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"

TabFM-Auto: Self-Evolving Pipelines for Tabular Foundation Models

arXiv:2609.37989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models achieve strong zero-shot accuracy on structured data by pretraining on synthetic tables, but they ignore the column names, task descriptions, and…

Same Bytes, Different Authority: Reserved-Token Representations in Chat-Template Prompt Injection

arXiv:2609.35932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt injection against LLM agents becomes much stronger when the injected instruction is wrapped in the model's own chat template. A forged template marker such as…

Multi-Depth Temporal Fusion for Feedforward, Locally Trained Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2609.37047v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new spiking neural network (SNN) design to process static images and event streams using time-to-first-spike (TTFS) latencies. Our key research question is…

ScaGNN: a Graph Neural Network for Multiple Scattering Simulations

arXiv:2609.37509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The boundary element method (BEM) provides an efficient numerical framework for solving multiple scattering problems in unbounded homogeneous domains. By restricting the…

GNA: Granular Neighbor Assembly for Retrieval-Augmented Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2609.36281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep forecasters predict from a fixed-length lookback window, and lengthening it gives diminishing returns at a growing cost. Retrieval augmentation instead shows the…

A foundation model for energy and radiation systems built on heterogeneous scientific interfaces

arXiv:2609.38067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific foundation models are commonly evaluated after heterogeneous physical problems have already been translated into a compatible gridded, tokenized or symbolic…

Multi-Agent Flow Matching with Decoupled Generative Guidance

arXiv:2609.38133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative modeling is widely used for producing diverse objects from complex, multimodal distributions. However, its expressivity does not, in general, come with formal…

Variational Augmented Invertible Koopman Autoencoder for probabilistic time series forecasting

arXiv:2609.37435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Koopman autoencoder models have been shown to successfully build a latent embedding with linear dynamics for arbitrary dynamical systems, enabling strong…

Trajectory Soup: Pushing the Compute-Scaling Frontier of LLM Mid-training via Diverse Trajectories

arXiv:2609.37169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mid-training equips pretrained large language models with specialized and reasoning capabilities, but the returns of this stage are bounded since additional serial compute…

CALIBUDGET: Calibration-Guided Source Allocation for Fixed-Budget Mixed-Reasoning Adaptation

arXiv:2609.36721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fixed-budget adaptation from heterogeneous data sources requires deciding not only how much data to use, but how much exposure each source receives. Size-proportional…

Physics-Guided Flow-Map Matching for Precipitation Nowcasting

arXiv:2609.37487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Precipitation nowcasting, generating future radar fields from past observations, is critical for flood warning and disaster response. It is also a demanding benchmark…

Identifiability Guarantees for Drivers and Dynamics of Delayed Physical Systems

arXiv:2609.37944v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A wide range of methods have been proposed, including physics-informed neural networks, which are powerful but do not guarantee identifiability of the dynamics, symbolic…