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natural language processing

8,685 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

SelfSearch: Reward-Free Search for Self-Improving Agents

SelfSearch is introduced, a reward-free search procedure in which agents modify themselves using records of previous self-improvement episodes, providing concrete experience for improving both task solving and self-modification.

Jungwoo Yang, InJin Kong, Yohan Jo · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Can a Cacheable Decision Model Follow Rules?

Certo is a small non-generative decision model (Qwen3-4B): it scores candidate actions from their text and returns a probability, instead of generating an answer, and how much rule-sensitivity survives that move, and whether it can be trained back.

D. Rajput, Nirdesh Chauhan, S.Rao Kosaraju · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Context Language Models

Context Language Models are introduced, language models that natively manage their own context and can be steered with natural-language instructions evolved through a standard skill-optimization loop, improving held-out accuracy by up to 35.9 points on a context-management task while reducing compute.

Ru-Lin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, J. Yin et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

EngiWorld: What Can Frontier Agents Deliver in Professional Engineering Environments?

EngiWorld provides the first rigorous foundation for measuring progress toward agents that operate professional engineering software end to end, and introduces an artifact-centric evaluation methodology built on a unified domain-verifier suite.

Hong-Cheng Gao, Hai-Long Qu, Yu-Ang Lei et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Review Sep 2026

KUPAS MASTER: Distilling the Tacit Expertise of Master Practitioners into Agent-Ready Experience Corpora

KUPAS MASTER, an experience engineering platform built around nine-layer cognitive corpus construction, turns heterogeneous work records and practitioner interviews into traceable, reusable experience corpora for agents, and provides a practical path from individual tacit experience to organizational knowledge and agen...

Chang-Mian Wang, Yu-Chao Ma, Xu-Chao Lu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents

This paper recast context compression as a causal decision preservation problem over discrete interaction units and introduces FOCUS, a training-free context compression framework that operates entirely at test time that requires no offline data collection or fine-tuning.

Shantanu Dixit, Anson Bastos, Xu-Chao Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Rational Clarification by Assistive Agents via Value-of-Information Reasoning

Users of language-based assistive agents often make ambiguous requests. In response, an assistant can either directly act on its interpretation of the request --- risking misalignment with the user --- or ask a clarifying question. Which option is the most safe and helpful? A common approach is to ask questions that mi...

T. Nguyen-Hien, Y. Teh, Wee-Sun Lee et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Solving Without Stopping: On-Policy Distillation at Small Scale

On-policy distillation, where a student learns from a stronger teacher's feedback on its own outputs, is a common way to pass reasoning to smaller models. We analyze what it transfers at small scale, distilling Qwen3-8B into Qwen3 4B, 1.7B and 0.6B students, in thinking mode (reason at length, then end the reasoning an...

Hong-Yang Li, Yi-Ming Zhu, Xiao Li et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Asking for What Was Never Requested: Horizontal and Vertical Proactivity in Agents

An agent that uses tools typically responds to what the user explicitly asks, yet completing the task may require information the user never requested. Work on proactive agents mainly studies whether and when an agent should act on its own, not what information it should pursue. We study a distinct axis of proactivity:...

Ido Levy, Asaf Yehudai, Segev Shlomov et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Harness Evolution as Learning: Approximation, Generalization, and Optimization Limits of Self-Improving Personal Agents

This work introduces a preference-oriented benchmark and systematically characterize the capabilities and limitations of personal agents associated with these three dimensions of harness evolution, offering a unified perspective on the limits of personalization through harness evolution and inform future harness design...

Ze-Yu Gan, Zi-Xuan Gong, Yong Liu · 2 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

SIPO: Unifying Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Self-Distillation

This work proposes self-instructing policy optimization (SIPO) with a contrastive self-teacher to provide dense credit, and demonstrates that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without an external teacher or additional generation.

Zhenrui Yue, Hui-Min Zeng, Yue-Qi Wang et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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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.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 15, 2026

AI model decodes the language cells use to communicate

A new computational approach reveals how cells communicate to assemble into tissues. This could accelerate stem cell engineering, improve disease models, and inform therapies.

Microsoft Research Blog Oct 15, 2026

Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar

Zero-knowledge proofs can verify computing results without rerunning workloads or exposing sensitive data. Magnetar helps bring them into the mainstream with support for standard programming languages, major speed gains, and quantum-resistant security. The post Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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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