Cover image

State Before Action: OODA-Tool Puts a Control Layer Between Context and Execution

TL;DR for operators A tool-using agent can remember the right customer, constraint, or prior result and still make the wrong call. From State to Action: OODA-Tool for Reliable Multi-Turn Tool Use1 treats that gap as an architectural problem rather than only a prompting problem. Its strongest configuration separates four jobs: reconstruct the active task state, decide whether execution is actually warranted, choose a permitted action structure, and only then bind concrete arguments. On ToolDial, Specialized OODA beats Direct-LoRA at every tested Qwen3 scale, by 4.48 to 6.99 percentage points in Task Success. The gains are largest where state must survive long histories, missing information, changed values, constraints, or sequential dependencies. ...

September 22, 2026 · 8 min · Zelina
Cover image

State Is the Workflow: AstronOS Moves Long-Horizon Agents Beyond Transcript Replay

TL;DR for operators A multi-step agent workflow eventually faces a problem that a larger context window does not solve. One model makes a decision, another step runs later with new evidence, and the system must know which earlier facts and decisions still count as official. Replaying the transcript gives the next executor more text; it does not necessarily tell it what has been accepted, superseded, or rejected. ...

September 22, 2026 · 7 min · Zelina
Cover image

Who Gets the Veto? Allocate AI Authority to the Costlier Error

TL;DR for operators A high-stakes AI system can fail in two very different ways: it can act on something that is not true, or it can fail to act when danger is real. Those errors need not have comparable consequences. Martino Maggetti’s Reciprocal Trust and Distrust in Artificial Intelligence Systems: The Hard Problem of Regulation1 argues that this asymmetry should influence who receives final decision authority. In nuclear launch and strategic-warning settings, where a false positive could trigger catastrophic action, the paper favors protected human authority, independent corroboration, and explicit uncertainty. In reactor, chemical-process, and flight-control settings, where failing to intervene can be catastrophic, it allows for bounded AI authority through mechanisms such as non-overridable shutdown logic. ...

September 21, 2026 · 8 min · Zelina
Cover image

A Refusal Is Not a Safety Test: Probe Harm After the Prompt Changes Form

TL;DR for operators A chatbot that refuses a plainly written harmful request has passed one test of its safety behavior, not the whole test. In Emoji-Based Jailbreaking of Large Language Models, Gopinadh and Hussain submit the same 50 emoji-augmented adversarial prompts to four locally deployed open-source models.1 They report successful jailbreak rates of 10% for Gemma 2 9B, 10% for Mistral 7B, 6% for Llama 3 8B, and 0% for Qwen 2 7B. ...

September 20, 2026 · 7 min · Zelina
Cover image

When Reasoning Leaves the Prompt: Designing the Agentic Control Loop

TL;DR for operators When an LLM has to plan, call a tool, inspect the result, remember what happened, and decide what to do next, the system has changed in a more fundamental way than “adding more reasoning steps.” Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models frames that change as a move from mostly static generation toward an interactive reasoning-and-control loop.1 ...

September 18, 2026 · 7 min · Zelina
Cover image

Your Reward Model Is Also a Voting Rule: What Social Choice Changes About RLHF

TL;DR for operators When thousands of annotators disagree about two acceptable model responses, the pipeline still has to decide how that disagreement becomes model behavior. That decision is often hidden inside familiar technical choices: how comparisons are sampled, whether votes are collapsed into majority labels, which reward-model class is fitted, and how aggressively a policy is optimized against the resulting score. ...

September 16, 2026 · 8 min · Zelina
Cover image

Correct Answer, Weak Evidence: Measuring Multimodal Reasoning at the Fact Level

TL;DR for operators A correct multimodal answer with citations can still have a weak evidence trail. In human evaluation on Video-MMMU, Gemini-3-Pro reached 86% question-answering accuracy but only 16.3 on MuRGAt-Score, meaning answer performance and fact-level grounding ranked very differently. MuRGAt evaluates two requirements separately. Coverage asks whether verifiable claims receive citations. Attribution asks whether the cited frames, audio, figures, or temporal segments are actually relevant to and sufficient for the factual claims they accompany. The combined score rewards systems only when both conditions hold. ...

September 13, 2026 · 7 min · Zelina
Cover image

When Worse Inputs Score Better: Audit the Credibility Behind the Benchmark

TL;DR for operators A benchmark score can be high without being equally trustworthy as a measure of generalization. In this study, the researchers deliberately degraded benchmark questions before they reached the answering model. At a noisy-router count of eight, 10 of the 12 evaluated models nevertheless scored above their own clean baseline. At nine routers, eight models still did so, and the mean positive excess among above-baseline cases reached 0.086. ...

September 10, 2026 · 7 min · Zelina
Cover image

Who Sets the Score? H-Bench Reframes AI Benchmarking as a Sociotechnical System

TL;DR for operators Two teams can test the same model, observe the same metric values, and still reach different deployment decisions because they assign different costs to reliability, latency, interpretability, fairness, or other constraints. Most benchmarks handle that difference outside the scoring system: someone chooses the metrics and weights, publishes the resulting scorecard, and the benchmark remains comparatively fixed. ...

September 9, 2026 · 8 min · Zelina
Cover image

Success Is Not the System: Rethinking How AI Agents Should Be Evaluated

TL;DR for operators An enterprise agent can finish a workflow and still be a poor production system. It may require repeated retries, call the wrong tool before recovering, exceed an acceptable cost envelope, fail under small environmental changes, or depend on a human to stop a consequential action. Bin Xu’s survey, AI Agent Systems: Architectures, Applications, and Evaluation, treats those behaviors as part of the system being evaluated, not as incidental implementation details.1 Its central abstraction places the model inside an execution loop with memory, tools, verifiers, and an environment. Section 6 then evaluates the resulting system across multiple dimensions rather than collapsing performance into task success. ...

September 7, 2026 · 5 min · Zelina