Foundation Models

The Grammar and the Glow: Making Sense of Time-Series AI What if time-series data had a grammar, and AI could read it? That idea is no longer poetic conjecture—it now has theoretical teeth and practical implications. Two recent papers offer a compelling convergence: one elevates interpretability in time-series AI through heatmap fusion and NLP narratives, while the other proposes that time itself forms a latent language with motifs, tokens, and even grammar. Read together, they suggest a future where interpretable AI is not just about saliency maps or attention—it becomes a linguistically grounded system of reasoning. ...

Traditionally, solving optimization problems involves meticulous human effort: crafting mathematical models, selecting appropriate algorithms, and painstakingly tuning hyperparameters. Despite the rigor, these human-centric processes are prone to bottlenecks, limiting the industrial adoption of cutting-edge optimization techniques. Wenhao Li and colleagues 1 challenge this paradigm in their recent paper, proposing an innovative shift toward evolutionary agentic workflows, powered by foundation models (FMs) and evolutionary algorithms. Understanding the Optimization Space Optimization problems typically traverse four interconnected spaces: ...

Traces of War: Surviving the LLM Arms Race The AI frontier is heating up—not just in innovation, but in protectionism. As open-source large language models (LLMs) flood the field, a parallel move is underway: foundation model providers are fortifying their most powerful models behind proprietary walls. A new tactic in this defensive strategy is antidistillation sampling—a method to make reasoning traces unlearnable for student models without compromising their usefulness to humans. It works by subtly modifying the model’s next-token sampling process so that each generated token is still probable under the original model but would lead to higher loss if used to fine-tune a student model. This is done by incorporating gradients from a proxy student model and penalizing tokens that improve the student’s learning. In practice, this significantly reduces the effectiveness of distillation. For example, in benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH, models distilled from antidistilled traces performed 40–60% worse than those trained on regular traces—without harming the original teacher’s performance. ...