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A survey detection channel overrides the pixels in an astronomical foundation model, and biases tomographic mean redshifts

arXiv:2608.23626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models for astronomy are trained on survey pixels together with the catalogue products derived from those pixels. Those catalogues are incomplete at a measurable rate, and a model trained on both inherits that incompleteness as a systematic. We audit AION-1, a 39-modality transformer trained on more than 200 million…

LLM Agents Perform Controlled Experiments Using Simulation Models

arXiv:2608.23622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool use, but many scientific and engineering tasks require more than plausible text and code generation. They require understanding how a system responds to intervention, which in practice depends on controlled experimentation. In this work, we propose a…

ESQ-Bench: A Multi-Tier Enterprise Oracle Benchmark for Evaluating NL2SQL Dialect Generalization and Silent Semantic Divergence

arXiv:2608.23569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State-of-the-art Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) models report execution accuracy exceeding 89 percent on established benchmarks such as Spider and BIRD. However, these benchmarks rely on simplified academic schemas and open-source SQL dialects that do not reflect the complexity of enterprise database environments. We introduce ESQ-Bench, an Oracle-first NL2SQL benchmark…

RENDER: Controlling Reader-Facing Evidence in LLM Memory Evaluation

arXiv:2608.23568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory and RAG evaluations often treat the answering model's input as an implementation detail, even though systems may render the same history as a memory entry, summary, typed record, or raw excerpt. We introduce RENDER, a benchmark control that fixes the conversation while varying the reader-facing artifact. RENDER combines a…

Orchestration is the new challenge for CX in the age of AI agents

Presented by Tata Communications Enterprises are deploying AI agents, voice AI, and automation across messaging, voice, and digital channels faster than the architecture meant to support it. Most of that deployment has involved attaching conversational AI to legacy systems never built for it, says Gaurav Anand, global head of the Customer Interaction Suite at Tata…

AI models flub these intelligence tests. Can you fare any better?

Puzzles and games have been central to AI development since the very beginning. Just as we humans like to test our smarts with crosswords or logic puzzles, developers can test how far models have advanced with a gaming gauntlet. The term “machine learning” was popularized in a 1959 article by the IBM computer scientist Arthur…

Raised on AI

When my oldest child was born, I immediately set up Gmail and Twitter accounts in her name. I broadly announced her birth online and proceeded to plaster her photo across all sorts of platforms. In short, I began creating her digital footprint long before she could stand on her own two feet.  Fast-forward a couple…

The Download: the Kids issue arrives, and Bill Gates reveals his AI fears

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. Introducing: the Kids issue If the desire to limit kids’ use of technology was once a subcurrent, it has become a raging flood. Countries around the world are banning children from…

The inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts’…

Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?

It’s a glorious day in Kirkland, Washington, an affluent Seattle suburb on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in…