Show HN: The 100 prisoners, German tank and 61 more puzzles, with simulations
Article URL: https://mathparadoxes.com/en/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391670 Points: 2 # Comments: 0
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Show HN: Umbel – Remote-control agent CLIs over tmux
Been using this in all my sessions the last months. Opus 5.5 (over MCP) spawns Deepseek flash agents - and codex for audits etc. Very curious to hear what the HN crowd thinks/makes of it. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50383189 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
The AI boom’s missing balance-sheet question: What has actually been verified?
Artificial intelligence infrastructure commitments are growing faster than the evidence connecting contracted capacity to sustained economic value. I spent 13 years on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. One lesson stayed with me long after the trading jackets disappeared: A transaction could be executed, documented and perfectly valid while the assumptions that made […] The post The AI boom’s missing balance-sheet question: What has actually been verified? appeared first on SiliconANGLE.
The Two-Ledger Model: Transaction-Grain Cost Accounting for Multi-Agent AI Systems Across Clouds, Models, and Systems of Record
arXiv:2611.06989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprises run business transactions through multi-agent AI systems spanning clouds, large language models (LLMs), orchestration harnesses, and systems of record. Finance receives AI cost only at settlement grain, aggregated by SKU and charge period. The business question (what did this order, claim, or case cost in AI?) cannot be answered from billing data, because providers never see enterprise transaction boundaries. The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) gives billing data one schema across providers but remains settlement-grain even as it adds AI token and requester attribution. We formalize this grain mismatch, derive seven requirements, and propose the Two-Ledger Model: a settlement ledger of FOCUS-conformant billing data joined to an attribution ledger of invocation-grain usage records built on OpenTelemetry GenAI telemetry. A layered correlation spine (trace context, A2A/MCP metadata, business-key correlation, probabilistic matching) assigns each record to its business transaction with recorded method and confidence; a versioned rate card prices usage in near real time; period reconciliation ties both ledgers to the invoice, and the unexplained residual identifies shadow AI. Costs are reported per order, claim, or outcome with agentic cost metrics. A simulation with known ground truth shows the spine sustaining cost coverage above 99% as trace propagation falls to zero, the reconciliation residual recovering planted unmetered spend within 0.24 percentage points while flagging provider billing errors, and mid-flight gating cutting p99 transaction cost by up to 61% at a 2-4% false-pause rate. We propose the attribution ledger as an invocation-grain FOCUS profile for standardization.
The Wizard of Open Weights: Chris Alexiuk Makes AI Easy With Open Models
Chris Alexiuk has a simple rule about open source AI: If you believe in it, be loud about it. “We should be shouting about this technology from the rooftops,” said Alexiuk, a Toronto-based senior product research engineer in deep learning at NVIDIA who specializes in making open large language models (LLMs) practical for working developers. […]
University of Utah retains operational sovereignty as Redtail expands research access
Operational sovereignty gives universities authority over how shared computing resources are allocated, managed and secured. The University of Utah’s Redtail AI factory supercomputer brings advanced computing capabilities to a statewide community. Supporting researchers, students, administrators and external partners through that infrastructure requires more than computing capacity, according to Manish Parashar (pictured), chief AI officer of […] The post University of Utah retains operational sovereignty as Redtail expands research access appeared first on SiliconANGLE.
WeLM-Image: A Unified Image Generation Model towards Visual Intelligence
arXiv:2611.07392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present \textbf{WeLM-Image}, a unified image foundation model that integrates multimodal understanding into text-to-image generation, instruction-guided editing, and multi-reference synthesis. Designed for single-GPU deployment in WeChat's large-scale consumer applications, the model processes text, reference images, and target latents as one interleaved sequence. A Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone combines shared attention with independent understanding and generation parameters to limit optimization interference. Equipping each path with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules provides sparse capacity, with 31.7B stored parameters and approximately 5.4B generation parameters activated per target latent token. A generation-oriented data engine combines a knowledge-grounded visual vocabulary with large-scale visual clustering to balance semantic coverage and editing tasks, while training-time evaluation guides iterative data refinement. Bilingual annotations and verified editing supervision support progressive training up to native 1.5K resolution. We optimize generation and editing separately with rubric- and checklist-based rewards, then consolidate the specialized policies through noise-aware on-policy distillation. In the reported overall comparisons, the 1536-resolution model ranks first among the evaluated open-source models on PRISM-Bench, Qwen-Image-Bench, and UnicBench. MeanFlow-based few-step distillation yields WeLM-Image-Turbo, which generates a $1024\times1024$ image in 4.98\,s on a single NVIDIA H20 GPU using eight guidance-free steps.
When Every Choice Is Correct: A Causal Study of Numerical Preference in Language Models
arXiv:2611.06025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model chooses a number between 1 and 30, every integer in the range is valid, yet the model can favor particular answers. We use numerical choice to study how preference is processed across layers and tokens. Perturbation probing and gradient attribution nominate neurons for activation interventions. In a selected Qwen3-4B case, a pre-answer edit changes 17 to 15 while both runs first emit 1. After the edit ends, selective cache and attention-output replacements trace part of its continuing influence on the second digit. Replacing one attention head's output or the other heads' outputs jointly produces similar immediate readout contributions; both interventions restore 17 but have different final log-odds effects on 7 versus 5. Holding later multilayer perceptron (MLP) outputs at their values from the edited run without either replacement reduces this effect gap from 0.119 to 0.0025 nat. Later computation therefore changes how similar local contributions affect the continuation. Retrospective estimates across eighteen contexts capture much of the probability movement but miss the selected answer switch. Prompt tests also separate influence from answer changes: one held-out prompt retains influence without switching, and only one of twelve fresh wordings qualifies for the reader/MLP test; there, joint MLP clamping again reduces the gap between the two reader effects while the answer remains 17. These results use numerical choice as a controlled case for studying persistent state and conditional downstream processing; they do not establish the origin or a complete circuit of natural numerical preference.
Where Should a KV-Cache Repair Budget Go? Distractor Structure and Contextual Compatibility in Non-Prefix Reuse
arXiv:2611.06397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-prefix KV-cache reuse encodes retrieved chunks independently and concatenates their caches. To find where a small repair budget should be spent, we vary the chunks around the answer-bearing one (the target) across three 7B-8B models and four datasets of dialogue memory, open-domain QA and API documentation. Reuse loses 19-100% of the context-dependent questions that full prefill answers, and it loses more when the other chunks are of the same kind as the target. Because the recoverable damage is spread over these other chunks, restoring a few of them recovers little, and the budget is better spent on the target. This works through contextual compatibility: recomputing the target against the reused cache beats inserting its full-prefill KV in all seven settings tested, although the recomputed KV stays far from the full-prefill KV. Question attention over reused caches, however, selects the target in at most 18.8% of development questions. A retriever finds it more often, and recomputing its top chunk after moving it next to the question significantly beats InfoFlow-style reordering at the same 5% budget in six of nine open-domain QA and API-documentation settings. On dialogue memory, though, recomputing chunks never significantly beats the token-level selector chosen for each setting.
A Closer Look at Phonon TTS. Launching High-Quality On-Device Speech That Tops the Benchmarks.
Phonon, a small text-to-speech model that runs entirely on the user's device without requiring internet access, has been released with support for English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Built on the Pocket TTS lineage using flow matching, Phonon achieves high-quality audio in compact sizes (65 MB and 75 MB), with the 31m version licensed under Apache 2.0 for commercial use. It excels in intelligibility and speed, ranking first in German and Spanish on Hugging Face's Open TTS Leaderboard and leading in CPU streaming benchmarks. The model supports voice cloning, custom voices via Gradium Studio, and integrates with Hugging Face Transformers. It is available in multiple formats and backends, including WebAssembly, GPU, and NPU, enabling deployment across phones, laptops, single-board computers, and browsers. Over 200,000 downloads were recorded in its first two weeks, with active developer adoption through tools like ExecuTorch, Micdrop, and Spaces. Future developments include support for additional languages, smaller models, and custom vocabulary fine-tuning.
A Feasibility Condition for Confidence-Gated Tiered LLM Inference
arXiv:2611.05394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tiered inference distributes large language model computation across a hierarchy of devices, from on-device and edge hardware to the datacenter, and is increasingly offered as the route to cheaper, lower-latency, and more private serving. Most such systems orchestrate frozen model checkpoints, and most decide what to resolve locally and what to escalate using a confidence signal produced by a forward-deployed model. We give a closed-form condition for when no threshold on that signal makes a tiered cascade worthwhile relative to sending every query to the backstop. Modeling the routing decision as a binary test and separating local from escalation cost through an architecture cost ratio $\kappa$, we derive a feasibility condition bracketed by a signal-free floor, below which a cascade is feasible at any signal quality, and a perfect-signal ceiling, above which none is. Read along the $\kappa$ axis the condition inverts: where local compute is billed, cost binds, matching a recent empirical finding; where it is sunk, on decentralized hardware, feasibility becomes unconditional and signal quality instead sets what the cascade achieves. We turn the condition into three design requirements that existing trained-in primitives satisfy only in isolation, and we propose, as future work, a co-designed architecture and a protocol to test it. The condition and the inversion hold independently of that architecture; they are the paper's contribution.
Agile Deliberation: How AI helps humans define the gray areas
Data Mining & Modeling
Augmentation with Reinforcement Transformation for Low-textured Scientific Sketch Image Retrieval
arXiv:2611.05408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-textured sketch images are widely used in scientific applications, including wildlife conservation, archaeological illustration, and forensic composites. Learning from and retrieving such images is challenging because they lack detailed surface textures and visual variations commonly exploited by modern deep learning models. This paper proposes Augmentation with Reinforcement Transformation (ART) to fine-tune pretrained models to learn effective representations for accurate sketch image retrieval. Our key observation is that sketches are particularly sensitive to image transformations, such as rotation, flipping, zooming, and stretching. While some transformations preserve their structural integrity, others may introduce distortions that hinder representation learning. Instead of randomly choosing transformations to construct fine-tuning views, ART formulates augmentation selection as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where transformations are treated as arms and their effectiveness is continuously evaluated through rewards. This enables ART to adaptively construct reward-guided view banks before self-supervised fine-tuning; the subsequent representation loss does not feed back to ART. On Florida manatee sketches provided by Mote Marine Laboratory, ART achieves 71.40% average Top-1 accuracy for transformed-scar retrieval, compared with 68.83% for random augmentation selection, and 55.84% for location-aware sketch retrieval, compared with 18.18% for frozen CLIP.
b12128
The fix addresses intermittent CI failures in TOPK_MOE tests caused by near ties in logits, particularly with uniform random inputs and narrow-range gating functions like sqrt_softplus. The solution involves redrawing logits until group selection and top-k decisions have a relative margin of 1e-4 in double precision, and constructing logits by inverting the gating function using a grid-based approach to ensure consistent expert selection across backends.
Certinia brings AI into professional services workflows
Certinia Inc. is bringing AI into the software firms use to sell projects, assign staff, deliver work and bill clients. AI’s ability to instantaneously draw from a deep well of information and provide guidance in practically any field of expertise has changed the paradigm for professional services. For Certinia Inc., whose business facilitates 7.1 billion […] The post Certinia brings AI into professional services workflows appeared first on SiliconANGLE.
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.
Cognitive Bias Signatures in Search-Equipped LLM Agents: A Stage-Resolved Analysis
arXiv:2611.05720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search can help LLM agents correct mistakes, but their starting conditions may shape which evidence they find and use. Drawing on cognitive-bias paradigms, we develop a controlled search harness to examine result order, records of prior work, and initial hypotheses while holding each question and document collection fixed. Matched controls distinguish order effects from differences in document composition and the effects of failed work from context length. Across 10 models and 1,000 synthetic search worlds, we track queries, retrieved documents, document openings, and final answers. Our comparisons suggest that final answers are more sensitive to initial evidence order during active search than when all evidence is supplied in full. Dead-end histories can reduce strategy switching relative to matched neutral histories, indicating an effect beyond context length. Under wrong hypotheses, stage measurements distinguish reduced retrieval or opening from errors that persist after counter-evidence is opened. Exploratory interventions show that opening counter-evidence more often can coincide with lower accuracy, while accuracy can improve with little change in opening.
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...
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Customers are pulling data back into the Oracle database as agents demand real-time access
A shared semantic layer is fast becoming the dividing line between lakehouses built for reporting and those built for artificial intelligence. As AI agents join human analysts in querying corporate data, enterprises need platforms that make sense of information scattered across clouds, formats and rival systems. Oracle Corp. has spent the past year rebuilding its […] The post Customers are pulling data back into the Oracle database as agents demand real-time access appeared first on SiliconANGLE.