Depression affects millions of Bengali speakers across South Asia, yet automated detection systems have relied almost entirely on datasets translated from English. Such datasets cannot capture the emoticons, romanized Bengali words, and elongated spellings that characterize real expressions of distress. We introduce BanglishDepYT, a Bengali depression dataset collected natively from YouTube, comprising 191,000 unlabeled comments and 1,000 samples verified through dual bilingual annotation. We propose EPH (Emotion-Preserving Hybrid preprocessing), which converts emoticons to semantic tags, preserves Banglish tokens, protects negation words, and normalizes emotional elongation. A key finding is that preprocessing choice substantially affects performance on informal text: standard cleaning reduces the Banglish Survival Rate to zero (SVM F1: 0.7062), while EPH preserves signals (CESS: 0.9996 vs. 0.6694) and raises SVM F1 to 0.8570, an improvement of 0.1508. We further apply domain-adaptive pretraining (DAPT), continuing SahajBERT pretraining on unlabeled in-domain comments. DAPT-SahajBERT achieves the highest mean F1 (0.8161) and MCC (0.6272), significantly outperforming the baseline (F1: 0.7805, p = 0.0013, d = 1.450) and matching MuRIL (p = 0.589). These results suggest that targeted domain pretraining is a competitive alternative to large-scale multilingual pretraining. LLM-assisted annotation using Qwen2.5-7B achieves substantial human agreement (kappa = 0.611), enabling pseudo-labeling of 96,071 comments. Semi-supervised training improves AUC from 0.8499 to 0.8731 (p = 0.044), offering a scalable path to expanding annotation. All code, models, and datasets are publicly released to support reproducible research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01633
Verifying that a packaged food is Halal requires reading ingredient declarations and E-number additives before goods enter certified warehouses. Dual-origin additives such as E471, E422, E441 and E920 are Mushbooh (doubtful) unless a botanical, microbial or certified-Halal qualifier appears in the same ingredient clause, so a plant-based qualifier on one clause must not clear an unqualified additive in another. We call a failure to respect this scope cross-clause modifier confounding and build a benchmark of 3,199 items (277 Open Food Facts records and 2,922 template-generated clause-swap items, labelled by an explicit 50-code rule base rather than by a certification authority) with a 540-item counterfactual suite. We propose Halal-NeSyNet, which couples a DistilBERT encoder with a 16-dimensional rule-derived symbolic vector through cross-attention and gated fusion, trained with an asymmetric false-Halal risk loss. Over five seeds, text-only TF-IDF baselines reach 86.25-86.71 % accuracy with 13.42-21.73 % false-Halal leakage and 6.33-26.00 % counterfactual triad consistency, whereas Halal-NeSyNet reaches 97.04+/-0.34 % and 99.67+/-0.50 %. Gradient boosting given the same symbolic vector reaches 96.25+/-1.24 % (+0.59 points from Halal-NeSyNet, 95 % CI [-1.11, +2.28]), so most of the gain comes from clause-scoped symbolic features and not from the network, and the risk loss did not help. Holding out whole template families, text-only models fall to 61.91-78.35 %, Halal-NeSyNet to 90.87+/-11.76 % and logistic regression with the symbolic vector to 91.11+/-2.88 %, with far more spread for Halal-NeSyNet. A three-lane receiving simulation auto-clears 49.33 % of cargo at 0.76 % green-lane contamination. Because labels and features come from one rule engine and 91.3 % of the items are templated, the results measure fidelity to a rule policy, not religious certification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01612
While online medical consultation broadens access, unprompted patient disclosures and topic shifts frequently disrupt clinician inquiry, leaving clinical states progressively revealed. We characterize these dynamics using both existing evaluation metrics and task-specific interaction metrics designed in this work. Through an empirical study across 16 medical dialogue datasets, we show that authentic online interactions exhibit substantially lower contextual continuity and higher unpredictability than offline and simulated benchmarks. We propose PRISM (Policy Reasoning with Inferred States for Medicine), a framework inspired by partially observable Markov decision processes that decouples latent state estimation from action selection to address drifting dialogue trajectories. Specifically, PRISM factorizes clinical triage into belief estimation, policy optimization, and response realization. By maintaining an evolving posterior belief over consultation states and conditioning action selection on the maximum a posteriori state, PRISM advances clinical goals while accommodating patient-initiated shifts. Extensive evaluations show that PRISM substantially outperforms frontier LLMs and clinical agents, achieving a 22.40 percentage point gain in clinical decision accuracy alongside decisive improvements in response generation, surpassing the strongest baseline by 5.51 points in BERTScore_F1. Furthermore, ablation studies show that providing oracle consultation states consistently boosts response quality across all evaluated baselines by guiding their action reasoning, yielding average gains of 5.58 points in BERTScore_F1.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01474
Foundation models (FMs) learn reusable representations from large collections of unlabeled data. In chemistry the corresponding data mainly consists of molecular structures, which are abundant, whereas experimental measurements are scarce. Chemical FMs such as ChemBERTa and MoLFormer were therefore trained on diverse molecular structures to enable fine-tuning on small experimental datasets (less than 100 datapoints in most realistic scenarios) and subsequent property prediction. At the same time, general-purpose FMs such as GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were trained on virtually all publicly available data, including knowledge of the humankind on molecular properties and laws governing them. Here we compare accuracies of chemical and general-purpose FMs on tasks from various areas of chemistry. Strikingly, general-purpose GPT-6 Astra outperforms the currently eligible chemical FMs on five physicochemical and quantum-chemical regression tasks when only 60 experimental datapoints are available. Only when provided 10x datapoints do the best chemical FMs reach performance of GPT-6 Astra: on 1,000 and 10,000 points they show performance on par with Astra on 60 and 1,000 points, respectively. Thus, counterintuitively, frontier general-purpose FMs are better suited for guiding chemical research in data-scarce areas than specialized chemical FMs, suggesting that learning relevant primitives (e.g. chemical structures) does not substitute training on relevant humankind knowledge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41899
Multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery provides continuous, cloud-free observations of crop phenology for agricultural monitoring in cloudy and rainy regions, yet high-accuracy classification typically requires extensive labeled samples. Although self-supervised pre-training mitigates label dependency in remote sensing, existing frameworks primarily target optical imagery or generic spatial SAR scenes, underutilizing temporal backscatter dynamics and polarimetric scattering mechanisms. We propose SAR-TS-BERT, a physics-guided BERT-style self-supervised pre-training framework for SAR time-series crop classification. SAR-TS-BERT integrates backscatter intensities and polarimetric ratio features (VV, VH, and VV/VH) with dual-polarimetric Cloude-Pottier decomposition parameters ($H/\alpha/A$) into a six-band input representation through two core designs: 1) a physics-guided span masking strategy (SpanPhysics) that adaptively selects contiguous masked spans based on temporal backscatter change rates to prioritize key phenological transitions; and 2) a dual-branch cross-modal fusion encoder that models backscatter and polarimetric decomposition features through separate Transformer branches followed by bidirectional cross-attention fusion. On independent test sets in Estonia (EuroCropsML) and the USA (California CDL), SAR-TS-BERT achieves overall accuracies (OAs) of 96.78% and 87.29%, respectively, and attains a mean monthly OA of 99.37% on Chongming Island, Shanghai. On the Estonia benchmark, pre-training improves OA and Macro F1 by 1.17 and 1.59 percentage points over training from scratch under full supervision, and by 2.58 and 5.19 percentage points using only 1% labeled data. Incorporating SAR scattering physics into temporal self-supervised pre-training effectively enhances crop classification accuracy, parcel-level mapping consistency, and few-shot transferability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41728
Clinical trial failures are a major barrier to efficient drug development, incurring substantial costs and delaying patient access to effective therapies. Structured approaches such as the Hierarchical Interaction Network (HINT) predict trial outcomes by explicitly modelling interactions between drugs, diseases and protocols, but make limited use of the free text in trial registrations. We evaluate two domain-specific language models, BioBERT (108M parameters) and BioMistral (7B parameters), for phase-level outcome prediction on the TOP benchmark (12,477 trials), representing each trial as text built from ten this http URL fields. We compare fine-tuning (full fine-tuning for BioBERT, low-rank adaptation for BioMistral) with probing, in which the pretrained model is frozen and only a lightweight classifier is trained on its embeddings. On the held-out test set of each phase, all four language-model variants achieved higher ROC-AUC (0.613--0.772) and PR-AUC (0.649--0.901) than the published HINT results, corresponding to relative PR-AUC gains of 10--20\%. F1 differences were small and mixed, and no model, including HINT, clearly exceeded the F1 of a trivial classifier that predicts success for every trial. Under the configurations tested, probing performed comparably to fine-tuning: fine-tuned models scored highest on ROC-AUC and PR-AUC in Phases I and II, and frozen BioMistral embeddings in Phase III (ROC-AUC 0.772; PR-AUC 0.901), although most differences between variants were below 0.03 and were not tested for significance. These results suggest that pretrained biomedical representations already encode signal relevant to trial outcome, and that probing is a computationally cheaper alternative to fine-tuning for this task.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41710
Small-scale sentiment classification often suffers from data scarcity, which limits the generalization ability of the models. This study evaluates and compares the effectiveness of three data augmentation strategies: Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), back-translation, and contextual token substitution (nlpaug-style), with both traditional machine learning classifiers (Logistic Regression, Random Forest) and transformer-based models (BERT). We perform a comprehensive empirical comparison with low-resource sentiment datasets by summarizing the results of recent studies and performing targeted head-to-head experiments. Our findings indicate that all augmentation methods improve performance. Contextual augmentation yields the most consistent gains for BERT models, while EDA and back-translation provide greater benefits for traditional classifiers. These insights help guide the selection of data augmentation techniques tailored to model type and dataset size, filling a critical gap in research on data augmentation for sentiment classification on small datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41518
Transformer-based language models have achieved remarkable success in automated short answer grading (ASAG). However, current methods in ASAG struggle to comprehend, reason about and evaluate complex mathematical answers involving symbols and formulas. These score-only methods fail to generalize across diverse responses and skill states associated with identical scores. Moreover, they ignore the potential upward bias introduced by generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) usage in assessing students' performance and knowledge mastery. To address these limitations, we propose AICG (AI-aware Cognitive-supervised Grading), a two-branch multi-task framework. The first branch combines RoBERTa-based regression, ordinal, and classification heads for individual-answer grading. The second branch uses an expert-designed Q-matrix to associate responses with assessed skills and jointly predicts G-DINA-derived skill mastery and learning gain. Through the shared encoder, these skill-level targets provide cognitive supervision for answer grading beyond score labels. AICG further uses a Gen-AI detector, trained through supervised contrastive pretraining followed by linear classification, to estimate assistance probabilities and convert them into reliability weights, attenuating unreliable cognitive evidence during learning assessment. We conduct experiments on 49,402 instructor-graded responses spanning 19 academic semesters. Relative to RoBERTa regression, AICG reduces mean absolute error (MAE) by 50.3% and improves quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) from 0.798 to 0.927. Ablations identify Q-matrix-guided cognitive supervision as the primary source of improvement, while AI-aware weighting further reduces overall MAE by 4.2% over the unweighted cognitive model and consistently improves MAE and QWK across the four most recent post-Gen-AI semesters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41215
The bottleneck of attention mechanisms, which are the fundamental building block of modern language models, is their quadratic complexity in terms of context size. There has thus been an increasing interest in the compression of the context, also called KV-cache compression. In this article, we consider the problem of compressing the context of attention mechanisms by first formulating it in the Hilbert space associated with its kernel. In this formalism, attention can be represented as the ratio of two linear maps whose interpolant is also the ratio of interpolants, this allows us to consider the interpolation of the linear maps directly. We thus introduce two novel KV-cache compression methods which we call GAIM and Q-DAIM, based on the Generalized Empirical Interpolation Method (GEIM) and the Q-Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (Q-DEIM), respectively. As the cost of these methods is quadratic in terms of context length, we propose surrogate models based on the Taylor series, the Performer and the Random Fourier Features method which allow the compression to be done in linear time. Finally, we extend this result to the streaming attention setting, providing new methods which allow one to penalize the selection of interpolation nodes based on the previously interpolated context and to update the previous interpolation based on new information. We then provide numerical results on the convergence of the residuals and the output error in future queries and preliminary results on the LongBench-E benchmark showing performance comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. These experiments suggest that the range revealed by our Q-DAIM method could help identify where information is concentrated in the KV cache, thus enabling an efficient compression.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40943
Proactive assistants offer short, memory-grounded hints during a conversation, deciding when to assist and what to suggest. Current systems split this between a gate and a larger generator; we evaluate both together on 28,058 decision points. Stage-wise generation scores are oracle-gate ceilings: behind a real gate, end-to-end exact match is 0.2619 against a ceiling of 0.2971, and end-to-end precision is 0.2387, leaving substantial headroom. A gate pays off through precision and compute, whose saving falls from 4.39x with an 8B generator to 1.38x with a 1B one. The memory profile drives hint quality: removing it costs 24.7 exact-match points (rescaled BERTScore 0.57 to 0.35), while retrieval and a larger generator add nothing on exact match. One 1B decoder can do both, gating from an intermediate layer and generating in the same pass. At its final checkpoint it matches or exceeds the two-model pipelines on automatic end-to-end measures with 1.31-1.76x less wall-clock time than the matched 1B pipeline; across three seeds, its deeper exit ties the separate gate. A human evaluation (1,144 ratings over 32 dialogues) supports the memory effect and rates the single model level with the matched 1B pipeline and below the 8B one. Graded metrics and LlamaPIE's native judge track human ratings more closely than exact match, which we report as a strict lower bound.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40611
Activation steering changes what a language model generates by editing its hidden states at inference time. Its most common form adds one vector, the difference of class means (DiM), to every hidden state. CHaRS (concept heterogeneity-aware representation steering) uses optimal transport instead: an entropic plan pairs the clusters of the two classes, and each hidden state moves along a mixture of the cluster displacements, weighted toward its nearest clusters. We study this family of clustered optimal-transport maps for toxicity mitigation in Gemma-2-2B and Granite-3.1-2B, and ask what the plan adds to DiM and whether that survives INT8 and NF4 quantization. We prove an identity: whatever the plan, the displacements averaged with the cluster sizes as weights equal DiM, so a clustered map can differ from DiM only for tokens whose routing weights depart from the cluster sizes. In the CHaRS protocol they stay close, and CHaRS is statistically equivalent to Mean-AcT, which adds DiM at every layer, in all eight pre-specified equivalence tests. A variant fitted on individual tokens, which routes each token mainly to its nearest clusters, leaves 37-39% less toxicity than DiM on Gemma and 51-61% less on Granite at steering strength 3 (toxic-bert), where DiM already removes 76-85% of it. Two other toxicity classifiers confirm the gain on Granite, but on Gemma only one does. At equal strength the variant has somewhat higher perplexity, but at matched toxicity it is slightly more fluent than DiM. Yet a nearly constant map from the same clusters also leaves about 30% less toxicity, so the role of treating tokens differently remains open. Under INT8 and NF4 the variant still leaves less toxicity than DiM, and transferring it from full precision to the NF4 model instead of refitting it adds no significant toxicity after correction for multiple tests.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40055
Inspired by the analogy between the all-or-none activation of biological neurons and the true-false of logic circuits, McCulloch and Pitts proposed a mathematical model of the biological neuron in 1943 with the aim of simulating logical reasoning. Although Norbert Wiener considered the model overly simplistic at the time, it later became a building block of modern neural networks, including large language models. Despite their remarkable empirical success, however, conventional neural networks remain largely black-box systems and struggle with reliable symbolic reasoning. Viewing vectors as spheres of zero radius, we relax the zero-radius constraint and represent concepts as spheres with non-zero radii. We argue that sphere-based representations can capture additional features of biological cognition, including representing spatial concepts as regions and reasoning through model construction and inspection. Building on sphere embeddings, we introduce Sphere Neural Networks (SphNNs), which use a transition map to achieve symbolic-level Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning without training data, thereby taking an initial step toward the original goal of McCulloch and Pitts. We suggest that the zero-radius constraint may reflect an aspect of the oversimplification identified by Wiener and may limit conventional neural networks' capacity for symbolic-level logical reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39559
This dissertation investigates whether Natural Language Processing (NLP) based semantic message prioritisation can improve the treatment of urgent disaster messages in opportunistic emergency communication, using the 2015 Nepal earthquake as a case study. TF IDF with Logistic Regression and BERT are used to classify social media messages into nine humanitarian categories, which are mapped to four routing priorities from P1 to P4. These priorities are integrated into the ONE simulator within a controlled Kathmandu earthquake scenario using a modified Binary Spray and Wait router. BERT achieves higher priority accuracy and P1 recall than Logistic Regression, while reducing under prioritisation and severe priority errors. However, improved NLP performance does not produce uniform network gains. P1 delivery probability remains high and similar across routing conditions, and no consistent latency reduction is observed. The clearest difference appears under buffer pressure, where the BERT condition shows fewer observed ground truth P1 buffer losses than Logistic Regression. The results indicate that semantic prioritisation is most valuable when limited transmission and storage resources are contested, although it cannot overcome mobility and contact constraints in opportunistic networks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37933
Detecting harmful content in Arabic is challenging because of dialectal variations and the semantic overlap between different harm categories. This paper presents a two-stage approach for classifying Arabic user prompts into seven categories of harmful content. First, GLiNER is used to extract harm-related entities from each prompt. The extracted entities are then added to the original text and passed to a fine-tuned MARBERT classifier for final classification. The approach combines explicit entity information with the contextual understanding of a pretrained Arabic language model. The system was evaluated on the development set of the ArGuard 2026 shared task. The results achieved a macro-F1 score of 0.886 and an accuracy of 0.897, demonstrating promising performance in fine-grained harmful content detection. The system reported an accuracy of 0.793 and Macro-F score of 0.735 on a blind test set for subtask 1. For subtask 2, it achieved an accuracy of 0.770 and Macro-F score of 0.754. The analysis also showed that distinguishing between related categories remains challenging. These findings suggest that integrating NER with Arabic language models is a promising approach to harmful content detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37265
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) syndrome differentiation is usually evaluated as static final-label selection over complete clinical records. This setting hides three diagnostic behaviors: whether a model distinguishes semantic-neighbor syndrome labels from easy random distractors, whether it updates predictions as evidence fields are revealed, and whether it should commit under uncertainty. We introduce TCM-DiagCommit, a benchmark derived from the public TCM-SD/ZY-BERT resource while retaining its source syndrome labels; it converts 1,834 source cases into 23,842 task rows over 148 syndrome labels. The benchmark combines random, profile-neighbor, and full-vocabulary candidate ladders with staged t1/t2/t3 evidence. It also includes fixed-label tongue/pulse perturbations and insufficient-evidence variants. A benchmark-defined action contract scores commit, acquire, defer, and abstain. Across five zero-shot DirectLLM calibrations, random10 top-1 accuracy is 63.2% to 66.4%, but hard20 falls to 24.7% to 30.3% and full148 to 14.8% to 22.3%; on hard20, WT(all) wrong-terminal commits remain 62.2% to 74.3%. These results show that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for diagnostic benchmark evaluation: answer selection, evidence use, and benchmark commitment scoring should be measured separately.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37243
Spectral-temporal unmixing of MODIS time series is essential for applications such as abundance mapping and spectral library construction, yet it remains challenging due to (i) spectral-temporal information coupling in MODIS data, (ii) intra-class endmember spectral variability and inter-class signature ambiguity, and (iii) the instability of naively fusing multiple expert representations. This paper presents the Multi- task Disentangling Fusion Mamba (MDF-Mamba) to address these limitations. To resolve spectral-temporal coupling, we design a disentangling architecture that pairs per-channel spectral experts with a dedicated bidirectional state-space (Mamba) temporal branch. Convolutional modules each process a single spectral channel, while the Mamba branch encodes the cross-channel seasonal trajectory, forming a multi-branch expert ensemble with soft inter-expert reweighting based on squeeze-and-excitation. For the integration of these spectral and temporal expert outputs, we introduce mHCFusion, adapting the manifold-constrained hyper-connection framework to merge the outputs in a stable and interpretable manner. Endmember variability is addressed by extending the linear mixing model with pixel-wise learnable spectral variability weights that capture intra-class endmember variation. Finally, we design a multi-task training objective that combines supervised abundance estimation with self-supervised spectral reconstruction and endmember regularization terms on the same training data, yielding a highly efficient framework for spectral-temporal unmixing. Experiments on MODIS time series covering the Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces show that MDF-Mamba achieves the best performance on 12 of 14 evaluation metrics across both datasets (7 of 7 on Alberta; 5 of 7 on Saskatchewan), ranking second on the remaining two.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36750
Written transcripts of the same speech can differ in ways that are not uniquely determined by the speech signal. We formulate evaluation-side transcript canonicalization (ETC), which maps multiple surface forms to a single canonical form when their differences are not determined by speech. To our knowledge, ETC-Bench is the first and most comprehensive multilingual benchmark for evaluation-side transcript canonicalization, covering 181 phenomenon types across 12 languages. Each instance is a minimal pair that shares a sentence context and differs only in a target span exhibiting one phenomenon. To evaluate both canonicalization success and semantic preservation, we propose Semantic-preserving Exact-match Normalization Accuracy (SENA), which combines exact agreement between independently canonicalized pair members with a pair-relative BERTScore constraint against information loss. We further introduce the Taxonomy-guided Agent Canonicalization Skill (TACS), which provides LLM agents with phenomenon descriptions and explicit canonicalization contracts. Experiments with five baseline configurations and three TACS-based agents show that the agents outperform the baseline systems on shared languages. ETC-Bench provides a systematic testbed for evaluation-side transcript canonicalization across languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36527
TrackJoint is a Modelica MultiBody component that turns a three-dimensional road surface into a joint with two degrees of freedom. The two joint coordinates are the distance travelled along a reference line and the sideways offset from that line. Together they give the position, orientation and angular velocity of a single frame_b connector. All road geometry reaches the joint as a small set of periodic piecewise-quintic splines, so one component can represent any circuit whose splines have been fitted beforehand. The road constraint is closed with d'Alembert's principle. The two generalized forces that belong to the joint coordinates are set to zero, so no Lagrange multipliers are needed. The joint is connected to a multibody race car in Dymola and the pair is exported as one FMI~3.0 FMU. The same FMU is then used for time-domain simulation and for CasADi/IPOPT minimum lap-time optimization, with no change to the model in between. This works because the joint keeps the arc-length coordinate as a real state and publishes its time derivative, which is the quantity that lets the problem be rewritten with distance We report results for minimum lap time simulations on the Singapore Formula~1 circuit.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36407
Early AI programs were often also theories of how people think, and programs that wrote programs were, in part, theories of how people program. Here we report on the reanimation of two such programs that offer two seemingly different theories of programming and were developed for quite different purposes. The first, Herbert Simon's Heuristic Compiler (1961), was an experimental model of programming as problem-solving, applying the means-ends analysis methods of the General Problem Solver to investigate the nature of the programming task. The second, KBEmacs (1984), was a working prototype of an intelligent programming assistant developed by MIT's Programmer's Apprentice project, built on the view that expert programmers recognize and combine familiar patterns, or "cliches." It let a programmer build up programs by combining cliches through a stylized English command language. We approach both through the methodology of Executable Archaeology, the study of historical computational systems by running their original code, a process we call "reanimation." Our reanimation of the Heuristic Compiler reproduces the compiled code appearing in Simon's 1963 paper, and our reanimation of KBEmacs reproduces the SQRT sequence of its December 1984 self-test. Examined side by side, the two theories turn out to have much in common: the Heuristic Compiler also works by adapting existing routines, and Simon later argued that search alone requires a large body of programming knowledge. To highlight the reflexivity of this project, we deliberately used a modern AI-assisted programming tool, Anthropic's Claude Code (Opus 5.5), to carry out much of the detailed reanimation work, building on a significant base of existing software. The explicit, executable theories of programming that both systems embodied are largely absent from today's far more capable AI coding assistants.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36341
IceBERT, the reference encoder for Icelandic, found that a cleaned web crawl is enough to train a strong model and that starting from a multilingual model can help on some tasks. We revisit both findings with the ModernBERT architecture. We train Icelandic encoders from 12M to 1B parameters on 9B tokens of open data, and rerun IceBERT's benchmarks and five newer tasks for 30 encoders under one protocol with confidence intervals. Our 1B model trained from scratch, to our knowledge the first monolingual Icelandic encoder of that size, is significantly better than IceBERT on all eleven tasks; warm-started from the English Ettin encoder of the same shape, it has the best score of all encoders on every task we rank. Because our model shapes match the English Ettin encoders and the multilingual mmBERT, we can also test the warm start under controlled conditions, at six model sizes and four token budgets. With our vocabulary transplanted, a warm start was never significantly worse than scratch training on the same Icelandic text, and from base size up it was not significantly worse on four tasks than scratch training on 4 times the text (8 times at base and 1B). As models grow, most of the transfer comes from the source model's transformer layers, so even an English source helps. Keeping the source vocabulary instead cost 5 F1 on question answering and nearly three times the compute.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36230