18 AUG 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in cybersecurity operations to assist cybersecurity analysts with rapid decision-making against emerging threats. However, there is a main criteria that must be met when using LLMs in cybersecurity, that is, trust in the generated outputs. As Agentic AI is integrated into operational systems, a robust evidence attribution and provenance tracking technique is essential to trace the origins of model generations. When autonomous agents make a decision (right or wrong), the ability to trace back through the decision chain is critical, as…

Many areas of AI research, such as language model interpretability and chain of thought faithfulness, seek to explain model behaviors. But what constitutes a "good" explanation? In this work, we evaluate explanations through the lens of counterfactual simulatability-whether the explanation is useful for predicting model behaviors on related counterfactual inputs. To this end, we introduce CHIVE (Counterfactual Hypothesis Investigation Via Edits), a novel agentic pipeline that identifies unexpected model behaviors in the wild and investigates them with counterfactual prompt edits. This yields t…

Reinforcement learning algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) are largely distinguished by their variance reduction strategy. Group-relative methods like GRPO reduce gradient variance by sampling multiple rollouts per prompt, but provide only sequence-level credit. Training is also blocked by straggler rollouts, reducing throughput and increasing off-policyness. Learned value functions theoretically address both problems, providing token-level advantages without requiring large groups. However, additional infrastructure engineering challenges combined with the practical success of critic-…

Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes coming in was still " bigger than I would have wished for ". In fact, 7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel's history, adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. It's time to look at some statistics to get a handle on how the kernel's development community is changing.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, dracut, freerdp, gnome-remote-desktop, kernel, and nghttp2), Debian (apr-util, docker.io, ironic, neutron, postgresql-15, unzip, and util-linux), Fedora (chromium, jfrog-cli, jrnl, libgsasl, libsoup3, pdns, pdns-recursor, perl-Archive-Tar, php-pear-PHP-CodeSniffer, rust-bat, rust-git-delta, rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool, rust-lsd, rust-pretty-git-prompt, rust-tokei, and stunnel), Gentoo (haveged, HTTP-Daemon, nginx, NTFS-3G, Portage, PostgreSQL, and X.Org X server, XWayland), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bin…

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference , better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation about bootstrappable builds , which is som…

Version 5.0 of GNU Poke , a binary-data editor, has been released. This release includes a number of improvements to the Poke compiler, additions to the Poke language, as well as runtime and standard library updates. See below for the full list of changes.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Mark J. Wielaard has been honored with the second annual Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom for his many years of service to software freedom. Mark is one of many key FOSS developers who has designed his career so that his employers have funded much of his FOSS work. Nevertheless, Mark continues his volunteer work after hours as a key contributor who maintains Sourceware — the oldest FOSS collaboration and developer infrastructure hosting site in history. In addition to his work on Sourceware, Wielaard is a member of the DWARF De…

This paper presents PostgreSQL-V 2.0, a scalable integrated vector database system inside PostgreSQL. Existing PostgreSQL-based vector search systems such as pgvector embed vector indexes into PostgreSQL's page-oriented storage engine, incurring significant overhead that leads to a huge performance gap with specialized vector databases. In our earlier work, we introduced PostgreSQL-V 1.0, which addresses this issue by separating vector index structures from PostgreSQL's storage engine, enabling vector search performance close to that of native vector index libraries while preserving SQL compat…

Labeling large text corpora with LLM teachers has become a practical route to training data at scale. At millions of items, hand-labeling every batch is not feasible, and two questions dominate: what label quality a teacher buys per dollar, and how to keep a fleet of GPU workers busy under skewed, failure-prone workloads. We present a simple, reproducible pipeline that addresses both. First, a work-stealing ring pool: each worker owns a queue, drains it first, and then steals from ring successors, with exactly-once task claims via atomic conditional writes and crash tolerance via stale-claim s…

Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time. Put plainly, instead of re-deriving what a corpus means on every question, the work is done once when a document arrives and is thereafter merely consulted -- a compiler, not an interpreter, of meaning. An alternative is to compile that meaning once, at ingest time, into a compact, queryable semantic substrate and maintain it as the corpus evolves. The central objection is maintenance cost: rebuilding a truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) on every change appears pro…

Choreographic programming is a programming model for developing distributed applications where an entire communication protocol is written as a single program, which a compiler then projects to one process per participant. Choreographic programming abstracts over low-level network communication primitives such as sockets, and provides a high degree of safety guarantees with deadlock freedom ensured by construction. Mechanizing choreographies necessarily deals with both operations specific to distributed programming and standard (local) operations that also occur in non-distributed programs, as…

The rise of vehicle-infrastructure (V2I) collaboration enables safer and broader perception. To process large-scale V2I video streams, vision-language models (VLMs) are promising as they unify multi-view vision into end-to-end task grounding, reducing handcrafted design. We use Vision Mixture-of-Experts (V-MoE) as the distributed visual backbone of VLMs, leveraging sparse expert routing to enable conditional computation across diverse viewpoints under resource constraints. Yet, V-MoEs face a critical challenge: large-scale data shifts over minutes to hours in V2I systems, amplified by agnostic…

Functional dependencies are an important and well-studied class of database constraints that correspond to a notion expressed by dependence atoms in team logic. In practice, data often contain errors, so in some cases it might be useful to allow the database to have a small number of tuples that violate the desired dependency. Väänänen (2017) studied the axiomatisation of a notion of approximate dependence that specifies for each dependence atom how much of the database can be disregarded. We demonstrate that the interaction of approximate dependence atoms is more complicated than previously t…