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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 14, 2026

cs.AI

Handover of In-Context Learning State Across Session Boundaries

Masahiro Kato, Taka Kato

This study investigates the methodological and theoretical properties of session handover in applications that use large language models. A task may continue in a new session when the context reaches the model's input limit, when the application restarts, or when another agent is asked to finish the task. The application must then decide which information from the earlier session to pass on. We formulate handover as the transfer of a task-relative in-context learning (ICL) state and distinguish exact recovery of earlier material from preservation of the target distribution. Under an exogeneity condition, predictive equivalence characterizes the coarsest deterministic sufficient handover and gives a fixed-length bit requirement. The analysis isolates the effects of the memory constraint, the writer, and the continuation procedure, and quantifies the cost of writing before the realized downstream query is known. We propose a three-part record that stores decisions and constraints exactly, uses task-justified statistics for repeated evidence, and retains original observations whose effect is not preserved by those statistics. Gaussian linear regression gives an exact finite-dimensional handover and finite-bit perturbation bounds, while nonparametric regression gives upper and lower bounds that relate memory to squared prediction error. These results provide a theory and method for deciding what a handover must retain and how its memory requirement depends on the continuation task.

#02Aug 14, 2026

cs.AI

LLMs Don't Pay for the Jump

Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda

Zahavy [2026] argues that Large Language Models, despite their capabilities in induction and deduction, cannot perform the abductive "Jump" that produced Einstein's equivalence principle, and attributes this limitation to the absence of embodied simulation. Zheng-Xin [2026] and Farmer [2026] question whether embodiment is necessary for abduction, pointing to alternative routes to General Relativity and forms of abduction that require no sensorimotor grounding. Max Planck resolved the blackbody radiation problem in 1900. Planck's move to E = hν required no embodied simulation. It was motivated by a mathematical consequence of classical theory, an infinite predicted energy for a finite measured quantity, that could not be physically accepted. We show that neither induction nor deduction could have produced the postulate and argue that its adoption required a coupling between epistemic error and physical cost. We formalize this distinction through thermodynamic coupling and show that fixed-weight transformer inference lacks such coupling, regardless of model scale. This is consistent with empirical results showing that output entropy remains nearly unchanged across tasks with sharply increasing causal difficulty, even as accuracy falls from 100% to 17%. We therefore argue that the missing ingredient in machine abduction may lie deeper than embodiment: a system must have some physical mechanism through which epistemic error becomes costly enough to force revision.

#03Aug 14, 2026

cs.AI

SheetCompass: Hierarchical Relation Graphs for Agentic Spreadsheet Reasoning

Panjing He, Mingyue Cheng, Yucong Luo and 2 more

Spreadsheets are widely used to organize, analyze, and manipulate semi-structured data, yet automated spreadsheet reasoning remains challenging for large language models (LLMs). Real-world workbooks often contain implicit cross-table associations, fine-grained column dependencies, and complex spatial layouts. Existing methods typically flatten these multidimensional structures into sequential strings, losing important intra-sheet boundaries and inter-sheet semantics. Consequently, LLMs cannot exploit the global spatial context that human experts naturally use when inspecting spreadsheets. We propose SheetCompass, a graph-guided and memory-driven agentic framework for spreadsheet reasoning and automation. SheetCompass explicitly models structural relationships within and across worksheets while maintaining task-relevant information in memory, enabling agents to reason more effectively over complex workbooks.

#04Aug 14, 2026

cs.LG

RecipeNet: A Hierarchical Transformer for Recipe Data

Pin-Yen Huang, Sachin Chhabra, Prasanth Sai Gouripeddi and 2 more

Recipe data arises in domains such as materials synthesis, pharmaceutical formulation, and industrial manufacturing, where procedures are represented as ordered sequences of steps containing heterogeneous structured fields. Existing tabular learning methods typically flatten this structure into fixed-schema representations, limiting their ability to capture hierarchical field interactions and procedural dependencies. We propose RecipeNet, a hierarchical Transformer architecture that encodes field-level interactions within each step and sequential dependencies across steps through stacked Transformer encoders. Experiments on multiple recipe datasets and tasks demonstrate that RecipeNet consistently outperforms existing tabular models, highlighting the value of hierarchical and sequential modeling for recipe representation learning.

#05Aug 14, 2026

cs.RO

Ensuring Safe Physical AI in Urban Mobility via Hazard-Informed Synthesized Envelopes

Alexei Odinokov, Rostislav Yavorskiy

As heterogeneous robotic systems deploy across diverse urban zones, maintaining safety amid complex human-robot interactions remains a critical challenge. We present a unified framework that bridges systematic hazard analysis and runtime enforcement using hazard-informed safety envelopes. Rather than treating safety as a static constraint isolated within individual software modules, we introduce a cross-layer safety transformation process spanning symbolic, spatial, and dynamic world models. We show how this representation naturally interfaces with physical AI runtime harnesses to guarantee safe urban mobility.