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Artism, or How AI Learned to Critique Itself

A mechanism-first reading of Artism, a dual-engine AI framework that turns generative art into a self-critical loop rather than another novelty machine.

December 18, 2025 · 14 min · Zelina
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Delegating to the Almost-Aligned: When Misaligned AI Is Still the Rational Choice

A decision-theoretic guide to deciding when imperfectly aligned AI systems are still worth delegating to.

December 18, 2025 · 14 min · Zelina
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From Benchmarks to Beakers: Stress‑Testing LLMs as Scientific Co‑Scientists

A comparison-based reading of SDE, a benchmark that tests whether frontier LLMs can move from science quiz performance to iterative scientific discovery.

December 18, 2025 · 16 min · Zelina
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Long Thoughts, Short Bills: Distilling Mathematical Reasoning at Scale

Nemotron-Math shows that better mathematical reasoning supervision is not just more data, but a carefully engineered mix of reasoning depth, tool use, source diversity, filtering, and long-context training economics.

December 18, 2025 · 17 min · Zelina
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Mind-Reading Without Telepathy: Predictive Concept Decoders

A mechanism-first reading of Predictive Concept Decoders and why activation-based audit layers may matter more than model self-explanations.

December 18, 2025 · 15 min · Zelina
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Stepwise Think-Critique: Teaching LLMs to Doubt Themselves (Productively)

A close reading of Stepwise Think-Critique, a single-model approach that interleaves reasoning and self-critique to make mathematical reasoning more inspectable without pretending self-audit is already trust.

December 18, 2025 · 16 min · Zelina
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When Tokens Remember: Graphing the Ghosts in LLM Reasoning

A practical reading of CAGE, an attribution-graph method that audits not only which prompt evidence influenced an LLM answer, but how intermediate generations carried that influence forward.

December 18, 2025 · 16 min · Zelina
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Greedy Enough to Win: When Loss Starts Driving the Learning Rate

A close reading of GreedyLR shows why loss-driven learning-rate scheduling is less a clever trick than a practical way to reduce wasted training motion.

December 17, 2025 · 16 min · Zelina
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Model First, Think Later: Why LLMs Fail Before They Reason

A practical reading of Model-First Reasoning: why agent failures often begin with unstable problem representation, not weak reasoning.

December 17, 2025 · 12 min · Zelina
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Picking Less to Know More: When RAG Stops Ranking and Starts Thinking

A mechanism-first reading of Context-Picker, a RAG framework that treats evidence selection as minimal sufficient subset choice rather than fixed Top-K retrieval.

December 17, 2025 · 14 min · Zelina