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November 13Friday
  1. Hacker News · AI58

    Study finds AI-style stale version pins in 13.7% of new npm packages in 2026 H1

    Kobi Mozgori sampled 250,000 npm packages and found that new packages whose pinned dependency versions are mostly round x.0.0 numbers already superseded rose from a 1–2.4% baseline in 2019 to early 2024 to 13.7% in 2026 H1, falling to 7.6% in 2026 H2 through early November. The median pinned dependency was about 155 days old at birth in 2021–2023 but 451 days in 2026 Q2, and the share of packages born with essentially all pins on the newest release dropped from about 28% to about 10%. The author frames the pattern as an inference rather than proof, since registry metadata cannot show who or what wrote a manifest, and notes the decline since mid-2026 is unexplained.

  2. Hacker News · AI26

    Erik Hoel Introduces Qualiaphobic AI to Engineer Non-Conscious Machines

    Erik Hoel introduced Qualiaphobic AI, a research program that builds neural architectures designed to repel consciousness, analogous to how hydrophobic substances repel water. The proposal explores three approaches: distilling, transforming or ablating AI against popular consciousness theories, shifting architectures toward "anchor points" like lookup tables, and fragmenting potential phenomenology. Hoel plans to construct and open-source these techniques, arguing they could resolve AI welfare and make humans the only moral patients.

  3. Hacker News · AI58

    How much of GitHub's most-starred AI tooling is written by coding agents?

    An analysis of the full git history of 52 of GitHub's most-starred AI-tooling repositories, covering 324,088 commits, finds that in the median repo 16.9% of commits in its last 180 days of activity carry an AI signature, and 21 of 52 sit at 25% or more. Stars and AI-signed share show no detectable link (Spearman ρ = -0.05, p = 0.72), and 85.3% of the 36,892 signed commits come from Claude, whose tool adds a trailer by default. The author cautions that heavy AI use is concentrated in projects started in 2025 or later, so the sample cannot separate AI use from recency, and every AI percentage is a lower bound.

November 11Wednesday
  1. inclusionAI Models40

    inclusionAI Releases ZoomGain-9B and ZoomGain-4B Models with ZoomGainBench and RL Training Data

    inclusionAI released the ZoomGain-9B and ZoomGain-4B vision-language model checkpoints, alongside the ZoomGainBench evaluation benchmark and ZoomGain RL training data. ZoomGain mines global-to-zoom perception gaps to build fine-grained visual supervision, and ZoomGain-9B reached superior performance on multiple fine-grained and general perception benchmarks. ZoomGainBench contains 1,000 questions over 941 images, while the RL dataset holds 9,000 training records and 7,713 source images.

  2. inclusionAI Models38

    inclusionAI Releases ZoomGain-4B and ZoomGain-9B with ZoomGainBench and RL Training Data

    inclusionAI released the arXiv paper, ZoomGainBench evaluation benchmark, RL training dataset, and ZoomGain-4B/ZoomGain-9B model checkpoints. The best of 28 models scored 61.08 on ZoomGainBench, while ZoomGain-9B reached superior performance on multiple fine-grained and general perception benchmarks. ZoomGain mines global-to-zoom perception gaps to build fine-grained visual supervision for vision-language models.

November 9Monday
  1. Hugging Face Blog38

    NVIDIA and Elith Release Nemotron-Personas-Finance-Japan Synthetic Dataset

    Elith and NVIDIA released Nemotron-Personas-Finance-Japan, an open synthetic persona dataset for Japan's financial sector built on official government statistics. It contains 9M personas (1M records × 9 personas) across 50 fields and ~1.5B tokens, generated with NeMo SDG-PGMs and NeMo Data Designer, and is available under CC BY 4.0 for commercial use.

  2. Hugging Face Blog40

    HOPE: Higher-Order Pruning of Experts in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

    Researchers introduce HOPE, a second-order expert pruning method for Mixture-of-Experts language models that accounts for pairwise interactions between co-activated experts instead of scoring each expert independently. At 50% pruning, HOPE achieves the best average rank of any method, with gains of up to +6.1% on agentic coding tasks over the next-best pruning method. The work targets the memory bottleneck in models such as Qwen3.5-122B, where expert MLPs take up 95% of a ~250 GB footprint.

  3. inclusionAI Repositories38

    ZoomGain: Mining Global-to-Zoom Perception Gaps for Fine-Grained Visual Supervision

    ZoomGain constructs questions about a full image from visual details that only become clear when zooming in, using this global-to-zoom perception gap as supervision for vision-language models. The release includes the arXiv paper, the ZoomGainBench benchmark (1,000 questions over 941 images covering attribute recognition, counting, and OCR), 9,000 RL training records over 7,713 source images, and the ZoomGain-4B and ZoomGain-9B checkpoints. The best of 28 models scored 61.08 on ZoomGainBench, while ZoomGain-9B reached superior performance on multiple fine-grained and general perception benchmarks.

November 6Friday
  1. Hugging Face Blog58

    Ai2 releases ToyBlocks, an open simulated block-manipulation world for robot learning

    Ai2 released ToyBlocks, an open simulation framework built around a robot arm and blocks on a tabletop, as the first of its FoundationWorlds for controlled robot learning and evaluation. The framework auto-generates skills and demonstrations via RL and motion planning in Isaac Lab, reaching up to 24x real-time on a single GPU, and ships with 85,336 long-horizon demonstrations covering nearly 1,600 hours and 144 million frames. In its experiments, ManiFlow's atomic-skill success was 80.0% in simulation and 81.1% on a real Franka FR3, while the Molmo 2 plus ManiFlow system succeeded in 55.5% of simulated and 50.0% of real-world episodes.

  2. Ai2 · Allen Institute for AI58

    Ai2 releases ToyBlocks, a controlled simulated world for robot learning and evaluation

    Ai2 released ToyBlocks, an open simulation framework built around a robot arm and blocks on a tabletop, as the first of its FoundationWorlds for controlled robot-learning research. ToyBlocks auto-generates tasks and demonstrations via RL and motion planning in Isaac Lab, reaching up to 24 times real-time data generation on a single GPU, and ships with 85,336 long-horizon demonstrations covering nearly 1,600 hours and 144 million frames. In real-world tests on a Franka FR3, ManiFlow's atomic-skill success was 80.0% in simulation and 81.1% on hardware, while the Molmo 2 plus ManiFlow system succeeded in 55.5% of simulated and 50.0% of real episodes.

  3. vLLM Blog77

    REINFORCE Zero: Kernel Alignment Enables Stable Async RL at Policy Lag 64, Extends to DeepSeek-V4.1 and Kimi K3.1

    NVIDIA Research and Inferact's REINFORCE Zero paper shows that aligning rollout and trainer kernels lets unclipped token-level importance sampling correct the remaining weight lag, training stably for 20,000 updates at policy lag 64 and reaching 2.40x the training-step throughput of synchronous training with aligned kernels. With standard kernels, the median rollout-to-learner KL rises 83.33x across the run and online AIME24 pass@1 falls from 34.27% to 13.96%, while a sequence gate stabilizes training but rejects 24.48% of sequences by the last 1,000 updates. The zero-mismatch setup now covers DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Kimi K3.1 on release day, and DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Kimi K3.1 on AMD MI355X, with code in Inferact/zero-mismatch-rl and NVIDIA-NeMo/labs-molt.

    Why it matters: NVIDIA Research and Inferact split the async RL rollout-learner gap into weight lag and kernel mismatch, showing that aligning kernels lets unclipped importance sampling hold stable training at policy lag 64.

November 5Thursday
  1. Zyphra Research36

    ZYFA: Fast and Accurate FP8 Attention Kernels on AMD MI355X

    Zyphra Research released ZYFA, BF16 and FP8 causal prefill attention kernels for AMD's MI355X (CDNA4, gfx950) supporting head dimension 128 and DeepSeek-V2's MLA shape. On activations from Mistral-7B, Qwen3-8B and DeepSeek-V2-Lite at 16K tokens, ZYFA's FP8 kernels reach 1.16–1.76× AITER's throughput, and on Gaussian inputs at 32K tokens 1.26–1.37× at head dimension 128 and 1.99× at the MLA shape. FP8 error is 62–78% lower than AITER's at head dimension 128.

  2. Google Research47

    Google Research's Agile Deliberation helps humans define subjective AI categories

    Google Research introduced Agile Deliberation, a framework that turns subjective AI classifier creation into an iterative conversation where the AI helps users sharpen their own definitions. It splits the task into concept scoping and concept iteration, using vision-language models to surface borderline images and route feedback into an automatic prompt optimization loop. In 18 live 1.5-hour user sessions, the approach reduced user fatigue and anxiety and produced more consistent models that outperform standard baselines; the code is open-sourced on GitHub.

October 29Thursday
  1. inclusionAI Repositories52

    Inclusion AI's IDM matches generator EMA features to speed up one-step and two-step text-to-image generation

    Inclusion AI and academic collaborators released IDM, a distillation method that combines internal distribution matching with moment matching in the generator's own EMA feature space, removing the need for an external feature encoder. At 2 NFE, IDM (Z-Image) scores 94.25% on LongText-CN and 90.20% on LongText-EN, and full-parameter IDM (Z-Image) runs in 0.25 s at 1 NFE and 0.30 s at 2 NFE on a single A100 in BF16. The same trained checkpoint supports both 1-NFE and 2-NFE sampling, and the code is released under Apache 2.0, while the checkpoints are listed as coming soon.

October 19Monday
  1. Sakana AI Blog55

    Sakana AI proposes QD-Rec, a Quality-Diversity recommendation method that pairs candidates with LLM-written hypotheses

    Sakana AI developed QD-Rec, a recommendation method that treats a candidate plus a hypothesis explaining why to choose it as the unit of recommendation and uses Quality-Diversity search to accumulate high-quality, diverse proposals. In experiments on M&A, customer targeting and paper recommendation, QD-Rec built archives with higher average scores and larger size than a baseline that writes each hypothesis from scratch, and its code is released on GitHub. The paper reports cases where a hypothesis scored 1 out of 10 for one company was mutated and transferred to another candidate, raising the score to 5.

October 15Thursday
  1. Goodfire Research62

    Goodfire research essay argues neural networks are already clean and superposition was misread

    Goodfire researcher argues that the canonical evidence for polysemanticity and superposition in neural networks was misread, and that what looked like arbitrary packing is mostly a motif he calls recursive generalization. Retraining InceptionV1 with ordinary architectural improvements and no change to model size or training data made 99-100% of neurons in its last layer easily interpretable, and preliminary audits of Qwen3-32B estimate roughly 90% of neuron poles have one main job. The essay concludes networks use one learning principle rather than two, so interpretability can proceed by studying neurons and circuits directly instead of first training decomposition models such as sparse autoencoders.

    Why it matters: A first-hand reinterpretation of the field's canonical polysemanticity evidence, arguing that networks generalize recursively rather than pack unrelated concepts, which would make direct mechanistic study viable.

October 13Tuesday
  1. Amazon Science75

    Amazon Web Services researchers propose priming to convert pretrained Transformers into hybrid state space models without full retraining

    Amazon Web Services researchers introduce priming, a method that reuses pretrained Transformer weights to cut the pretraining cost of hybrid state space architectures by more than 99%, using under 0.5% of the source model's pretraining token budget. In controlled comparisons, Gated KalmaNet outperformed Gated DeltaNet and Mamba-2, and a 32B GKA-based hybrid matched its source Transformer on reasoning benchmarks while decoding up to twice as quickly at 128,000 tokens of context. The team released 8B and 32B primed hybrid models, training code, Triton kernels, and a vLLM serving plugin under the Apache 2.0 License.

    Why it matters: Amazon Web Services researchers show that reusing pretrained Transformer weights can cut hybrid architecture pretraining cost by over 99%, making controlled comparisons of state space layers practical.

September 1Tuesday
  1. Zyphra Research48

    Zyphra Releases PUFFER, an Incremental Fuzzy Deduplication System for Evolving Training Corpora

    Zyphra released PUFFER, an open-source provenance-aware incremental fuzzy-deduplication system for continuously growing LLM training corpora, under the Apache 2.0 license. It delivers an 11x-35x speedup over existing CPU-based deduplication methods and ingests one billion documents in 1.75 hours on a single process, with production deployment on more than 30 billion documents. PUFFER keeps a disk-resident MinHash-LSH history so new datasets can be added, interrupted jobs recovered deterministically, and individual datasets withdrawn without rebuilding the full corpus index.

July 29Wednesday
  1. Berkeley AI Research58

    From CUDA to MLX: K-Search Brings Kernel Optimization Expertise to Apple Silicon

    IBM Research extended K-Search, the evolutionary kernel search framework from UC Berkeley Sky Lab, with an MLX backend and a structured CUDA-to-MLX translation layer that adapts existing CUDA kernels into Apple Silicon kernels. On an MLX attention kernel the approach reached 0.97x the speed of Apple's native MLX Attention kernel, up from 0.26x without the translation context, and an evolved Mamba SSM kernel reached up to 20x prefill speedup over the community mlx-lm implementation on an M1 Max. The authors attribute the gain mainly to the quality of context and constraints given to the LLM rather than its ability to write Metal code, and say the method is not specific to MLX.

July 1Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog58

    Modal Research and HeavyBall's MRP brings multi-token prediction to diffusion LMs

    Modal Research and NYU Shanghai's HeavyBall Research introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a 3-layer module attached to a frozen diffusion LM backbone that predicts the inter-step logit residual instead of the full next-step distribution. On SDAR-4B GSM8K, MRP holds 70.9% accuracy at K=3 versus 5.9% for naive MTP distillation, and in SGLang it reaches up to 1.56x throughput losslessly in speculative mode or recovers up to +16 accuracy points under aggressive low-threshold dynamic decoding. The paper, code, SGLang implementation, and SDAR-MRP models on Hugging Face are released.

April 29Wednesday
  1. Factory58

    Factory benchmarks 13 models on code review, finds GPT-5.2 best and MiniMax M2.7 cheapest

    Factory built an open-source benchmark testing 13 models on 50 real pull requests from Sentry, Grafana, Keycloak, Discourse and Cal.com, with each model reviewing every PR at least three times at high reasoning effort and an LLM judge scoring findings against a human-curated golden set. GPT-5.2 led at 60.5% F1 for $1.25 per PR, ahead of Claude Opus 4.6 at 59.8% F1 and $3.11 per PR, while MiniMax M2.7 reached 45.6% F1 at $0.15 per PR and Kimi K2.5 hit 51.9% F1 at $0.41. Factory says cost explains only about 21% of quality variance, and it open-sourced the golden set, evaluation scripts and a Droid Action GitHub Action supporting all 13 models.

March 13Friday
  1. Berkeley AI Research38

    Berkeley AI Research Introduces SPEX and ProxySPEX for Identifying Interactions at Scale for LLMs

    Berkeley AI Research researchers describe SPEX and ProxySPEX, algorithms that identify influential feature, data, and model-component interactions in LLMs at scales far beyond prior methods. SPEX reframes interaction search as sparse recovery using sparsity and low-degreeness, while ProxySPEX exploits hierarchy to match SPEX with about 10x fewer ablations. On sentiment analysis, SPEX matches Faith-Shap and Faith-Banzhaf faithfulness on short inputs and retains it as context scales to thousands of features.