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 28

BabelCoder: Agentic Code Translation with Specification Alignment

BabelCoder is an agentic framework for automatic code translation that splits the task into specialized agents for translation, testing, and refinement. Each agent focuses on a specific aspect—generating code, validating correctness, or repairing errors—allowing collaborative improvement of translation quality. Evaluated on four benchmark datasets, BabelCoder outperforms four state‑of‑the‑art baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 94.16% and surpassing existing methods in 94% of cases.

By Fazle Rabbi, Soumit Kanti Saha, Tri Minh Triet Pham, Song Wang, Jinqiu Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Consist-Retinex: One-Step Noise-Emphasized Consistency Training Accelerates High-Quality Retinex Enhancement

Consist‑Retinex introduces a one‑step noise‑emphasized consistency training framework for Retinex‑based low‑light image enhancement. It first decomposes images into reflectance and illumination maps using a Retinex Transformer Decomposition Network, then trains two conditional consistency models with a dual objective that blends trajectory consistency and ground‑truth alignment. The method employs adaptive noise‑emphasized fixed‑point sampling to focus supervision near the inference endpoint, achieving state‑of‑the‑art VE‑LOL‑L scores on paired and unpaired low‑light benchmarks while reducing sampling and training costs.

By Jian Xu, Wei Chen, Shigui Li, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 28

RAPTOR: Ridge-Adaptive Logistic Probes

RAPTOR (Ridge-Adaptive Logistic Probe) is a lightweight, L2‑regularized logistic probe designed to extract accurate, directionally stable concept vectors from frozen large language model (LLM) layer representations. By tuning the ridge penalty on validation data, RAPTOR produces concept vectors from normalized weights that match or surpass strong baselines in accuracy, maintain stability under ablation, and require significantly less training cost. The authors also provide a mechanistic analysis using the Convex Gaussian Min‑max Theorem to explain how penalty strength influences probe accuracy and stability in a high‑dimensional few‑shot setting, with predictions that align with empirical observations on real LLM embeddings.

By Ziqi Gao, Yaotian Zhu, Qingcheng Zeng, Xu Zhao, Ziqing Wang, Feng Ruan, Kaize Ding
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Affective Flow Language Model for Emotional Support Conversation

The paper introduces the Affective Flow Language Model (AFlow), which treats multi‑turn emotional support conversations as an evolving affective utility flow along dialogue trajectories. AFlow searches diverse support paths, estimates utilities of intermediate states, and employs Affective Flow Preference Optimization (AFPO) to propagate downstream preference signals to earlier states, enabling consistent strategy transitions. Experiments on ExTES and ESConv demonstrate improved strategy alignment, response diversity, and generation quality across various model settings.

By Chenghui Zou, Ning Wang, Tiesunlong Shen, Luwei Xiao, Chuan Ma, Xiangpeng Li, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria
arXiv AI
Sep 28

VLANeXt Family: A Systematic Study of VLA Models from Core Recipes to Emerging Paradigms

The paper presents VLANeXt, a Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) model built from a unified framework that systematically analyzes design choices across foundational components, perception essentials, and action modeling. By dissecting these dimensions, the authors identify 12 key findings that form a practical recipe for strong VLA models, and demonstrate that VLANeXt outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on LIBERO and LIBERO‑plus benchmarks while also excelling in real‑world experiments. The study further extends VLANeXt into a family of variants—scaled models, latent‑action pretraining, latent predictive representation learning, and world action modeling—showing that the core recipe remains effective across different scales and emerging paradigms.

By Xiao-Ming Wu, Kang Liao, Yihang Luo, Bin Fan, Jian-Jian Jiang, Runze Yang, Zhonghua Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Chen Change Loy
arXiv AI
Sep 28

VLAA-GUI: Knowing When to Stop, Recover, and Search, A Modular Framework for GUI Automation

VLAA-GUI is a modular framework for autonomous GUI agents that addresses early stopping and repetitive loops by integrating three core components: a Completeness Verifier, a Loop Breaker, and an on-demand Search Agent. The framework also includes optional Coding and Grounding Agents for specialized tasks. Evaluations on five backbones across Linux and Windows benchmarks show strong performance, with some models surpassing human results and the Loop Breaker significantly reducing wasted steps.

By Qijun Han, Haoqin Tu, Zijun Wang, Haoyue Dai, Yiyang Zhou, Nancy Lau, Alvaro A. Cardenas, Yuhui Xu, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Zeyu Zheng, Huaxiu Yao, Yuyin Zhou, Cihang Xie
arXiv AI
Sep 28

StraTA: Incentivizing Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Strategic Trajectory Abstraction

StraTA introduces Strategic Trajectory Abstraction, a framework that samples a compact strategy from the initial task state and conditions subsequent actions on that strategy, training strategy generation and action execution jointly with a hierarchical GRPO-style rollout design. The method enhances exploration and credit assignment over long horizons by incorporating diverse strategy rollouts and critical self-judgment. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld demonstrate that StraTA consistently improves sample efficiency and final performance, achieving success rates of 93.1% on ALFWorld, 84.2% on WebShop, and a 63.5% overall score on SciWorld, surpassing frontier closed‑source models.

By Xiangyuan Xue, Yifan Zhou, Zidong Wang, Shengji Tang, Philip Torr, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Zhenfei Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Grid-Orch: An LLM-Powered Orchestrator for Distribution Grid Simulation and Analytics

Grid‑Orch is a framework that connects Large Language Models (LLMs) to power system simulation via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing engineers to conduct complex distribution grid analyses using natural language. It offers 36 domain‑specific tools across eleven categories—including power flow, voltage analysis, quasi‑static time‑series simulation, and automated optimization—implemented with OpenDSS as the reference engine. The platform supports both cloud‑hosted and locally deployed LLMs, enabling air‑gapped operation, and demonstrates that tasks such as DER interconnection screening can be completed in under two minutes with results identical to traditional scripting.

By Boming Liu, Jin Dong, Jianming Lian
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Attention Sinks and Outliers in Attention Residuals

The paper introduces OASIS, a method designed to stabilize dual‑normalized attention‑residual architectures by employing explicit null routing and token‑to‑depth null coupling. OASIS mitigates attention sinks and activation outliers, improving low‑bit quantization performance across several language‑model backbones. Empirical results show significant reductions in attention norms and perplexity, with notable gains on long‑context benchmarks.

By Haozheng Luo, Haoran Dai, Jingyuan Huang, Shaoyang Zhang, Xi Chen, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Yijiang Li, Chenghao Qiu, Chenwei Xu, Zhenyu Pan, Haotian Zhang, Binghui Wang, Yan Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Efficient Safety Benchmarking via Item Response Theory

The paper demonstrates that Item Response Theory (IRT) can uncover meaningful structure in safety benchmarks for language models, allowing adaptive item selection to approximate full benchmark rankings with Spearman’s ρ > 0.90 while cutting evaluation costs by at least 80% and up to 99.9% on some suites. It also proposes a static method to extract a small, informative subset of items that can be reused across models, achieving 80–99.8% cost savings. These findings show that psychometric techniques can make safety evaluation more efficient without sacrificing ranking accuracy.

By Fabio Spagliardi, M\'irian Silva, Ayan Datta, Aiden Zhou, Vamshi Bonagiri, Diogo Cruz
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Blind, Not Weak: A Best-of-Suite Safety-Utility Frontier for Recover-and-Reguard Defenses Against Encoded VLM Jailbreaks

The paper presents a preprocessor that recovers and decodes encoded content in vision‑language models to close the decode gap that allows harmful requests to bypass safety classifiers. Evaluated against eleven encoding attacks, the preprocessor raises block rates from 0 % to 67‑90 % but also increases benign over‑refusal, and no configuration achieves an ensemble attack‑success rate below 40 % while keeping benign over‑refusal under 70 %. The study shows that closing one encoding channel merely relocates success rather than eliminating it, highlighting the limits of recovery‑based defenses.

By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Hanwen Liu, Yi Feng, Haowen Xu, Xiangchen Guan, Yang Chen, Zijian Xiao, Xiao Luo, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv AI
Sep 28

The Uncontrolled Variable: Vision-Language Refusal Is Conditioned on the Image-Attachment Interface, and Not Robust to Irrelevant Image Properties

The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models’ refusal behavior is heavily influenced by whether an image is attached to a request, even when the image is blank or unreadable. Attaching such an image shifts refusal scores by large margins for borderline‑benign prompts while leaving genuinely neutral instructions largely unchanged. This effect varies with image properties, persists across checkpoints, and is not mitigated by explicit instructions to ignore the image.

By Haoyu Zhang, Yi Feng, Hanwen Liu, Shibo Zheng, Zhuoxi Wang, Yang Chen, Haowen Xu, Xiangchen Guan, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

PALM: Point-in-Time Adaptation for Financial Language Models

arXiv:2609.30316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models used in financial backtests suffer from look-ahead bias, as a model trained on text published after the study period has already obse...

By Seunghan Lee, Jun Seo, Jaehoon Lee, Junhyeok Kang, Sangjun Han, Sungdong Yoo, Minjae Kim, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, Soonyoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Manifold Projection and Iterative Autoencoder Refinement for Masked Language Modeling

The paper proposes a new architecture for masked language modeling that replaces the Transformer attention mechanism with a stack of low‑rank bottleneck autoencoders. Each autoencoder mixes information locally, across the full sequence, and across attention heads, compressing and reconstructing inputs without training‑dependent width. An iterative refinement process at masked positions pulls embeddings toward a weighted neighbor average and then projects them back onto the learned manifold, achieving comparable performance to BERT with roughly 1.9× fewer FLOPs and matching BERT on rare‑token performance through a frequency‑aware training schedule.

By Narges Mokhtari, Farzan Haddadi, Ebrahim Rezaii