arXiv AI

Two AI Metrics Diverged: Will it Make All the Difference?

arXiv:2607. 00913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As exponential compute scaling continues, will the capabilities of frontier AI models outstrip what is accessible to developers on a small fixed budget?

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Thomson: Continual Learning of Frontier Models for SovereignAI

The paper introduces Thomson, a frontier AI model developed through continual learning on open-weight models, aiming to democratize access to high-performance AI. It argues that institutions with limited resources can achieve frontier-level performance by applying a modern mid- & post-training stack, preserving model plasticity and stability while minimizing high-impact interventions. Thomson demonstrates competitive performance across agentic tasks, safety, legal, tax, multilingualism, and large-scale deep research, exhibiting a distinctive π-shaped improvement pattern and effectively mitigating the forgetting problem seen in narrow domain adaptation.

By Shengzhuang Chen, Jerrod Parker, Yejin Bang, Andrew M. Bean, Nabeel Seedat, Stefan Winzeck, Daniil Glazko, Jannik Zgraggen, Fangyi Yu, Scott Arnott, Dietrich Trautmann, Luca Ciuffreda, Guglielmo Bonifazi, Davide Romano, Bradley Bell, Kirsty Fielding, Daniele Giofr\`e, Tom Zielund, Ipshita Chatterjee, Sneha Murthy Ghantasala, Manpreet Nanreh, John Scoville, Maciej Sakowicz, Wassim Seifeddine, Lukas Thede, Jonathan Richard Schwarz
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Comprehensive AI governance requires addressing non-model gains

arXiv:2606. 00047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI governance often centres on the model-level governance paradigm, which assumes that a model's capability profile is primarily a function of the compute and data used during training.

By Arthur Goemans, Dan Altman, Noemi Dreksler, Jonas Freund, Milan Gandhi, Zhengdong Wang, Sarah Cogan, Sebastien Krier, Demetra Brady, Lewis Ho, Allan Dafoe
arXiv AI
Sep 24

The Capability Manifold and ML Scaling Laws

The paper introduces a capability manifold, a multidimensional framework that maps downstream capabilities—such as reasoning, retrieval, planning, and adaptation—to pre‑training, post‑training, and test‑time resources via bounded scaling functions. It provides analytical Jacobians to quantify how sensitive each capability is to changes in resources and their interactions. By embedding existing Kaplan‑ and Chinchilla‑type scaling laws and test‑time compute into this manifold, the authors demonstrate that these scaling relationships can be unified as trajectories on a common capability manifold.

By Syed Ali Raza Zaidi, Maryam Hafeez
arXiv AI
Jun 6

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602. 07840v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems.

By Benjamin Le, Xueying Lu, Nick Stern, Wenqiong Liu, Igor Lapchuk, Xiang Li, Baofen Zheng, Kevin Rosenberg, Jiewen Huang, Zhe Zhang, Abraham Cabangbang, Satej Milind Wagle, Jianqiang Shen, Raghavan Muthuregunathan, Abhinav Gupta, Mathew Teoh, Andrew Kirk, Thomas Kwan, Jingwei Wu, Wenjing Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks

arXiv:2503. 14499v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite rapid progress on AI benchmarks, the real-world meaning of benchmark performance remains unclear.

By Thomas Kwa, Ben West, Joel Becker, Amy Deng, Katharyn Garcia, Max Hasin, Sami Jawhar, Megan Kinniment, Nate Rush, Sydney Von Arx, Ryan Bloom, Thomas Broadley, Haoxing Du, Brian Goodrich, Nikola Jurkovic, Luke Harold Miles, Seraphina Nix, Tao Lin, Chris Painter, Neev Parikh, David Rein, Lucas Jun Koba Sato, Hjalmar Wijk, Daniel M. Ziegler, Elizabeth Barnes, Lawrence Chan
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Bridging Compute- and Data-Optimal Pretraining

arXiv:2607. 25271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classical compute-optimal scaling laws assume an unbounded supply of fresh pretraining data, yet pretraining is increasingly entering a regime in which compute grows faster than the availability of high-quality data.

By Tian Qin, Kimia Hamidieh, David Alvarez-Melis
arXiv AI
3d ago

Revisiting scaling laws for reward optimization

The paper presents a new scaling law for reward optimization in AI alignment, showing that performance scales as Θ(√min{log(M), K}), where M is the number of preference comparisons used to train a proxy reward model and K is the KL‑divergence budget relative to a reference policy. The authors derive this law using an information‑theoretic model, prove its tightness, and validate it with extensive experiments involving a 70B gold reward model and smaller proxy models (0.6B–4B). The empirical results demonstrate a strong fit (R² 97–99 %) across different model sizes, noise levels, and optimization methods, suggesting that reward optimization behaves like a simple selection task over IID Gaussian variables with noisy feedback.

By Ali Aouad, Aymane El Gadarri, Vivek F. Farias
arXiv AI
2d ago

Capabilities Ain't All You Need: Measuring Propensities in AI

The paper introduces a formal framework for measuring AI propensities—tendencies of models to exhibit particular behaviours—using a bilogistic formulation that identifies an "ideal band" of success probability. It estimates the limits of this band with task‑agnostic rubrics and applies the method to six families of LLMs, showing how shifts in propensity affect task performance. The study finds that propensity estimates from one benchmark predict behaviour on held‑out tasks and that combining propensity with capability metrics yields stronger predictive power than either alone.

By Daniel Romero-Alvarado, Fernando Mart\'inez-Plumed, Lorenzo Pacchiardi, Hugo Save, Siddhesh Milind Pawar, Behzad Mehrbakhsh, Pablo Antonio Moreno Casares, Ben Slater, Paolo Bova, Peter Romero, Zachary R. Tidler, Jonathan Prunty, Luning Sun, Jose Hernandez-Orallo