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#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Agentic Data Engineering for LLMs: System Design and a Controlled Empirical Study

LLM data engineering requires iterative experimentation to determine how data selection, rewards, and curricula affect model learning, making it a natural setting for AI-for-AI (AI4AI) research. Can agents use experimental feedback to progressively improve strategies, and do the resulting strategies improve target-mode...

Ruomeng Ding, Qianli Shen, Zhaoyang Han et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Learnable Low-Rank Polynomial Sketch for Effective Linear Attention

Softmax attention in Transformers suffers from quadratic complexity in sequence length, making it impractical for long-context applications. Linear attention alleviates this issue by replacing the exponential kernel with alternative functions that enable linear-time computation. Among existing linear attention approach...

Zongyue Qin, Haoran Deng, Jason Cong et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Next-Concept Modeling: Fast, Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Text Generation

Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer parallel sampling for faster generation than autoregressive models, an increasingly important advantage as inference becomes a dominant computational workload. However, DLMs degrade quickly with fewer sampling steps, process the full sequence at every step, and require many passes...

Hermann Kumbong, Ishan S. Khare, Iddah Mlauzi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

One Model, Multiple Compute Budgets: Multi-Ratio ConceptMoE for Flexible Compute Across Turns

Large language models typically support different inference budgets through separate model sizes or fixed compute configurations. In multi-turn interactions, however, compute demand can vary substantially across turns. Using a high-compute model for every turn wastes computation, while routing among independent models...

Yiyang Fu, Zihao Huang, Dongchen Han et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Auditing LLM Program Search for Bermudan Stopping with Primal--Dual Certificates

LLM program-search agents are usually judged by the score that drives their search. We study LLM-driven search over Python exercise policies for Bermudan options, an optimal stopping problem where a trusted evaluator owns the simulation and a dual upper bound~$U$. For any policy, $0 \le V^\star - L_\pi \le U - L_\pi$;...

Yuhua Qian · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

A Geometric Perspective on Reward Function Updates in Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is classically solved using Lagrangian optimisation, by jointly optimising a primal-dual problem with gradient descent to obtain the optimal reward function parameters and corresponding optimal policy. While this algorithmic view of IRL has been highly influential, gradient-based re...

Anish Diwan, Jan Peters, Oleg Arenz · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

PLDiv: Measuring Dataset Diversity and Semantic Collapse via Persistence Landscapes

Modern data pipelines increasingly combine human-created and human-curated data with AI-generated data for model training and evaluation. As datasets grow, they often add semantically redundant samples rather than expanding semantic coverage, which deteriorates the quality of the whole dataset. Existing diversity metri...

Yang Ba, Michelle V. Mancenido, Rong Pan · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Rotate the Loop: Blockwise Conformality for Looped Transformers

Looped transformers reuse one shared block across many recurrent steps, so depth becomes a quantity that can be spent at runtime rather than a stack of distinct layers. Those extra steps help only if a write made on one recurrent step is still readable on later ones, and that depends on the linear map applied to the re...

Alexey Zemtsov, Albina Klepach, Vadim Lomshakov et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Can We Trust This Evaluation? Instance-Level Reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-judge evaluation commonly aggregates multiple judges' decisions into a majority vote, yet this panel decision process does not guarantee that the evaluation of an individual item is reliable. We propose Structured Cross-fitted Uncertainty Risk (SCUR), a label-free approach for estimating instance-level evaluat...

Yang Ba, Michelle V. Mancenido, Rong Pan · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Pick the Mixture, Not the Samples: Combinatorial Data Selection for LLMs

Data selection for LLM fine-tuning faces two facts about real training: data pools draw from many distinct domains, and evaluation spans diverse tasks. As a result, the same sample helps different tasks differently, and samples interact during training so that a subset's value is not the sum of its parts. Current data-...

Luyang Zhang, Jialu Wang, Bebei Li · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Contrastive Covariance Subspaces for Activation Steering

Activation steering controls large language model behavior by adding a direction to hidden activations during inference. For steering to work well, that direction must be a pure signal for the target concept: any confound entangled with it, such as an incidental topic or writing style, is injected into the residual str...

Alexandros Xenos, Manos Plitsis, Niki Foteinopoulou et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

OPMD: On-Policy Mechanism Distillation Beyond Output Supervision

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves language-model by supervising a student on prefixes sampled from its own policy, but its supervision remains confined to the output space. Consequently, OPD transfers what a teacher predicts without supervising the intermediate computation that produces those predictions. Simply di...

Yingdong Shi, Zhihong Li, Changming Li et al. · 0 citations

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Microsoft Research Blog Oct 12, 2026

Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring

StudentSim is a research system for evaluating and improving AI tutoring tools before they are tested with learners. It models how individuals may engage with tutors, giving feedback to improve tutor performance across subjects like chess, writing, and mathematics. The post Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring appeared first on Microsoft Research.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 7, 2026

Discovering the value of humanistic inquiry

Students in MIT’s Concourse program delve deeply into the human condition, debate challenging questions, and learn to develop judgment about issues that can’t be quantified.

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