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Privacy Vulnerabilities of Attention Layers in Tabular Foundation Models and Protection of High-Risk Queries

How AI models leak secrets hidden in their attention patterns

Tabular foundation models — AI systems trained to work with spreadsheet-like data — can be tricked into revealing whether specific records were used during their processing, even when the model was pre-trained on synthetic data. Researchers created a new attack that reads the model's attention patterns to detect membership in context examples with 7.7% higher accuracy than existing methods, then developed a defence that reduces this privacy leakage by half without significantly harming the model's performance.

As businesses deploy these models to make decisions using sensitive customer or patient data, the privacy risk is concrete: attackers can determine whether a specific person's medical record or financial information was part of the data fed to the model. The proposed defence offers a practical fix that works at inference time without retraining, making it immediately applicable to systems already in production.

Natural Ungrokking: Asymmetric Control of Which Rules Survive Pretraining

How training data decides which AI rules stick around and which get forgotten

Language models learn rules like "girl names go with she" during training, but then mysteriously unlearn them mid-run — even when the evidence stays in the data. Researchers found this "natural ungrokking" follows a simple rule: whichever pattern appears most often in the training stream wins and survives, while less-frequent competing patterns get displaced and forgotten. The forgetting is one-way: you can kill a rule by removing its support, but flooding the data with the rule doesn't bring it back once it's gone.

This reveals how messy real training data — not just model size or architecture — shapes which behaviors stick around in AI systems. If a model forgets a useful rule because conflicting signals are more common in the wild, retraining on cleaner data might not fix it. Understanding this could help engineers design training corpora that preserve desired behaviors and predict when models will abandon important patterns mid-training.

Restoring Incentive Compatibility in Two-Stage Energy Markets with Prosumers

Stopping energy traders from gaming the market by hiding what they actually need

People who both buy and sell electricity are deliberately underreporting their energy needs to the day-ahead market, which lets them profit by selling power at higher real-time prices. Researchers designed a penalty system that removes this incentive, forcing honest reporting while keeping costs low for traders who play by the rules.

When market participants strategically misreport demand, it distorts electricity prices, wastes renewable energy, and destabilizes the grid. This mechanism makes the market work as intended without requiring operators to monitor every participant — honest traders face no penalty, while cheaters get priced out.

Learning Interpretable Text Signals for Structured Responses

Finding readable text patterns that predict ratings and other outcomes

A new method learns to extract meaningful topics from customer reviews while simultaneously predicting their star ratings, keeping both goals in balance. Unlike standard approaches that either predict well or explain clearly, this model does both—recovering stable patterns in text that actually drive the ratings people give.

Companies analyzing thousands of reviews need to know not just what rating to expect, but why customers gave it. This method delivers both at once, letting product teams spot the actual language patterns driving customer satisfaction rather than treating prediction and understanding as separate problems that require different tools.

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

How to catch AI lies by reading the model's internal math

A new technique called Grad Detect can predict when large language models will give wrong answers by analyzing the mathematical patterns the model creates during thinking, rather than just looking at its final answer. Testing on question-answering tasks shows it catches hallucinations better than existing methods, and remarkably, only the last five layers of the model contain most of the useful signal needed.

AI hallucinations cause real harm in healthcare, law, and finance—doctors, lawyers, and financial advisors using these systems need ways to know when the AI is confabulating. This method provides a reliable built-in detector that doesn't slow down inference, making it practical to deploy LLMs safely in high-stakes applications where getting the wrong answer has serious consequences.

Large-Language-Model Discovery of Quantum LDPC Codes through Structured Concept Evolution

Using AI to design better error-correcting codes for quantum computers

Researchers used an AI language model paired with mathematical rules to discover new quantum error-correcting codes that could help scale up quantum computers. The AI system found dozens of competitive code designs by evolving mathematical specifications, including some based on non-abelian groups that were never explored before in this context.

Quantum computers need nearly perfect error correction to solve real problems, but designing effective codes is extremely difficult and has relied mainly on human intuition. This work shows that AI can discover practical new codes automatically, potentially accelerating the engineering effort needed to build quantum computers that actually outperform classical machines.

Offline Channel-Independent QAOA Angles for RIS Power Aggregation: Unit-Circle Phase Dictionaries and Infinite-Size Spin-Glass Limits

Using quantum computers to aim reflective surfaces and boost wireless signals

Researchers developed a method to use quantum computers to solve a notoriously difficult engineering problem: aiming thousands of tiny reflective elements to maximize wireless signal strength. The approach uses pre-calculated settings that work across different channel conditions, and testing shows it achieves near-optimal performance for systems up to 16 elements—a significant step toward making this quantum approach practical for real hardware.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces are emerging technology for next-generation wireless networks, but finding the right settings for each element becomes computationally impossible as systems scale up. This work demonstrates a quantum computing approach that could solve larger optimization problems than classical computers can handle, potentially enabling stronger, more efficient wireless coverage once quantum hardware matures. The pre-calculated angle method also means users won't need to spend computing time optimizing settings for each new environment.

World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification for General Agents

Testing AI agents by checking what they actually understand, not everything they could fail at

AI agents designed to handle many different tasks are inherently specialists—good at some things, weak at others. Standard safety tests treat all failures equally, missing where an agent truly understands its world and where it's just guessing. This paper introduces a new testing method that maps an agent's actual performance on specific tasks directly to measurable reliability of its internal understanding, with proven error bounds.

Current safety certification for general AI agents is too blunt: a single worst-case failure in any scenario can block deployment, even if the agent works reliably in the scenarios that matter. This work makes it possible to certify when an agent is safe to deploy on specific tasks by proving exactly where its planning is trustworthy and where it isn't. This could enable practical deployment of capable AI systems while maintaining verifiable safety guarantees.

A Concentration Inequality for the Covariance Matrix of an Arbitrary Subset of Random Vectors

Measuring uncertainty when you choose which data points to analyze

When statisticians select which data to use based on what that data looks like, standard mathematical guarantees break down. This paper proves new rules for how reliable sample covariance matrices remain even after such data-dependent selection—and shows these new rules are much tighter and more practical than existing workarounds. The results extend to realistic scenarios with weakly dependent observations and apply directly to clustering problems.

Many real machine-learning algorithms pick or filter their data based on what they see, not randomly in advance. Without reliable guarantees for this setting, practitioners can't know whether their statistical conclusions are trustworthy. This work closes that gap, providing theoretical backing for algorithms that adaptively select subsets of data while maintaining provable recovery guarantees—particularly relevant for clustering tasks where picking the right groups is inherently data-dependent.

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

Why the best brain-computer interface decoder changes from person to person

Brain-computer interfaces that read motor intention from EEG show no single best decoding method across people, even in ideal conditions. Testing over 1,000 different pipelines on more than 340,000 individual model fits revealed that the top-performing approach varies by dataset and person—matching the decoder to each person's brain patterns improved accuracy by about 7 percentage points compared to using one universal decoder.

Brain-computer interfaces aim to help people with paralysis or locked-in syndrome control prosthetics or communication devices. If one decoding method worked best for everyone, clinical deployment would be straightforward. This work shows that practical BCI systems need to personalize their approach for each user rather than relying on a single universal design, suggesting that real-world BCI performance depends as much on fitting the algorithm to individual brain differences as on the algorithm itself.

AI Exposure Scores: what they measure, what they miss, and what comes next

Why AI job-impact scores miss what policymakers actually need to know

A widely-cited 2023 study measured how much AI could assist with different jobs, but researchers now show these scores oversimplify the real world—ignoring when and where jobs actually change, who gets hurt or helped, and whether workers can actually use AI tools. The gap widens because policymakers keep citing the original scores without knowing their limitations, leaving policy decisions built on incomplete evidence.

Governments and companies are making decisions about worker retraining, hiring, and regulation based on these exposure scores. If the scores ignore timing, geography, and actual adoption patterns, policymakers might protect the wrong workers or miss those most at risk. The authors argue the real fix requires researchers and policymakers to talk directly—sharing better data, involving workers in the research itself, and shifting from predicting job losses to actively preparing for them.

Optimal Small Set Expanders and Their Codes

Building better secret-sharing networks that resist quantum computers

Researchers identified the best possible network designs that connect small groups of users to as many others as possible, then proved these optimal networks can be built with specific structural properties. They showed these designs could improve codes used in post-quantum cryptography—the encryption methods needed to protect secrets from future quantum computers.

As quantum computers grow more powerful, current encryption methods will become obsolete. These optimized networks offer a concrete path to building cryptographic systems that stay secure in a post-quantum world, potentially protecting everything from financial transactions to government communications decades from now.