Large language models

Model releases, architecture work and prompting research on large language models — from frontier-lab announcements to the arXiv papers behind them.

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OpenAI Blog
Oct 1

How Albertsons Companies is reimagining retail from the inside out

Albertsons Companies is leveraging ChatGPT Enterprise and the OpenAI API to accelerate internal workflows and enhance the grocery shopping experience for millions of customers. By integrating these AI tools, the retailer aims to streamline team collaboration and improve service efficiency. The initiative reflects a broader trend of using advanced AI to transform retail operations from within.

Simon Willison
Oct 1

Quoting Matthew Green

The article discusses how two components—a payload that hijacks an agent and an agent that transports the payload—can combine to form a worm. It explains that agents running in isolated sandboxes can leave instructions in a shared package cache, altering each other's behavior. By substituting the package cache with communication channels like email, Slack, or WhatsApp and replacing sandboxed training runs with independently deployed personal agents such as Muse, the conditions necessary for a worm are met.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

Aligning Thoughts with Answers: Probability Rewards to Tame Thinking Drift

The paper introduces Rita, a reinforcement learning framework that addresses thinking drift in vision‑language models by enforcing consistency between reasoning and answers. Rita employs two reasoning‑label‑free rewards—thinking and consistency rewards—derived from the conditional probability of reference answers, and uses a difficulty‑aware data filtering strategy to select informative samples for training. Experiments on EgoIntention and RefEgo‑Int benchmarks demonstrate that Rita outperforms both supervised fine‑tuning and vanilla RL‑fine‑tuned approaches.

By Pengzhan Sun, Shiu-hong Kao, Shijie Li, Yongyi Su, Junbin Xiao, Arjun Reddy Akula, Angela Yao
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Space Filling Curves is All You Need: Communication-Avoiding Matrix Multiplication Made Simple

The paper proposes a new matrix multiplication approach called SFC-CA GEMM that uses space‑filling curves to partition work in a platform‑ and shape‑oblivious way, achieving communication‑avoiding properties. It demonstrates provable asymptotic communication optimality for both square and rectangular matrices and outperforms vendor libraries on multiple x86 and Arm platforms, with speedups up to 5.5× for specific shapes and 1.8× in weighted harmonic mean throughput. The method is applied to real‑world tasks, improving large‑language‑model inference by up to 1.85× and distributed‑memory GEMM by up to 2.3× over state‑of‑the‑art frameworks.

By Evangelos Georganas, Alexander Heinecke, Pradeep Dubey
arXiv AI
Oct 1

GraphCert: Bootstrap Agentic Graph Reasoning with Certified Evidence Rubrics

GraphCert introduces a method to bootstrap graph reasoning agents by generating graph‑grounded question‑answer pairs and certifying the supporting evidence. The approach uses a Bootstrapped Graph Quizzer to produce QA pairs, then executes and semantically curates the evidence into certified rubrics that guide reward‑based training of a Graph Solver. Experiments on five GRBENCH domains show GraphCert outperforms larger LLM agents and demonstrates robust policy transfer across heterogeneous graphs.

By Weiqi Jiang, Yuchen Ying, Rui Wang, Kaixuan Chen, Bingde Hu, Shunyu Liu, Yu Wang, Tongya Zheng
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Template-Search Domain Adaptation via Multi-Stage Feature Alignment for Cross-Modal Object Tracking

The paper introduces TSDA-Track, a Template-Search Domain Adaptation framework designed to reduce modality gaps in cross‑modal visual object tracking. Two variants are explored: Pre‑AFA TSDA‑Track uses adversarial alignment before transformer interaction, while Enc‑CFA TSDA‑Track applies contrastive alignment after interaction to strengthen cross‑modal correspondence. Experiments on datasets such as LasHeR, RGBT234, GTOT, and Anti‑UAV‑024 show that both variants outperform state‑of‑the‑art trackers, with Pre‑AFA achieving an SR/PR of 43.2/56.0 on RGBT234 under the modality‑switch protocol.

By Fereshteh Aghaee Meibodi, Amir Mehdi Soufi Enayati, Shadi Alijani, Homayoun Najjaran
arXiv AI
Oct 1

RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce

RealWorldShop introduces a new benchmark for conversational shopping agents, featuring 3.28 million grounded products, structured shopping episodes, a profile‑grounded user simulator, and role‑play evaluation. Analysis reveals that existing systems generate locally plausible responses but struggle with state tracking, constraint updating, and grounded convergence, especially in ambiguous or multi‑intent scenarios. The authors propose REALSHOP_AGENT, a session‑control framework with explicit state management, shopping‑flow control, catalog‑grounded retrieval, and runtime guards, which consistently outperforms strong baselines on the benchmark.

By Xinwei Yang, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Persona and Persuasive Framing in AI Voice Agents: A $2\times2$ Field Experiment with Children

The study reports a $2 imes2$ randomized field experiment involving 1,072 calls to a German Santa Claus telephone hotline, with 89 child conversations (median age 6) meeting inclusion criteria. Children were routed to one of four LLM voice agents that varied in persona (Santa vs. Helper) and framing (persuasive nudges toward prosocial wishes vs. neutral). Persuasive framing increased the likelihood of a prosocial wish from 11.6% to 45.7%, while persona authority had little effect on compliance but did influence engagement, with children more likely to hang up on the Helper within the first minute.

By Thilo Tamme (Technical University of Munich), David Steck (Technical University of Munich), Anton Hantel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
arXiv AI
Oct 1

OSWorld-Science: A Benchmark of Computer Use Agents for Learning and Using Scientific Software

OSWorld-Science is a benchmark and evaluation environment for computer-using agents that use visual language models (VLMs) to perform scientific software tasks. It includes 12 VLMs and 146 high-quality tasks across domains such as molecular drawing, pathology image analysis, statistical computing, and physical simulation, with artifact-based evaluation and a harness that logs interactions and supports model comparison. The benchmark was developed through expert proposals and iterative human–AI co‑design, and results show that current VLMs still struggle with key scientific questions, offering insights into factors like language, reasoning, and context length.

By Dingyuan Dai, Heli Qi, Lei Liu, Yinxi Li, Baiding Chen, Zijun Dou, Qingcheng Zeng, Qi Kang, Oliver Sun, Eric Wang, Bo Zhou, Haixin Wang, Yufan Du, Shi Bo, Ruihan Lin, Mengqi Yuan, Dunjie Lu, Steven Dillmann, Yiming Shi, Tina Su, Amy Xin, Minghao Liu, Xi Wang, Xu Huang, Ge Zhang, Pengyu Nie, Zhen Yang, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li, Weihao Xuan, Tianyu Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 1

What Can Component-Replacement Evidence Establish? A Critical Scoping Review of Local Decisions in LLM Agents

The article reviews how replacing components in language‑model agents affects execution trajectories and downstream outcomes. It maps 348 studies, analyzes 90 comparison records, and finds that while many studies report both local decision metrics and task endpoints, they rarely demonstrate matched comparisons or prove that improved local decisions drive task‑level gains. The review identifies three potential mechanisms—recovery and disruption, intervention timing, and downstream use—and proposes eight claim‑specific reporting items to clarify evidence quality.

By Shuyang Zhang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Jianshuo Chang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
arXiv AI
Oct 1

E2E-SWE: Benchmarking LLMs on Building Working Codebases from Scratch

E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.

By Hantian Ding, Chloe Bi, Jiacheng Zhu, John Yang, Matt Deitke, Pengcheng Yin, Zijian Wang, Rui Hou
arXiv AI
Oct 1

A Reusable Semantic Web Framework for Evidence-Grounded Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments under the EU AI Act

The paper introduces a reusable Semantic Web framework that aggregates fragmented evidence needed for Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments under the EU AI Act, focusing on high‑risk public sector categories such as employment and worker management and access to essential public services. A curated 150‑record corpus is annotated across four axes and serialized into a SPARQL‑queryable knowledge graph of 1,351 RDF triples, enabling five demonstration scenarios that retrieve 103 records (68.7% coverage). Evaluation against a 69‑record gold standard shows that LLM‑assisted classification in the employment domain yields a low κ of 0.045, highlighting challenges in automated fairness‑related evidence retrieval, while all artefacts are released openly for regulators, authorities, and SMEs.

By Faith Olopade, Delaram Golpayegani, David Lewis