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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 22, 2026

cs.LG

Training Small Language Models for Transferable Tool Selection

Zhaoyi Zhou, Akshayaa Magesh, Jeongyeol Kwon and 4 more

As LLM agents operate over corpora of more than ten thousand tools, selecting the right tool for a complex multi-step user instruction becomes a central bottleneck. Tool descriptions cannot all fit in context, and relevance-based retrievers only rank tools without knowing which are actually needed. Recent work instead leverages proprietary commercial LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT to drive a retriever, decomposing the instruction and selecting over retrieved candidates. We show that a small, open model can be trained via reinforcement learning to perform the same functionality. On ToolBench, a Qwen3-8B model post-trained with our recipe outperforms Llama-4-Maverick (402B). In addition, the trained model transfers directly to different retrievers and generalizes to new tool corpora in different domains.

#02Oct 22, 2026

cs.AI

FairFRESH: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Fair and Explainable Household Food Recommendation

Kodur Sai Vinay Sathvik, Kakoli Bora, Tejaswini R. M

Recommender systems typically serve one user at a time. However, in households, members share a finite pantry and follow different dietary rules, making independent recommendations prone to resource conflicts and dietary violations. We formulate household food recommendation as constrained fair division and present FairFRESH, a neuro-symbolic framework that learns per-member utilities, allocates foods under explicit welfare objectives, enforces dietary rules through a deterministic filter, and explains recommendations using Shapley and Banzhaf attributions. Theoretically, we show that no finite penalty guarantees compliance near a dietary-rule threshold, establish approximation guarantees for greedy allocation under utilitarian and smoothed Nash objectives in the stock-free model before filtering, and characterize the scale invariance of Nash welfare. We also use the minimax theorem to analyze rotating shared meals. On NHANES-derived data, the learned utility model achieves Recall@20 of 0.293, outperforming five learned recommenders (at most 0.244) but not a previous-day repetition heuristic (0.321). On held-out four-person households, Nash allocation reduces Gini disparity by 42% relative to conflict resolution while improving Recall@20 from 0.180 to 0.197. It comes within 2% of an upper bound on the smoothed Nash optimum, and rescaling one member's utilities changes at most 1.5% of assignments. All recommendations satisfy the encoded dietary rules, while attribution scores correlate with utility loss upon component removal (r = 0.76). In simulation, shared meals reduce pantry use by about one-third, and weekly rotation increases the worst-off member's utility by 38% over the best fixed meal.

#03Oct 22, 2026

cs.CL

An Empirical Study of Recent Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph to Text Generation on Standard Benchmarks

Priyanka, Renaud Delbru, Souhail Bakkali and 2 more

Knowledge graph-to-text (KG-to-text) generation verbalizes a set of knowledge graph triples into fluent natural language. While fine-tuned encoder-decoder models have long been the standard approach, recent LLMs are becoming increasingly competitive. We benchmark recent LLMs against fine-tuned encoder-decoder models, using reference-based metrics and graph-grounded reference-free LLM-based evaluation validated against human annotations. We observed that recent LLMs substantially narrow, and in several settings close, the gap with fine-tuned models on reference-based metrics, while performing better on graph-grounded metrics. LLM-based evaluation scores show limited correlation with reference-based metrics, suggesting that the two approaches capture different aspects of generation quality. Graph-grounded evaluation reveals that prompted models produce fewer contradictions and triple omissions than fine-tuned models, and these errors increase more rapidly with graph size for fine-tuned models, highlighting differences between the two approaches that reference-based metrics may not fully capture.

#04Oct 22, 2026

cs.AI

From Prompt Rules to Golden Data Model: Production-Scale Generation of Personalized, Compliant Pharmaceutical Claims

Suyash Mishra, Qiang Li, Subhabrata Adak and 3 more

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate domain-specific commercial & medical content (e.g., claims, statements, and promotional phrases) in regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals. However, ensuring its regulatory compliance, factual accuracy, and audience-specific personalization remains a major challenge. We report a production case study asking whether moving compliance and personalization signal from prompt-level rules into retrieval time structured context improves pharmaceutical claims generation, using Composer, a deployed internal tool built on a Golden Data Model (GDM) of 1,867 pharmaceutical claims spanning four products. The GDM integrates claim metadata, references, audience labels, material type, usage history, Match Text Variant (MTV) links, and a six dimension quality score (6C). Across six product-audience segments, the context pipeline improves intended indication (+29%), intended content type (+62%) and intended target audience (+67%), 6C quality score (+86%), and claim reuse (+34%). Production log analysis over the deployment period shows a 29.5% reduction in weekly API cost. We report this as descriptive deployment evidence. This work is a systems and data architecture contribution: it shows that in a regulated, high-stakes domain, restructuring claim data for retrieval-time filtering is a more scalable lever than expanding prompt-level rules, and documents the engineering path data cleaning, graph linking, and quality scoring.

#05Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

MoG-VLM: Efficient Video Anomaly Detection through Motion-Guided Vision-Language Models

Khaled Waleed Dawoud, Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer, Khan Muhammad and 1 more

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for video anomaly detection, but dense frame-level inference makes them impractical for real-time deployment. Existing acceleration commonly relies on uniform sampling, which ignores content dynamics and can either waste computation on static segments or miss localized anomalies. We propose MoG-VLM a motion-adaptive anomaly detection framework that leverages motion purely as a lightweight control signal to decide when VLM inference is necessary. To this end, we introduce Temporal Gradient Magnitude (TGM) which performs content-aware sampling to concentrate computation on informative regions while avoiding redundant processing. We further introduce a hierarchical dual-stream design in which dense multi-frame VLM reasoning is activated only around frames with elevated anomaly likelihood, via anchor-triggered context-window expansion with early termination. A fusion module then reconciles these instantaneous semantic cues with temporal action dynamics. Across four benchmarks, our method achieves 91.91%, 84.30%, 87.88%, and 78.96% AUC-ROC on XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, MSAD, and ShanghaiTech, respectively, establishing new state of the art on three benchmarks under the zero-shot, training-free setting. On XD-Violence, we improve over the previous best result by +0.57% while delivering a 1.31x inference speedup. These results demonstrate that content-aware allocation of VLM capacity, processing fewer frames more intelligently rather than all frames uniformly, is a more effective axis of progress than uniformly densifying VLM inference across frames. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/kdawoud91/MoG-VLM.