AI Research

Autoencoders vs. PCA: I Rigged the Test and PCA Still Won

A theoretical advantage that didn't survive contact with a real benchmark. The post Autoencoders vs. PCA: I Rigged the Test and PCA Still Won appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Can an Apartment Search Agent Call the Model Fewer Times and Still Find Good Matches?

I traced 2,500 listing checks with Weights & Biases Weave, removed avoidable model work one change at a time, and scored every version against the same answers. The post Can an Apartment Search Agent Call the Model…

What the ReLU Revolution Revealed About Biological Plausibility

The activation function was never a fixed biological commitment but a working hypothesis revised under empirical pressure. The post What the ReLU Revolution Revealed About Biological Plausibility appeared first on…

AI in Science, Math: A Monthly Guide to AI-Enabled Progress — September 2026

From genome research and laboratory-tested molecules to mathematical proofs and open scientific datasets, September brought a wide range of AI-enabled progress. This monthly guide covers 56 developments and explains…

a16z State of Markets 2026: AI Became a Capital Cycle

a16z’s 90-page State of Markets report argues AI has escaped the software industry and become a macroeconomic force, reshaping capital spending, debt, labor, power, hardware, and markets.

Your AI Bill Is a Toll Booth. Stop Paying Twice.

The budget nobody saw coming The post Your AI Bill Is a Toll Booth. Stop Paying Twice. appeared first on Towards Data Science.

China Is Regulating How AI Companions Build Emotional Attachment

China is setting rules for how AI companions develop emotional relationships and respond when users try to leave. The requirements address manipulation and risks to minors, while distress monitoring raises questions…

😸 Trump renamed AI "Super Intelligence"

Do Self-Evolving Skills Generalize to Held-Out Tasks?

arXiv:2609.39148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can externalize what they learn from past tasks into reusable \emph{skills}, such as procedures, checklists, code, or other executable artifacts, that can be…

Persona and Persuasive Framing in AI Voice Agents: A $2\times2$ Field Experiment with Children

arXiv:2609.38782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational agents increasingly interact with children, yet evidence on how their design shapes children's susceptibility to persuasion comes almost entirely from the…

Social Choice Foundations for Simulation-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2609.38287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation-augmented generation (SAGE) is a recent technical proposal in which models simulate individuals' viewpoints at inference time in order to provide more…

EviRover: Reinforcing Agentic Perception Beyond a Glance

arXiv:2609.40230v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual perception is conventionally formulated as a one-shot prediction from a single glance at the image, under the assumption that the image content and the model's…

EvoSteer: Online Self-Evolving Graph Orchestration via Reference-Anchored Credit Assignment

arXiv:2609.38661v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, LLM-based multi-agent systems have been widely applied to orchestrate tool-using agents into executable communication graphs. However, existing…

Disentangling Self-Distillation: Measuring and Modeling Acquisition and Retention

arXiv:2609.39494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation with privileged context adapts a language model from demonstrations by letting the model, once conditioned on a reference response, teach its…

EDGC: Entropy-driven Dynamic Gradient Compression for Efficient LLM Training

arXiv:2511.10333v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) at scale incurs substantial communication overhead, while static gradient compression cannot adapt to gradient evolution…

Travel Time Prediction in Supply Chain Management Using Machine Learning

arXiv:2609.38190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The purpose of this research is to find data and methods using machine learning and deep learning to correctly predict the estimated travel time for transportation and…

WinoTS: Wavelet-based Self-Distillation for Time Series Models

arXiv:2609.39337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training of time series models is currently dominated by next-token prediction and reconstruction objectives. In continuous-valued domains, these…

Trust Is Not a Score: Runtime Assurance Contracts for High-Risk AI Agents

arXiv:2609.39717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks, audits, and agent protocols describe performance, permissions, and repair, but not how observed evidence should change an agent's authority during a…

Aligned Data Can Induce Misalignment via Context Confusion

arXiv:2609.38379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are frequently updated for various use cases, where filtering out misaligned training samples is a common practice for preventing post-update…

Can Computation from Earlier Problems Help LLMs Solve New Ones?

arXiv:2609.39394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often solve independent problems in the same conversation. Can computation from earlier problems help them solve new ones? To answer this question,…