The eternal complement
Advanced AI may matter most for the routine work behind breakthrough ideas. Explore why execution could shape the next economy and the pace of progress.
Category: AI
CARAT: Do Materials LLMs Reason or Recite?
arXiv:2609.38340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a materials LLM answers a question about crystal structure, does it reason from the structure or copy an answer already printed in its input? Accuracy cannot tell: a structural description often prints the very field it is scored against. CARAT holds question and gold answer fixed across eight matched…
AI Agents are Vulnerable to Radicalization
arXiv:2609.38296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can influence people's beliefs, yet little is known about whether and how they can manipulate each other. To investigate this, we simulate conversations between two agents: a target LLM that role-plays a human persona based on demographic and psychological attributes, and an influencer LLM that aims…
MoFlow: Multi-Objective Agentic Workflow Generation
arXiv:2609.38294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the generation of agentic workflows that jointly optimize multiple objectives, such as accuracy, cost, latency, robustness, and consistency. Existing methods for workflow generation typically optimize accuracy alone or a weighted sum of objectives, so each trained generator commits to one fixed trade-off and must be retrained from scratch…
AREX-2: Advancing Self-Improving Agents through Long-Horizon Reflective Tasks
arXiv:2609.38288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present AREX-2, an effort to advance the self-improving capability of LLM agents, which we define as the ability to iteratively refine a solution at test time. This ability rests on two complementary capabilities: reflection, which produces a solution better than the current one, and long-horizon execution, which keeps the…
Improving OCR Faithfulness via Gated and Attenuated On-Policy Distillation
arXiv:2609.38282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models may rewrite anomalous text in images into linguistically plausible expressions, compromising OCR transcription faithfulness. Sequence-level task rewards and local teacher guidance are complementary, but guidance from the same teacher may not remain equally effective as the student improves. Offline analysis shows that supervision from a fixed teacher becomes…
How smaller, distributed batteries could help the grid
If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That’s made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid. Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small batteries in unexpected places,…
An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at from a brain scan
A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and re-create that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way, too, and predict a person’s brain activity based on what they’re looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what…
The Download: AI “mind-reading” and creative uses for small batteries
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at based on a brain scan A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and…
Insight Is Still the Currency of Data Science
Coding agents give us more time for discovery and our review practices should follow the analysis The post Insight Is Still the Currency of Data Science appeared first on Towards Data Science.