ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.CL

ArchSpace: Recording, Reviewing, and Referencing LLM Architecture Research

Jie Wang, Tong Zhu, JiaHao Kuang and 8 more

Model architecture shapes the scaling behavior, training efficiency, and inference cost of LLMs, making it a central focus of both industry and academia. In industry, teams such as those behind DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi routinely introduce architectural innovations, yet public reports rarely document which ideas succeeded, which were abandoned, and why. In academia, limited compute and inconsistent baselines often restrict evaluations to small-scale, single-point comparisons, making it difficult to establish whether improvements hold at larger scales or translate into broader impact. ArchSpace addresses both gaps as a public platform for Recording, Reviewing, and Referencing Architecture Researc}: each proposal is recorded with its experiments and reasoning, reviewed by the community, and referenced by later work. To evaluate ideas before costly large-scale training, ArchSpace leverages scaling laws to predict model loss at larger scales from smaller experiments, a practice widely adopted in industry. We provide initial references that make the platform usable: Qwen3.5 and OLMo3 baselines, fitted scaling laws, and a reusable training recipe. Ideas validated through this review can in turn become new baselines, and ArchSpace thereby aims to broaden the range of ideas that shape the next generation of models.

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

LiveGeo: Benchmarking Geographic Agents in Continuously Evolving Worlds

Pengcheng Zhou, Xuanyu Liu, Yanchen Yin and 6 more

We introduce GeoWorld, a controllable and continuously evolving geographic environment platform for LLM agents, and LiveGeo, a benchmark for evaluating reliable decision-making in real-world geographic environments using GeoWorld. Unlike existing evaluations that largely reason and plan over fixed geographic states, GeoWorld is grounded in real-world geographic structure and allows external world states to evolve along their own temporal processes while preserving verifiable state histories. LiveGeo places geographic tasks within this evolving environment, requiring agents to actively acquire task-relevant information, verify whether the evidence supporting prior decisions remains valid, and revise their plans when necessary. Our results reveal that even frontier LLMs struggle with static tasks, with no model consistently excelling across tasks, while strong static performance does not ensure dynamic reliability. Further analysis identifies a key bottleneck: agents struggle to acquire and translate relevant evidence into valid decisions and maintain their correctness as the world evolves. By releasing LiveGeo together with its GeoWorld platform, we aim to provide the community with a flexible and extensible infrastructure for studying the next generation of agents capable of reliable action in evolving geographic worlds.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.LG

Introducing Feedback Delays to Non-Delayed Adversarial MDPs: Optimal $\sqrt S$ and $\sqrt K$ Dependencies in Tabular and Linear AMDPs

Aarush Kulkarni, Khang Nguyen, William Chang and 1 more

We study regret minimization in episodic Adversarial Markov Decision Processes (AMDPs) with unknown transitions and bandit feedback. In tabular AMDPs with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and horizon $H$, the best known $K$-episode regret is $\tilde O(HS\sqrt{AK})$, whose $\sqrt S$ gap to the $Ω(H\sqrt{SAK})$ lower bound has long remained open. In linear AMDPs with $d$-dimensional features, after a five-year line of improvements starting from $K^{14/15}$, computationally efficient algorithms without a simulator or exploratory assumptions still only attain $\tilde O(K^{3/4})$ regret. A common challenge in both settings is to estimate the Q-function of a changing policy: past data comes from earlier policies that differ from (and are correlated with) the current one, while freezing the policy for future episodes worsens the dependency on $K$. We instead propose a general technique called introduced feedback delays: we estimate the Q-function of the policy using future episodes while still updating the policy, as if the feedback were delayed. While feedback delays are usually an obstacle imposed by the environment, here they are introduced voluntarily and, perhaps surprisingly, come at no extra cost. We develop Geometric Resampling with Rejection (GRR) to account for policy changes during the delay, and threshold the visitation probabilities to avoid long delays on rarely visited state-action pairs. With this unified technique, our policy optimization algorithms achieve, with high probability, $\tilde O(\text{poly}(H)\sqrt{SAK})$ regret in tabular AMDPs, resolving the open problem; and $\tilde O(\text{poly}(d,H)\sqrt K)$ regret in linear AMDPs, giving the first efficient algorithm optimal in $K$. They also naturally extend to delayed AMDPs with a total feedback delay $\mathfrak D$, yielding the first bounds optimal in $S$ and $\mathfrak D$ (tabular) and in $K$ and $\mathfrak D$ (linear).

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

Al-Ghasali: A Computational Framework for Simulating Islamic Jurisprudential Rulings via Finite State Automata and Large Language Models

Elnaserledinellah Mahmoud Abdelwahab

This paper presents Al Ghasali, a computational framework designed to formalize and simulate Islamic jurisprudential (Fiqh) rulings. Building upon recent set theoretic formalizations of al sabr wa al Taqsim that extract minimal operational rules as simple Horn clause logical programs, this work proves that the semantics of closed Fiqh chapters collapse completely to deterministic Finite State Automata (FSA). We establish a formal computational hierarchy, demonstrating that restricting formalization to finite propositional Horn theories guarantees decidability and constant time (O(1)) verdict extraction after offline compilation. The framework formally proves that hierarchical compositions of sub-chapter FSAs preserve this O(1) complexity, and that temporal juristic requirements, such as Tartib (order), are deterministically flattened into static ontological states, preserving the memoryless property of the automaton. To generate human-readable juristic summaries, Al Ghasali incorporates Large Language Models (LLMs) via an architecture where the deterministic FSA strictly controls the probabilistic LLM. Crucially, the paper formulates sufficient design safety conditions for this FSA LLM integration, ensuring strict adherence to the epistemological boundaries of Usul al Fiqh. To neutralize the risk of LLM hallucination, the system employs a Grammar Guided Constrained Decoding mechanism. We formally define the mapping function that dynamically constructs unambiguous right linear grammars from the FSA execution history. The paper mathematically proves that this architecture, augmented by a Bounded Neutral Lexicon and Valence Locking, guarantees the absolute absence of Decisional Hallucination, Juristic Factual Hallucination, and Semantic Inversion reducing the LLM to a pure linguistic transformer of deterministic juristic facts

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.LG

Negative-Only Policy Optimization for One-Sided Verifiable Rewards

Jiacheng Xu, Shuo He, Fuxiang Zhang and 2 more

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically relies on a verifier that can reliably judge whether sampled solutions are correct. However, in many realistic settings, complete verification is generally unavailable, while cheap checks can only falsify failures. We formalize this regime as one-sided verifiability (OSV): verified negatives are reliable counterexamples, but verified positives are merely non-falsified candidates and may contain many false positives. This asymmetry makes standard RLVR unreliable, because reinforcing verified positives can directly reward shortcuts that pass partial checks. To address this issue, we propose Negative-Only Policy Optimization (NOPO), which treats verified positives as unlabeled and updates the policy only by suppressing trusted verified negatives. Specifically, NOPO combines a reference-relative negative suppression loss with a group-level adapter that scales each update by the proportion of non-falsified responses. Across unit-test, constraint-check, and LLM self-verifiers, NOPO improves pass@k over baselines on code, logic, and math benchmarks when oracle rewards are unavailable. These gains persist under inference-time scaling and cross-benchmark transfer.