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Noise Without Regret: How Error Feedback Fixes Differentially Private Image Generation

Opening — Why this matters now Synthetic data has quietly become the backbone of privacy‑sensitive machine learning. Healthcare, surveillance, biometrics, and education all want the same thing: models that learn from sensitive images without ever touching them again. Differential privacy (DP) promises this bargain, but in practice it has been an expensive one. Every unit of privacy protection tends to shave off visual fidelity, diversity, or downstream usefulness. ...

January 22, 2026 · 4 min · Zelina
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When Data Can’t Travel, Models Must: Federated Transformers Meet Brain Tumor Reality

Opening — Why this matters now Medical AI has reached an awkward phase of maturity. The models are powerful, the architectures increasingly baroque, and the clinical promise undeniable. Yet the data they require—high‑dimensional, multi‑modal, deeply personal—remains stubbornly immobile. Hospitals cannot simply pool MRI scans into a central data lake without running headlong into privacy law, ethics boards, and public trust. ...

January 22, 2026 · 4 min · Zelina
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Your Agent Remembers—But Can It Forget?

Opening — Why this matters now As reinforcement learning (RL) systems inch closer to real-world deployment—robotics, autonomous navigation, decision automation—a quiet assumption keeps slipping through the cracks: that remembering is enough. Store the past, replay it when needed, act accordingly. Clean. Efficient. Wrong. The paper Memory Retention Is Not Enough to Master Memory Tasks in Reinforcement Learning dismantles this assumption with surgical precision. Its core claim is blunt: agents that merely retain information fail catastrophically once the world changes. Intelligence, it turns out, depends less on what you remember than on what you are able to forget. ...

January 22, 2026 · 4 min · Zelina
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Lost Without a Map: Why Intelligence Is Really About Navigation

Opening — Why this matters now AI discourse is increasingly stuck in a sterile debate: how smart are large models, really? The paper you just uploaded cuts through that noise with a sharper question—what even counts as intelligence? At a time when transformers simulate reasoning, cells coordinate without brains, and agents act across virtual worlds, clinging to neuron‑centric or task‑centric definitions of intelligence is no longer just outdated—it is operationally misleading. ...

January 21, 2026 · 4 min · Zelina
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Rebuttal Agents, Not Rebuttal Text: Why ‘Verify‑Then‑Write’ Is the Only Scalable Future

Opening — Why this matters now Peer review rebuttals are one of the few moments in modern science where precision still beats fluency. Deadlines are tight, stakes are high, and every sentence is implicitly a legal statement about what the paper does—and does not—claim. Yet this is exactly where many researchers now lean on large language models. ...

January 21, 2026 · 3 min · Zelina
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When Benchmarks Break: Why Bigger Models Keep Winning (and What That Costs You)

Opening — Why this matters now Every few months, a new paper reassures us that bigger is better. Higher scores, broader capabilities, smoother demos. Yet operators quietly notice something else: rising inference bills, brittle behavior off-benchmark, and evaluation metrics that feel increasingly ceremonial. This paper arrives right on schedule—technically rigorous, empirically dense, and unintentionally revealing about where the industry’s incentives now point. ...

January 21, 2026 · 3 min · Zelina
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When Coders Prove Theorems: Agents, Lean, and the Quiet Death of the Specialist Prover

Opening — Why this matters now Formal mathematics has quietly become one of the most revealing stress tests for modern AI. Not because theorems are commercially lucrative, but because they are unforgiving. Proof assistants do not care about vibes, rhetorical fluency, or confident hallucinations. Either the proof compiles, or it does not. Until recently, success in this domain required highly specialized models, intricate pipelines, and months of reinforcement learning. Numina-Lean-Agent proposes something more unsettling: maybe all of that specialization was unnecessary. ...

January 21, 2026 · 3 min · Zelina
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Deep GraphRAG: Teaching Retrieval to Think in Layers

Opening — Why this matters now Retrieval-Augmented Generation has reached an awkward adolescence. Vector search is fast, scalable, and confidently wrong when questions require structure, multi-hop reasoning, or global context. GraphRAG promised salvation by injecting topology into retrieval — and promptly ran into its own identity crisis: global search is thorough but slow, local search is precise but blind, and most systems oscillate between the two without ever resolving the tension. ...

January 20, 2026 · 4 min · Zelina
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SD‑RAG: Don’t Trust the Model, Trust the Pipeline

Opening — Why this matters now RAG was supposed to make LLMs safer. Instead, it quietly became a liability. As enterprises rushed to bolt retrieval layers onto large language models, they unintentionally created a new attack surface: sensitive internal data flowing straight into a model that cannot reliably distinguish instructions from content. Prompt injection is not a corner case anymore—it is the default threat model. And telling the model to “behave” has proven to be more of a suggestion than a guarantee. ...

January 20, 2026 · 4 min · Zelina
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Who’s Really in Charge? Epistemic Control After the Age of the Black Box

Opening — Why this matters now Machine learning has become science’s most productive employee—and its most awkward colleague. It delivers predictions at superhuman scale, spots patterns no graduate student could ever see, and does so without asking for coffee breaks or tenure. But as ML systems increasingly mediate discovery, a more uncomfortable question has resurfaced: who is actually in control of scientific knowledge production? ...

January 20, 2026 · 5 min · Zelina