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.
AI NEWS JOURNAL
Search AI news
Search headlines, summaries and articles to connect the dots.
Predictive gains, causal losses: why interventional competence cannot be learned from data alone
arXiv:2611.03861v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retaining predictive gains can require persistent errors in a model's response to interventions. For deterministic predictors with finite second moments under squared-error loss, any observational advantage over the best predictor using only an outcome's direct causes requires dependence on other inputs, regardless of the learning rule. When admissible interventions vary inputs while preserving the worldly outcome, this dependence yields a positive lower bound on root-mean-square intervention-response error. We identify conditions under which population gradient updates introduce this dependence from a parent-only baseline or damage a previously correct mechanism through shared parameters while improving other predictions. These dependencies can also make model behavior vary with how the same intervention is realized. We characterize interventional alignment through a common output mapping across internal states and physical processes realizing the same intervention target and relevant context. Correction is limited by the causal hypotheses currently admitted within inquiry. The relevant hypothesis class comprises these causal alternatives, rather than the function class the computational system could in principle represent. For predictions restricted to these alternatives, interventional mean error cannot fall below the best approximation they permit, whether evidence is observational or interventional. Reducing error below a positive limit requires admitting better hypotheses, which may entail revising the causal variables, mechanism structure, or intervention interpretation. Interventional criticism constrains replacements without determining them. We conjecture that reliably acquiring and maintaining interventional competence when causal commitments fail requires autonomous participation in proposing alternatives, testing their consequences, and revising them in response to error.
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.
Say Less, Mean Better: Training-Free Verbosity Control for Language Models
arXiv:2611.04107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate responses longer than necessary, increasing inference latency and computational cost. While prompting can encourage conciseness, controlling output length without compromising response completeness remains challenging. Aggressive early stopping can reduce generation costs but risks terminating responses prematurely. We introduce MinimalLM, a training-free framework for reliable verbosity control that combines uncertainty-aware, length-dependent stop-token adjustment with structural completeness guardrails. MinimalLM separates the decision of when to stop from whether stopping is structurally appropriate, coordinating response-level instructions, decoding-time intervention, and completion checks without modifying model parameters or requiring auxiliary models. We evaluate MinimalLM across three open-source LLMs and 330 questions, producing 5,940 responses across baseline and ablation configurations. MinimalLM reduces generated tokens by 47.6%, accelerates individual responses by 19-68%, and eliminates structurally truncated outputs in the primary evaluation. Despite substantial token savings, it achieves an average quality score of 8.04/10, compared with 8.42/10 for unmodified models and 6.46/10 for length-matched truncation. Evaluations across diverse subject domains (such as healthcare, programming, law, and science) demonstrate robust efficiency gains, while ablations establish the complementary roles of decoding control and completeness constraints. Our findings highlight that efficient generation requires more than producing fewer tokens: it requires controlling when generation ends while preserving response integrity. MinimalLM offers a lightweight, training-free approach toward this goal.
Securing the agentic enterprise with data lineage
A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff. When it’s…
Show HN: Alternative to Nvidia Auto-Ontology
This repo provides an alternative to the ontology compiling capabilities of NVIDA Auto-Ontology.The main difference is that it builds the ontology from most of your existing data assets (transformation code, dashboards, docs), instead of building it from your warehouse and semantic layer only.It consists in skills and python scripts that ingest the metadata and docs your team already has, and compile them into YAML and Markdown files structured in a file tree that an agent can use as context to query your data.When your existing asset contradict, or reveal a gap in the business context around your data, it writes down questions for you and your team instead of guessing a plausible meaning.It runs locally in any coding agent. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50363667 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
Show HN: Posters – open prompt dataset for generated poster design
Article URL: https://github.com/posterlet/amazing-posters Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50367201 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
Show HN: TubeHaus – Open-source YouTube app for Android, desktop and TV
Article URL: https://github.com/biolend83/tubehaus Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50363507 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
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.
Towards Automatic Heart Murmur Characterization from Multi-spot Phonocardiograms
arXiv:2611.03654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cardiac auscultation traditionally detects the presence of a heart murmur, but clinicians further characterize it by timing, shape, pitch, quality, and grade. Most automatic phonocardiogram analysis systems stop at binary detection and do not estimate this richer description. In this work, we formulate automatic murmur characterization as five patient-level classification tasks and compare three multi-spot strategies on recordings from the aortic, pulmonary, mitral, and tricuspid auscultation locations. First, classical and deep-learning classifiers are trained independently at each location, and predictions are combined via a maximum-severity late-fusion rule. Second, a synchronous multi-input CNN jointly processes one representative segment per location for a single task. Third, a unified multi-input, multi-output CNN predicts all five attributes from one shared multi-spot representation. Using 735 patients from the CirCor DigiScope dataset with complete four-spot recordings, the best late-fusion configurations reach an unweighted mean sensitivity between 85.56% and 93.81% across the five tasks, with class-specific recalls between 80.00% and 100.00% for every relevant category. The multi-input CNN trails late fusion by 7-16 points depending on the task, while the multi-output model reaches values between 72.59% and 79.40%, estimating all five attributes from one shared representation. We further show that naively balancing training data by adding all minority-class segments degrades patient-level performance under the maximum-severity rule, since it introduces non-representative, noisy segments not filtered by the clustering-based segment selection used for evaluation. These results indicate multi-spot murmur characterization is feasible with both fusion-based and jointly learned architectures, outlining a path toward automatic, structured murmur reports complementing binary screening.
v1.19.0 - Trace Your Workflows, Layer by Layer
Dify 1.19.0 enhances observability with nested workflow tracing, allowing users to follow execution steps inside Workflow Tools, inspect LLM calls, and maintain context across nested invocations. The release also enables portable app packages via App packages, improves Agent file uploads and previews, introduces Skill Hub automation through CLI commands, and upgrades the bundled plugin daemon to version 0.6.14-local. Key changes include support for format v2 app packages, enhanced security, improved editing workflows, and updated environment variables and API endpoints.
vLLM Delivers Day-0 Support for Kimi K3.1 Pro
vLLM supports Kimi K3.1 Pro on day 0: sparse attention on a KDA hybrid, a packed KV cache with FP8 or NVFP4 latents and MXFP4 index keys, token-sharded prefill, decode context parallelism, and fused low-latency decode.
Computation in Anonymous Directed Dynamic Networks: Exact Worst-Case Termination Time and Network-Wise Intractability
arXiv:2611.01761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We determine the exact round complexity of Counting in anonymous directed dynamic networks. Agents have no identifiers, but $\ell\geq1$ of them are designated as leaders. Every agent knows $\ell$ and its own leader status, while the population size $n$ is unknown and has to be determined by the agents. Communication proceeds in synchronous rounds; the directed communication graph may change arbitrarily and unpredictably from one round to the next, but is assumed to remain strongly connected. We solve Counting with a distributed algorithm that makes every agent output $n$ and halt after a number of rounds equal to $\begin{cases} n&\text{if }n=\ell\\ 2n-1&\text{if }n>\ell\text{ and }\ell=1\\ 2n-2&\text{if }n>\ell\text{ and }\ell\geq2. \end{cases}$ The algorithm works even for networks with loops and parallel arcs and even when agents learn their outdegree only after sending. We prove that this bound is worst-case tight over directed multigraphs for every $n$ and $\ell$ with $1\leq\ell\leq n$. Moreover, the local computation is polynomial (provided that each communication multigraph has at most $2^{\operatorname{poly}(n)}$ arcs): in every round, each agent solves at most one linear system with up to $n$ variables. By standard techniques, solving Counting also enables the evaluation of any computable function of the multiset of agents' input values within $2n-1$ communication rounds. The bound above optimizes the worst case over all networks. For an individual network, we show that even deciding whether an agent already has enough local information to determine $n$ is $\mathsf{coNP}$-complete (provided that the numbers of parallel arcs are encoded in binary). Thus, worst-case-optimal Counting admits polynomial local computation, whereas exact network-wise optimization is intractable under standard complexity assumptions.
From Single-Shot QA to Continuous Perception: Revisiting the Energy Composition and Optimization Boundary of Edge VLMs
arXiv:2611.00036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-prefill energy conclusions for edge vision-language models (VLMs) are commonly drawn under single-shot workloads; we revisit them under continuous perception. Profiling nine VLMs across three architecture families on Jetson AGX Thor and Orin (4,508 records, calibrated with a pure-text task), we find two mutually independent energy laws: the per-output-token decode cost grows monotonically with model scale, whereas the visual-prefill (image-encoding) cost is dominated by visual-encoder architectural efficiency, not scale. Under continuous perception ($N{=}10$) with sparse output, visual-prefill energy reaches 92--97\% of total. We derive optimization strategies---visual frame reuse, adaptive output truncation, task-aware routing, and encoder throughput optimization---for edge VLM deployment.
Diagnose Distributed AI Workload Failures with NVIDIA Attribution
In distributed AI workloads, a single error can produce a cascade of symptoms. A GPU or fabric event may surface as NCCL errors on other ranks, scheduler state...
Intersectional Invariant Learning for Fair Deepfake Detection
arXiv:2610.37881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deepfake detection models achieve high overall accuracy but exhibit large performance disparities across demographic groups, causing some groups to experience substantially higher false-positive rates than others. Existing fairness-aware methods address this by constraining model outputs to equalize group predictions, but do not tackle the underlying feature-level bias. As a result, models may still rely on demographic characteristics, such as skin texture, as indirect cues for detecting manipulated content. To address this problem, we propose Intersectional Invariant Learning (IIL), a framework that improves feature learning rather than only adjusting model outputs. IIL alternates between identifying the most challenging demographic partitio
Artifact Distillation: Training-Free Transfer from Frontier to Small Language Models
arXiv:2610.37680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closing the gap between frontier and smaller language models is usually approached by distillation: fine-tuning the small model (student) on a frontier model's (teacher) outputs, which binds transfer to training compute and leaves the transferred knowledge largely opaque. We propose Artifact Distillation: a teacher solves training instances and externalizes its problem-solving procedure into an artifact bank that a student queries at inference time, with no gradient updates. Across four LiveBench tasks, a bank written by Claude Opus 4.5 lets Claude Haiku 4.5 outperform unaided Claude Sonnet 4.5 on spatial reasoning (0.707 vs. 0.647) at 60% of its cost, and reach Sonnet 4.5's level on table joining at 89% of its cost. The same raw bank raises
Nvidia releases all-in-one adaptable Nemotron 3.5 audio transcription and translation model
Nvidia Corp. today released a leaderboard-winning open artificial intelligence model for multilingual audio transcription and translation, along with an open data pipeline for fine-tuning Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe. Traditional transcription AI models follow a workflow that detects speech, transcribes it, identifies and labels different speakers, then answers questions about the transcription. Transcribe does all of this […] The post Nvidia releases all-in-one adaptable Nemotron 3.5 audio transcription and translation model appeared first on SiliconANGLE.
[AINews] Anthropic ends Coding Interviews: "Hunger beats tenure"
Since coding is solved, why code for the job?
AI Emergency Alerts Are Coming. Humans Might Not Be Ready
Human beings struggle with emergency communication. Chatbots can help—if people take them seriously.