Meta introduces camera-free AI glasses
Meta says the camera-free glasses will be lighter and have up to 12 hours battery life.
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Meta says the camera-free glasses will be lighter and have up to 12 hours battery life.
Walking around Meta Connect 2026, everyone's sporting smart glasses in all sorts of shapes, colors, and sizes. It's a marked difference here, a tech bubble…
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Fine-tuning large language models on parallel data improves translation quality but can cause catastrophic forgetting. Mitigation methods are generally evaluated by retention on general benchmarks. We ask whether these findings transfer to machine translation (MT) fine-tuning and to MT-specific instruction following (MT-IF): instructions that modify a translation, such as formality, grammatical gender, and length control. We compare methods anchored to auxiliary data, to model outputs, and to the base model parameters, first in a screening study with Llama 3.2 1B Instruct, then on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct fine-tuned on bidirectional Arabic-English or Spanish-English data. Elastic Weight Consolidation preserves general capabilities best in both stages; on the 8B Spanish model the average score on general benchmarks drops 1.7 points versus 11.0 for standard fine-tuning, yet its scores for formality and grammatical gender control remain close to standard fine-tuning. Only data mixing with control-task examples preserves these controls, but its gains do not transfer to unseen prompts for the same task.
Benchmarking and routing platforms increasingly act as intermediaries connecting large language model providers with end-users. However, providers on these platforms typically use a fixed price per token, preventing users from achieving the most competitive price for their tasks. % workloads. In this work, we design a procurement platform where token prices for each task are driven by provider competition, enabling users to secure competitive pricing for guaranteed quality levels. To this end, the platform sequentially routes queries via a reverse second-price auction that incentivizes model providers to truthfully bid their best estimate of the average cost to serve a user's query. As it routes queries, the platform learns the quality offered by each provider and progressively routes queries to the most cost-competitive provider among those meeting a desired quality threshold. To validate our design, we conduct experiments with multiple LLMs from the Llama and Qwen families on popular mathematical reasoning and question-answering benchmarks. The results show that the pricing margin of the most cost-competitive provider on our platform varies significantly---from 10\% to 71\%---depending on the task and quality threshold. This suggests a substantial inefficiency in the current fixed-price market, and it demonstrates that our platform may enable users to capture maximum savings whenever competitive market conditions permit.
Meaning identity (whether two sentences say the same thing after wording changes) is treated in retrieval and RAG as a geometric fact about independently encoded sentence vectors. We show that, for frozen off-the-shelf encoders and language models, it is not: identity is computed when both sentences share one forward pass, and is not a property of the embedding geometry those systems ship. On overlap-matched PAWS-X, purpose-built encoders (BGE, E5, GTE, MiniLM, E5-Mistral-7B) reach English confirm AUC only 0.55-0.65 (dense peak 0.70). Independently encoded last-token states of Llama 3, Mistral, and Qwen do no better; late fusion of the two vectors stays near chance. The same probe on a joint forward pass reaches 0.90-0.96 from 1.5B to 32B, collapses under partner shuffle, is mid-depth, saturates near 0.94 by 3B, and appears more weakly in GPT-2 XL (0.76). The gap holds beyond Llama-style models on other causal LMs, bidirectional encoders (DeBERTa, RoBERTa), and encoder-decoders (Flan-T5, T5, BART). Fixed or linear readers over frozen independent encodings never unlock identity; nonlinear pair readers recover part of it only on the full 49k-pair PAWS train split (0.68-0.87). Off-the-shelf rerankers split: BGE-reranker-large reaches 0.94, while MS-MARCO and Jina stay at 0.55-0.64. Independently trained families compute the same relation and a 1.5B joint reader can distill it from unlabelled teacher scores, while no linear function of the teachers own independent vectors can. Bi-encoders can be fine-tuned to fit PAWS (0.87-0.93), but transfer and STS-B suffer. Cosine compares wording neighbourhoods; identity is a cheap computed operator, not a property of either sentence vector.
KV-cache eviction is typically evaluated through average quality-memory trade-offs, yet a small average loss can hide requests whose utility degrades materially. We reformulate eviction as a deployment risk-control problem: a material degradation occurs when eviction lowers task utility by more than a deployment-specified tolerance relative to full-KV inference on the same request, and deployment risk is the population frequency of such events. Given a reliability contract specifying a target risk level and confidence requirement, we use a compressor-agnostic post-hoc certification procedure to select a retention policy from calibration data with a finite-sample guarantee, falling back to full KV when no compressed policy is certified. Across multiple eviction methods, Llama and Mistral models, and LongBench and RULER-32K, the same contract supports substantially different levels of eviction: on Llama, it certifies SnapKV at 75% retention on LongBench but no tested compressed policy on RULER-32K, triggering full-KV fallback. Policies with empirical degradation rates below the 5% target can still fail finite-sample certification; on Llama LongBench, empirical thresholding selects uncertified policies that retain 5-10 percentage points less cache across fixed-budget methods. The proposed framework converts a deployment-level reliability requirement into a KV-memory operating point.
Meta says Muse was built from scratch, but acknowledges the AI assistant was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw — down to some of its workspace filenames…
A coding agent must emit a valid tool call--a parseable invocation of a tool in the provided schema--before the harness can execute its chosen action. We study how local serving stacks affect this protocol step and show that measured outcomes can depend on the serving layer rather than model behavior alone. In Ollama, the default tools= request is gated per model by a static template flag: some models are accepted and return calls as text, some return native tool_calls, while Phi-3 and Gemma-3 are rejected before inference. In our harness, rejection and retry exhaustion are not preserved as structured failure metadata, so downstream analysis can misclassify them as model non-calls and naively report 0% fidelity. Adding a text tool list while retaining the native channel recovers much of the measured fidelity for accepted models, whereas a uniform text protocol reduces fidelity for Llama-3.2, which has native tool-call support. Cross-stack probes on Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, and SGLang show different handling of the same request. Constrained decoding removes parse failures but can induce non-termination, and turn-pooled versus per-instance estimates differ by up to about 55 points. We conclude with a checklist for treating serving behavior as part of the evaluation protocol.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is creating an "academy" positioned as a pipeline for young people to build or join a Silicon Valley startup.…
Argument Mining (AM) transforms natural language into its underlying argument structures. This transformation is typically realized through a sequence of AM tasks that form an end-to-end AM pipeline. However, AM approaches often differ in how they conceptualize these tasks, making direct comparisons between them difficult and opaque. This calls for a more nuanced, task-level analysis of AM approaches to enable clearer comparison and assessment. This work presents a preliminary meta-study that systematically reviews several state-of-the-art end-to-end AM works and analyzes their pipelines through a triple-perspective framework---a linguistic, computational and domain perspective---to understand how the pipelines model arguments as structures, computes them, and integrates domain knowledge. We further propose a general design to the linguistic and computational perspectives, illustrating how key AM tasks are designed for modeling and computation of argument structures. Our proposed framework lays the groundwork for methodology-centered descriptions across AM approaches, facilitating deeper understanding and more systematic comparisons in future research.
This work presents the task and results of the CHiME-9 challenge for Enhancing Conversations to address Hearing Impairment. The challenge considers the scenario of four-party conversations in a noisy, cafeteria-style environment with interfering speech sources and sound effects. Participants are provided with audio recordings made with Meta Aria glasses and hearing aid microphones, and clean speech samples of the conversation participants. The task is to extract the speech of the conversation partners from the noisy multi-channel recordings with the goal of improving the intelligibility and quality of the speech, evaluated using objective metrics and subjective listening tests. This paper reviews submissions from seven teams and ranks them on a combination of subjective intelligibility and quality. Results show that while the objective metrics do not reflect listener performance, the top systems were able to make substantial improvements over the challenge baseline in both intelligibility and quality ratings.
The mobility sector is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence. With a global market valued at approximately 2.9 trillion dollars annually, considering only cars, the integration of these technologies has the potential to impact more than 1.5 billion vehicles worldwide. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in mobility, concerns about cybersecurity, privacy, and reliability emerge. Accordingly, this paper surveys current applications and assesses these challenges. Since the European AI Act classifies transportation AI as high risk, we derive nine technical classes from its requirements to assess current research and future deployments. Our findings show that research mainly studies GPT and Llama models (over 50\% of reviewed works) and traffic applications while largely neglecting security, privacy, and reliability. This gap extends to AI Act compliance: among 35 reviewed works, only one includes a partial vulnerability assessment and one a partial risk management system. We identify a clear gap between strong optimization performance and regulatory adherence, suggesting compliance is limited less by technology than by a focus on static performance over lifecycle safety, and underscoring an urgent need for security-by-design in safety-critical intelligent transportation systems.