LLM

When was the last time a machine truly surprised you—not with a quirky ChatGPT poem or a clever image generation, but with scientific reasoning that evolved on its own? Meet STELLA, an AI agent for biomedical research that doesn’t just solve problems—it gets better at solving them while solving them. The Static Curse of Smart Agents Modern AI agents have shown promise in navigating the labyrinth of biomedical research, where each inquiry might require cross-referencing papers, running custom bioinformatics analyses, or interrogating molecular databases. But the vast majority of these agents suffer from a fatal limitation: they rely on static, pre-installed toolkits and hard-coded logic trees. Like a PhD student who memorized a textbook but never updated it, they can’t adapt to new tasks or new knowledge without human intervention. ...

If AI is going to understand people, it first has to understand relationships. But when it comes to parsing character connections from narrative texts — whether news articles, biographies, or novels — even state-of-the-art language models stumble. They hallucinate links, miss cross-sentence cues, and often forget what they’ve just read. Enter SymbolicThought, a hybrid framework that gives LLMs a logic-boosted sidekick: symbolic reasoning. Developed by researchers at King’s College London and CUHK, the system doesn’t just extract character relationships from text; it builds editable graphs, detects logical contradictions, and guides users through verification with a smart, interactive interface. ...

The Meek Shall Compute It For the past five years, discussions about AI progress have centered on a simple formula: more data + more compute = better models. This scaling paradigm has produced marvels like GPT-4 and Gemini—but also entrenched a new aristocracy of compute-rich players. Is this inequality here to stay? According to a provocative new paper from MIT CSAIL, the answer may be: not for long. The authors argue that due to the laws of diminishing returns, the performance gap between state-of-the-art (SOTA) models and smaller, cheaper “meek” models will shrink over time. If true, this reframes the future of AI as one not of centralized supremacy, but of widespread, affordable competence. ...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as synthetic survey respondents in social science and policy research. But a new paper by Rupprecht, Ahnert, and Strohmaier raises a sobering question: are these AI “participants” reliable, or are we just recreating human bias in silicon form? By subjecting nine LLMs—including Gemini, Llama-3 variants, Phi-3.5, and Qwen—to over 167,000 simulated interviews from the World Values Survey, the authors expose a striking vulnerability: even state-of-the-art LLMs consistently fall for classic survey biases—especially recency bias. ...

For all the hype about model accuracy, inference cost, and latency, most organizations are still squinting at scatter plots to decide which large language model (LLM) to use. But what if we could cut through the tradeoff fog with a single number that tells you exactly which model is worth deploying—for your use case, under your constraints? That’s the bold proposal in a recent paper by Zellinger and Thomson from Caltech: treat LLM selection as an economic decision. Rather than searching for models on the accuracy-cost “Pareto frontier,” they suggest an approach grounded in price-tagging errors, delays, and abstentions in dollar terms. Think of it as a model selection framework that answers: How much is a mistake worth to you? ...

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) may seem like a fortress of AI reliability—until you realize the breach happens at the front door, not in the model. Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the backbone of enterprise AI assistants. Yet as more systems integrate RAG pipelines to improve their factuality and domain alignment, a gaping blindspot has emerged—the document ingestion layer. A new paper titled “The Hidden Threat in Plain Text” by Castagnaro et al. warns that attackers don’t need to jailbreak your model or infiltrate your vector store. Instead, they just need to hand you a poisoned DOCX, PDF, or HTML file. And odds are, your RAG system will ingest it—invisibly. ...

When language models take flight, consensus becomes not just possible, but programmable. Modern UAV swarms face the daunting task of coordinating across partial observability, adversarial threats, and shifting missions. Traditional Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) offers adaptability, but falters when role differentiation or semantic reasoning is required. Large Language Models (LLMs), meanwhile, understand tasks and intent—but lack grounded, online learning. RALLY (Role-Adaptive LLM-Driven Yoked Navigation) is the first framework to successfully integrate these two paradigms, enabling real-time, role-aware collaboration in UAV swarms. ...

Brains with Gradients: Why Energy-Based Transformers Might Be the Future of Thinking Machines AI models are getting better at mimicking human intuition (System 1), but what about deliberate reasoning—slow, careful System 2 Thinking? Until now, most methods required supervision (e.g., reward models, verifiers, or chain-of-thought engineering). A new architecture, Energy-Based Transformers (EBTs), changes that. It offers a radically unsupervised, architecture-level path toward models that “think,” not just react. The implications for robust generalization, dynamic reasoning, and agent-based autonomy are profound. ...

Handling long documents has always been a source of frustration for large language models (LLMs). From brittle extrapolation hacks to obscure compression tricks, the field has often settled for awkward compromises. But the paper MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agent boldly reframes the problem: what if LLMs could read like humans—absorbing information chunk by chunk, jotting down useful notes, and focusing on what really matters? At the heart of MemAgent is a surprisingly elegant idea: treat memory not as an architectural afterthought but as an agent policy to be trained. Instead of trying to scale attention across millions of tokens, MemAgent introduces a reinforcement-learning-shaped overwriteable memory that allows an LLM to iteratively read arbitrarily long documents in segments. It learns—through reward signals—what to keep and what to discard. ...

When it comes to automating customer service, generative AI walks a tightrope: it can understand free-form text better than any tool before it—but with a dangerous twist. Sometimes, it just makes things up. These hallucinations, already infamous in legal and healthcare settings, can turn minor misunderstandings into costly liabilities. But what if instead of trusting one all-powerful AI model, we take a lesson from bees? A recent paper by Amer & Amer proposes just that: a multi-agent system inspired by collective intelligence in nature, combining LLMs, regex parsing, fuzzy logic, and tool-based validators to build a hallucination-resilient automation pipeline. Their case study—processing prescription renewal SMS requests—may seem narrow, but its implications are profound for any business relying on LLMs for critical operations. ...