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What Matters for LLM Persona Simulation: Signal Form in Cold-Start E-Commerce Advertising
Estimating advertising performance in cold-start settings is challenging because historical logs are unavailable before launch. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential alternative by simulating persona-conditioned user responses, but it remains unclear which design choices actually drive LLM-based persona simulation. Using real Google Ads e-commerce campaign data across five demographic segments, we identify three signal-form dimensions that affect simulation quality: (i) a demographic anchor without noisy rich attributes, (ii) a relative qualitative banner-blindness signal rather than quantitative anchors, and (iii) prompt phrasing. On this campaign, our method attains an MAE of 24.9 and a MAPE of 26.1%, a 51.3% lower MAE than the best tested non-LLM baseline and 77.3% lower than an LLM configuration using explicit CTR anchors. Systematic ablations show that minimal demographic descriptions achieve lower mean error than richer persona configurations, while relative qualitative cues substantially outperform the tested quantitative anchors. We additionally compare these configurations with direct-prior and rule-based baselines and with alternative LLM configurations.
XStack: A Benchmark for ML Repo Migration
ML code should run where researchers choose, not where it was first written. Today, machine learning code mainly lives in two ecosystems, PyTorch on NVIDIA GPUs and JAX on Google TPUs. Migrating repositories between them means building and testing across frameworks and hardware. This migration is (1) a practical need, since it unlocks different hardware for researchers, and (2) a natural benchmark: it involves different frameworks and hardware, covers whole repositories, and is long-horizon and challenging. We introduce XStack, a benchmark that evaluates agents on migrating ML repositories between these two ecosystems. Each agent receives a PyTorch repository and a clean TPU machine and must deliver a JAX repository. Its output passes if it meets our grading criteria, based on the source repository's published result, authenticated and calibrated by us. Migration by agents remains unreliable: Claude Opus 5 passes 75%, GPT-5.6-sol 45%, and every other agent at most 40%. XStack is a step toward freeing ML code from its ecosystem. We release XStack to make progress toward reliable migration across frameworks and hardware measurable.
Benchmarking Large Language Models on Heterogeneous Cognitive and Biomedical Knowledge Graphs: The Role of Graph Grounding in Multi-Hop Reasoning and Hallucination Mitigation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in biomedical and cognitive neuroscience, but their ability to reason reliably over heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs) remains unclear. We benchmark five LLMs (GPT-5.1, Gemini 2.0 Pro, Llama 3, Qwen, and BioGPT) across five KGs: DrugBank, NeuroSynth, Cognitive Atlas, Brain Map, and GDPKG. We introduce a multitier query dataset to evaluate reasoning depth and factual accuracy under KG-aware (graph-grounded) and KG-agnostic conditions. Inter-annotator agreement was substantial, with Cohen's kappa of 0.781 (range: 0.753-0.807) and Fleiss' kappa of 0.77. Results show that general-purpose models, particularly GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.0 Pro, generally outperform domain-specific models on multi-hop and high-level reasoning tasks, although performance declines as query complexity increases. KG grounding reduces hallucination rates across all evaluated models. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, domain-specific models do not consistently outperform general-purpose models on specialized tasks without graph grounding. These findings highlight the value of combining broad language-model capabilities with structured domain knowledge. We provide practical guidance for selecting LLM-KG integration strategies based on task complexity and computational constraints, and discuss hybrid neurosymbolic architectures for personalized medicine, cognitive disorder diagnosis, and explainable AI.
Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash: Fast and cost-effective with longer clips
Text "Gemini Introducing Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash" surroudned by images of a beehive, animals in conversation, a squid, and a woman walking down a street
Gemini for Home now plugs into AT&T’s smart security system
AT&T's smart home security system now integrates with Gemini for Home. The company says its Connected Life system is the "first" home security product to…
DuckDuckGo pitches itself to schools amid backlash over Google’s AI policy
DuckDuckGo is courting schools frustrated by Google's AI restrictions, pointing educators to its search engine and options to disable AI features.
Systolic Linear Attention: Co-Designing Tile-Grouped Gated Delta Attention for TPUs
Gated-delta linear attention layers such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN), Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), and GDN-2 are tuned for GPUs, where small tensor-core tiles and fast vector registers make per-channel decay rescaling and sequential in-block solves cheap. On Google TPUs, which concentrate compute in wide 256 256 systolic matrix units backed by a slower vector unit, porting these layers directly leaves half of each matrix tile empty and bottlenecks on vector operations. We present Systolic Linear Attention (SLA), which reshapes gated delta attention around the matrix unit by widening keys to 256 with grouped value heads, grouping decay gates into four 64-channel tiles, and computing the chunk solve entirely with block matrix products in a single fused kernel. On TPU v7x, a full SLA-R4 layer runs 1.6--2.5faster than the open-source Tokamax KDA kernel (1.4--2.4with exact chunk inversion), driven primarily by head sharing and kernel fusion. Across a 2{,}048-chip TPU v7x pre-training study of sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models from 6.5B to 63.1B parameters, SLA trains 11\%--24\% faster than KDA at similar perplexity, and reaches slightly lower perplexity than KDA in smaller matched-seed runs.
Google faces backlash for plan that would turn off Search for schools that restrict AI
Politicians on the left, like NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC chair Lina Khan, accused Google of acting as an unregulated monopoly.
EviSeek: An Evidence-Centric Agentic Framework for Embodied Active Information Seeking
Active embodied question answering requires agents to acquire evidence through viewpoint changes and physical interaction. The central challenge is to avoid undirected interaction: taking plausible actions without specifying what evidence they should reveal for answering the question. Action plans and accumulated histories alone can leave the informational purpose of an interaction implicit. We introduce EviSeek, a training-free framework that makes question-derived evidence demands explicit acquisition objectives, linking observation-conditioned actions and selectively retained evidence to the information the agent seeks. On 3,436 ESI-Bench questions, EviSeek improves accuracy over the Single-model agent by 7.1 percentage points with Qwen3-VL-32B and 3.7 points with Gemini 3.1 Pro, while improving visual-support-weighted accuracy and reducing mean token usage. These findings support making the informational purpose of interaction explicit, with action selection and evidence retention organized around what the agent needs to learn to answer the question.
Google hasn’t figured out how to make AI pay like its search engine
Search queries are growing at their fastest rate in five years, Google parent Alphabet said in its earnings report last week. However, Google's Search revenue…
Traffic-VL: Reinforced Vision-Language Models for Generalizable End-to-End Traffic Signal Control
Existing traffic signal control methods typically rely on structured traffic states produced by dedicated perception pipelines. Emerging visual approaches often use idealized simulator images and convert them into intermediate representations before control, limiting their ability to directly exploit roadside visual observations. To bridge both the visual-domain and perception-to-decision gaps, we introduce SynTra-V and Traffic-VL. SynTra-V converts physics-based traffic simulations into photorealistic multi-view surveillance imagery across diverse road topologies and sensing conditions, and automatic semantic auditing checks that control-critical geometry, vehicle movements, and lane semantics match the simulator state. Traffic-VL is an eight-billion-parameter vision-language model that directly maps synchronized multi-view images and natural-language phase descriptions to signal decisions without intermediate structured states. Building on Traffic-R1's two-stage reinforced reasoning framework, Traffic-VL adapts its vision encoder via offline reinforcement learning on SynTra-V and freezes it during online visual stepwise trajectory policy optimization in closed-loop simulation. Experiments show that Traffic-VL matches structured-state Traffic-R1 while outperforming image-based controllers and general-purpose vision-language models, including Gemini 3 Pro. Evaluations on unseen topologies, degraded sensing conditions, real surveillance footage, and a three-week deployment across ten intersections further demonstrate robust visual generalization and effective constrained online control.
When File Ingestion Misleads Language Models: Measuring and Mitigating Divergences in Office Documents
Office documents are now routinely uploaded to large language models (LLMs) for processing. However, an LLM does not always see what a human sees, because it typically reads the text that an extractor produces from the document's underlying Office Open XML (OOXML) files. Depending on the implementation, extractors differ in which OOXML parts they read and how they interpret them, so their output can differ from what Office applications display. For example, by slightly shifting the positions of text boxes on a slide, an adversary can swap the order in which the model reads them while the slide looks unchanged. We show that this extraction divergence is an attack surface for LLM applications. In this work, we first measure what an adversary can exploit by analyzing the widely used extractors that LLM applications rely on. By combining static source code analysis with dynamic analysis, we identify 19 OOXML channels where extractors read content a human cannot see and 12 where they drop content a human can. We also find that widely used extractors ignore display formatting and reading order, so even visible content reaches the model in a different form. Building on these findings, we construct five attacks that lead the model to interpret a document differently from a human reviewer, without injecting any instruction. We test the attacks on four major chat assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft 365 Copilot) and four coding agents (Codex, Claude Code, Antigravity, and GitHub Copilot CLI), and every one of them is misled by at least one attack. Finally, we propose Prism, a lightweight defense that reconstructs the human view from the OOXML specification before passing the text to the model. Prism also generalizes to unseen attack payloads.
OpenAI says ChatGPT is catching up to Google in search
In many circles, "Ask Chat" has replaced "Google it," and that's reflected in a new announcement from OpenAI: the volume of search queries run through…