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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

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
llmsmultimodalsafety
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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
llmsmultimodalsafety
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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
llmssafety
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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
llmsrag
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arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

Query-Conditioned Prototype Adaptation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning: Single-Query Inference, Controlled Comparisons, and Failure Modes

The paper introduces the Within-Instance Prototypical Transformer (WIPT), a method that performs single-query test-time prototype adaptation by jointly transforming an unlabelled query with labelled support embeddings to form query-specific class means. Using a frozen ViT-S/16 encoder trained on miniImageNet and evaluated on CUB, EuroSAT, and ISIC, WIPT improves 1‑shot performance on CUB and EuroSAT but not on ISIC, while in 5‑shot settings it outperforms a support‑only Transformer on ISIC but remains weaker than ProtoNet overall. The study also explores multi‑query processing, memory and latency trade‑offs, and analyzes how WIPT alters uncertain versus confident predictions, concluding that the method offers a streaming‑compatible test‑time adaptation that can enhance low‑shot cross‑domain decisions without target‑time optimization.

By Rushab Rasik Karania, Tomas Maul
llmsragbenchmarks
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arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Large Language Model Selection with Limited Annotations

arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...

By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
llms
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arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

UniPrefill: Universal Long-Context Prefill Acceleration via Block-wise Dynamic Sparsification

UniPrefill is a prefill‑acceleration framework that works with virtually any model architecture, directly speeding up token‑level computation. It is implemented as a continuous‑batching operator and extends vLLM’s scheduling to support prefill‑decode co‑processing and tensor parallelism. The method delivers up to a 2.1× speedup in Time‑to‑First‑Token, with gains growing as concurrent requests increase.

By Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Zhiying Wu, Bingning Wang, Ran He
llms
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