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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arXiv AI
Sep 30

Right Words, Wrong Moment: A Clinician-Grounded Analysis of Distress in 19,930 Conversations between Young People and ChatGPT

arXiv:2609.35953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Young people increasingly turn to General-Purpose Conversational Agents (GPCAs), such as ChatGPT, in moments of distress. We examine young adults' (age...

By Marx Wang, Ella Zhang, Cameron Tan, Andrea Mock, Songling Ngo, Zijing Wang, Robert Wolfe, Shirin Amouei, Rachel A. Hanebutt, Desmond C. Ong, Caroline Figueroa, Katie Davis, Anind K. Dey, Alexis Hiniker
arXiv AI
Sep 30

KV-streams for Efficient Compaction in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.35750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling the horizon of agentic LLMs is bottlenecked by the need to fit ever longer context traces in GPU memory. Context compaction has been...

By Emiliano Penaloza, Dane Malenfant, Dheeraj Vattikonda, Roger Creus Castanyer, Siddarth Venkatraman, Abhay Puri, Jonathan Light, Matthew James Sargent, Augustine N. Mavor-Parker, Massimo Caccia, Lucas Caccia, Glen Berseth, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Alessandro Sordoni, Minseon Kim, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Laurent Charlin, Guillaume Lajoie
arXiv AI
Sep 30

AnyAct: Universal Action for Self-Evolving Agents

AnyAct introduces a universal action layer that consolidates diverse tool capabilities into a self‑evolving action space for AI agents operating in open‑world environments. It tackles the scale dilemma, tool non‑stationarity, and heterogeneous feedback by using hierarchical progressive retrieval and test‑time reliability evolution, while a heterogeneous observation grounding module unifies multi‑modal feedback. Evaluations on LiveMCPBench and the newly created OSMCP benchmark show state‑of‑the‑art performance, with significant gains in task success rate and reduced execution steps, especially for models with limited native capabilities.

By Lingrui Xu, Yangqin Jiang, Jiachang Zhang, Xubin Ren, Chao Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

THEIA: A Multimodal Dataset and Benchmark for Vision-Language Analysis of Layout

THEIA is a multimodal dataset that pairs thousands of analog circuit layout images with question‑answer conversations, and it introduces a benchmark using a fine‑tuned vision‑language model to analyze GDSII files. The dataset and benchmark enable designers to interact with and query physical layouts as intuitive, meaningful entities. Experiments on five realistic tasks show the fine‑tuned model outperforms general‑purpose vision‑language models by up to 73%, revealing a significant gap between general multimodal reasoning and domain‑specific layout understanding.

By Giuseppe Chiari, Michele Piccoli, Federico Viola, Davide Zoni
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Byzantine-Robust Federated RAG via Aligned Calibration and Fixed-Membership Conformal Prediction

This paper introduces a Byzantine‑robust federated retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) framework that uses aligned calibration and fixed‑membership conformal prediction to ensure that the answer set contains the correct answer with a chosen probability, even when some nodes are compromised. By having all nodes score the same calibration questions and retaining only candidates that could be kept by a plausible group of honest nodes, the method guarantees correctness in finite samples and produces smaller answer sets than simpler approaches. Experiments on medical exam question‑answering tasks with language‑model nodes demonstrate that the method meets the target coverage whenever the number of misbehaving nodes does not exceed the declared bound, while plain averaging often fails.

By Prasanjit Dubey, Aritra Guha, Xiaoming Huo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

TriageRA-CCF: Source-Side Clinical Confidence and Coverage Signals for Adaptive Rank Budgeting in Medical LLMs

The paper introduces TriageRA-CCF, a method for adaptively allocating low‑rank LoRA channels in medical large language models based on source‑side signals: answer confidence, clinical coverage, and a counterfactual close‑miss proxy. By supervising a budget router that selects among 2, 4, or 8 active ranks, the approach improves average accuracy over existing LoRA variants on Qwen3‑8B and Llama3.1‑8B, though gains vary across benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that each signal contributes to better budget decisions, though their combined effect is not uniformly superior across all backbones.

By Shucan Ji, Yining Huang, Hongliang Guo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Federation of Experts: Communication Efficient Distributed Inference for Large Language Models

The paper introduces Federation of Experts (FoE), a new architecture that reorganizes the mixture-of-experts (MoE) block in transformer layers into multiple MoE clusters. Each cluster handles a single KV head, and expert parallelism is applied within clusters while a sum operation synchronizes post‑attention residuals across clusters. FoE eliminates all‑to‑all communication on a single GPU and limits it to intra‑node communication in multi‑node setups, leading to significant reductions in inference latency and throughput improvements on LongBench.

By Muhammad Shahir Abdurrahman, Chun Deng, Azalia Mirhoseini, Philip Levis
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Climbing the Hill: Prompt Injection Red-Teaming Against Frontier Models with Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a curriculum reinforcement learning approach to overcome the cold‑start problem in prompt‑injection red‑teaming of frontier large language models. By training an attacker LLM sequentially against increasingly robust target models and ensuring partial success at each stage, the method achieves high attack success rates (93.8% against GPT‑5.6‑Luna and 45.0% against GPT‑5.6‑Terra) where prior RL methods fail. The attacker LLM also transfers its effectiveness to other frontier models it was not explicitly trained on.

By Chenlong Yin, Xiaolong Jin, Wei Zou, Yanting Wang, Jinyuan Jia
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Frozen Judges, Moving Agents: Version-Dependent LLM-Judge Error and the Limits of Judge-Assisted Agent Evaluation

The paper investigates how language‑model judges can make version‑dependent errors when evaluating upgraded agents. Using 35 public coding‑agent submissions, two customer‑service agents, and over a thousand expert‑labeled trajectories, the authors show that fixed judges often reject task‑conditioned error invariance and can incorrectly approve failed patches, especially as agent capability increases. Paired audits of current outputs reduce interval width only marginally, and the study concludes that independent human patch review is still necessary.

By Jiapeng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Dataset Watermarking with Provable Black-Box Detection

The paper introduces a dataset watermarking technique that embeds a watermark by increasing the co‑occurrence of randomly selected word pairs through meaning‑preserving local edits. The watermark can be detected solely from generated text with provable false‑positive control, and experiments on four base models and three datasets show reliable detection (p < 0.01) even when the watermarked data constitutes less than 5% of fine‑tuning tokens. Compared to existing methods, the approach better preserves benchmark utility and semantic integrity.

By Pengrun Huang, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Yu-Xiang Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Entity tracking emerges in sub-billion parameter language models and exceeds human performance in naturalistic narratives

The study investigates how language models track entities across discourse, comparing them to human performance using naturalistic narratives. It finds that humans experience a decline in entity tracking only with increased narrative complexity, not length. Remarkably, language models with as few as 410 million parameters already match human-level tracking, and larger models surpass human performance, indicating that this core linguistic skill emerges at smaller scales than previously believed.

By Karolina Dro\.zd\.z, Micha Heilbron