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natural language processing

6,756 papers

#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Retrieval Capacity of Self-Attention Under Competition

How many tokens from its context does a language model actually use, and what determines that number? We study this question through self-attention. Without retraining, we retain only the tokens with the highest attention weights at each head, layer, and query, keeping their original weights unchanged. By varying the s...

Timur Mudarisov, M. Burtsev, Radu State · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

One Threshold Does Not Fit All Languages: Language-Conditional Deferral for Reliable and Efficient Low-Resource Text Classification

In the Global South, the lower-income countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America where most of the world's languages are spoken, a deployed text classifier usually runs on ordinary CPUs, serves many languages with a single model, has few labeled examples in any of them, and relies on people to catch its mistakes. Suc...

Bhanu Prakash Vangala, Vangala Navya · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

The Geometry of Inference in Transformer Residual Streams

Transformer language models build predictions through successive residual updates, but how their representations become specific to an eventual outcome remains unclear. We study this process by comparing intermediate residual states with their own final states and an empirical bank of final states from other contexts....

Timur Mudarisov, M. Burtsev, Radu State · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

CompOrca: Corpus-Scale Compliance Labelling of Instruction-Tuning Data

Studying how fine-tuning shapes refusal and noncompliance behaviour requires knowing which training examples refuse or otherwise fail to fulfil the request. Existing annotations cover evaluation sets, which are far smaller than training corpora. We present CompOrca, compliance labels for all 4,233,923 examples of the O...

Philipp E. Glass, A. Miron · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

From Dissonance to Orchestration: Teacher Intervention in On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own reasoning trajectories using feedback from a stronger teacher. Teacher interventions can improve these trajectories, but also change the distribution on which the student learns. Our controlled studies show that rollout quality alone is an incomplete criterion fo...

Yu-Hao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Yi-Nan Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Your Benchmark Is Not Saturated: Reviving Multiple-Choice Evaluation with Answer Pooling

Multiple-choice benchmarks are cheap to grade and are running out of room, and the standard remedy, writing harder items, is slow and repeated for every benchmark. A saturated benchmark still holds a harder task. Each question's wrong options are written for that question alone, so a model can score by eliminating a fe...

M. Eltahir, Abobaker Ahmed, Nawaf Barebood et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Relevance Is Not Sufficient Evidence: Detecting Evidence Gaps Before Generation in RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external sources, but retrieved passages often name the right entities without providing the facts needed to answer. Even when instructed to abstain, 12 generators answer 40.0-99.3% of insufficient-evidence questions. Training generators to abstain t...

Su-Ting Chen, Peichun Hua, Yun-Ming Xiao · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Seeing What Should Be Heard: Diagnosing and Repairing Cross-Modal Shortcuts in Omni-Modal LLMs

Omni-modal large language models (LLMs) are expected to answer a question using the modality it explicitly refers to. However, existing training paradigms rarely verify whether models actually follow this modality, because multimodal inputs from the same sample often provide redundant evidence for the same answer. In t...

Yue-Ran Ma, Ronghao Lin · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

SEED: Self-Speculative Decoding via Implicit Encoder-Decoder

Self-speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by drafting tokens from the target model itself, but faces a sharp tradeoff between the quality and cost of the draft. Early-exit methods produce drafts cheaply by terminating computation at intermediate layers, but forgo the deeper representati...

Han-Kun Lin, Patrick Pynadath, Ruqi Zhang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

FinRT: Distilling Adaptive Red-Teaming Strategies into Reusable Adversarial Generators in Consumer Finance

In regulated industries like consumer finance, seemingly harmless user queries can exploit large language model vulnerabilities, triggering safety failures and pushing responses dangerously close to policy limits. Existing automated red-teaming methods trade off attack effectiveness against generation cost, while treat...

Rikhiya Ghosh, Himanshu Kumar, Sriram Venkatapathy et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

HeurEvo: Agentic Evolution of Hybrid Solver-Augmented Heuristics for Time-Critical Mathematical Optimization

Recent advances in agentic heuristic design use AI agents and execution feedback to automate algorithm discovery for challenging optimization problems. In many practical settings, high-quality solutions must be obtained under strict runtime constraints, motivating hybrid approaches that combine problem-specific heurist...

Fei-Jie Wu, Hugo Barbalho, Konstantina Mellou et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

FastGuide: Accelerating Reward Guidance for Diffusion Large Language Models

Gradient-based reward guidance provides a flexible way to use downstream reward models to control masked diffusion language models at inference time. However, its computational cost remains high as each decoding iteration incurs expensive diffusion model forward passes and reward model backpropagation steps. To address...

Darshan Thaker, Lachlan Ewen MacDonald, Ren\'e Vidal · 0 citations

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Sep 24, 2026

Estimating suicide risk from text

A new language-processing tool could help identify the highest-risk individuals from natural language, enabling swifter interventions.

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