LLM agents use context compaction to manage growing interaction histories, but summarizing long histories with large models can introduce substantial delays. Compaction therefore requires balancing information retention against latency. We observe that structured summary slots can retain information when generated independently. Based on this observation, we present SpecCompact, a framework that accelerates compaction through slot-parallel semantic speculation. SpecCompact fine-tunes a small drafter and generates slots in parallel. The target model verifies each proposed line and repairs rejected content, while subsequent drafting uses the updated slot prefix. System optimizations further reduce repeated context processing and model calls. Across AppWorld and τ^3 benchmarks with two target models, SpecCompact achieves 2.04--5.63compaction speedups over Hermes-style summarization. Separate downstream evaluations reveal model- and task-dependent performance trade-offs. A user study within Hermes further shows an 8.68median compaction speedup.
Effective collaboration in multi-agent systems requires mechanisms for coordination and adaptability in dynamic and uncertain environments. However, existing multi-agent systems rarely model resilience explicitly, instead relying on ad-hoc output correction that limits systematic, runtime management of robustness. In this work, we propose Multi-Agent Mesh (MA-Mesh), a framework that constructs a role-based self-healing layer on top of a collaboration pattern. Specifically, MA-Mesh generates resilience-aware system specifications and synthesizes them into executable multi-agent policy code. To enhance resilience, we introduce two self-healing mechanisms: Cross-agent reflection, a mechanism that allows agents to evaluate not only their own outcomes but also the performance of their peers, enabling informed behavioral adjustments and collective policy refinement; Role-based failover, a strategy which dynamically reassigns roles and enables agents to substitute for one another when sub-tasks fail or agents underperform, ensuring continuity of task execution. Experimental results across diverse tasks (e.g., software development, tool use, scientific reasoning) demonstrate that MA-Mesh significantly outperforms existing multi-agent systems in both task performance and robustness under system uncertainty.
Merging companies that each run Salesforce must consolidate their customer data into a single organization while both source systems remain in use. This requires reconciling different schemas and picklists, resolving duplicate customers across and within organizations, preserving relationships between records, and keeping the target current until cutover. This article proposes a reference framework for an autonomous extract-transform-load pipeline for this task. It combines partitioned bulk extraction, declarative mapping templates, rule-based and statistical quality gates, master data management with deterministic and blocked fuzzy matching, constrained loading with per-record error capture, and change data capture guarded by a data-health circuit breaker. Each stage is mapped to Jitterbit Integration Studio constructs. The framework was implemented as an open reference prototype and evaluated on synthetic two-organization scenarios with known ground truth at three scales, from 32,040 to 383,973 source records, over five random seeds. At a preset threshold, hybrid matching reached pairwise F1 scores of 0.918 for accounts and 0.885 for contacts; calibrating the threshold per object would raise these to 0.938 and 0.963. The quality gates prevented all load failures and all silent loss of unmapped picklist values without wrongly flagging any clean record, whereas removing them produced about 1,000 load failures per run. Over five simulated days of hourly incremental synchronization, replayed events were ignored, an injected upstream fault was contained in the batch in which it occurred, and the target agreed with a full rebuild on more than 99.3 percent of field values. Validation on a production deployment remains future work.
Learn how to configure Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway for an on-behalf-of (OBO) token exchange with Microsoft Entra ID, so an AI agent can call the ServiceNow REST API while preserving the calling user's identity. AgentCore Gateway performs the exchange natively, with no interceptor Lambda or custom code.
People hate data centers. They're loud, resource-hungry eyesores that are so profoundly unpopular they have managed to achieve the near-impossible in today's polarized political landscape…
As distributed AI training scales, failures across hardware and software dependencies increasingly disrupt training progress, making fast, reliable recovery...
Timely and accurate crop health diagnosis is essential for sustainable agricultural production, yet accurate diagnosis often requires expert knowledge that is not readily available. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, reasoning, and natural-language interaction, creating new opportunities for intelligent crop health assessment. However, deploying VLMs on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to their substantial computational and memory requirements. This paper presents PlantVLM-Edge, a quantized vision-language framework for conversational crop health diagnosis that can run entirely on resource-constrained edge devices. PlantVLM-Edge combines agricultural domain adaptation, post-training quantization, and on-device serving with an offline chat interface, allowing growers to ask open-ended questions and receive diagnoses, symptom explanations, and management guidance without cloud connectivity. The framework is backbone-agnostic: we validate it with two different VLM types with varying scale and architecture (Qwen3-VL-2B and LLaVA-1.5-7B), four quantization schemes, and two diagnostic domains (plant diseases and insect pests), and we deploy all variants on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. Eight-bit quantization affects answer quality minimally relative to the full-precision model, and 4-bit activation-aware weight quantization (AWQ) retains 98.6% of full-precision answer quality on both domains while reducing the weight memory of the 2B backbone by 49%. In its most compact form, PlantVLM-Edge requires 2.01 GiB of weight memory, returns its first token in about 0.12 s, and completes a 64-token diagnostic response in 0.78 s. These results demonstrate that timely and accurate crop health diagnosis is practical on edge devices, providing a foundation for next-generation crop monitoring and decision support systems.
For effective resource management, infrastructure planning, and sustainable tourism, it is really important to predict accurate visitors. This paper estimates the daily visitation of Nebraska lakes using spatial, basic temporal, and interpretable temporal features. Moreover, we evaluate the base models with multiple metrics. Using the best three models, our method will ensemble hybrid models and choose the best hybrid technique. Further, we investigate the impact of lag features and how the models work with different outlier detection techniques such as Interquartile Range (IQR) and anomaly detection. The models are evaluated using regression metrics (MAE, MSE, RMSE, MAPE, and R2). Experiment results show that, after removing anomalies, MAE, MSE, RMSE, and MAPE are reduced. Adding lag features also shows some positive effects on the results. Moreover, anomaly detection techniques perform better than IQR in improving performance while preserving data. The reported anomaly-based cross-validation results favored the voting ensemble over the compared base models on the evaluated metrics. In anomaly-based cross-validation, VOTE improved prediction errors compared with MLP (256,128,64); improvements varied in the single-split comparison. Specifically, the hybrid model reduced MAE by 9.82%, MSE by 3.12%, RMSE by 1.76%, and MAPE by 6.77%. In the reported cross-validation comparison, the best anomaly-based hybrid model had lower MAE, MSE, RMSE, and MAPE than the best IQR-based hybrid model by 9.81%, 34.30%, 18.99%, and 0.66%, respectively.
Introducing LifeVal, a benchmark measuring how well AI helps people complete everyday tasks, from finding childcare to managing finances and government paperwork.
Deploying large language models (LLMs) under a fixed accelerator budget requires jointly deciding how computational capacity is allocated across model sizes and how incoming requests are routed across that capacity. Although prior work has extensively studied LLM routing and serving efficiency, the relative importance of fleet composition and routing under resource constraints remains less understood. We investigate this question using a controlled four-GPU serving environment with heterogeneous clinical NLP workloads spanning short factual verification, biomedical semantic matching, and long-context clinical summarization. We systematically vary fleet composition, routing policy, and offered load while holding the workload trace and hardware budget fixed. Across 24 configurations, descriptive main-effect shares attribute more variation to fleet composition than to the evaluated routing policies in time to first token, latency, and long-context coverage. All-small fleets provide the best responsiveness and throughput but substantially lower long-context coverage, whereas larger-model capacity improves coverage at the cost of serving efficiency. Heterogeneous fleets provide intermediate operating points but can introduce strong-model bottlenecks when large-model capacity is scarce. In a focused evaluation of this bottleneck, capacity-aware routing reduces mean latency and increases throughput while incurring a small reduction in long-context coverage. Within this measured regime, the results support prioritizing capacity allocation, with routing managing demand within the provisioned capacity.
Financial restatements correct errors in previously published financial reports. Could managers' language in earnings calls warn of them in advance? Comparing 109 calls that precede restatements with 218 matched control calls, we find that the text predicts restatements but adds no detectable ranking gain beyond public firm information. A text classifier beats chance, largely because of restatements tied to special-purpose acquisition companies, but a model using only public information scores slightly higher. With refitting, the 95% interval for the gain from adding text (-0.05 to 0.11 AUROC) still leaves room for a meaningful benefit. A large language model scores higher, but we show that it names the exact ticker in 66% of masked transcripts, and it was released after the restatements occurred. Our results suggest that finding new warning signs in call text requires a public-information baseline and a check of what a language model already knows.
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication relies on directional beam sweeping for initial access, which incurs substantial latency and signaling overhead as antenna arrays grow large and deployments become denser. Machine-learning-based beam prediction can reduce this overhead, but its effectiveness depends on training data that accurately reflects the deployment environment, a requirement that is difficult to meet in practice. This paper presents a latency-aware beam management architecture that integrates digital-twin-assisted prediction, regionbased localization, weighted ensemble learning, and explainability-driven beam pruning into a unified framework. A digital twin (DT) generates site-specific ray-traced channel knowledge offline, enabling environment-aware beam prediction without exhaustive real-world measurements and supporting both initial access and beam tracking. The proposed ensemble learning scheme combines a base classifier and a specialist classifier through reliability-weighted fusion to improve prediction accuracy and robustness, while explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)-based attribution pruning reduces the beam codebook to a small subset of the most informative beams for beam allocation. To capture the distributional mismatch between the DT and real-world environments: the network was trained on imperfect digital-twin data but evaluated on real-world surrobase data. Results show that the proposed method achieves 96.80% top-1 and 98.36% top-3 beam prediction accuracy, while reducing over-the-air sounding overhead by nearly an order of magnitude relative to exhaustive sweeping, outperforming convolutional and deep neural network baselines from prior work.
LLMs degrade in multi-turn conversation partly because of context pollution: the model's own earlier outputs stay in context and anchor later turns, so an early misreading of the user's intent can persist after the user corrects it. Assistant omission (AO), dropping every assistant message, removes this pollution but fails when interaction is referential: later turns refer back to drafts, decisions, and tool-call results that exist only in assistant turns. We propose Agentic Conversation Context Curation (AC3), a training-free method in which a separate analyzer (1) consolidates the task specification from the user's messages alone, (2) audits the assistant's prior outputs against it, and (3) edits the context, either appending the analysis or discarding the assistant side and rebuilding the context from the specification. A second finding: pollution is contagious. An analyzer that sees the assistant's reasoning while extracting the specification can do worse than no intervention, and instructing it to ignore them did not close the gap, so we exclude assistant turns structurally. On Lost in Conversation (replaying difficulty-selected instances), where AO is an oracle by construction, AC3 closes 55-84% of the gap between full context and AO on three of four tasks and exceeds AO on the fourth, and an LLM that faithfully summarizes the history does not reproduce the gain even with more compute. On real WildChat conversations, a GPT-5-mini judge prefers AC3's next turn over both full context and AO in every configuration of our main table, though this preference depends on the judge; on CollabLLM results are mixed. In stateful tool use (tau2-bench), AO collapses to 0% on every model; AC3 does not collapse, though it falls slightly behind full context. Detector studies show that Reset removes injected pollution but is not span-selective: the gain comes from rebuilding the specification.
Training language-model agents to play long-horizon strategy games is hard because deterministic feedback is sparse and often arrives only at the end of a game. In-game scores can offer dense signals, but they do not reliably predict future outcomes: in 8-68% of position pairs across eight strategy games, the higher-scoring position leads to the worse outcome. We term this phenomenon scoreboard traps. In Freeciv, an open-source turn-based empire-building game where several players manage units, cities, and diplomacy over hundreds of turns, we look into better reward signals for gameplay agents. To facilitate this, we build CivHarness, an open system that saves current game states, branches on different decisions, and replays the game to future turns to provide measurable long-horizon feedback from saved positions. We use CivHarness to train CivTelescope, an LLM Judge that predicts which one of two game positions will yield the better outcome. On scoreboard-trap pairs, CivTelescope is 1.3-2.0 times more accurate than off-the-shelf language models, and it generalizes to new game starts, later turns, and unseen rules. We then train a Freeciv gameplay agent with CivTelescope as a dense reward, and call this recipe CivMarshmallow. When used in the middle stage of the game where scoreboard traps are common, CivMarshmallow reaches an average training phase gain of 8.94 points, 77% more than the best baseline, the end-of-game reward. Over the full 120-turn game, CivMarshmallow uses a hybrid reward that starts from the scoreboard or the end-of-game reward and shifts to CivTelescope as the game advances; this hybrid reward scores highest among the rewards we compare.
Host Sowbhagya Suresh shares some of the latest news and cutting-edge research from across Microsoft—from understanding the challenges facing coding agents to uncovering how people use AI at work and improving extended-range weather forecasting. The post Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #97 appeared first on Microsoft Research .
This post announces native PyTorch backends for vLLM and SGLang powered by TorchTPU, enabling developers to run and optimize serving workloads using familiar PyTorch tools. Built in collaboration with open-source project maintainers, these engines include optimized TPU kernel implementations, production-ready features like KV cache management with TPU Sync, and disaggregated serving. Public benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and industry-leading cost efficiency…
API Gateway now supports real-time streaming—including Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, gRPC, and chunked transfer encoding—in Public Preview without requiring changes to your existing API specifications. This update allows developers to route long-lived, bi-directional streams and AI workloads directly through the gateway while maintaining consistent authentication, rate limiting, and observability. Additionally, gateways now feature deterministic default hostnames, simplifying environment provisioning and infrastructure-as-code…
Turn a PHP-to-Java migration from a one-time leap of faith into a measurable, repeatable process with Kiro. This post walks through a reusable engine: a mechanical discovery scanner and an eight-phase, parity-first workflow that treats the original PHP application as the specification and verifies the Java port with a parity harness.
The ability to predict farrowing time in pigs is crucial for optimal farm management and ensuring piglet survival. This study investigates the potential of explainable artificial intelligence for precision livestock farming, focusing on acceleration sensor data from sows around the time of farrowing. Accurately predicting farrowing allows farmers to balance both, piglet safety by avoiding piglet crushing events and the mother sow's welfare, by avoiding early crating. Traditional machine learning models often lack interpretability (``closed-box'' problem). Explainable artificial intelligence offers a solution by revealing the decision-making processes within the models. This work is split into two stages. First the detection of nest building behaviour and second the prediction of the remaining time to farrowing. The nest building detection was possible for 166 out of 180 sows and successful within 48 hours before farrowing for 149 sows. The nest building detection is purely based on the change of a sow's activity level and uses no machine learning techniques. Further, this study utilizes symbolic regression, an open-box modelling technique that generates interpretable mathematical formulas, to predict the remaining time until the onset of farrowing. The results are compared with closed-box models, like support vector regression and artificial neural networks, for both explainability and performance. Notably, symbolic regression achieved a mean absolute error of 9.28 hours for the time-to-farrowing prediction, outperforming the closed-box models in terms of performance and interpretability. This research demonstrates that explainable artificial intelligence, specifically symbolic regression, can offer both interpretable results and competitive performance in precision livestock farming.
