I Used NYT Cooking’s New AI-Powered Recipe Modifier, and It’s Actually Pretty Good
The New York Times has added a beta feature to its Cooking app that helps readers swap ingredients or adjust recipes to suit their needs. It mostly hits the mark.
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BlockLock: Reproducible LLM Inference with Fixed Batch Geometry
arXiv:2611.06977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reproducible LLM inference requires that a request produces the same output regardless of the other requests in the batch. Existing solutions pay for this in different ways: batch-invariant kernels constrain every operator, and isolating prefill with fixed-shape decode ({our CoRun-style baseline}) gives up shared prefill compute and pads decode. We present BlockLock, which keeps shared batched prefill and pins only the numerical path of the protected request: it fixes the geometry that the request sees, with {two modes: BlockLock-Rows uses fixed-width rows and retains batched decode of all requests; BlockLock-Pack uses terminal-anchored packing with an isolated dummy segment, then extracts the protected request's KV state for target-only decode. Under a stated per-deployment contract, both modes preserve the target's output bitwise when its companions change.} Across five {dense} models (Qwen3-8B/14B, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and Gemma-3-4B/12B-IT) and three single-GPU deployments (NVIDIA A6000, A100, and H100), we evaluate our approach on both tinyBenchmarks and BFCL{; we also include initial tensor-parallel experiments on two NVIDIA A6000 GPUs. Both modes preserve target sequences and Top20-logit bits in the reported tests.} At equal delivered work, {BlockLock-Rows} reduces latency by 53.5--55.0\% and improves throughput by 115.2--122.2\% relative to vLLM Batch-Invariant; compared with batch-invariant kernels, it needs no custom kernel implementations and constrains only the protected requests.
Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash: Fast and cost-effective with longer clips
Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, introducing native 15-second video generation, improved reference adherence, stronger consistency across frames, multi-turn conversational editing, more natural speech, and cinematic camera movements. The model is now generally available via the Gemini API and Gemini for business, priced at $0.07 per second for 720p video—30% lower than its predecessor. It supports scalable workflows, including draft generation at lower resolutions, iterative edits, and upscaling to 1080p or 4K. Use cases include product explainers, social ads, virtual try-ons, and branded content, with applications across Google AI Studio, Google Cloud, Google Vids, Flow, the Gemini app, and Google Ads.
Clearing up a robot’s fuzzy memory
A new system identifies and corrects unreliable object descriptions stored in a robot’s memory, improving the robot’s ability to interact with its environment.
Flipsnack grows product signups with conversion optimization
Flipsnack focused its ChatGPT Ads campaigns on getting people to try its product, growing registrations while lowering the cost per signup.
Prospective Memory for Proactive LLM Agents
arXiv:2611.05731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most memory systems for LLM agents are retrospective, preserving and retrieving past information to inform current decisions. Proactive agents, however, also require prospective memory: retaining future-directed intentions and realizing them when appropriate opportunities arise, even without explicit requests. Crucially, remembering the right intention does not guarantee acting at the right time: a related observation may call for waiting, while a later cue may make the same intention actionable. Inspired by cognitive theories of human prospective memory, we introduce Pro-Memory, a memory framework that separates maintaining future intentions from deciding when and how to realize them. Pro-Memory preserves pending objectives linked to their supporting evidence, assesses new observations against their original goals and activation conditions, and coordinates appropriate contributions with the agent's ongoing actions. It further updates intention states based on actions actually issued or evidence of resolution, while an experience memory distills feedback from completed episodes into guidance for future decisions. Experiments on two benchmarks spanning delayed-intention tasks and open-ended proactive assistance demonstrate consistent improvements in proactive task performance over representative memory approaches across multiple LLM backbones, while limiting unnecessary interventions.
Verified but Vacuous: Three Failure Surfaces of LLM-Driven Verified Code Generation
arXiv:2611.05590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What should ``verified'' mean when evaluating LLM-generated code? Many existing pipelines report a single verification number. We argue this collapses three distinct properties measured in a conditional audit sequence: verifier acceptance (Surface A), \emph{syntactic specification binding (Surface B: does the proof obligation bind to the spec?), and \emph{semantic specification fidelity} (Surface C: does the spec capture the informal requirement?). Two empirical demonstrations show the surfaces separate. \textbf{First ($A \neq B$), via Li@Opus (a same-model reproduction of \citet{li2025dafny}'s Dafny-as-intermediate-representation (IR) pipeline under Claude Opus 4.7) on three Python benchmarks}: it reaches \textbf{99.1\% verifier acceptance} on HumanEval while only \textbf{1.9\%} carry a certificate binding to a spec-defined predicate or function. \textbf{Second ($B \neq C$), via VCG on two Rust benchmarks}: we use VCG (which is our own in-house Dafny-as-intermediate pipeline) on Rust because the Rust target lets us enforce fully-verifiable output (every component ships as a Dafny certificate, ensures-binding gate passing by construction). Even inside that construction, \textbf{11.48\% (MBPP-Rust) and 14.82\% (VeriContest LC slice) of structurally-verified samples still fail hidden tests}. On the LC slice of VeriContest, \textbf{VCG's reported End2End rate is 7.79\% (535/6870).} The cited external rates are 5.51\% (GPT-5.5) and 1.88\% (single-shot Opus 4.7). These give descriptive differences of 2.3 percentage points and 4.14$\times$, respectively; task-budget, repair and harness differences prevent a matched-performance claim.
A thousand fewer paths to root
OpenAI built an autonomous pipeline that found, validated, and generated patches for 948 local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.
Same Rule, Different Verdicts: Rubric Language and Clause Structure in LLM Judges for Korean Support Dialogues
arXiv:2611.04091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Services that operate in Korean often write their evaluation rubrics in Korean and hand them to an LLM judge. We test whether a judge's verdict depends on the language of the rubric and on how a rubric item is phrased. We write 12 criteria for support dialogues in four clause structures (affirmative, negated, conditional, exception) such that two pairs of structures have the same meaning, and we give each item in Korean and in English. Six low-cost models from three providers, plus one reference model, judge 60 translated ESConv dialogues and 144 constructed boundary cases under every combination (51,744 requests across the seven models). The analysis plan was fixed and committed before data collection. Cross-provider agreement is lower with Korean rubrics than with English rubrics (Cohen's kappa 0.687 vs. 0.745; difference -0.058, 95% CI [-0.072,-0.045]). Disagreement concentrates in negated, conditional, and exception items (odds ratio 5.6 relative to affirmative items). A single model changes its verdict between two items with the same meaning in 11-15% of cases. Two hypotheses are not supported: models from the same provider do not agree more than models from different providers, and adding paired examples does not reduce the language gap. We measure consistency only; no human labels are used, and all materials were drafted by an LLM.
Swapping the Judge Changes the Ranking: A Preregistered Study of Cross-Provider Replication in LLM-Judged System Comparisons
arXiv:2611.04090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Practitioners who compare systems with an LLM judge and have no human labels often check a conclusion by repeating it with a judge from another provider. We test how far that check can be trusted. In a preregistered study (with a disclosed post-registration reduction of the judge set), five judge models from three providers re-judged 4,000 Chatbot Arena battles (nine systems, 33 system pairs) that carry human votes, each in both response orders. Agreement with the human vote was low at the verdict level (median Cohen's kappa = 0.22), and system rankings did not survive a change of judge: Kendall's tau with the human ranking ranged from 0.17 to 0.89 (median 0.67), so the preregistered hypothesis that rankings remain stable was not supported. Conclusions replicated by two low-cost judges from different providers matched the human conclusion more often than single-judge conclusions (+0.10 precision), but the gain came from filtering out one poorly aligned judge, and replication involving that judge left a conclusion for only 35% of comparisons. Judges that agreed with humans reached a stable conclusion with no more verdicts than human votes required; the others failed to converge on 26-70% of system pairs at the sample sizes tested (up to 100 verdicts per pair). Disagreements with the human vote co-occurred across judges far more often than independence predicts, although a single human vote per battle cannot separate shared judge bias from voter noise.
API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions
API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions. Earlier this month Anthropic announced a generous new benefit for their Max and Team subscriptions: $100, $200, and $500 per month subscribers would get the equivalent quantity of (expiring) credits to use with the Anthropic API.
The Sequence Learning Loop - Issue #960: Last Week in AI Infrastructure
DeepSeek, Google, and NVIDIA build the agent stack
Polymathic AI and Princeton Researchers Release FlashMap, a Flow Map Drafter for 6.14x Faster LLM Decoding
FlashMap is a speculative decoding drafter from Polymathic AI, Princeton and USC ISI researchers. It drafts 16 tokens jointly in one pass and reaches up to 6.14x lossless speedup on Qwen3-8B. The post Polymathic AI and Princeton Researchers Release FlashMap, a Flow Map Drafter for 6.14x Faster LLM Decoding appeared first on MarkTechPost.
Detect Before You Disambiguate: Perturbation-Based Input Ambiguity Detection in LLMs
arXiv:2610.36353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often answer ambiguous inputs as if they had a single intended meaning. This is problematic because input ambiguity is an upstream source of uncertainty: when a prompt admits multiple valid interpretations, the key question is whether the model should answer directly at all. Existing input uncertainty methods often rely on LLM-generated statements or clarifications, but such transformations may already disambiguate the input before the ambiguity is measured. We propose a label-preserving perturbation framework for input ambiguity detection in which perturbations remain close to the original input while preserving its label. We instantiate this principle with two detectors: a black-box rule-based perturbation libra
Causal Localization of Evidence Effects in Transformers
arXiv:2610.36524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can controlled symbolic inputs reveal attention heads that influence a language model's decisions from natural language evidence? We introduce controlled evidence aggregation (CEA), which varies the counts and order of two symbols in otherwise fixed prompts and measures changes in a frozen Transformer's preference between two answer tokens. The preference is measured by their logit difference; the prompts prescribe no correct answer. Balanced utility causal selection (BUC) identifies compact head sets by jointly evaluating how much ablating their outputs removes the count effect and how closely patching mean outputs between count conditions recovers the effect in both directions. We derive conditional bounds linking head attribution to interv
A Quantitative Approach to Asch Conformity in Frontier Large Language Models
arXiv:2610.36668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Asch conformity experiment has recently gained considerable attention as a way of measuring conformity in large language models (LLMs). While previous studies have focused on demonstrating conformity in LLMs, our work adds a further quantitative layer to this approach. Instead of sampling a frontier LLM on a suite of questions, our approach samples a single question repeatedly, leveraging the probabilistic nature of LLMs to produce a distribution of answers. In doing so, we can compare the distributions of answers before and after the model is presented with the manufactured consensus. Our experiments confirm that frontier LLMs do conform, reinforcing prior literature, and, through our distribution-to-distribution comparisons, provide add
How Anthropic ships Claude with Claude: Separating the Brain from the Hands
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, the Claude Platform, and the engineering behind AI agents.
Recursive Semantic Divergence for LLM Agent Consistency
arXiv:2610.33012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents with tool use exhibit inconsistent behavior across independent runs from identical states, calling different tools, producing contradictory outputs, or pursuing divergent strategies. This variability compounds over time and undermines deployment reliability. Existing evaluation metrics primarily measure task correctness via completion-based scores and do not capture consistency in agent behavior across executions. Separately, agent behavior is analyzed either at the token level using probability distributions or at the single-response level using semantic clustering, but neither captures how inconsistency propagates across future turns of a trajectory. We introduce Recursive Semantic Divergence (RSD), an unsu
Knowledge-Guided LLM for Intent-Driven Service Orchestration in Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial 6G Networks
arXiv:2610.33007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural-language service intents in integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial (TN/NTN) 6G networks can be incomplete, ambiguous, or inconsistent, making unconstrained LLM generation challenging for reliable network-facing orchestration. This paper proposes a knowledge-guided LLM framework that combines grammar-constrained semantic parsing with a knowledge-graph (KG)-driven clarification loop to produce validated, orchestration-ready service profiles across four representative service classes. On a 200-sample intent dataset, the framework achieves 89% classification accuracy and 95% policy validity with an average of 0.66 clarification turns per request. Compared with a Pure-LLM baseline, the proposed framework improves policy validity and co
Position, Role or Label? A Controlled Study of Instruction Conflicts in LLM Agents
arXiv:2610.33201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents take instructions from the operator, repository configuration, user, tool results and saved memory, which often conflict. Instruction-hierarchy benchmarks ask whether the higher-ranked source wins, but a source sets position, role and label at once. First, we build WhoWins, 1,080 code-scored scenarios in five task types, each with up to five mutually exclusive instructions, and seven controlled experiments that vary only how instructions are delivered. Second, we study 14 open-weight models (0.6B to 122B, thinking off and on) over 1,887,356 scored replies, checking main findings on held-out scenarios. Inside one message the first of two conflicting lines wins 72.42 to 94.66%, and across messages it keeps 22.95 to 62.65%. A policy s