The latest AI news, in focus.

Rank-Aware Differentially Private Release of Listwise Preferences for LLM Alignment

arXiv:2610.37682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Listwise preference feedback offers richer supervision for large language model (LLMs) alignment than pairwise comparisons, but a full ranking also reveals more sensitive user preferences. Existing privacy-preserving alignment methods focus mainly on pairwise feedback, while listwise alignment under local differential privacy (LDP) remains unexplored. Extending LDP to this listwise domain raises a critical challenge: the high sensitivity of the full ranking space demands excessive noise, neutralizing the benefits of listwise supervision. To address this challenge, we analyze the interaction between supervision granularity and privacy noise in downstream training, and introduce a rank-aware exponential mechanism that privatizes listwise prefer

Artifact Distillation: Training-Free Transfer from Frontier to Small Language Models

arXiv:2610.37680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closing the gap between frontier and smaller language models is usually approached by distillation: fine-tuning the small model (student) on a frontier model's (teacher) outputs, which binds transfer to training compute and leaves the transferred knowledge largely opaque. We propose Artifact Distillation: a teacher solves training instances and externalizes its problem-solving procedure into an artifact bank that a student queries at inference time, with no gradient updates. Across four LiveBench tasks, a bank written by Claude Opus 4.5 lets Claude Haiku 4.5 outperform unaided Claude Sonnet 4.5 on spatial reasoning (0.707 vs. 0.647) at 60% of its cost, and reach Sonnet 4.5's level on table joining at 89% of its cost. The same raw bank raises

Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models

arXiv:2610.37788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language model assistants sometimes change a correct answer when the user suggests a wrong one. The behavior, called sycophancy, is usually attributed to preference-based post-training, yet early measurements found it in pretrained models. We ask where it comes from by measuring it at every available stage of training: 13 open checkpoints from 5 lineages, from base model through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to release. We separate how far an injected claim moves a model's answer from how firmly the answer was held, and vary who makes the claim, how reliable they are said to be, and how strongly they make it. Two sycophancy behaviors with different origins emerge, and both replicate across datasets. Deference to a claim i

Supervised Fine-Tuning for Reasoning Large Language Models: A Survey

arXiv:2610.37681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks, where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long chain-of-thought data serves as a crucial foundation for eliciting and enhancing their reasoning abilities. Despite rapid progress in both improving and analyzing reasoning-oriented SFT, the field still lacks a systematic survey that consolidates its fast-growing literature. To fill this gap, we present a comprehensive review of recent advancements in reasoning SFT, examining the literature through the dual lenses of methodological design and analytical investigation. First, we review methodological improvements across the SFT pipeline and categorize them into data-centric approaches and algorithm-cent

Liquid AI unveils the LFM3 multimodal model family, emphasizing efficient, specialized intelligence

Recently, Liquid AI officially launched its next-generation foundation model family, LFM3. The first release includes six models with approximately 2 billion parameters, covering text, vision, audio, omni-modal, and decision-making capabilities—all built on the LFM3-1.7B-Base foundation and achieving a pre-training throughput of 22 trillion tokens. This series adopts a novel tri-hybrid layer architecture, integrating gated short convolutions, sliding windows, and other mechanisms, prioritizing fewer parameters and higher efficiency.

OmniBrain-0: A Unified Agentic Model for Embodied Intelligence

arXiv:2610.36013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose embodied intelligence requires robots to coordinate diverse skills over long horizons, track task progress, and recover from failures. Specialist policies alone do not ensure task-level reliability, while powerful multimodal agents rely on costly reasoning and external experience that compact models struggle to reproduce. We introduce OmniBrain-0, a lightweight unified embodied agent that coordinates manipulation and navigation through a shared high-level decision model, integrating task understanding, planning, progress tracking, and feedback-driven recovery. Our progressive training framework combines embodied pretraining, domain-specialized agent distillation, and multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD). It distills pow

CONCUR: Concordant Auxiliary Rewards for Multi-Task, Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.36437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) on multiple tasks, a task's primary reward can gate auxiliary rewards such as a length reward: on a failing response, an auxiliary cannot exceed the primary. However, group-relative advantage estimators treat a gated auxiliary like any other component, so it can reverse the primary's order, and at the primary's ceiling only auxiliaries order responses. Keeping gated auxiliaries hurts some tasks, while dropping them hurts others. We propose CONCUR, an advantage estimator that replaces the standardized scores of each gated auxiliary with the closest scores that satisfy two conditions: responses with higher primary rewards cannot receive lower scores, and responses at

Fine-Tuning NVIDIA Nemotron to Know Local Rules, Not Just Local Languages

As AI adoption expands globally, people across languages and cultures are using it in more aspects of their daily lives. General-purpose language models serve...

ProtoEEG: Structured Prototype Alignment for EEG Visual Decoding

arXiv:2610.33065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: EEG visual decoding remains difficult because scalp recordings are noisy, spatially coarse, and variable across trials and subjects. Most systems align each trial with a dense image embedding, although that embedding mixes semantic content with instance-specific texture, pose, and background. This target can demand details absent from EEG and provides no explicit account of the visual factors supporting a prediction. We propose \textbf{ProtoEEG}, a prototype-mediated framework that reformulates EEG--image alignment as soft composition over a shared learnable visual codebook. A trainable EEG encoder and a frozen visual teacher produce assignment distributions over the same $K=64$ prototypes. Their weighted reconstructions form a structured rep

Whispering Wisely: Smart Subset Selection for ASR Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2610.32997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models such as OpenAIs Whisper have substantially improved speech recognition quality but remain expensive to fine-tune, especially when large amounts of transcribed audio are available. This makes it challenging for many practitioners to adapt these models to new languages or domains. In this work, we introduce an embedding-based subset selection approach for selecting smaller training sets for ASR fine-tuning. Using Whispers pretrained encoder, we map each audio sample into a fixed-dimensional embedding space and apply a greedy k-center algorithm to select diverse and representative subsets of the training data. We evaluate this approach on both Hebrew and Danish, showing that k-center selection often impr

OpenESM: Energy-Steered Models Are Scalable Foundation Learners

arXiv:2610.33005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Energy-based models have shown promising properties for domain-specific tasks but remain challenging in modeling general-purpose scenarios. To bridge this gap, we design energy-steered models (ESMs) for foundational language modeling. ESMs integrate energy steering and token generation within a single architecture to leverage the energy-guided search to refine token generation. Specifically, ESMs first optimize a latent state over the energy landscape, then leverages the refined latent state for token generation. By performing such energy-guided pre-training on large-scale corpora, ESMs learn generally effective energy landscape where favorable tokens correspond to lower energy values. To explore the scaling behavior of ESMs, we pre-train ESM

EKT-Router: Expert-Evidence Alignment for Embodied Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2610.33044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied vision-language models must answer questions from partial, evolving observations. Their success depends on both the reasoning capability selected and the evidence available to it. Expert routers adapt internal computation, while tool-augmented systems acquire external evidence; choosing these independently can leave a suitable expert without the evidence it needs. We introduce EKT-Router, a bounded framework that jointly selects a capability expert, optional knowledge, and perceptual tools. Outcome-derived signatures represent the overlapping strengths of General, Spatial Reasoning, and Spatiotemporal experts. A joint utility scores complete expert-evidence routes under a call budget. After acquisition, a packet verifier admits valid

ReMedI: Inference-Time Refinement and Self-Distillation for Controllable Molecular Optimization

arXiv:2610.32103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In drug development, lead optimization must improve competing properties, such as increasing permeability and reducing toxicity, while limiting scaffold changes that could compromise the lead's potency. RL-based post-training, such as C-MORAL, addresses this problem by fine-tuning molecular language models to directly optimize molecular leads for objectives of interest, which relies on expensive task-specific datasets and faces challenges in achieving multi-objective optimization (MOO). We argue a pre-trained model may already contain useful molecular edits that zero-shot generation cannot efficiently reach. Motivated by the limited search capabilities of zero-shot generation, we develop an efficient Metropolis-Hastings search strategy to bet

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

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

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

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.