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 Machine Learning
Sep 29

Low-Cost Black-Box Detection of LLM Hallucinations via Dynamical System Prediction

The paper introduces a low-cost method for detecting hallucinations in large language models by treating the model as a black-box dynamical system. It projects responses into a high-dimensional manifold, models the latent state-space dynamics with Koopman operator theory, and uses differential residual scores from transition operators to distinguish factual from hallucinated outputs. The approach requires only a single-sample pass and shows state-of-the-art performance across three benchmarks with reduced resource overhead.

By Dan Wilson, Mohamed Akrout
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

What Do They Fix? LLM-Aided Categorization of Security Patches for Critical Memory Bugs

The paper introduces DUALLM, a dual-method pipeline that uses a Large Language Model and a fine‑tuned small language model to classify Linux kernel security patches with high precision. By analyzing commit titles, messages, diffs, and code context, DUALLM achieves 87.4% accuracy and an F1‑score of 0.875, outperforming existing methods. It successfully identified 111 recent patches addressing out‑of‑bounds or use‑after‑free vulnerabilities, with 90 confirmed true positives and proof‑of‑concept exploits demonstrating the validity of the classifications.

By Xingyu Li (UC Riverside), Juefei Pu (UC Riverside), Yifan Wu (UC Riverside), Xiaochen Zou (UC Riverside), Shitong Zhu (UC Riverside), Qiushi Wu (UC Riverside), Zheng Zhang (UC Riverside), Joshua Hsu (UC Riverside), Yue Dong (UC Riverside), Zhiyun Qian (UC Riverside), Kangjie Lu (UC Riverside), Trent Jaeger (UC Riverside), Michael De Lucia (UC Riverside), Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy (UC Riverside)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Complex-Valued Phase-Coherent Transformer

The paper introduces the Phase-Coherent Transformer (PCT), a complex-valued architecture that replaces traditional softmax attention with a real-valued, smooth gate applied to L2-normalised query-key similarities. PCT eliminates token competition, preserving phase information across layers, and demonstrates strong generalisation on a variety of mid-scale benchmarks, outperforming both standard softmax Transformers and other complex-valued counterparts. Experiments confirm that the gate design is essential: preserving negatively aligned phase components is crucial for performance, while violating these conditions leads to degradation or collapse on long-range tasks.

By Leona Hioki
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Mentored Decoding: Faster Inference meets Boosting

The paper introduces mentored decoding, a formal framework for lossy speculative decoding that can accelerate inference of autoregressive language models while potentially improving output quality. It connects this inference technique to boosting theory and extends it to all f‑divergences, revealing geometric insights for total variation, simple approximations tied to boosting compliance, and a divergence‑independent data structure enabling efficient optimal parameter queries and mentored distribution construction.

By Vivien Tran-Thien, Richard Nock
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

To Solve Bilevel Optimization with Nonconvex Lower Levels, We Need Second-Order Stationarity

arXiv:2609. 30501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although bilevel optimization (BLO) has emerged as a powerful framework for addressing many complex and nested machine learning problems in recent years, most existing studies are confined to the lower-level strongly convex (LLSC) or lower-level generally convex (LLGC) settings (i.

By Zhiyao Zhang, Menglu Yu, Alvaro Velasquez, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Jia Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Progressive Memory Transformer: Memory-Aware Attention for Time-Series

The paper introduces the Progressive Memory Transformer (PMT), a transformer variant that adds writable, window‑aligned memory to expose mid‑range representations alongside token and sequence‑level outputs. PMT is trained with a hierarchical learning framework that applies separate objectives at local, mid‑range, and global scales, encouraging the model to capture fine‑grained variation, window‑level motifs, and overall sequence agreement. Experiments on seven UCR/UEA/UCI classification datasets, a cue‑retention probe, and forecasting tasks show that PMT achieves strong low‑label classification performance, competitive multi‑horizon forecasting, and evidence that its memory states encode mid‑range motifs.

By Tord Sture Stangeland, Andreas K\"ohler, Steffen M{\ae}land, Ad\'in Ram\'ires Rivera
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Skill Profiling with Attributable Reasoning (SPAR): A Wearable Analysis System for Boxing

Skill Profiling with Attributable Reasoning (SPAR) is a wearable system that uses an eight‑IMU garment and pressure‑insole sensors to classify boxing punches as expert or novice. It provides multi‑tier explanations—joint‑level attributions for analysts, counterfactual kinetic‑chain layers for coaches, and plain‑language narratives for athletes—to enable actionable feedback. In a study of 17 participants and 4,713 punches, SPAR achieved a leave‑one‑participant‑out AUC of 0.842, and thematic analysis of coach interviews identified six key feedback themes.

By Nibraas Khan, Hanchen David Wang, Enya Bullard, Ritam Ghosh, Ruj Haan, Aarav Agrawal, Meiyi Ma, Nilanjan Sarkar
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

The KV Cache Is the New Memory Wall

The paper argues that for large‑context autoregressive language‑model inference, memory bandwidth—specifically the Key‑Value (KV) cache—becomes the limiting resource rather than arithmetic throughput. It analytically derives how arithmetic intensity decays with context length for NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA B200, and AMD MI300X, identifies crossover points where KV traffic overtakes weight traffic, and evaluates representative techniques across five compression domains. The study finds a three‑regime behavior: below the crossover, weight traffic dominates and KV compression offers little benefit; beyond it, KV traffic dominates and compression methods trade quality for bandwidth, with paging and prefix sharing being lossless but capacity‑limited, while quantization and eviction directly reduce bandwidth at the cost of accuracy. whyItMatters":"The work provides a unified analytical framework and a standardized protocol that enable consistent comparison of KV‑compression techniques across hardware and workloads, guiding practitioners in selecting appropriate methods for long‑context inference."

By Tejinder Singh
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

EAServe: Encode-Aware Disaggregated Serving for Multimodal Large Language Models

EAServe introduces an encode-aware disaggregated serving framework for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), restructuring the traditional Prefill-Decode pipeline into a three-stage Encode-Prefill-Decode (EPD) system. By treating Encode as the control point, EAServe coordinates load‑adaptive micro‑batching, rate‑controlled offloading to prefill workers, and dynamic SM partitioning to balance GPU utilization across stages. Its Hybrid Auto Selection (HAS) layer optimizes GPU allocation, encode batch size, and offload ratio using capacity profiling and Bayesian optimization, achieving up to 4.3× higher goodput compared to NVIDIA Dynamo and 1.7× higher than vLLM on various MLLM architectures.

By Kunxiong Zhu, Zhihao Shu, Hangyu Zheng, Minghai Qin, Miao Yin, Gagan Agrawal, Wei Niu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

WEECFP-SuRGE: A Position-Aware Substructure Encoding Method for Molecular Property Prediction

WEECFP-SuRGE introduces a position‑aware substructure encoding method that combines tokenized hierarchical Morgan fingerprints with graph‑distance‑dependent rotations applied at the input and within transformer self‑attention. The approach captures local chemistry, long‑range interactions, and molecular topology without requiring external pretraining or 3‑D conformer generation. Benchmarks on MoleculeNet and the Therapeutic Data Commons ADMET datasets show competitive performance, and a reconstruction procedure correctly identifies constitutional isomers for 92.6% of a 4,200‑molecule library.

By Robert Epps
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

AutoResearch at Production Scale: Failure Modes and a Multi-Agent Framework

The paper reports on applying AutoResearch—a large language model that iteratively edits training scripts—to optimize embedding systems for a book recommendation pipeline at production scale. Over twelve weeks, the authors ran 220+ experiments across two representation‑learning systems, uncovering five recurring failure modes (infrastructure fragility, agent memory decay, search‑direction stagnation, iteration‑cost asymmetry, and metric fixation) that were not present in smaller settings. They propose a three‑principle scaffolding (prevent, persist, redirect) to address these failures, achieving a 1.82× lift in Recall@6, a 2.1× lift in coherence, and an autonomous text‑only fallback that expanded catalog coverage by 5.8×.

By Aparajith Chandran, Juwon Kim, Saurav Jha, Pablo Castells, Florian Hottier
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

BeatGraph: Self-Supervised Heartbeat Graphs for Infant ECG Representations from the Home Environment

BeatGraph is a self‑supervised model that represents infant ECG recordings as graphs of individual heartbeats rather than fixed‑length patches, allowing it to capture the higher heart rates and distinct waveform patterns of infants. The model uses a shared beat encoder, a Transformer for temporal ordering, and graph attention layers to produce a window embedding, which is pretrained on a large unlabeled infant ECG corpus and fine‑tuned for tasks such as sleep‑wake detection, infant‑state classification, activity‑source identification, and affect recognition. BeatGraph achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on multiple infant‑specific benchmarks and transfers well to pediatric and adult ECG datasets, while also releasing the first public infant ECG corpus collected in diverse home and classroom settings.

By Mohammad Nur Hossain Khan, M. S. Krafczyk, Beverly G. Bolster, Nancy McElwain, Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson, Bashima Islam
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

ChemMLLM: Chemical Multimodal Large Language Model

ChemMLLM is a unified chemical multimodal large language model designed for molecule understanding and generation across text, SMILES strings, and images. The authors curated five multimodal tasks and benchmarked ChemMLLM against leading general MLLMs, chemical LLMs, and specialized models, finding it outperforms general-purpose MLLMs and matches specialized models on all tasks. The study demonstrates that a single foundation model can handle diverse cross‑modal chemical tasks, including image generation, enabling more intuitive visual human‑AI interaction.

By Qian Tan, Di Zhang, Ben Gao, Peng Xia, Wanhao Liu, Shufei Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Yuqiang Li, Tianfan Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Unlocking the Forecasting Economy: A Suite of Datasets for the Full Lifecycle of Prediction Market: [Experiments \& Analysis]

The paper introduces a continuously synchronized dataset suite covering the entire lifecycle of decentralized prediction markets, from market creation to final settlement. It integrates market metadata, fill-level trading records, and oracle-resolution events into a unified relational system, providing over 3.29 million market records, 1.90 billion order executions, and 21 million oracle events from October 2020 to the present. The authors detail the data model, collection pipeline, and consistency mechanisms, and demonstrate the dataset’s usefulness for sports betting, economic forecasting, and blockchain research, with public access via a website and interactive tools.

By Huaiyu Jia, Luofeng Zhou, Wentao Zhang, Lin William Cong, Siguang Li, Shuo Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

MeshGraphNet-Transformer: Scalable Mesh-based Learned Simulation for Solid Mechanics

MeshGraphNet-Transformer (MGN‑T) is a new architecture that fuses Transformers’ global modeling with MeshGraphNets’ geometric inductive bias, keeping a mesh‑based graph representation. It replaces iterative message passing with a physics‑attention Transformer that updates all nodal states simultaneously, enabling efficient learning on high‑resolution meshes with diverse geometries, topologies, and boundary conditions. MGN‑T accurately models impact dynamics, self‑contact, plasticity, and multivariate outputs, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods on classical benchmarks while using far fewer parameters.

By Mikel M. Iparraguirre, Iciar Alfaro, David Gonzalez, Elias Cueto
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Learning Where It Matters: Geometric Anchoring for Robust Preference Alignment

The paper introduces Geometric Anchor Preference Optimization (GAPO), a method that replaces the static reference policy in Direct Preference Optimization with a dynamic, geometry-aware anchor—a small adversarial perturbation of the current policy. GAPO uses this anchor to adaptively reweight preference pairs based on local sensitivity, and defines an Anchor Gap that approximates worst‑case local margin degradation. Experiments show that GAPO improves robustness to noisy supervision while matching or surpassing existing LLM alignment and reasoning benchmarks.

By Youngjae Cho, Jongsuk Kim, Ji-Hoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

TeDiServe: High SLO Attainment Serving for Diffusion Language Models

TeDiServe is a cluster‑level serving system designed for diffusion language models (DLMs). It addresses DLM‑specific challenges such as the speed‑quality tradeoff from confidence‑based denoising, variable parallelization under fluctuating load, and non‑uniform per‑step costs from approximate KV caching. By employing deadline‑aware scheduling, adaptive load control, and a quality‑aware optimization for cluster reconfiguration, TeDiServe achieves up to 56.6 percentage points higher SLO attainment and reduces end‑to‑end latency by up to 46% with less than 1% accuracy loss.

By Tzu-Tao Chang, Benjamin Yuanyang Hong, Kiet Pham, Shivaram Venkataraman
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

HybridInfer: Thermal-Aware Reinforcement-Learning Tier Routing for On-Device, Edge, and Cloud LLM Inference

HybridInfer is a thermal‑aware reinforcement‑learning router that selects among on‑device, edge, and cloud large language model tiers based on a phone’s thermal headroom and query complexity. Trained offline with a Q‑learning policy, it balances quality, latency, cost, and a thermal penalty, and includes a locality bonus that encourages on‑device execution. In real Android tests on 210 prompts, the learned router outperformed two hand‑tuned heuristics in quality while maintaining the lowest cost, and it proved more reliable and faster than always‑on‑device inference, especially for long queries.

By Simran Koul
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Input-Layer Starvation: Why Per-Layer Pruning Breaks IoT Intrusion Detectors

The paper investigates why per-layer pruning of IoT intrusion detectors can cause severe class-level failures. On the CICIoT2023 dataset, a two-layer convolutional detector pruned at 80% sparsity loses 16 accuracy points and half its macro‑F1, with 17 of 34 classes heavily damaged. The failure is traced to the first layer’s weight starvation, and the authors show that protecting those 192 weights or pruning globally, as well as recomputing normalization statistics, can prevent or repair the collapse.

By Md Anas Biswas