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17,191 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Decoupling Exploration from Optimization in RLVR

Modern language models undergo reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on top of already-trained checkpoints. A key promise of RLVR is the discovery of new reasoning strategies. In principle, a model can sample novel ideas absent from its prior training data. In practice, however, augmenting RLVR with str...

Saif Punjwani, Micah Goldblum · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Composing What Each Teacher Learned: Delta Distillation for Multi-Teacher On-Policy Learning

Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) is used in two settings. In common-domain composition, several teachers score each student rollout from one prompt domain and their signals form a single target; in routed-domain distillation, prompts from different domains are assigned to the corresponding specialist. Both s...

Yuanda Xu, He-Jian Sang, Zheng-Ze Zhou et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

A Good Self-Teacher Meets the Student Where They Are: Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching

Reinforcement Learning (RL) from outcome rewards suffers from sparse supervision, particularly on difficult, long-horizon tasks where successful trajectories are rare and costly to generate. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers an attractive alternative by providing dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher...

Randy Ardywibowo, Arnav Dalal, Jian-Tao Jiao · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Q-Learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching

Flow policies capture rich and diverse action distributions, and fine-tuning them with off-policy RL to improve beyond the demonstrations has drawn growing interest. However, fine-tuning a flow policy against a learned value function is not trivial, because the policy generates its action over many flow steps. Adjoint...

Yong Dong, Minsung Yoon, Jaehyuk Kim et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding Rounds

A theoretical framework for training and evaluating parallel and semi-autoregressive drafters by representing speculative decoding as a Markov reward process, which yields the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, which weights local rejection costs by state occupancies and exactly equals the expected number of dec...

Yun-Xiao Zhao, Chang-Xiao Cai · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Fault-tolerant foundation models

Emerging computer hardware often trades reliability for energy efficiency; here we show that large-language models (LLMs) can be trained to tolerate this unreliability, and that rather than degrading, their error resilience actually increases as they grow. Modified neural scaling laws inferred from 40,000 GPU-hours of...

T. McCourt, I. Fiete, Isaac L. Chuang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

SemanticFold: Latent Sequence Compression SeparatesLanguage Modeling, Decodability, and Reasoning

We study whether latent sequence compression of prompt prefixes preserves the capabilities that large language models rely on during inference. We introduce SemanticFold, a compression scheme that folds prefix hidden states at learned boundaries, and evaluate it across five model scales: Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-8B, SmolLM2-1...

Ming-Yan Liu, Ming-Qiang Huang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Logarithmic Regret via Passive Change Detection in Piecewise-Stationary Self-Tuning Regulation

We study minimum-variance control of an unknown autoregressive system with exogenous inputs and coefficients that change at unknown times. Under bounded independent disturbances, fixed detection gaps, stability and feasibility conditions, and sufficient time between changes, we prove \(O((C+1)\log((T+1)/\delta))\) regr...

A. Ch. Madhusudanarao, Rahul Singh · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Stationary Bias and Extrapolation in Nonlinear Two-Timescale Stochastic Approximation

Constant-step stochastic approximation generally has a nonzero stationary mean error that persists under time averaging. This paper studies that error for nonlinear two-timescale recursions driven by an exogenous finite-state Markov chain. Under stated smoothness assumptions and conditions on the stationary distributio...

A. Madhusudanarao, Rahul Singh · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Conference Open access Oct 2026

From Prompts to Trees: Effective LLM-Guided Tree Generation for Few-Shot Tabular Classification

While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich world knowledge and impressive generalization capabilities, their direct application to tabular data classification is hindered by high inference costs and limited interpretability. In contrast, decision trees are fast and transparent but often underperform in low-data re...

Yue Qiu, Ze-Kang Du, Yi-Qun Diao et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Beyond Outcome Rewards: Constructing and Assigning Retrieval Credit for Search Agents

Search agents enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively retrieve and use information for complex multi-hop questions. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a promising approach for post-training such agents, but its reliance on sparse, outcome-based supervision can make credit assignment...

Wenyu Huang, Xin-Yu Hou, P. Vougiouklis et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

ExperienceIndex: Artifact-Grounded Memory

Knowledge-intensive tasks require answering many questions by reasoning about a shared corpus of artifacts (e.g., court cases, or scientific literature). As humans interact with these corpora, they naturally accumulate experiential knowledge about artifacts, enabling them to quickly identify the complete set of relevan...

Peter Baile Chen, Geoffrey X. Yu, Xinming Liu et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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Microsoft Research Blog Nov 3, 2026

Learn the rules: The hacker mindset

Research Manager Mike Walker reflects on a career spanning hacker culture, cybersecurity, and AI, sharing lessons about trust, teamwork, leadership, and why solving difficult problems requires curiosity, judgment, agility—and an understanding of the rules. The post Learn the rules: The hacker mindset appeared first on Microsoft Research.

Google DeepMind Blog Nov 3, 2026

Agentic cheminformatics with Google Antigravity

Learn how Google Antigravity and our Cheminformatics Skills accelerate drug discovery workflows, search compounds, and propose novel rigidified macrocycles.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 28, 2026

Making machines that can listen

Professor Paris Smaragdis develops computers with superhuman hearing for applications like speech recognition, music understanding, and environmental monitoring.

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