25% at matched accuracy across Gemma, Qwen, Nemotron, and GPT-OSS on math, science, and coding reasoning benchmarks. Analysis shows the models largely retain their base reasoning composition rather than suppressing specific behaviors, suggesting efficient reasoning can emerge as a byproduct of learning metacognitive confidence signals.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper argues that self-training data for LLMs should be filtered for strategic diversity — substantively different problem-solving approaches — rather than just correctness among IID samples. It introduces GROOT, a method that builds a hierarchical tree of approaches and samples distinct paths, and adapts Verbalized Sampling (VS) to generate an unstructured set of approaches, testing both on competitive programming and Next-Chapter Prediction tasks. Models trained on strategically diverse (even incorrect) traces from Qwen3-4B outperform IID distillation from a 235B teacher and provide stronger initializations for RL and test-time scaling.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

DistillGuard is a malicious NPM package detection framework that extracts multi-granular features via static graph analysis of install/import/runtime behavior, then uses an online LLM to distill security knowledge into structured labels used to LoRA-fine-tune a Qwen3-8B model for offline deployment. It reports 95.3% accuracy, 99.4% precision, and an 93.8% F1 score, beating baselines by 11.1-30.0 F1 points, and the authors catalog eight typical API attack chains observed in malicious npm packages.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Proposes Comparison-based Preference Optimization (ComPO), a zeroth-order alternative to direct preference alignment methods (like DPO) that extracts directional information from preference pairs via comparison oracles rather than optimizing a differentiable preference loss, aimed at mitigating likelihood displacement. The paper establishes convergence guarantees for an offline scheme and a performance guarantee for an online variant using reverse-KL control against a reference policy, and reports experiments on Mistral, Llama, Gemma-2, Qwen3, and Gemma-3 showing improved length-controlled win rates over existing direct alignment baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper evaluates whether small, edge-deployable vision-language models (Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B, Gemma3 4B) in the 2-8B parameter range possess genuine taxonomic knowledge for species identification, comparing them against the 300M-parameter domain-specialist BioCLIP on a 96-species task. Testing clean iNaturalist photos against real camera-trap imagery from 6 field collections, they find all models degrade sharply (9.6-26.6 point domain gaps) on field imagery, that BioCLIP outperforms every VLM by 33-59 points despite its smaller size, and that under open-set prompting 5.9-9.6% of model responses are fabricated, taxonomically nonexistent species names with consistent per-model fabrication rates across evaluation sets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 10 Sep 2026🧠 AI

ESPO (Error-Structured Prompt Optimization) is a prompt-optimization method that addresses prompt bloat in evolutionary optimizers like GEPA by splitting the process into Diagnose (clustering training errors into structural patterns), Propose (generating diverse candidates via four independent strategies), and Select (bootstrap stability selection). Across seven NLP benchmarks (Tweet, MMLU, GSM8K, HotpotQA, ScoNe, HoVer, PUPA) it beats GEPA by 3.76pp average accuracy (74.67% vs 70.91%) while producing prompts 47% shorter, and generalizes well across student models including Gemma 3 12B, Mistral 14B, Qwen3 32B, and Claude Haiku 4.5.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026🧠 AI

The Graph Machine (GM) is a neural architecture that maintains an O(n)-sized state accessed via sparse, dynamic routing using differentiable "edges" — pointer-like objects updated through a pointer-chasing-like referral mechanism. The authors replace 75% of dense Transformer layers in Qwen3-0.6B with GM sparse layers and pretrain from scratch on 15.7B tokens, showing that retrieving only 2–4 of 4,096 tokens per KV head per sparse layer preserves or marginally improves loss compared to the dense baseline. This suggests a path toward more efficient pretraining by reducing dense attention computation while retaining large effective context/state.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026🧠 AI