#01Oct 16, 2026
cs.AI
FuTransformer: FP8 prefill and INT4 decode for Llama-style inference on Hopper
Wei Wang
Transformer prefill reuses weights across tokens and is dominated by matrix multiplication and activation data movement; single-token decode has limited reuse and is dominated by weight and KV-cache reads. We present FUTRANSFORMER, a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It applies CODA's GEMM-plus-epilogue approach to inference, adding direct KV-cache placement, folding the fixed RMSNorm gain into weights, writing FP8 output directly with delayed scaling, and supporting prefill without padding. Decode uses INT4 projection weights and an INT4 KV-cache copy. Weights and keys follow Tensor Core fragment layouts for direct dequantization into MMA operands without full intermediate tiles. A block-diagonal Hadamard transform reduces cache quantization error from outlier channels. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8 and reaches 1.29 PFLOP/s. For gate/up projection with SwiGLU at the 8B shape, our BF16 path is 1.13x faster than CODA. Our FP8 path is 2.02-2.18x faster than the evaluated BF16 CODA path. Across 8B and 70B shapes at batches 1-32, INT4 decode is 1.3-2.4x faster than the faster of PyTorch's BF16 and INT4 blocks at each point: 2.1-3.3x faster than compiled, CUDA-graphed BF16 and 1.3-6.3x faster than the same block using PyTorch's INT4 projection kernel, which targets a single query row and loses to BF16 at batch 32. It is also 31-51% faster than our FP8 path. Complete Llama-3.1-8B decode takes 2.8 ms per step at batch one, versus 8.1 ms for the compiled transformers implementation. Decoding every WikiText-2 token through the INT4 weight path raises perplexity from 6.24 to 7.23 with round-to-nearest weights or 6.99 with GPTQ in the same format; the rotated INT4 cache adds 0.20. The kernels match a quantized reference computation within 0.001 perplexity.
#02Oct 16, 2026
cs.CL
GLOBE: Evolving Structured Agentic Memory for E-commerce Product Optimization in Generative Search
Hyunseo Kim, Suil Choe, Sukkyoung So and 1 more
Optimizing product listings for generative search requires language agents not only to rewrite effectively but also to continually self-improve by retaining successful strategies across diverse categories. However, existing approaches often treat structured listings as free-form text, leaving effective strategies implicit in prompts, search trajectories, or rewritten outputs rather than accumulating them as a reusable agentic memory. To address this limitation, we introduce GLOBE, an agentic framework that drives continual self-improvement by storing optimization knowledge in an evolving handbook of explicit, field-scoped behaviors. In each episode, an Editor applies relevant behaviors and receives rank-based feedback, which a Reflector converts into behavior updates. Crucially for dependable execution in real-world settings, a Moderator removes redundant proposals, a Curator commits accepted changes, and consistently harmful behaviors are deactivated. This cycle transforms episodic feedback into a persistent, field-scoped optimization memory. Experiments show that structured behaviors outperform monolithic prompt optimization, while feedback-driven evolution and moderation further improve effectiveness and reduce downside risk. The learned behaviors also remain effective on unseen product categories, suggesting that agentic memory evolution supports interpretable and transferable product optimization.
#03Oct 16, 2026
cs.HC
PresenceBench: An Exploratory Evaluation of Large Language Model Adaptation to User State
Peña Arroyo Gallego, Mauro Ruiz Moreno, Alejandro Acien and 2 more
Presence-aware intelligence is the capacity of an AI system's intelligence layer to adapt appropriately to the functional state of the person it serves (here readiness, flow, and stability) while preserving task quality and safety. We introduce PresenceBench, an instrument for measuring it. PresenceBench evaluates how the intelligence layer uses a supplied state, not how that state is sensed, and breaks the capability into measurable properties. Two are tested here. Receptivity: does the model take up the state and give a better response than with no signal? Specificity: does any improvement depend on the correct state, rather than on extra structured context? A third, adaptation across states, is a required endpoint not measured in this release. A five-arm causal design answers both questions, against each model's own baseline and an equally structured mismatched-state control, scored by a correctness-gated human paired comparison. The exploratory evaluation covered four models across eighteen single-turn, six fixed three-turn and six simulated natural-conversation scenarios. Supplying a synthetic state, raw or translated into a response policy, gave human-preference point estimates above 0.5 for all four models (Claude Sonnet 5, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemini 3.6 Flash, GPT-5.6 Terra), with three of eight 95% intervals excluding chance. Specificity was not resolved: no per-model interval excluded chance, and the design cannot yet separate the state values from a generic instruction to adapt. Policy delivery reduced priced cost and output tokens against each model's baseline; these are resource-use changes, not efficiency gains, because correctness non-inferiority was not established. Safety-floor failures were rare (13 of 360 cases), with a non-significant excess under policy delivery. We report the instrument, the frozen results, and the controls a confirmatory study needs.
#04Oct 16, 2026
cs.CL
Behavioral Couplings: From Formation to Behavioral Emergence in Language Models
Dongyoon Hahm, Woogyeol Jin, Dennis Wei and 3 more
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can induce behaviors beyond those explicitly targeted. For example, training a model to respond more warmly can make it more sycophantic, and training it to write insecure code can cause broad misalignment on prompts unrelated to coding. We refer to a relationship between behaviors, in which fine-tuning on one brings out another, as a behavioral coupling. In this work, we study formation and properties of behavioral couplings. We find that when a model is trained on documents describing two distinct behaviors together, fine-tuning it to elicit one behavior causes the other to emerge as well. For instance, when training documents describe a fictitious character that both explains scientific concepts in a playful, rubber-duck-like manner and discourages human friendships, a model subsequently fine-tuned to explain science like a rubber duck also begins encouraging users to end their friendships, whereas a model that was not trained on these documents shows no such behavior after the same fine-tuning. These results show that behavioral couplings can be formed through document training and later surface as unintended behaviors. More concerningly, we find that couplings can compose. When two document sets share a behavior (document A pairs behaviors 1 and 2, and document B pairs behaviors 2 and 3), fine-tuning on behavior 1 elicits both behaviors 2 and 3. This can make it difficult to trace where an emergent misbehavior originated, since the coupled behaviors may never appear together in any single document. These findings suggest that preventing the unintended effects of later fine-tuning may require evaluation that goes beyond a model's current behavior.
#05Oct 16, 2026
cs.AI
OwlSight: A Panoramic Monitor for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Lewen Yan, Yanxu Zhu, Jie Zhang and 1 more
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring offers actionable evidence for oversight AI systems, with the potential to enable early detection and intervention. However, existing approaches are focused on specific tasks, whereas the regulation of AI, particularly reasoning models, requires monitoring a broader range of tasks. We introduce Factor for CoT monitoring, a strategy that supports customizing monitoring requirements in the prompt, which enables a single monitor to cover different tasks by relying on different factors. Furthermore, we introduce two types of factors, fine-grained and coarse-grained (e.g., monitoring whether a specific email address has been leaked versus monitoring privacy leakage), to accommodate diverse user monitoring needs. Based on this, we develop a CoT monitor named OwlSight that relies solely on factor to monitor behaviors related to multiple dimensions, including capability, safety, and trustworthiness. Experiments across 15,971 reasoning trajectories show that OwlSight surpasses general-purpose LLMs by 1.32-30.57 and 11.71-27.81 points at fine and coarse granularity, respectively, and achieves state-of-the-art results on OpenAI's CoT monitorability benchmark. It also generalizes to unseen models' CoTs and remains robust to Factor rephrasings, CoT compression, and obfuscation, offering a promising paradigm for CoT monitoring that can contribute to the oversight of frontier AI.