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What Counts as a Creator Now

In the span of about a week, three of the largest platforms in the creator economy told their users, in effect, what they re actually Continue reading on The Functional Technologist »

What happens when AI stops funding itself?

One cash-flow chart sent me back to the fiber boom, merchant power and a question I now find more useful than is AI a bubble? Continue reading on DataDrivenInvestor »

arXiv Machine Learning·Aug 17, 2026

Don't Claim Benchmark-Oriented Optimization Improves General Coding Capability -- Diverse Evaluation Is Required

arXiv:2608.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training papers, model cards, and blog posts often treat scores on a small set of coding benchmarks (e.g., SWE-bench and LiveCodeBench) as evidence of broad coding capability, both for research artifacts and user-facing systems. We argue that optimization for these benchmarks leads to measuring task-specific performance, creating a meaning gap between measured scores and claims of general coding ability. We examine this gap with a Django-based case study benchmark suite we create. Evaluating foundation models and checkpoints post-trained on SWE-bench trajectories, we find that benchmark rankings frequently fail to generalize. Post-trained checkpoints show little cross-task transfer, and SWE-bench optimization yields limited or no gains on our tasks or on LiveCodeBench. Similarly, fine-tuning on individual Django modalities fails to transfer. We conclude that a small number of benchmarks is insufficient for evaluating diverse models u

Depth-Aware Sensitivity Analysis of Mixture-of-Experts Models via Magnitude-Based Expert Masking

arXiv:2608.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale large language models (LLMs) while preserving computational efficiency through sparse activation. Despite their widespread adoption, the relative importance of individual MoE layers remains insufficiently characterized, particularly for model compression. This paper presents a systematic layer-wise sensitivity analysis of the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model (40 MoE layers, 256 experts per layer, top-8 routing) using magnitude-based expert masking on the XLCoST cross-lingual code translation benchmark. We conduct a multi-phase study spanning 100, 300, and 500 prompt evaluation scales across three H100 GPU servers. Our central finding is that layer sensitivity is strongly depth-dependent: early layers (0-9) and middle layers (10-29) are highly fragile to expert masking, while late layers (30-39), and especially very-late layers (35-39), tolerate aggressive masking of low-magnitude experts. Flat all-layer m

arXiv AI·Aug 17, 2026

arXiv Machine Learning·Aug 17, 2026

L-FNO: Lorentzian Fourier Neural Operator for Stochastic Event Dynamics

arXiv:2608.13562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern operational systems face uncertainty even in routine conditions, where rare, bursty, and self-exciting events emerge from both exogenous covariates and endogenous event dynamics. Standard neural operators are typically trained as regression-style function-to-function models rather than conditional-intensity estimators, limiting their suitability for sparse event regimes. We introduce the Lorentzian Fourier Neural Operator (L-FNO), a stochastic neural operator that combines an FNO-style covariate path, Lorentzian spectral kernels for history-dependent excitation, and a likelihood-based training objective. We evaluate L-FNO on eight synthetic point-process benchmarks and three real-world datasets covering disease outbreak prediction and semiconductor fault or defect detection. L-FNO improves event likelihood, calibration diagnostics, and rare-event detection over regression- and likelihood-based neural operator baselines. These resul

Inducing Reward-Free Judging Rubrics that Reduce Over-Crediting in Agent Evaluation

arXiv:2608.13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time. Such a judge is a reward-free proxy whose value depends on whether it can be trusted, yet existing judges either hand-write the scoring rubric, as in G-Eval, or fine-tune the judge's weights, and both tend to credit fluent but unsuccessful trajectories as successes. We instead induce the text of an agent-judging rubric from a small set of ground-truth-labeled trajectories, grounding it in true outcomes. We present RubricForge, which evolves a judge rubric by reflective evolution against labeled trajectories to maximize agreement with the environment reward, freezes it, and applies it to held-out trajectories in one model call with no environment access. The optimized artifact is human-readable text, so every verdict

arXiv AI·Aug 17, 2026

arXiv Robotics·Aug 17, 2026

hint$^2$: Hierarchical World Models for Inference-Time Temporal Logic Guidance

arXiv:2608.13678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central goal of robot learning is to enable robots to execute rich instructions specified at runtime. Large-scale language-conditioned policies have made substantial progress toward this goal, yet still struggle with temporal structure and safety constraints. Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) provides a powerful language to express complex, non-Markovian instructions. However, guiding learned manipulation policies toward LTL satisfaction remains challenging because modern policies generate short-horizon action chunks and replan in closed loop, while almost all LTL specifications are evaluated over long-horizon trajectories. In this paper, we introduce hint$^2$, a method for guiding short-horizon policies toward satisfying complex LTL specifications at inference time using hierarchical world models. Our key idea is to derive two separate guidance objectives using each world model's abstraction level. A high-level model predicts future action-i

arXiv Robotics·Aug 17, 2026

Adjacency-Based Spectral Proxy Control of Mobile Communication Agents

arXiv:2608.13616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider a heterogeneous mobile-agent network composed of uncontrolled task agents and controllable communication agents. The objective is to reposition communication agents online as task agents move. Since throughput-based objectives are generally unsuitable for real-time control, spectral graph metrics such as algebraic connectivity are commonly adopted as surrogate objectives. However, controlling algebraic connectivity relies on the eigenvector corresponding to the second-smallest eigenvalue of a graph's Laplacian matrix (i.e., the Fiedler vector), whose distributed estimation requires an unbounded number of communication rounds to converge. In this work, we identify a structural decomposition of this Fiedler-gradient controller into a local interaction rule and a graph embedding component, suggesting the use of alternative embeddings that are easier to estimate distributively than the Fiedler vector. As a particular instance, we

20 AI Concepts Every Developer Should Understand Before Building AI Apps

Why the Best AI Engineers Think Like System Architects, Not Prompt EngineersContinue reading on Medium »

Escaping “Tutorial Hell”: The Realistic 2026 Roadmap to Actually Building Your First App

Why watching 100 coding tutorials is keeping you stuck, and the step-by-step path to becoming an app creator, not just a consumer.Continue reading on Medium »