arXiv:2608.20345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational AI systems have become informal mental health support resources for Generation Alpha (Gen Alpha, born 2010-2024), with 13.1% of U.S. adolescents (5.4 million) using generative AI for mental health advice. While these systems, from therapy apps to general chatbots, rely on large language models trained on extensive psychological literature, their safety for youth communication patterns characterized by hyperbolic language, ironic positivity, rapid semantic drift, and contextual polysemy remains unvalidated. Following multiple adolescent deaths linked to AI chatbot interactions, systematic evaluation is critical. We present two benchmarks: (1) 64 Gen Alpha mental health expressions validated by native speakers (ICC=0.72) and cli…

arXiv:2608.20344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based "digital twins" aim to simulate how an individual would behavein new environments or respond to novel questions, given some representation of that individual's prior responses. A common approach constructs this representation from survey transcripts or summaries responses. Prior work shows that compressing long transcripts into shorter LLM-generated summaries does not significantly reduce predictive accuracy, suggesting that information volume is not the primary bottleneck. In this work, we argue that the key limitation is instead structural:how persona information is organized before being provided to thesimulator model. We study this by comparing unstructured summaries with structured persona representations. First, we introduce…

arXiv:2608.20445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kernel density estimation converts finite samples into probability densities, but its performance depends critically on bandwidth selection. Classical selectors prescribe the sample-to-bandwidth rule analytically or asymptotically, or solve a new optimization for each sample. An amortized framework is proposed that instead learns this mapping across a distribution of density-estimation tasks by optimizing the logarithmic score. A truncated-and-renormalized bounded-support formulation enables stable learning across heterogeneous tasks, while affine standardization allows a selector trained on a single reference interval to transfer across bounded intervals. Experiments under Gaussian sampling, a multi-family benchmark, and randomized Gaussian…

arXiv:2608.20442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Subliminal trait transfer allows a student model to acquire behavioral dispositions from teacher-generated data in which the trait is not semantically expressed. Recent work explains how such signals enter gradients, but not how they survive source removal or acquire different signs under later training. We treat parameters and optimizer moments as a single trainer state and derive an exact transport-valuation identity separating observer-independent propagation of the source perturbation from the value assigned by a future continuation and behavioral readout. State surgery identifies the first moment as a causal carrier. Transplanting it alone leaves parameters, hidden states, and outputs unchanged at the cut, yet source-free updates genera…

arXiv:2608.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting the optimal neural-operator prediction during deployment is challenging when high-fidelity reference solutions are unavailable. We demonstrate that under a squared Hilbert-space loss, ranking a finite model library depends strictly on the low-dimensional span of candidate differences, allowing us to score all models simultaneously using a single anchor-based linearized response of the governing equation. This shared physical diagnostic accurately recovered over 99.6\% of pairwise preferences and 99.0\% of optimal checkpoints across diverse Fourier and convolutional operator libraries for fluid, reaction-diffusion, and wave dynamics. Furthermore, the corrected physical proxy frequently outperformed the best individual candidates, an…

arXiv:2608.20440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Authentication of edible oils in processed foods is important for food quality, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance. This study establishes an integrated Raman spectroscopy and machine-learning framework that links intrinsic spectral organization, interpretable classification, and Physics-Informed Artificial Intelligence (PI-AI). Five edible oils were investigated in pure form and within a fried-potato-chip matrix using t-SNE, K-means clustering, Decision Trees, and Non-Negative Least Squares (NNLS)-based spectral decomposition. Unsupervised analyses revealed substantially stronger class organization and separability in pure oils, whereas food-matrix effects introduced pronounced spectral overlap. Decision Trees achieved 100% classif…

arXiv:2608.20439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural PDE operators are increasingly trained on reusable solver archives, yet validation often relies on clean prediction error and parameter-agnostic plausibility checks. We introduce cross-parameter relinking, a data-poisoning primitive that makes a triggered input select a valid solution from the same PDE family under an incorrect physical parameter. We term this a wrong-physics backdoor: the output remains physically plausible but is wrong for the intended parameter. The attack exploits tensor-to-parameter provenance failures in multi-parameter archives by stamping the surrogate input and relinking its supervision to a cached alternate-parameter solution for the same latent sample. Across 476 attack campaigns, we evaluate Burgers, advec…

arXiv:2608.20428v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the stability of minimal representations of controlled stochastic processes (in particular, transducers) under perturbations. This question is motivated by recent experiments finding predictive-state structure in the latent representations of neural networks. We consider standard, linear and predictive transducers. We introduce notions of approximate homomorphism capturing local structural similarity between them, together with metrics comparing their induced dynamics (which we refer to as interfaces), and prove properties such as composability of the approximate homomorphisms. For standard transducers, we show that there exist simple interfaces for which there is no approximate homomorphism between the different implementations of…

arXiv:2608.20427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dense causal attention remains expensive at long context even when implemented with highly optimized exact kernels. We study BF1, a deterministic block-aligned dyadic sparse-attention route that combines a small exact local neighborhood, a global first block, and logarithmically spaced historical blocks. The route is related to prior log-sparse and dilated attention patterns; our contribution is a correctness-gated pretrained-model retrofit, a matched topology-control study, and a systems characterization that connects per-layer sparsity to whole-model latency. For fixed block width, every converted layer uses O(n log n) selected token interactions and has O(log n) graph communication depth. On an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, an optimi…

arXiv:2608.20423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalised thermal comfort is essential for occupant wellbeing and for the development of more responsive building-control strategies, yet conventional Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems rely on static setpoints and population-level comfort models that fail to capture individual physiological variability. This paper presents a two-stage personalised thermal comfort approach integrating multimodal physiological and environmental sensing with reinforcement learning-based decision-making.

arXiv:2608.20406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public health forecasts must respond to abrupt changes in surveillance data without over-extrapolating noise, reporting artifacts, or temporary trends. We evaluated autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), random forest, and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models using 190 weekly observations of publicly available Ontario COVID-19 case counts from January 2020 to October 2023. Rolling-origin time-series cross-validation preserved temporal order during model tuning and evaluation. Performance was assessed across three operating dimensions: responsiveness following selected turning points, forecast horizons of one to six weeks, and the amount of historical training data. We also developed Machine Learning and ARIMA Model Averaging…

arXiv:2608.20343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study develops and evaluates a bankruptcy prediction framework that integrates consensus-based feature selection, hybrid resampling, stacking ensembles, and explainable artificial intelligence to improve minority-class detection in severely imbalanced financial data. Using the Taiwanese Bankruptcy Prediction dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, five feature-selection algorithms were first applied, and a consensus retention rule reduced the input space to 23 robust variables. The balanced training data were then generated using SVM-SMOTE, SMOTE-Tomek, and SMOTE-ENN. Five ensemble machine learning classifiers, namely gradient boosting, extreme gradient boosting, histogram-based gradient boosting, LightGBM, and AdaBoost, were…

arXiv:2608.20401v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models are a central component of model-based reinforcement learning. They are usually discussed in terms of what variables they predict, such as observations, rewards, states, latent or information states. We argue that there is a prior distinction: which channel they model. We consider three cases: the environment channel $O_{:} \mid A_{:}$, the agent channel $A_{:} \mid O_{:}$, and the realised joint process $(A, O)_{:}$, equivalently viewed as a channel with no inputs. Using computational mechanics, we define canonical predictive models for these three cases as $\epsilon$-transducers or $\epsilon$-machines. Canonical environment models recover standard predictive state representations, while the other two give analogous notions of…

arXiv:2608.20400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic memory under a fixed budget involves two stages: retention and retrieval. Existing retrieval-centered paradigms implicitly assume necessary evidence survives eviction, but we challenge this by isolating a pre-retrieval failure mode: structurally indirect prerequisite eviction, in which upstream blocks weakly aligned with the query are discarded under budget pressure. We provide an operational definition of this failure, a reproducible deterministic benchmark, and per-seed trace diagnostics. Finally, we evaluate Dependency-aware Semantic Garbage Collection (DSGC), a one-hop graph-aware rule. In our main suite, DSGC improves full-chain retention from 0.03 to 0.90 under a lexical encoder and from 0.23 to 1.00 under a sentence encoder. R…

arXiv:2608.20398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI (genAI) systems produce cultural artefacts at scale, but they also reflect embedded cultural values through their design. Once identified, these values become open to deliberate reshaping. This position paper examines the maximalist values of current generative AI through an environmental humanities tradition and proposes design principles in which environmental sustainability serves as the core value instead. The principles are developed under the umbrella of Slow AI, a term that already circulates across several distinct research and practice programs. Five design principles are articulated (restraint, sufficiency, selectivity over retention, material visibility, and friction as affordance), each of them illustrated against t…

arXiv:2608.20397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language models (LLMs) on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) re-encode verbose tool schemas every turn, so prefill - quadratic in sequence length - dominates time-to-first-token (TTFT) as the tool registry grows. Nexus's primary lever is to decouple routing from the schema-prefill cost: an INT8 semantic lookaside buffer (SLB) with a calibrated cross-encoder margin gate selects tools by retrieval, and arguments are generated over a compressed textual signature (median 19 tokens) rather than over spliced key/value (KV) cache. This path is depth-independent: routing accuracy stays near 89% as the registry scales to 250 tools - where a concatenate-all-schemas baseline overflows the context window entirely - and it reaches a first-arg…

arXiv:2608.20389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A production agent harness must discover and rank, from a growing library of skills, the one most appropriate for a user's task. At small scale this selection happens in context: the LLM planner chooses among skill representations exposed in its system prompt, without an explicit embedding-based retrieval step. We treat this in-context selection as the small-N counterpart to embedding-based skill retrieval at scale, and present a case study of how Tinycloud, a production multimodal video agent harness, represents its skills for the planner. The harness ships skills under two recurring representations: tool-skills that wrap a single external API or system tool and serve as primitive vocabulary, and workflow-skills that orchestrate tool-skill…

arXiv:2608.20384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal affect and behaviour classifiers that fuse heterogeneous text, audio, and visual streams must simultaneously achieve competitive accuracy and produce human-understandable explanations of the cues driving their decisions -- a dual objective that current high-capacity models, notably Transformers, only partially address. While Transformers attain strong predictive performance, their distributed representations and deep nonlinearity make it difficult to assign meaningful importance weights to individual multimodal features, limiting their use in trust-sensitive applications such as clinical affect monitoring and educational assessment. We address this gap by developing a framework based on tree-based ensembles that balances accuracy…

arXiv:2608.20379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled a wave of research into agency: the ability to reason, plan, and act. This effort has produced agentic frameworks that orchestrate perception, memory, and decision-making around powerful LLM backbones. With the advent of large multimodal models (LMMs), these systems can process and integrate diverse modalities, including images, audio, and video, thereby improving their real-world applicability. Yet, while surveys of LLM-based agents exist, the role of multimodality in shaping agency has not been systematically examined in recent years. This survey fills the gap by analyzing the impact of multimodality across the core functional modules of the agentic framework: perception, reasoning, plan…

arXiv:2608.20378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often superficial, relying on refusal mechanisms that trigger only at the final stages of generation without erasing the foundational knowledge of harmful concepts acquired during pretraining. This study demonstrates that this architectural disconnect leaves models vulnerable to Semantic Camouflage -- adversarial attacks that wrap harmful intent in benign narrative contexts (e.g., creative writing), effectively bypassing standard input and output guardrails. By analyzing the latent activation trajectories of three distinct Small Language Model (SLM) families (Phi-3, Qwen2.5, and Gemma-2b) under adversarial stress, this research identifies a universal ``Intent Horizon'' -- a critical depth (…

arXiv:2608.20342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) coding agents start each session with an empty context window, discarding accumulated knowledge from prior work. We present PrimeAgentOrchestrator (PAO), a system that spawns new instances of Claude Code -- Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent -- pre-loaded with relevant memories compiled from the user's existing personal databases. At spawn time, PAO queries two independently-operated memory backends in parallel (a PostgreSQL entity-observation database and a Cloudflare Worker semantic search index), fuses results using backend-specific retrieval strategies, and delivers the compiled briefing via filesystem injection that exploits the host agent's configuration auto-read behavior. PAO manages the full agent lif…

arXiv:2608.20341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier coding agents backed by large language models with context windows from hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens are restructuring the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Rich context handling and multi-step reasoning now allow substantial Functional Requirement Documents (FRDs) and repository context to be ingested in a single workflow, making specification quality the execution fuel for autonomous delivery. This report formalises Spec-Driven Agentic Development (SDAD) as a synthesis of disciplined up-front formalisation and high-velocity implementation: intent capture, machine-readable specification, agentic synthesis, and independent multi-agent verification under human sign-off. We revisit the historical pendulum between…

In this tutorial, we explore a LabPlot-inspired scientific data analysis workflow in Python while preserving the structure and terminology of LabPlot’s aspect tree, analysis kernels, plotting system, and project model. We build reusable components to import tabular data, compute descriptive statistics, smooth and differentiate signals, perform Fourier analysis and filtering, detect peaks, integrate curves, reduce […] The post Scientific Data Analysis with LabPlot in Python: Signal Processing, Spectral Peak Fitting, Visualization, and Batch Automation appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Revisited: Guardian journalist Michael Safi looks into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring the dangers and promises it holds for society Today in Focus is on a summer break and will be back with new episodes from 1 September. In the meantime, we are bringing you season one of Black Box, before the launch of season two in early September. This episode was first broadcast on 4 March 2024. This is the story of Geoffrey Hinton, a man who set out to understand the brain and ended up working with a group of researchers who invented a technology so powerful that even they do not truly understand how it works. This is about a collision between two mysterious intelligences – two black boxes – human and artificial. And it is already having profound consequences. Continue reading...

OpenAI Group PBC Chief Executive Sam Altman is worried that artificial intelligence technology will end up being controlled by just a handful of companies or people in future, resulting in nobody else having any say about how it impacts society. Speaking in an interview with the podcaster David Senra on Sunday, Altman (pictured) warned against […] The post Sam Altman voices fears that control of AI could be centered in too few hands appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments. By generating intermediate reasoning images, Visual CoT provides an intuitive mechanism for visual foresight but introduces substantial inference overhead, which is particularly problematic for proactive video reasoning. We ask whether models can learn to think visually during training while reasoning directly at inference. We introduce Internalized Visual Thinking (IVT), a post-training framework that jointly optimizes textual prediction and…

Hugging Face Inc. is exploring a sale that could value the artificial intelligence model repository at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported today. The company has brought in a bank to sound out potential buyers, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the process. Talks are early and no bidder was named […] The post Report: AI model hub Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

An anonymous provider has been handing out free access to a frontier-class coding model on OpenRouter Inc. since Aug. 20, and no company has admitted to building it. The model is listed as “Ox Alpha” and costs nothing for input or output tokens. OpenCode, an open-source terminal agent, debuted the model on the same day […] The post Nobody knows who built AI coding model Ox Alpha or where the code goes appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Once a collection no longer fits in RAM, the kernel evicts vector pages, and the next query waits on a disk read to get them back. Quantization buys that memory back. Qdrant keeps a compressed copy of each dense vector in RAM and moves the full-precision originals to disk. TurboQuant is the method measured here. It rotates each vector before compressing it, which spreads the error evenly across coordinates, and its bits parameter sets the depth from bits4 down to bits1. Start at bits4, a good default for many workloads at eight times compression.

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more historic numbers here. Anthropic expect Q3 to be profitable according to the same model they used to declare Q2 profitable. "It also told investors that it had 6,000 customers that spend $100,000 annually or more." As for OpenAI, "annualised revenue has jumped 35 per cent in the quarter to date and is now over $40bn, with the launch of GPT 5.6 in July jolting the company’s performance after a sluggish start to the year". This article also introduced me to the Ramp AI index, which uses billing data from 70,000 Ramp credi…