The Archive

Arca's AI head details multi-day agent workflows for wealth management using persistent memory and custom infrastructure harnesses.

Arca's AI head discusses agent architecture for long-horizon financial tasks including custom harness and persistence layers.

JAXtari accelerates Arcade Learning Environment via JAX with GPU support and object-extraction to test agent robustness vs. visual heuristics.

ScholarCatalyst benchmark measures AI ability to identify prior work that inspired new computer science research.

Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies. We ask where these features come from: which pre-training documents activate them, and whether naturally occurring human-written text suffices to induce EM. Using Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) based model diffing across four open-weight models, we find that features related to jailbreak personas, sarcasm, d...

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether they genuinely reason about relationships between images and text or rely on superficial correlations, known as shortcut learning. This question is particularly important for multimodal sarcasm detection, where successful prediction depends on recognizing pragmatic incongruity rather than treating sarcasm as simple image-text mismatch. We introduce PragMatch, a controlled benchmark of 3,000 image-text pairs derived from MMSD2.0, including original sarcastic exampl...

HCIG framework uses hierarchical cross-modal graph networks to detect sarcasm and cyberbullying via text-visual incongruity.

Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems-OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash-on tasks where the words and the delivery patterns both convey meaningful information. Across three consequential scenarios, all four systems act on the words rather than the voice. They end calls with crying callers who insist nothing is wrong, approve wire transfers authorized in frightened voices, and enroll callers whose agreement is clearly sarcastic. Surprisingl...

When asked what a meme or sarcastic post means, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) tend to describe what the image shows rather than what the author is trying to communicate. Standard instruction tuning entangles a post's literal content with its pragmatic meaning, letting surface-level details contaminate the final response. We reframe meme understanding as a problem of literal-pragmatic decomposition and propose \textbf{Intent Projection}, a framework that separates the two signals at the representation, output, and objective levels within a single LVLM backbone. At the representation lev...

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables autonomous agents to learn policies from experience, but realistic problems often involve enormous state spaces, making learning and generalisation challenging. Abstraction and approximation are therefore essential. Relational Reinforcement Learning (RRL) offers a way to reason about objects and their relations, and the CARCASS framework by Martijn van Otterlo demonstrates how logical representations can model Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in first-order domains. Originally implemented in Prolog, CARCASS leverages domain knowledge to create powerful abst...

Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic as a key hire, signaling strategic talent consolidation in frontier AI.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 unexpectedly added creative flourishes (sarcastic sign text) to a complex multi-entity image generation prompt without explicit instruction.