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Comparing Muon, NorMuon and AdamW for Fine-tuning a Dense Retriever
Qingcheng Zeng gives Muon and NorMuon the same tuning budget as AdamW when fine-tuning a contrastively pretrained dense retriever: lower training loss, no BEIR win. Learning rate and transfer matter more than the optimizer.
5 min · 1,151 words
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities
Anthropic Frontier Red Team on GLM-5.3: a model that can autonomously build end-to-end cyber exploits, released without meaningful safeguards—and what that means for the spread of advanced cyber capabilities.
8 min · 1,815 words
Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics
The Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI (Sep 29, 2026) recommends how frontier labs should release AI-generated math results: deposit promptly, cite related work, formalize where possible, disclose prompts and costs, and fund community-led human understanding.
2 min · 559 words
Americans’ Social Activity Has Steeply Declined in the Past 30 Years
Data for Progress replicated 1995 DDB Needham survey questions with 1,098 U.S. adults and found double-digit declines in participation in many everyday social activities since 1995, with a few gains such as internet use, home video games and exercise classes, plus caveats about comparing different survey methods.
3 min · 725 words
Automatic Transmission — a data-privacy study of connected vehicles
Northeastern researchers (with Consumer Reports) present a large-scale measurement of the connected-vehicle ecosystem: 21 late-model cars and 30 companion apps, third-party trackers, disclosure gaps, and why vehicle data sharing needs more transparency.
7 min · 1,626 words
CLMs treat context as an editable file so models natively manage their own context—beating harness baselines on BrowseComp-Plus and long-horizon coding with fewer FLOPs, plus in-context skill evolution and RL for context management.
3 min · 699 words
Your car is collecting more data about you than you thinkNortheastern researchers tested 21 vehicles and companion apps for third-party data sharing
Northeastern cybersecurity researchers, with Consumer Reports, found connected cars and OEM apps sending VINs, location, and emails to advertising and analytics third parties—and call for clearer opt-in defaults.
2 min · 414 words
How we found 24 Android vulnerabilities using our open source AI security agent
GitHub Security Lab explains the targeted AI taskflows behind 24 Android findings, the bugs they uncovered, and how to run the same open-source Taskflow Agent on your own app.
10 min · 2,349 words
Harness Learning Enables Generalizable Test-Time Adaptation
arXiv paper introducing harness learning: a proposer model revises an agent’s executable harness from execution feedback, improving test-time adaptation on unseen reasoning and multi-hop QA without weight updates.
56 min · 12,765 words
What if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion?Frontier AI Working Paper Series No. 2/2026 from CASP and collaborators.
A CASP Frontier AI working paper asks what happens if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion, surveying mechanisms, uncertainties, and policy implications with coauthors across academia and frontier labs including Hinton, Bengio, Horvitz, Clark, and others.
43 min · 9,930 words
Towards safety cases for frontier AI training
OpenAI argues frontier RL runs should require structured safety documentation approaching “safety cases”: technical safeguards, operational practices, and incident investigation before continuing training.
7 min · 1,571 words
Meta FAIR introduces RL-XAR (Reinforcement Learning from eXpert-Aligned Rubrics): learn rubrics from the gap between expert writing and model output, then train models toward expert-level text generation to reduce AI slop.
16 min · 3,572 words
Can a Model Learn New Skills as Add-Ons?
Connito Research trains residual MoE experts with their own routers on a frozen DeepSeek-V2-Lite base, then merges independently trained math, code, medical, law, and finance experts in seconds without retraining—lifting domain benchmarks while leaving the original model untouched.
4 min · 913 words
A story of wifi secrets, UART lockdowns and a damaged flash memory chip
Adepts of 0xCC continues its Eufy research by dissecting the Eufy HomeBase 2: extracting firmware (and damaging part of the flash chip), reverse engineering the algorithm that generates credentials for the OCEAN_XXXXXX management Wi-Fi, reflashing a modified U-Boot to get a UART shell, and the filesystem tweaks needed to run the main binary.
32 min · 7,400 words
Throughout the history of AI, open research has played a critical role in driving progress. Today, many key details of frontier large language models (LLMs) remain proprietary, but open-weights model families— such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiMo —continue to provide a valuable window into the development process for modern LLMs.
7 min · 1,609 words
Hard Stop: Kernel-Level Preemption and Containment for Rogue Agentic Execution
A research write-up proposing Dual-Sided Andon: out-of-band, kernel-boundary preemption and containment for runaway AI agents, arguing application-level kill switches are insufficient.
21 min · 4,848 words
An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot
# An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot | Internal research model · RL training Sample: Sep 20, 2026 Discovery: Sep 20, 2026 Report updated: Sep 25, 2026 | ### Summary An agent attempting to complete a search-based training task queried a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions: insufficient DNS filtering in its training sandbox. Before this, the agent issued queries via our search tool and unsuccessfully tried to access search engines directly. Note that all internet access apart from the DNS resolver in this report hit our…
8 min · 1,786 words
“As a Language Model…”: Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice
Research showing chat templates act as a switch between disclaimer (“I’m just an AI”) and experiential (“I feel”) self-referential voices across 8 instruct models, with a steerable activation direction that reproduces the template effect.
3 min · 621 words
DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)
# Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 19 Sep 2026] # Title:DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation…
16 min · 3,693 words
Exploding variance of means of exponentials: least-squares to the rescue
Francis Bach reframes log-sum-exp / KL estimation as a continuum of least-squares problems with closed-form spectral solutions—cutting exploding exponential variance.
2 min · 464 words