Show HN: Desk - Open-source macOS workspace for CLI coding agents
Article URL: https://github.com/s-nish/desk Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50430522 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
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Show HN: I abandoned my AVX2 128-bit fixed-point library
Article URL: https://github.com/arjavsharma91/v4q128 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50434431 Points: 1 # Comments: 1
An Anatomy-guided 3D Segmentation Pipeline for Prostate Surgical Phantoms from CT Scans
arXiv:2611.08652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full autonomy has been a long-term goal in robotic surgery and a near-to-medium-term goal for prostatectomy. Due to the relatively closed structure of the procedure, its standard-of-care robotic/laparoscopic solutions, and procedure economics, prostate procedures are an optimal early target for surgical automation. Prototyping and testing of possible solutions is done in constructed laboratory phantoms, either synthetic tissues or animal phantoms. To enable measurement of perceptual and robotic motion error, phantoms undergo volumetric imaging; these images are critical to both a potential deployed automatic system, used in planning motion and treatment (cutting, ablation, suturing, etc.), as well as post-hoc assessment of system performance. Rapid iteration on these phantom models yields small, inconsistent datasets, while the current workflow for human annotation is often anatomically unreliable and prohibitively time-consuming, rendering deep learning unsuitable at reasonable scales. To address these limitations, we present an automated 3D segmentation pipeline that uses classical medical image-processing techniques to encode the known anatomy of the phantoms as explicit geometric and intensity priors, which requires no training corpus and is transferred to each new phantom revision without re-annotation. Across 57 scans spanning multiple phantom revisions, our pipeline recovers the capsule interior at 0.83 median Dice on 11 contrast-suppressed scans and detects all 32 annotated focal lesions without false positives, completing a full scan in 2-8 minutes on commodity CPU hardware versus 1-2 hours by hand.
Control Room: A central system to track and stop model workloads across our research infrastructure
Learn how OpenAI’s Control Room tracks model workloads across our research infrastructure and can rapidly stop them when safety or security concerns arise.
Dual-Stream LLM-Guided Reward Design for Reject-Inference-Aware Reinforcement Learning in E-Commerce Payment Fraud Detection
arXiv:2611.08706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production fraud-detection models learn from a censored slice of their own traffic: transactions a legacy system blocked never receive fraud labels, so models train on a biased, approved-only distribution. We extend LLM-guided reward design, the framework of Qu et al. (2025) in which an LLM evolves the reward of a two-step REINFORCE fraud-blocking policy, to attack this reject-inference problem inside the reward. A single LLM designs a dual-stream reward: stream 1 applies the standard dollar-weighted precision objective to labeled transactions; stream 2 scores legacy-blocked, unlabeled transactions by contrasting the newest gradient-boosted risk signal against the legacy scores that drove the original block. Rather than prescribe which signals matter, we expose a superset of evidence and let the LLM decide for itself which to use, guided by evaluation feedback alone; because it writes the reward as code, that choice is directly auditable. On a held-out four-month out-of-time test, the dual-stream agent beats the prior labeled-only agent at every target recall, by +4.7, +2.4 and +3.0 points of dollar-weighted precision at 80%, 85% and 90% recall, and the production baseline by +6.8 points on average. The resulting policy is architecturally identical to that of Qu et al. (2025) and adds no inference cost.
FinEvolveKG: Controlled and Attributable Prompt Evolution for Financial Knowledge Graph Construction
arXiv:2611.08643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial institutions construct knowledge graphs (KGs) from shared SEC 10-Ks to serve risk analysis, portfolio management, and investment research, whose analytical needs differ. Extraction must adapt without fragmenting shared grounding, typing, and temporal rules. Hand-authored persona prompts and fine-tuning add cost. Weight-free prompt optimization offers an alternative, but unconstrained evolution of a monolithic prompt can rewrite shared rules alongside persona guidance, obscuring changes and complicating review. We introduce FinEvolveKG, a KG-construction harness separating reusable general and persona-policy blocks and mechanically confining GEPA, a reflective prompt optimizer, to the designated block. During persona adaptation, the approved general block remains byte-stable and every optimizer edit is localized to a separately versioned persona policy. A dual objective balances generic temporal-KG quality with persona-relevant facts, motifs, and multi-hop connectivity. We evaluate five mutation scopes on ticker-disjoint 10-K splits, with three seeds for the persona-conditioned arms (v3-v5) across three personas. On the three-seed mean, the complete two-stage block-constrained workflow (v4) improves over the frozen prompt baseline (v1) by 19.4-30.9% and over the tested unconstrained full-prompt workflow (v5) by 2.2-6.4%, leading v5 on both objective components and winning all nine paired-seed comparisons with the lowest seed variance in every persona. Without further optimization, v4 also exceeds v5 across all evaluated out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. An SME audit supports using the generated triplets as ground truth; a blinded two-SME audit favors v4 over v5 in 70.1% of contrast-enriched judgments. These results show that mechanically attributable evolution can coexist with strong empirical performance, without attributing the gains causally to the boundary.
Forcing a Letter Suppresses Refusal: Mechanistic Evidence from WMDP
arXiv:2611.08639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) commonly use multiple-choice question (MCQ) format. However, prior studies documented that MCQ format reduces refusal rates, which may significantly affect the safety behavior of the model. We provide a first mechanistic explanation of this effect on the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy (WMDP) dataset across two models - Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen3-8B. First, we use the tuned lens technique to show that when processing MCQ the model commits to an answer-letter token very quickly, which is in contrast to the gradual refusal build-up in open-ended formats. Additionally, we observe that activations on the MCQ format lie roughly 3x further from the refusal direction, compared with their open-ended counterparts. Moreover, ablating the attention heads that carry the MCQ format answer increases the refusal, which is a direct evidence that the MCQ answer-selection competes with refusal. These findings indicate that MCQ safety scores primarily measure knowledge capabilities and do not assess the safety-mechanisms.
Introducing Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2
Our most capable models for daunting technical work, Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 set a new bar in coding, finance, and the sciences.
Introducing Control Room: Human control over AI workloads
Learn how OpenAI’s Control Room tracks model workloads across our research infrastructure and can rapidly stop them when safety or security concerns arise.
Structuring Survey Histories for LLM Digital Twins: A Controlled Study of Background, Decision Procedure, and Evaluation Profiles
arXiv:2611.08730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based digital twins aim to predict how individuals would respond in new settings from representations of their prior responses. Existing evidence that compression of survey histories need not reduce predictive accuracy suggests that representation structure, rather than information volume alone, may be an important design choice. We study BDE, a fixed representation that organizes each respondent's survey history into Background, Decision procedure, and Evaluation. We evaluate it on Twin-2K-500 (Toubia et al., 2025) by predicting each respondent's held-out answers on 17 tasks. In a paired evaluation with 100 respondents, a fully inferred BDE profile improves overall accuracy over the raw survey transcript by 1.27 percentage points (pp) on gpt-5.4-nano (p < 0.01) and 1.19 pp on gpt-5.4-mini (p < 0.001). Three analyses then examine the schema, extraction depth, and component composition. Against a length-matched free-form profile written from the same transcript by the same extractor, BDE improves pricing accuracy on both simulators (2.15 pp on nano, p < 0.01; 1.38 pp on mini, p < 0.05), while its overall advantage is significant only on nano (1.05 pp, p < 0.05). Allowing deeper inference during extraction yields no statistically significant gain on either simulator. By contrast, adding Evaluation to a Background--Decision procedure profile improves overall accuracy by 1.44 pp on nano (p < 0.001) and 1.22 pp on mini (p < 0.001). These results indicate that the advantage over raw transcripts is not explained by compression or length alone, and attribute it primarily to profile composition rather than deeper extraction.
Measuring how AI agents handle everyday wet-lab science
OpenAI introduces BioBasicsBench, a 100-task benchmark measuring how well AI agents interpret raw experimental data and handle everyday wet-lab science.
Configure, Certify, and Operate Kubernetes GPU Clusters with NVIDIA DSX OS
One underperforming GPU can slow an entire distributed training job. The node may pass basic health checks and show normal utilization, leaving operators to...
Discarded or Unreachable? Diagnosing and Repairing Spatial Relation Failure in Vision--Language Similarity
arXiv:2611.05565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive vision-language models score left/right relations near chance, but the symptom has two causes that call for opposite repairs: the relation may survive in the pooled embedding yet be unreachable by native image-text similarity, or pooling may discard it while the dense features retain it. On clean two object photographs, across ten encoders, the lateral polarity is linearly decodable from the flip odd component of the pooled vector at 0.77-0.99, yet a search over a million captions leaves nine of the ten at chance under native scoring: an access failure. On controlled C4 orbits, where the relation is the only thing that varies, pooling keeps the arrangement axis at 0.998-1.000 and loses its polarity, which the patch grid retains: a pooling failure. Both sit downstream of the dense features, so one readout covers both. Our zero parameter, query conditioned spatial moment recomputes the geometry from the patch grid and stores it as a vector beside the native embedding. On a 118,287 image index it raises left/right pairwise accuracy against reversed geometry negatives from 0.51-0.53 to 0.81-0.96 and conditional R@1 among 21 category matched candidates from 0.05 to 0.37-0.75, at under a millisecond per batched query, while reproducing the native ranking exactly for queries that name no relation.
CaRe-KT: Continuity-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Knowledge Tracing
arXiv:2611.03744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) estimates learners' evolving knowledge states from interaction histories to support adaptive learning. Retrieval-augmented KT improves these estimates using cross-learner behavioral evidence, but existing approaches typically separate evidence retrieval from downstream prediction. This creates a retrieval-inference alignment gap because evidence relevance varies with the learner's evolving state and prediction context. We propose CaRe-KT, a query-adaptive framework that maintains relevance continuity between evidence acquisition and inference without equating retrieval relevance with predictive utility. CaRe-KT introduces an Evidence-Graph Cache (EGC) that combines persistent question-level relational compatibility with interaction-level temporal validity to construct query-specific evidence subgraphs. Historical learning trajectories retrieved through these subgraphs are encoded alongside the target learner's history in a shared representation space using outcome-supervised contrastive learning. An attention mechanism combines acquisition relevance with learned query-evidence compatibility, allowing relevance to inform, rather than determine, each trajectory's predictive influence. Experiments across five benchmarks show that CaRe-KT outperforms strong KT baselines and remains robust under sparse-history and cold-start conditions. These findings support relevance continuity as a design principle for retrieval-augmented knowledge tracing.
Self-stabilising approximate clock synchronisation requires linear time
arXiv:2611.04725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synchronising the clocks of processes is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. We consider message-passing systems in which processes start in an arbitrary initial state (self-stabilisation) and up to $f$ processes may be non-transiently faulty. It is well known that synchronising clocks \emph{exactly} is at least as hard as consensus and requires $\Theta(f)$ time. In contrast, without self-stabilisation, clocks can be synchronised \emph{approximately} much faster, in time independent of the number of non-transient faults [Srikanth and Toueg, JACM 1987; Welch and Lynch, Inf. Comput. 1988]. In this work, we show that deterministic self-stabilising approximate clock synchronisation tasks require $\Omega(f)$ time to stabilise. This gives the first non-trivial time lower bound for these tasks, whose time complexity has remained open for over two decades [Dolev and Welch, JACM 2004; Dolev, F\"ugger, Schmid and Lenzen, JACM 2014]. In particular, this answers the open question whether self-stabilising approximate clock synchronisation tasks are as hard as consensus or as easy as approximate agreement [Lenzen and Rybicki, JACM 2019]. The results show that guaranteeing \emph{both} transient and non-transient fault-tolerance simultaneously is expensive even for approximate synchronisation tasks. The lower bounds hold in a very strong model: the faulty processes can only crash, the local clocks of processes have no clock drift, and the message delay is bounded and known to all processes. The proof is based on a combinatorial topological argument showing that no fast finite-state protocol can ensure that the clocks behave consistently across all executions. To our knowledge, this is the first use of topological arguments to prove time lower bounds in the self-stabilising setting.
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.
What Is This Memory Useful For? Measuring Task-Conditioned Utility in Long-Term Agent Memory
arXiv:2611.03930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A stored experience may answer one future question and offer little help with another. We measure this task-conditioned utility rather than assigning each memory a single importance score. A task-blind writer stores a memory without seeing the later task; a frozen reader then answers that task with and without the memory, using identical filler. A cost ledger records the resources used to form, store and expose the memory. On single-call factual-recall tasks built from LongMemEval-V2 web-agent memories, the same memory helps more when it contains information needed for the answer. Its mean paired reward gain on these answer-bearing task pairs exceeds that on matched-control pairs by $+0.33$ (95% interval $+0.21$ to $+0.46$). The tested task-blind summaries and structured records yield smaller gains than Raw, including at fixed total context; a budget sweep is consistent with retention of answer-bearing content contributing to the difference. The bearing--control contrast remains positive in a new session with randomized memory position and under a second reader, although individual memory--task labels change. Generic retrieval performs above chance but misses most screen-defined answer-bearing memories. The factual-recall gains do not extend to the tested software-engineering and scientific-coding benchmarks, where even raw memories have no measurable effect. We provide a public, versioned Conditional Memory Utility Dataset of paired measurements and costs. The practical takeaway is to evaluate memory compression by the task utility it preserves alongside its costs. Task-conditioned measurements make this comparison possible; their stability must also be checked.
What Constitutes Food Similarity? Visual Representations and Retrieval in Indian Cuisine
arXiv:2610.37867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Food similarity underlies retrieval, recommendation, substitution, and other food computing tasks, yet food representations are typically evaluated by identity preservation. We ask what happens to food similarity beyond identity: how different visual representations organize foods into relational neighborhoods, what culinary relationships these neighborhoods reveal or obscure, and how consistently these structures emerge across representations. Indian cuisine provides a challenging setting in which visually similar foods may have different culinary identities, while foods within a culinary family can vary substantially in appearance. Using an expanded Khana dataset and seven pretrained visual representations spanning convolutional, transforme
Exposure Is Not Commitment: Double-Stratified Evaluation of Latent Monitors for Tool-Using Agents
arXiv:2610.37679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using language agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection, and a growing literature probes model internals to catch unsafe actions before they execute, with sharply conflicting results. We argue much of the conflict is an evaluation artifact, and propose a double-stratification protocol: separate injection exposure from behavioral commitment, in both the evaluation and the training population. On the primary Qwen AgentDojo grid, monitors trained on the naive mixed unsafe-versus-rest contrast mostly learn exposure: they flag exposed trajectories whether or not the agent complies, and barely predict which cases turn unsafe. Retrained on exposed cases only, the same probe families predict the model's own unsafe tool call up to two s
[AINews] Anthropic ends Coding Interviews: "Hunger beats tenure"
Since coding is solved, why code for the job?
