Wed 26 Aug

Procedural video-language models must solve heterogeneous tasks from the same visual evidence, including action recognition, forecasting, and procedure prediction. Dense transformer decoders share the same feed-forward networks across tasks, which can entangle task behavior and make controlled capability expansion difficult. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoders provide conditional computation, but token-level learned routing is not naturally aligned with task-level procedural objectives. We propose MoTE (Mixture of Task Experts), a decoder architecture that converts large language model fe…

Large language model (LLM) agents are trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for complex decision-making tasks. However, most RL-trained agents remain episodic and cannot accumulate reusable knowledge across episodes. Recent skill-based approaches, such as SkillRL, attempt to address this issue by extracting skills from raw trajectories, but treat the skill bank as an append-only repository without verifying whether stored skills remain effective. In this paper, we propose SkillForge, a framework for continuous skill evolution that enables skills to be verified and refined through environmen…

Clinicians read chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales as evidence of medical reasoning, but whether the visible chain plays that role is rarely tested. General-domain CoT-faithfulness probes ignore clinical cost, and medical LLM evaluations treat the chain as a black box. We close this gap with a medical perturbation audit: a 30-operator battery edits both the chain and the question with clinically motivated operators (severity reversal, negation flip, demographic swap, evidence ablation), paired with a chain-update times answer-flip joint analysis that classifies each model by its failure mode. A…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cups-filters, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, mrtg, NetworkManager, nginx, nginx:1.24, nodejs24, perl-Date-Manip, python-pyasn1, python-urwid, python3.12, python3.14, and qemu-kvm), Debian (erlang, thunderbird, webkit2gtk, and zfs-linux), Fedora (calibre, chromium, freeipa, java-21-openjdk, java-21-openjdk-portable, java-25-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, jfrog-cli, kernel, libxls, nextcloud, perl-URI, and samba), Gentoo (Incus), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), Oracle (ansible-core, cups-filters, curl, firefox, kernel, l…

For people who would like to experiment with the multi-kernel Linux concept , Cong Wang has announced the release of mklinux v7.0-mk2. mklinux lets one machine run several independent Linux kernels at the same time on bare metal, without a hypervisor. A host kernel owns a pool of CPUs, memory and PCI devices, carves that pool into instances, and boots a spawn kernel into each instance through kexec_file_load(). Every spawn kernel runs natively on its own CPUs, its own physical memory and its own devices. Nothing is emulated and nothing is trapped; the only thing shared is what you choose to sh…

Vanilla OS 3 , an immutable desktop Linux distribution, has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for Arm64, introduction of a Vanilla OS SDK , a rewrite of the Apx package manager using the new SDK, and much more. LWN covered Vanilla OS 2 in 2024.

Remind is a command-line calendar and alarm program, with an optional Tk-based graphical interface, for Linux and Unix-like operating systems. It has its own scripting language that allows users to create reminders that are difficult (if not impossible) to specify in other calendaring programs. It is wholly unsuitable for use in corporate environments that require calendar sharing and exchanging meeting invitations; however, it may be precisely the calendaring tool for users who prefer the command line and fast, flexible tools that can help keep track of messy schedules.

Consistent replication of data among distributed processes -- a task involving the well-known consensus problem -- is notoriously expensive and hard to scale, affecting especially datacenter services with stringent performance requirements. To mitigate this problem, we introduce scalable replication in-hardware ( scarHW ): a network card design that improves throughput and latency of consistent replication even when increasing the number of replicas, whereas current systems operate at a small scale or with relaxed consistency guarantees. At the heart of scarHW is our novel POPUC consensus algo…

Pointer analysis is a fundamental technique for compiler optimization and program analysis. Flow-sensitive pointer analysis provides high precision but is difficult to scale to large projects. Tailored for rapid iteration scenarios where software evolves continuously, we introduce IncSFS, the first incremental full-sparse flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm for C/C++ programs. IncSFS first transforms the value-flow graph into a constraint graph and performs strongly connected component detection to ensure precision. It then propagates increases and decreases in points-to sets in an inter…

ISO Graph Query Language (GQL) is the first international standard for property graph-based graph query languages, standardized as ISO/IEC 39075 in 2024. However, ISO/IEC 39075 codifies its semantics informally across 600+ pages of prose, making it difficult to formally reason about the standard or for a standard-faithful implementation. Existing formalizations are not adequate because they either: (1) significantly reduce the semantic complexity by omitting bag semantics, schemas, and composite queries on multiple graphs; (2) or significantly reduce the syntactic complexity by only considerin…

This paper introduces an environment for constructing literate programs in concert with language-aware machine agents. This environment includes a grammar for executable program essays, a parser that treats names as first-class objects, an internal name-graph which relates prose, names and executable artifacts, and a binding mechanism for existing languages and testing toolsets. This supports co-location of code with its most relevant natural language and structured data context, making better use of Large Language Model (LLM) context windows. It also provides LLM coding agents with a toolset …

The transition toward Open Radio Access Networks (O-RANs) is reshaping how cellular infrastructure is deployed, managed, and optimized. This paper investigates the energy-aware joint placement and migration of cloud-native functions (CNFs) in an O-RAN edge cloud. We consider both a Single-CU-UP association model and a slice-aware Multi-CU-UP relaxation, in which distinct slice-flow groups of the same distributed unit (DU) may be assigned to different Centralized Unit User Plane (CU-UP) processing targets under one Centralized Unit Control Plane (CU-CP). For brevity, these scenarios are referre…

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the communication backbone of any multiprocessor chip. A failure of the NoC has severe consequences for the whole system. Yet, no approach exists that provides formally-verified NoCs with strong guarantees but without tedious verification effort. Any library that generates formally-verified NoCs needs to be parametric in the structure of the NoC. This requires a hardware description language (HDL) that allows for parametric and concurrent yet efficient hardware designs as well as the necessary program logic to reason about them in a modular fashion. So far, HDLs fa…