The latest AI news, in focus.

Linear-Time Context Compression with State-Space Encoding

arXiv:2610.33006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) impose substantial computation and memory costs as context sizes increase, motivating methods that compress a context into a shorter representation before inference. Existing soft-prompt compression methods typically use the same Transformer backbone as used in the target model, where producing the compressed representation leads to significant latency overheads. This restricts them to the offline setting where context is compressed once and then reused across many queries. We propose the Boa Compressor, a plug-and-play online context compressor built on a Mamba state-space model (SSM) that encodes arbitrary-length context in a single linear-time pass, producing a representation on which we condi

The Emergence and Sparsification of a Syntactic Circuit

arXiv:2610.33299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To understand the emergence of grammatical behavior in language models, we track circuits for subject-verb number agreement in pythia-1b and ten seeds of pythia-410m across training. We find that subject-verb agreement is learned early, and is initially handled by a diffuse collection of neurons. However, after agreement behavior has stabilized, the mechanisms responsible for it continue to reorganize. The attention heads which mediate agreement often shift during training: in the case of pythia-1b, behavior is controlled by two heads early in training but by a third (different) head later. Furthermore, the circuit shrinks over training, with pythia-1b's final circuit being strikingly sparse. We take these results to be informative about how

Intuition with Evidence: Adaptive Dual Memory for Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2610.33019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As multimodal agents engage in sustained interactions, long-term memory serves two distinct but complementary functions: fine-grained evidence recall and internalized interpretation for global understanding. Although episodic and latent memory address these demands through explicit historical records and internalized experience, neither paradigm alone can accommodate the diverse memory affinities across tasks, owing to limitations in episodic evidence coverage and integration, and in latent factual grounding. To bridge this divide, we propose a dual-memory framework, unifying a model-native latent memory as an intuitive prior with a multi-indexed episodic memory for exact evidence reconstruction via retrieval-conditioned joint alignment. At i

Compatible Likelihoods for Flow Matching on Manifolds

arXiv:2610.31981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On the simplest non-Euclidean manifold, the 1D flat torus, we exhibit a distribution where a recently proposed extension of Riemannian flow matching is globally optimized by a velocity field that pushes samples away from the data distribution. We trace this failure mode to a property we call compatibility; a likelihood-based flow matching objective is compatible if its population minimizer recovers the marginal velocity field induced by the data and coupling. We give a general condition for compatibility, apply it to existing methods, and bound the worst-case error in terms of a residual component vanishing under compatibility. Next, we note that existing compatible objectives put density on velocities that are infeasible on compact manifolds

How Does Post-Training Shape LLM Value Preferences?

arXiv:2610.33371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: During post-training, large language models (LLMs) learn value preferences from corpora that may contain imbalanced proportions of opinions associated with different demographic groups. Amplifying these imbalances may further underrepresent some groups' opinions. However, how opinion mixtures shape value preferences across post-training paths remains unclear. To answer this question, we conduct controlled experiments using post-training corpora with different opinion mixtures and five post-training paths based on SFT, DPO, and GRPO. We find that post-training amplifies opinion imbalances differently across post-training paths. Once value preferences are amplified, whether further post-training can remove them depends on both the post-training

Conceptizer: Next-Token Prediction Is Not All You Need

arXiv:2610.33027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next-token prediction (NTP) rewards only the token that occurs next, penalizing every alternative. But natural language often offers many ways to express the same meaning. We introduce Conceptizer, a training framework that extends next-token prediction with a reward for meaning. Conceptizer uses a fixed, model-agnostic vocabulary of ~9K concepts, built from contextual synonyms, as units of meaning alongside tokens as units of text. It maps each next-token distribution to a concept distribution and shares the reward for the target meaning across its possible wordings. This provides a concept-level training signal without adding model parameters. Applied to 3 model families at 1B-8B parameters, Conceptizer achieves the lowest held-out NTP perp

From Writing Advice to Manuscript Governance: A Constrained-Transformation Framework for Academic Revision

arXiv:2610.33001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Academic revision presents a governance problem when legitimate writing objectives conflict. Writing-process and social-science research show that revision is recursive and that wording carries epistemic and disciplinary commitments. Those literatures identify important constraints but do not settle which objective should prevail when concision, outlet form or stylistic variation conflicts with evidence and claim boundaries. This paper models revision as an admissibility problem under ordered constraints. Task-relative invariants, contextual constraints and mutable presentation choices define the admissible space; a claim-preservation contract links evidence and judgement to an authorised claim boundary. Four governance propositions specify p

SUDO: From Scientific Publications to Global Scholarly Discourse

arXiv:2610.33018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) support literature search, scientific discovery, and agent-assisted research. Yet, most approaches to SKG construction pre-specify the knowledge unit to be represented, typically named scholarly entities or contribution-level statements, and retain only the publication content expressible through that unit. This choice produces two dominant yet distinct paradigms: concept-centric SKGs that preserve entities and local relations, and statement-centric SKGs that capture high-level discourse in sentences. In both cases, the graph reflects a chosen extraction target rather than how a paper constructs and communicates knowledge. We introduce SUDO, the Scholarly Upper Discourse Ontology, which defines how knowledge

Searching with Sparse Histories: Cross-Task Architecture Search from Incomplete Search Logs and Zero-Cost Proxies

arXiv:2610.32179v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural architecture search (NAS) is expensive, but cross-task transfer can reduce costs by reusing knowledge from previous tasks. However, existing methods struggle with sparse search histories and task-specific transfer failures. We propose a method, a risk-robust strategy that combines sparse source logs with zero-cost proxies through champion-based initialization and joint pairwise-ranker pretraining. On TransNAS-Bench-101, the proposal mitigates severe worst-case failures, reducing worst-10% ranks from 290 to 43 for Micro autoencoding and from 465 to 45 for Macro room layout. Across 13 cell-space targets, it outperforms a proxy-only ranker on 10 targets in both mean and worst-case performance, while maintaining competitive average perform

When to Stop Penalizing Actions? Martingale GRPO for VLA Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.32431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A failed vision-language-action (VLA) rollout does not imply that every action contributed to failure. Yet in group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), a single trajectory-level advantage is assigned to all actions in a rollout. Potentially useful recovery attempts can thus be penalized alongside the errors they aim to correct. Ideal stopping conditions for failure feedback are characterized using success-probability and policy-score martingales. At these stops, the removed gradient contribution has zero conditional expectation given the retained information. Truncation therefore preserves the expectation of a reference GRPO group-gradient estimator and can reduce its covariance. One such stop occurs when the conditional probability of succe

Putting Transformer Theories to the Test

arXiv:2610.32104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Several formal theories have been developed to characterize the capabilities and limitations of the transformer architecture, each employing different abstractions that capture different features of the architecture. Due to the differences in their underlying assumptions and conceptual frameworks, these theories can disagree in their predictions about what tasks transformers find easy or hard. We map out seven theories of transformer capability (Star-free, $\mathsf{AC}^0$, $\mathsf{TC}^0$, C-RASP, MPC, BAPO, and Sensitivity) and translate their results into a common matrix of predictions across a suite of tasks covering different computational structures. We provide new theoretical results to complete this matrix. We then evaluate theoretical

Parametric Session States Recover Retrieval Intent without Replaying History

arXiv:2610.33047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running assistants often interpret follow-up requests whose referents, constraints, and active goals were established many turns earlier. The central challenge is therefore not only context length, but retrieval intent: a current query such as ``use the previous configuration'' may omit the project, entity, and version terms needed to locate relevant evidence. Long-context models can recover those terms by replaying the interaction, but repeatedly pay the cost of processing history. Conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is cheaper, yet assumes an information-sufficient query; conversational rewriting either rereads the history or depends on an explicitly maintained textual memory. We introduce \emph{Parametric Session State}

OpenAI announces three big science discoveries and a new way to work with academics

Less than a month after its mass release of hundreds of manuscripts that it said contained solutions to long-standing mathematics questions, OpenAI is back with three more "major" discoveries in math, computer science, and physics. What's different this time is the choice to have external experts that OpenAI describes as "shepherds" guiding the results in […]

Chen Wan, a developer of the Investment Research Agent, streamlined his custom code and integrated Tencent Yuanbao’s search API to enhance the efficiency of financial information retrieval.

On October 26, 2026, Chen Wan, the creator of the paid research briefings for the new energy industry chain, deleted the two-year‑maintained cleaner.py (web‑page cleaning script) and sites.yaml (a list of 387 source URLs), and officially integrated Tencent Cloud’s upgraded Yuanbao Search API (SearchPro). Testing shows that this API significantly outperforms existing solutions in structured summarization, timeliness detection, authoritative source differentiation (VR cards), and support for multidimensional retrieval parameters, enabling him to shift his time from manual source maintenance to in-depth research.

Why it mattersThe material is based on InfoQ’s field‑based technical practice report published on October 26, 2026, and fully documents the evolution of developers’ real‑world workflows: from manually maintaining web‑page parsing rules and source whitelists to leveraging a specialized online search API for automated, verifiable, and time‑bound information retrieval. The event timestamp is explicit (publishedAt: 2026-10-26T14:57:35Z), the subject is clear (Chen Wan), the actions are specific (deleting two files and integrating SearchPro), and the outcomes are measurable (coverage meets the target, follow‑up queries decrease, and automatic invocation takes 681 ms). Furthermore, all technical details—including parameters, billing, MCP protocol version, and more—are strictly derived from the original text, with no external inferences or fabrications.

Import AI 478: Math for alignment; ProgramBench; and Mirendil shows what RSI means

What is “night” to a machine?

Cognitively Constrained Partners for Zero-Shot Coordination in Real-Time Partitioned Control

arXiv:2610.31726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective human-machine teaming requires agents that coordinate with unpredictable human partners. Reinforcement learning from live human feedback or large behavioural datasets is expensive, while purely simulated training overfits to artificial conventions and fails at Zero-Shot Coordination with real people. We propose a framework for training teaming agents against Cognitively Constrained Partners: simulated partners whose diversity emerges from procedural constraints grounded in human physiological literature, specifically reaction delays and perceptual limitations, rather than from reward shaping or historical training checkpoints. In a modified Lunar Lander environment, we report preliminary evidence that these partners play more like r

New research finds: The existing critic in reinforcement learning can be directly repurposed as a confidence estimator for large language models.

An AI research paper published on October 26, 2026, on arXiv (ID 2610.31820v1) states that, for large language models (LLMs) trained using value-based reinforcement learning (value-based RL), their existing critic modules can serve as high-accuracy, highly calibrated confidence estimators without requiring additional training or data.

Why it mattersThis study reveals the mathematical equivalence between confidence estimation and Critic training in reinforcement learning (under a well-defined correctness metric), and empirically demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization capability of reusing the Critic across more than ten domains, including mathematics, code generation, tool invocation, and general reasoning. These findings hold direct engineering value for lowering the barriers to trustworthy LLM deployment.

POS-Signature Demonstration Retrieval for In-Context Dependency Parsing

arXiv:2610.31966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demonstrations for in-context learning are often retrieved by semantic similarity, which may be a poor proxy for relevance in structured prediction. We study demonstration selection for Universal Dependencies parsing with a POS-signature policy that represents sentences with weighted part-of-speech statistics and retrieves three length-compatible, gold-parsed examples from the labeled training split. We evaluate two open-weight language models without fine-tuning on all 2,077 sentences of the UD English Web Treebank test set, comparing the policy with shot- and format-matched fixed and semantic three-shot baselines, as well as zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and critique-refinement systems. POS-signature retrieval yields the highest labeled atta

Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text Embedders

arXiv:2610.32122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report a systematic dissociation in modern text embedders: sentiment is almost perfectly decodable from their embeddings, yet almost entirely absent from their metric. Across eleven frozen encoders spanning 2021 to 2026, including 2026-generation models and the 4B-parameter LLM embedder Qwen3-Embedding-4B, a linear probe recovers sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy while cosine similarity separates polarity by a margin of only 0.003-0.064. Qwen3-Embedding-4B, the strongest probe in the panel, reaches 91.3% probe accuracy but only 64.3 retrieval MAP. Because retrieval, clustering, deduplication, and retrieval-augmented generation operate on the metric rather than on a trained probe, these systems are effectively blind to information t

Context or Knowledge: How LLMs Attribute Their Own Answers

arXiv:2610.32109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models can answer a question from a supplied document or from their parametric knowledge. When later asked where the answer came from, what determines their source report? We study this by intervening on the model's key-value (KV) cache after the answer is generated and before the source question is asked. On a controlled factual task with four models (7B-32B), changing or removing the document's cache never changes the report. In contrast, transplanting the question-and-answer (Q+A) cache between runs with identical question and answer tokens transfers it: every eligible report follows the donor, while the recipient's document is unchanged. On the two smaller models, steering Q+A values along directions fitted before any source ques