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NYT Cooking’s AI assistant saved my weeknight chicken, but almost ruined my cake

Around 7PM each weeknight, I find myself standing in front of the fridge, trying to decide on something for dinner that won't make my husband complain, "Chicken again?" Yes, I should meal plan more, but I don't, so this is where I'm at. A nightly battle in which the chicken usually wins. Recently, my best […]

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Epigraph-Form Guided Exploration

arXiv:2611.07066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discovering cooperative behavior in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is challenging due to the combinatorial complexity of joint state-action spaces, which hinders the emergence of coordinated behaviors from trial-and-error alone. Intrinsic rewards are often used to aid discovery, but naively combining them with team objectives can distort the learning signal, compromising task performance. In this paper, we propose EFXPLORER, a constrained exploration framework that maximizes exploration objectives subject to a constraint that preserves established task performance. We solve the resulting problem using an epigraph reformulation that introduces adaptive exploration budgets. This approach separates intrinsic rewards from task objectives and regulates exploration through task feasibility. To further encourage diverse and temporally extended exploration, we incorporate a successor distance-based intrinsic reward that captures long-horizon dependencies. Empirically, our method outperforms strong baselines and induces novel cooperative strategies across SMAX, VMAS, and MPE benchmark suites.

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.

How Amazon Marketplace evaluates content quality with Amazon SageMaker AI

Learn how Amazon Marketplace evaluates A+ Content quality at scale on Amazon SageMaker AI by rendering each product page as a single snapshot, scoring it with a vision-language model fused with OCR readability signals in a CatBoost classifier, and using SHAP to turn each decision into prioritized, actionable recommendations for selling partners.

PSGAgent: Enhancing MLLMs' Dynamic Visual Perception for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation via Agentic Reasoning

arXiv:2611.07408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Panoptic Scene Graph generation (PSG) requires holistic yet fine-grained reasoning over complex relations among objects. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) applied to PSG suffer from a perception bottleneck: they function as static observers limited by fixed-resolution views. As a result, models often overlook critical relations involving small or peripheral objects and struggle to differentiate ambiguous predicates in complex scenes. To address these limitations, we propose PSGAgent, an agentic framework that enhances visual perception for PSG through a think-act-observe loop. PSGAgent allows MLLMs to dynamically refine their visual perception using two tools: a Region Zoom-In Tool for local exploration of small or boundary relations and a Visual Highlight Tool for relation-focused segmentation that filters out irrelevant contextual noise. To optimize decision-making, we construct a two-stage training pipeline. First, we create a high-quality, error-aware Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (M-CoT) dataset that provides robust supervision for cold-start learning. Then, we design a novel hierarchical reward mechanism integrated with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) to enable strategic and adaptive tool usage. Extensive experiments on the PSG benchmark show that PSGAgent achieves SOTA performance, demonstrating strong capability in both holistic and fine-grained scene understanding.

Trust Responsive Runtime Authorization for Agentic AI with Empirical Characterization of Policy Behavior and Parameter Sensitivity

arXiv:2611.06996v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The policy that converts runtime estimates of an autonomous agent's condition into operational authority is rarely specified or measured. We empirically characterize the Trust Responsive Authorization Policy (TRAP), which maps an Authorization Readiness Score (ARS), a weighted combination of runtime trust, operational stability, and contextual risk, onto discrete authorization levels through an asymmetric rule: escalation requires consecutive observations above a band edge plus a margin, while a sharp drop in readiness restricts authority at once. On one matched set of 100 Monte Carlo traces, we compare TRAP with static, trust-only, risk-only, and symmetric policies. Under abrupt degradation, TRAP restricts at onset and re-escalates sooner after recovery than the symmetric policy, with the highest and, descriptively, least variable stability among the adaptive policies, although more of its post-recovery escalations occur below the selected trust threshold. Paired bootstrap intervals exclude zero for the remaining differences. In one-factor sweeps, recovery time rises with the escalation margin and run length, shifts with the score weights, and is unchanged by the restriction threshold. In an exploratory post-freeze experiment, when the same degradation is spread over 5-20 intervals, TRAP restricts only on the 4 traces that retain a single-interval drop above that threshold; averaged over all 100 traces, it holds authority above what readiness supports for 15.9-18.9 of the 20 degradation intervals, against 0.8 under abrupt degradation and about 10 for the symmetric policy. Its restriction advantage therefore depends on degradation being abrupt. All reported values are traceable to the publicly available, versioned research release.

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.

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.

Dharma Field Extractor: Any Document In, Structured Fields in JSON Out

The Dharma Field Extractor, a 2-billion-parameter model, specializes in extracting specific fields from diverse document types—such as invoices, IDs, and medical forms—into structured JSON format. It outperforms general-purpose frontier LLMs in accuracy and reduces cost by up to 147 times when self-hosted, demonstrating that domain-specialized small models can surpass large general-purpose models on well-defined tasks. The model supports both open extraction (detecting fields without a schema) and schema-directed extraction (returning exact field names and types), with training data spanning English, Brazilian Portuguese, and multilingual documents. Benchmarks show superior F1 scores and valid JSON output across real-world datasets like SROIE and FUNSD, reinforcing the thesis that specialization beats scale for enterprise document processing.

From Tokens to Trajectories: Parameter-Efficient Continuous Adaptation of Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv:2611.05451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While discrete tokenization in Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) establishes strong semantic reasoning, it introduces a strict quantization bottleneck that degrades fine-grained visual details, often resulting in structurally accurate but artifact-heavy images. We introduce FlowShift, a parameter-efficient post-training framework that bypasses this bottleneck by converting pre-trained discrete UMMs into continuous rectified-flow generators. Instead of discarding the backbone's semantic priors, FlowShift replaces discrete visual interfaces with continuous latent projections and applies LoRA to the attention layers. To efficiently boost visual quality without semantic drift, we propose Dual-Objective Velocity Vector Distillation (DOVD), which aligns the model with a high-fidelity continuous teacher and ground-truth continuous trajectories. This approach drastically improves perceptual quality while preserving prompt adherence and reasoning. When applied to leading discrete UMMs, FlowShift significantly improves COCO-30K FID and aesthetic scores, while retaining over 99.5% of multimodal understanding capabilities. Ablations confirm DOVD drives generation quality. Ultimately, FlowShift achieves high-fidelity continuous generation without sacrificing pre-trained semantic grounding.

How U Mobile built agentic telco operations with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

U Mobile, Malaysia's newest 5G network provider, built AiDaH, an agentic AI operations platform on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that moves beyond AI assistance to autonomous action across telco operations. Nine months after production launch, AiDaH handles over 150 operational scenarios across six divisions, cutting trouble tickets by up to 84.5%.

Meta acquires AI coding startup Conductor, whose app runs several coding agents at once

Meta Platforms Inc. has acquired artificial intelligence coding startup Conductor in a deal first reported today by Axios. Conductor confirmed it’s joining Meta in a post on its website. Terms were not disclosed. Conductor’s software lets a developer run several coding agents at once, each in an isolated copy of the codebase, and then review […] The post Meta acquires AI coding startup Conductor, whose app runs several coding agents at once appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Rewrite, Then Veto: Rewriter-Agnostic Edit Gating for LLM-Based Post-OCR Correction

arXiv:2611.05539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs can repair noisy OCR transcripts of historical documents, but they also change text that was already correct. We propose EditVeto, a veto gate placed after a full-context LLM rewrite. The rewrite is character-aligned to the OCR input, its differences are split into blocks, and a 0.6B-parameter gate keeps or reverts each block. An oracle analysis motivates the design: given the true error locations, per-span generation is worse than no correction, whereas vetoing a full rewrite's edits helps. Trained on rewrites by two Qwen3 models and evaluated, frozen, on the eight HIPE-OCRepair-2026 test sets, the gate improves all five rewriters tested, two of them unseen in training: weighted cMER falls by 0.0026-0.0044 and the preference score rises by 0.15-0.25 (paired bootstrap, p ~ 0.0002 each). On published competition outputs it lowers cMER for three of four teams but raises it for the winning run (0.0050 to 0.0065). In a second, disclosed test look, a retrained gate still improves LoRA-tuned rewriters (cMER -0.0011 to -0.0021), and an ensemble of their gated edits reaches a cMER of 0.0069 and a preference score of 0.928, mostly through fine-tuning and pooling rather than gating. Built only on public models and data, it is behind the winner (0.0050) and tied with the second-ranked run (0.0071), both from the only team using domain pre-training, and ahead of all other published runs. A third, secondary look shows the unchanged gate improving zero-shot Qwen3.8-27B (cMER 0.0114 to 0.0108) but only the preference score of its LoRA-tuned version.

Does the Trust Boundary Hold over Time? A Long-Horizon Benchmark for Receiver-Directed Federated Learning

arXiv:2611.03724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In receiver-directed federated learning, each site draws a trust boundary. For every source and model component it judges, on its own data, whether the transfer helps (admit), harms (reject) or cannot yet be told (abstain). We ask whether this boundary holds over hundreds of rounds. Our benchmark has a federation of thirteen semi-synthetic sites, an exact oracle for every evaluated transfer, paired seeds, an attack protocol, fourteen methods over 600 rounds and Qwen3-1.7B LoRA sites over 500. The answer depends on which boundary is measured. Across 20 paired CPU seeds, a gate judging against a fixed reference better identified transfers useful relative to the site's starting model. Yet it admitted 29% of transfers harmful to the model the site now has. A gate judging against the current model admitted 2% of harmful transfers on that target in the CPU tier, but missed many transfers useful to the starting model. Two short propositions explain these distinct failures. We also evaluate a held out audit that leaves gate verdicts intact. After training, it decides whether each final model is deployed or the site falls back to local training, and reports admissions that have gone stale. With independent audit data its guarantees hold after any training history. At 600 rounds the audit deployed 65 to 72% of models, none with negative benefit on its target, and kept 98% of the gain. No stale report had the wrong sign in our runs. With 20,000 audit observations, a variance-adaptive bound found 99% of stale transfers that cost at least 0.01 in log loss. A common-target Qwen3 comparison on 60 selected transfers shows the same tension over 100 rounds. With 38% adversarial sites, FedFomo and CS-Gate were the only evaluated methods with positive mean gain in every honest group.

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.

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.