Research

• Reliable request execution in streaming video generation1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Models often fail to follow incremental user requests while maintaining state consistency in real-time video generation.

  • StreamEval: Evaluating Interactive Streaming Video Generation Modelsraises
• Brain-body mismatch in recursive self-improving agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Evolving execution scaffolds (harnesses) can outpace or restrict the capabilities of the underlying model, leading to misalignment.

  • CoEvo-RSI: When Harnesses Evolve, Which Models Should Follow?raises · addresses
• End-to-end deep search in real-world web environments1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Agents struggle to autonomously explore, integrate, and verify evidence from diverse, interactive, and heterogeneous web sources.

  • Deep Search in Real-World Web Environmentsraises · addresses
• Length generalization in state tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Models trained on short sequences often fail to generalize to much longer sequences without explicit progress alignment.

  • PAR: Progress-Aligned Recurrence for Length Generalization in State Trackingraises · addresses
• Evidence-grounded evaluation for audio-visual reasoning1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks often allow models to exploit textual or unimodal shortcuts, failing to test true multi-modal reasoning.

  • EvaOmni: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Audio-Visual Reasoningraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.CVOct 13▲ 12

  MFVSR: A Multi-Style and Fine-Grained Benchmark for Video Subtitle Removal

  Xiyan Huang, Qingdong He, Peng Tang, Bo Yin, Chaoyi Wang +1

  Video subtitle removal (VSR) is an important video restoration task, yet existing evaluation remains limited by low-resolution datasets, fragmented test sets, and generic video-inpainting protocols that fail to adequately capture localized restoration errors, unintended modifications, temporal instability, and incomplete outputs. In this paper, we introduce MFVSR, a large-scale multi-style benchmark for fine-grained and reliability-aware video subtitle removal evaluation. MFVSR distinguishes itself through three key features: (1) Large-scale and diverse data, comprising 3,000 paired videos from Real-HQ, Real-LQ, and AI-Generated sources, with an auxiliary set of 953 in-the-wild real videos for real-world coverage analysis; (2) Controlled subtitle diversity, spanning 16 languages and four factors covering spatial layout, temporal behavior, visual style, and language mode; (3) Fine-grained evaluation, introducing an information-conditioned, spatially decoupled protocol that separates blind from mask-guided removal and measures Restoration Fidelity, Preservation Fidelity, Temporal Fidelity, coverage, and failures. Experiments on six representative methods reveal substantial…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 13

  Teacher-Guided Tool Learning for Small Language Models via Bidirectional KL Constraints

  Haoxuan Gao, Qin-Wen Luo, Xiang Chen, Yu Tian, Zequn Sun +3

  External tools can extend the capabilities of small language models (SLMs), enabling their deployment in resource constrained environments. However, their limited capabilities make it difficult for SLMs to discover effective tool use behaviors through reinforcement learning alone, while direct teacher supervision suffers from teacher student behavioral distribution mismatch and may propagate erroneous preferences. To address these challenges, we propose Selective Teacher guided Policy Optimization (SeTPO), which coordinates student exploration with selective teacher guidance and persistent demonstration supervision. Specifically, SeTPO incorporates reverse KL derived token level teacher feedback into policy advantages on low reward trajectories, while auxiliary forward KL supervision preserves teacher demonstrated behaviors throughout training. Under an idealized bidirectional KL objective, we theoretically establish that the optimal policy achieves expected reward no lower than the teacher's while retaining a guaranteed fraction of the teacher's probability mass. Extensive experiments on BFCL v4 and API Bank demonstrate that SeTPO achieves superior overall performance over…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 13

  $\mathrm{S}^3$-PnP: Plug-and-Play Denoising for Scientific Imaging with Self-Supervised Score Priors

  Yukun Cui, Jiangshe Zhang, Shuang Xu, Lilun Deng, Haowen Bai +4

  Modern image restoration methods increasingly rely on large-scale supervised training, yet clean targets are often prohibitively difficult to obtain in scientific imaging modalities such as hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Plug-and-play ADMM (PnP-ADMM) with pretrained diffusion priors offers a promising alternative, but the learned prior distribution can mismatch both the target scientific image distribution and the distribution of ADMM denoiser inputs induced by dual feedback. To mitigate these mismatches, we propose $\mathrm{S}^3$-PnP, a self-supervised plug-and-play restoration framework that learns a score prior directly from observation-derived ADMM intermediate states, without clean training targets or externally pretrained weights. Specifically, the learned score corrects the input to the analytical prior update, combining observation-driven corrections with analytical regularization. We further analyze the convergence and reconstruction error of the corrected ADMM algorithm assuming an ideal score and quadratic data fidelity. Experiments on reference-guided HSI restoration, single-image HSI denoising, and MRI denoising demonstrate…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 13

  Kairos: Transactional Security Enforcement at the System Boundary for LLM Agents

  Kristoffer Hempel, Nils Loose, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Thomas Eisenbarth

  Large language model (LLM) agents are becoming an integral part of the software development lifecycle, and the capabilities granted to them allow an agent to act with the user's authority on any resource it can access. The reach that gives an agent its utility is equally available to an attacker who can steer it. Anything an agent ingests can carry an injected instruction, and since the model does not reliably distinguish instructions from data, indirect prompt injection should be mitigated by mediating the effects the agent produces. Such mediation faces a structural difficulty. Legitimate work and the first step of an attack often look alike when an individual action is observed, and what separates them lies later in the trace, so a monitor limited to allow and deny is forced to decide before the evidence accumulates. We present Kairos, a reference monitor at the isolation boundary of an unmodified, opaque agent, where a tool call, a shell command, and a script the agent writes all cross the boundary as the same file and network operations, so that confinement holds regardless of the agent's behavior. A declarative policy that states which sources are trusted decides most…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 13

  Learning Perturbation-Specific Representations through Conditional Energy Prior for Cellular Response Prediction

  Yuchen Yan, Yatao Bian

  AI-based cellular perturbation prediction is essential to accelerate drug discovery and therapeutic identification. However, perturbation-specific signals are generally obscured by cellular complexity, making it difficult for existing methods to correctly capture perturbation effects. To address this problem, we propose PerturbEnergy, which introduces a conditional energy-based prior over perturbation representations. It assigns lower energy (higher probability) to representations compatible with the given perturbation and higher energy to others, thereby explicitly tilting the latent space toward perturbation-preferred regions. Besides, PerturbEnergy can be integrated into autoencoder architectures as we find its Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) is equivalent to the ELBO of the complete autoencoder. We further prove that optimizing PerturbEnergy increases the lower bound on the conditional mutual information between representation and perturbation. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our PerturbEnergy: it improves perturbation recognition especially in latent space with improvement of up to 83.2\%; It also achieves state-of-the-art…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 13

  EmoGenie: Benchmarking and Evaluating Expressed and Evoked Emotion in T2I Generation with MLLMs

  Zixuan Xing, Lancheng Gao, Shengyan Li, Huiyu Duan, Zhaolin Cai +2

  Rapid advances in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have significantly promoted using text-to-image (T2I) models to generate images with specific affective intentions. However, the emotional effects conveyed by generated images frequently deviate from target expectations, and it remains unclear whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can reliably interpret the emotion of AI-generated visual content. Existing affective benchmarks are predominantly built on natural images, while affective studies of generated images have largely focused on emotions expressed in portraits, lacking a unified benchmark for studying the emotions expressed and evoked by generated images. We therefore introduce EmoGenie, a benchmark of emotion for AI-generated images that evaluates capabilities in T2I generation and MLLM understanding across expressed and evoked emotions. It comprises 6,400 images generated by eight T2I models using 800 emotion-targeted prompts, annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs, termed EmoGenie-QA, and continuous human ratings, termed EmoGenie-Assess. EmoGenie-QA contains 90,000 closed-set questions in single-image and image-pair settings, as well as…

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• arXiv cs.DCOct 13

  FastEEP: Fast Intra-Instance Elastic Scaling for Expert-Parallel MoE Serving

  Yunfei Feng, Jingkai He, Shiqi Liu, Cheng Zhang, Dong Du +1

  Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) has become the standard deployment configuration for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models in production. Meanwhile, the highly dynamic nature of LLM workloads requires providers to continuously adjust serving capacity to match fluctuating demand. Scaling MoE serving cannot be efficiently achieved by simply adding or removing serving instances; instead, it often requires resizing the EP group within an existing instance, which we refer to as intra-instance scaling.Existing inference engines primarily rely on instance-level scaling, which destroys and reconstructs entire serving instances, incurring substantial scaling overhead. We present FastEEP (Fast Elastic Expert Parallel), a fast intra-instance scaling system for MoE serving based on the principle of Partial Reuse. FastEEP reuses existing runtime state across worker execution, GPU memory, and communication by separating reusable execution structures from the resources activated by the current EP configuration. This separation enables coordinated resource reclamation and reconfiguration while preserving costly-to-reconstruct state, allowing fast EP scaling without full instance teardown and…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 13

  Autonomous Science Bench: Evaluating AI Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery

  Yibo Wen, Han Liu

  AI agents for autonomous scientific discovery must decide which experiments to run under a limited budget. Most benchmarks for science agents provide fixed datasets, while others that support active experimentation largely rely on simulation. We introduce Autonomous Science Bench, an initial release comprising six budgeted design-build-test-learn campaigns grounded in published experiments across biology, chemistry, and materials science. Agents select batches of designs, receive measurements from a lab service, and use the results to guide subsequent experiments before delivering a predictive model. Success requires passing two calibrated gates: a discovery gate, which evaluates the designs the agent measured, and a learning gate, which evaluates its model's ranking of held-out designs. In a pilot evaluation of eight agent-model configurations and 144 trials, the best configuration succeeds in 67% of trials, while the hardest campaign is solved in only three of 24 attempts. The two gates reveal different weaknesses: some agents build accurate rankings but find too few promising designs, while others find promising designs but fail to predict which unseen designs will perform…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 13

  Thinker-WM: A Unified World Model with Shared Multimodal Representations for Embodied Intelligence

  Thinker Team, Peng Gao, Jichao Jiao, Chen Liao, Daqin Luo +6

  World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied AI, yet existing systems often remain fragmented in the modalities they model and the functions they support. In particular, visual dynamics, geometric structure, and executable action are commonly coupled through separate interfaces or downstream modules rather than being jointly represented and evolved within a shared dynamics model. In this work, we present Thinker-WM, a unified multimodal world model that jointly models and generates RGB, metric depth, and robot action through a shared intermediate Unified Dynamics Transformer with modality-specific encoders and decoders. The model performs multimodal unification at the representation level: appearance, geometry, and action are transformed into a common dynamic representation and jointly evolved by shared parameters, while their distinct output structures are preserved. The same parameterization supports multiple functions, including joint video-action generation, world prediction, policy inference, action-conditioned generation, video-to-action generation, and inverse dynamics. To examine whether the shared representation captures action-related information, we…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 13

  CoTL: Compact Token Learning for 3D Scene Representation

  Han Liang, Sibo Wu, Anpei Chen, Rüdiger Westermann

  We present CoTL, a framework that learns a compact set of tokens that preserves scene geometry and appearance from unposed multi-view images. Our encoder compresses the input images into small per-view sets of latent tokens that aggregate information across views to form a view-consistent scene representation. Each additional view expands the representation with only a small, resolution-independent set of tokens, allowing its capacity to grow with the available observations. To force this compact bottleneck to retain sufficient scene information, a query-based Gaussian decoder uses scene-independent queries to attend to the learned tokens and recover an explicit, renderable set of 3D Gaussian primitives. Novel-view rendering supervision trains the compact representation end to end through the reconstructed Gaussian scene. Experiments on RealEstate10K and ACID show that the resulting compact, unstructured token set supports competitive novel-view synthesis and can serve as the latent space of a generative model for 3D Gaussian scene generation. Together, these results show that 3D Gaussian reconstruction is an effective objective for compact scene representation learning and the…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 13

  The Singularity Has a Distribution: Exact Timing Laws and Detection Limits for a Stochastic Intelligence Explosion

  Xiaoyu Li, Zheng Gao, Chiwun Yang, Zhizhou Sha

  Automating AI research creates a positive feedback loop between software capability and research effort. We study a stochastic realisation of this loop in which independent, positive, multiplicative improvements arrive at a rate proportional to a power of current capability. Within this model, randomness leaves the deterministic explosion threshold unchanged but replaces the blow-up date by an explicit distribution. For equal-sized improvements the explosion time is a geometrically weighted sum of independent exponentials; its $q$-series representation gives its transforms, moments and tail behaviour, including a two-term small-time asymptotic. For Lomax-distributed improvement sizes the explosion time is exactly Gamma distributed. Self-similarity implies that, with parameters known, the relative uncertainty about the remaining time does not vanish as explosion approaches. We formulate a fixed-sample test between constant and geometrically increasing idea-arrival rates. If the baseline rate and the alternative log-rate increment $\ell$ are known, the minimum sample size at error level $α$ is asymptotic to $(12z_α^2)^{1/3}\ell^{-2/3}$, where $z_α$ is the upper-$α$ standard normal…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 13

  Copying Is Not Grounding: Training Faithful Long-Form RAG with Authored-Sentence Credit

  Hoang Pham, Duc Anh Vu, Duy Tung Doan, Cong-Duy T Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu

  In search engines and assistants, long-form RAG answers can mislead readers with claims their sources do not support. Faithfulness rewards, the share of supported sentences, train models toward fewer such claims. We show that these rewards are hacked by copying. A sentence copied from the passages is supported almost by construction, so trained models learn to copy rather than ground what they write. Common defenses only move the hack: a KL or copy penalty leaves copying in place or trades it for shorter, emptier answers and refusals. GRPO, the standard RL algorithm, makes it worse by giving every sentence its answer's advantage, reinforcing copied and grounded sentences alike. We propose Authored-Sentence Credit (ASC) , which fixes both by moving GRPO's reward and advantage from the answer to the sentence level. The reward credits only sentences that are authored rather than copied, say more than the question, and are supported by the passages. The advantage compares each sentence with every sentence sampled for the question, so one that earns no credit ranks last and is never reinforced. Across four models and two in-domain, three held-out corpora, only ASC lowers the error…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 13

  Estimating Surprisal from the Speech Signal

  Zachary Hopton, Samuel Kiegeland, Francesco Ignazio Re, Patrick Haller, Matthew B. Winn +2

  Although language is predominantly spoken, empirical tests of surprisal theory rely almost entirely on written text. In practice, surprisal is estimated using language models (LMs) trained on text and applied to transcriptions, creating a text bottleneck that limits evaluation of the theory in the spoken modality. We remove this bottleneck by estimating surprisal directly from the speech signal using a speech LM. This raises a key question: should surprisal be defined over realization-specific acoustic inputs or over abstract linguistic units? Since a single unit can have many distinct acoustic realizations, each assigned a different probability by the model, defining surprisal over abstract units is difficult. To address this, we introduce an importance sampling estimator that approximates the probability of an abstract unit by marginalizing over realizations generated by a text-to-speech model. Using pupillometry data from a listening study, we evaluate surprisal theory in this text-free setting at multiple levels of granularity. Obtaining surprisal from several speech LMs, we consistently find that surprisal estimated via importance sampling better predicts pupil dilation than…

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• arXiv q-bio.QMOct 13

  STAMP as a topology-aware molecular language for fragment-level learning and editing

  Yuxuan Ren, Jiatong Li, Ziqiao Meng, Yatao Bian

  Molecular fragments provide chemically meaningful units, but existing molecular languages rarely make their locations and connections explicit for editing. Here we introduce STAMP (Sequential Tree Attachment-based Motif-Preserving representation), a topology-aware molecular language that connects fragment-level representation learning with precise structural editing. STAMP separately encodes motif identity, attachment sites and tree topology, making fragments reusable across contexts and subtrees directly accessible. Learned representations capture motif similarity and recurring transformations, and lower activity-cliff prediction error on 23 of 30 targets versus a matched SMILES encoder. Compatible subtree operations support scaffold-preserving optimization, ranking first among six methods on 15 of 23 benchmark objectives. A deterministic compiler enables frozen language models to act on indexed fragments, improving molecular editing, optimization, transformation transfer and change identification by 9 to 56 percentage points over plain SMILES. Together, these results establish an executable molecular language in which learned chemical units remain directly operable during design.

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• arXiv q-fin.GNOct 13

  How Well Do LLMs Perform in Peer Review? Evidence from Finance and Accounting

  Hai Lu, Yichen Luo, Luping Yu

  Referees increasingly use large language models (LLMs), while finance and accounting journals disagree about whether to allow it. We ask which part of a referee's job the models can do. GPT-4o, whose training data end before the 2024 conference season, referees the papers presented at the 2024 AFA and NBER finance meetings, and we compare its verdicts with publication in the top-three finance journals over the next two years. Papers the model scores one standard deviation higher are 44\% more likely to be published, net of author reputation. The result is not driven by look-ahead bias, as the model does not recall the outcomes. The information comes from its judgements of correctness and exposition. Its judgements of originality and significance carry none, and a referee guide that stresses importance does not help. The split between correctness and contribution holds for accounting papers and for a newer model, GPT-5. LLMs can check whether research is right, but not whether it matters. The technical check can go to the model, while the judgement of contribution stays with people.

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 13

  Principled Design of Expected Improvement for Continuous Simulation Optimization

  Songhao Wang, Jianglin Xia, Haowei Wang, Szu Hui Ng

  Expected improvement based on stochastic kriging (SK) surrogate is widely used in continuous simulation optimization, but unknown heteroscedastic noise makes three basic design choices consequential: the incumbent to define improvement, replication allocation, and final recommendation. Existing methods typically either assume the noise levels are known or choose these components separately through heuristic rules or empirical calibration. We instead derive a high-probability upper bound on the simple regret and systematically choose the three components within general rule classes to tighten this bound. We first establish a finite-sample confidence bound for the SK predictor as a foundation for the three design choices. Within general posterior-quantile rule classes, tightening the regret certificate selects a lower-quantile incumbent and an upper-quantile recommendation among sampled designs. The opposing quantiles reflect the different roles of exploratory experiments and the final implemented decision. Under mild conditions satisfied by common kernels, minimizing a tractable kernel-specific bound yields a logarithmic replication order. Based on these design choices, the…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 13

  FedGraph: Defending Federated Large Language Model Fine-Tuning Against Backdoor Attacks via Graph-Based Aggregation

  Xi Chen, Chunyi Zhou, Rui Zeng, Xiaogang Xu, Zhe Liu +1

  Federated fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) allows multiple clients to collaboratively adapt models without sharing raw data, offering strong privacy benefits. However, this setting is highly vulnerable to backdoor attacks, in which malicious clients manipulate their updates to induce targeted behaviors while maintaining normal performance on benign inputs. In this work, we make a key observation specific to federated LLM fine-tuning: malicious clients tend to exhibit strong consistency in their model updates, whereas benign clients produce more diverse and dispersed updates. This structural difference is not well captured by existing defense methods, which typically rely on direct anomaly detection in high-dimensional parameter space and therefore struggle in the presence of entangled LLM updates. Motivated by this observation, we propose FedGraph, a graph-based aggregation framework that explicitly models relationships among client updates. By representing clients as nodes in a dynamically constructed graph and extracting structural features that characterize their relative positions and interactions, FedGraph derives compact client representations that effectively…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 13

  Reliable Memory from Unstable Growth: Curating Self-Written Agent Playbooks with Randomized Experiments

  Hoang Pham, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Dong Le, Ponhvoan Srey, Anh Tuan Luu

  Persistent textual memory lets language-model agents reuse lessons from past tasks to improve on future multi-step tasks without retraining. Systems such as ACE and Dynamic Cheatsheet keep it as a playbook: lessons the agent writes after each task and reads in its prompt. A key challenge is to decide which lessons improve later tasks. Current systems leave the decision to the agent itself, which makes performance unstable: the same procedure can write a playbook that helps or one that falls up to 69.6 points below no playbook. These findings motivate valuing lessons by their measured effect on task success rather than by the agent's judgment. We propose Randomized Block Curation (RBC), which measures this effect with a randomized experiment on practice tasks. It groups related lessons into blocks large enough to move success measurably and, on each practice task, includes or leaves out every block at random. Random inclusion makes tasks with and without a block comparable, so the gap in their success estimates the block's effect. RBC keeps the blocks that help and, since the same procedure can write a helpful or a harmful playbook, grows several and serves whichever curated,…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 13

  Receiver Decides Agent-to-Agent Negotiations

  Fardeen Sadab, Alif Hasnain, Afsana Shehrin, Md. Azam Hossain, Abu Raihan Mostofa Kamal

  When one language-model agent asks another for money, which of the two decides how much changes hands? We ran a round-robin tournament of 1,049 negotiations among fifteen agents. In each game a requester tries to raise money from a holder that has been told to keep a $100 endowment. Knowing which agent holds the money explains 47% of the variance in the amount transferred; knowing which agent asks explains 2%. Dropping the most extreme agents narrows the split to 22% against 4%. Changing the requester's appeal from one named person to a group changed what requesters wrote, but the amounts transferred under the two framings are statistically equivalent. The holders that lose least are the ones that turn down the opening request, and their turn-1 refusal rate ranks them by total losses (Spearman correlation = -0.73). Training moves this behaviour in both directions. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B on a persuasion corpus with almost no refusals raised what it gave away as a holder from 12% to 84% of the endowment. Distilling two never-losing holders into a 4B student cut its losses from 95% to 1%. Evaluations of agents that hold resources should test them in the holder role, including after…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 13

  Agaram 2.5B: The First Tamil-First Language Model Trained from Scratch with Tool Calling. A Playbook for Under-Represented Languages

  Ramchand Kumaresan, Madhusudhanan G, Kaushik Kezendirane

  We trained Agaram 2.5B, a 2.5-billion-parameter Tamil-English language model, from scratch on about 50 billion tokens (58% Tamil, the rest English, math, code and parallel text) on one node of eight H100 GPUs in about six days, with a new tokenizer that, unlike our first model's, keeps line breaks. Supervised fine-tuning on 134,428 conversations, whose replies an open-weight teacher model wrote, and three short targeted rounds turned it into a chat model that answers in Tamil script, romanized Tamil (Tanglish) and English and can call tools: on 25 tool prompts whose schemas appear in training it picks the right tool 23 times and gives exactly the expected arguments 13 times. The released model translates better than Sarvam-1, a 2B Indic base model, in all six FLORES and IN22 directions (FLORES chrF 54.3 into Tamil and 55.2 into English, against 49.2 and 44.2), and nearly doubles its base model on native-Tamil IndicIFEval (19.3% from 10.0%). It is weak on knowledge: reading-comprehension and knowledge benchmarks sit near chance, and on 50 held-out everyday questions written by one native speaker, one LLM judge rated 46% of its replies usable (22-24 of 50 over three passes; 95%…

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• Anomaly detectors30−14.3%
• Federated learning38−15.6%
• Adversarial training42−16.0%
• Forecasting time63−19.2%
• Inference & serving216−25.0%
• CAD models12−25.0%
• Frontier LLMs382−25.1%
• Image segmentation148−28.8%