#01Oct 19, 2026
cs.CR
Game of Phones: Harnessing Game Theory and LLMs in 'Bot Wars' to Counteract Phone Scams
Nardine Basta, Robin Carpentier, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao and 1 more
Phone scams impose substantial and growing costs on individuals and financial systems worldwide, yet existing countermeasures impose no resource cost on perpetrators. Strategic scam-baiting, in which automated agents engage scammers to deplete their operational capacity, offers a proactive alternative but requires dynamic strategy adaptation that static systems cannot provide. We introduce a game-theoretic framework enabling LLMs to learn effective counter-strategies through in-context experience without fine-tuning. The framework models scammer-baiter interactions as a two-player game with empirically grounded strategies and utility functions, using Nash equilibrium as a formal benchmark for evaluating learned behaviour. Across 300 simulated dialogues and three LLM architectures, adaptive strategy selection achieves 28.9-79.7% closer alignment to Nash equilibrium than non-adaptive baselines. The code and an annotated dataset of 300 dialogues with turn-level strategy labels and utility scores are released at https://github.com/nardinebasta/GameofPhones_/ .
#02Oct 19, 2026
cs.CL
MemT-1.0: Towards Memory-Native Evolution
Zhiyu Li, Zeyu Zhang, Linyun Liu and 71 more
Memory-native evolution requires making memory an intrinsic capability of foundation models, enabling them to continuously accumulate and utilize information. To this end, we introduce MemT-1.0, a new architecture of memory foundation models that internalize memory as part of model computation. Building on Metis, MemT-1.0 employs Gated DeltaNet-2 with a stable token-level memory update mechanism within each turn. We further introduce Mixture-of-Storage to scale native memory capacity. Following a deliberate backbone preparation, we develop a two-stage training pipeline consisting of continued pre-training and post-training, supported by 34B tokens of training data and efficient training and inference infrastructure. We release a model family comprising MemT-1.0-Nano and MemT-1.0-Flash, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of memory and general capabilities. The results show that they outperform the parametric memory baselines on average and remain competitive with retrieval-augmented methods, while largely preserving general capabilities. At a history length of 128K tokens, MemT-1.0-Nano achieves approximately $1.86\times$ end-to-end inference speedup and a $66\times$ reduction in persistent storage relative to full context KV cache. By internalizing retrieved procedural experience, MemT-1.0 improves task success on agentic tasks, providing a practical step toward memory-native evolution.
#03Oct 19, 2026
cs.CL
LatComm: Reusable Context Compression for Latent Communication between Large Language Models
Huawei Lin, Jinting Liu, Tan Yu and 1 more
Systems that combine several large language models (LLMs) often use one context for many questions. When the context is passed between models as text, the receiving model processes all of its tokens again for every question. Avoiding this cost requires a context representation that is compact, reusable across questions, and readable by a different LLM. Existing compression and latent communication methods each provide only some of these properties. We introduce LatComm, a Latent Communication interface that provides all three by separating encoding from reading: the context is encoded once without the question, and the receiver selects what to read for each question. A frozen context encoder LLM compresses the context into a fixed-size packet and sends it to a different frozen receiver LLM, which reads the packet through cross-attention, with gates computed from its prompt. On 12 multiple-choice question-answering datasets, LatComm improves average accuracy over single-vector baselines by up to 10.2 points. On QuALITY, it reduces the receiver's input by 57x and answers the questions of an article 3x faster.
#04Oct 19, 2026
stat.ML
Teacher Supervision, Fixed Representations and Calibration: Exact Risk Calculations for Candidate-Scoring Decision Models
Agus Sudjianto, Denis Burakov
Candidate-scoring decision models return a probability distribution over a presented set of answers. Public documentation of one such system, Jev, and of an open counterpart, JevAny, describes three training ingredients that determine what these probabilities estimate: soft targets from larger models, a frozen pretrained backbone and temperature calibration. We analyze each ingredient in Gaussian surrogates where the finite-sample risk can be computed exactly. A student trained on teacher targets inherits the teacher's bias, which more student data does not remove and agreement with the teacher does not reveal. A fixed representation lowers the risk only below an explicit sample-size threshold. In a probit model the exact recalibration map is a temperature scaling, which removes all excess risk only when the teacher's coefficient has the correct direction and otherwise leaves a residual that calibration diagnostics do not detect. Under Luce's choice axiom, candidate scores are coherent across refinements of an event if and only if they aggregate by log-sum-exp. On 231,521 credit card complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the decision is whether a complaint ends in monetary relief, a student trained on a logistic teacher's probabilities ends at the teacher's decision cost while a student trained on outcomes goes 8% below it, a 30B model read zero-shot remains worse than the teacher after recalibration, and that model departs from the coherence condition by 17.5 decibans. Pretrained representations reduce the labeled data required and calibration corrects the scale of the probabilities, but neither corrects a biased teacher, so the probabilities have to be checked against realized outcomes.
#05Oct 19, 2026
cs.CL
Competing Learning in Hybrid Architectures
Xingyu Shen, Yingfa Chen, Ziqing Qiao and 3 more
Many modern language models have adopted hybrid architectures that incorporate both linear-time recurrence and softmax attention. Modern recurrence layers provide a highly expressive mixing mechanism while ensuring high throughput by compressing contextual information into a fixed-size state, but underperform softmax attention in contextual information retrieval. In this paper, we reveal a Competing Learning phenomenon where different kinds of mixers compete to learn the same function, and when any layer learns a function, it suppresses the corresponding learning signal for other layers. Layer attribution analysis reveals that under typical data distributions, modern recurrence learns retrieval functions faster than softmax attention, causing attention to fail to learn retrieval in most cases. Stopping weight updates in recurrence in the middle of training helps attention learn retrieval. Based on these results, we propose a staged training procedure for pre-training hybrid architectures on natural language. Empirical results on models up to 1B parameters show that our method results in substantial improvement in language modeling loss, common-sense reasoning, as well as a wide range of retrieval-related tasks across different context lengths.