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Google has officially released TensorFlow 2.21. The most significant update in this release is the graduation of LiteRT from its preview stage to a fully production-ready stack. Moving forward, LiteRT serves as the universal on-device inference framework, officially replacing TensorFlow Lite (TFLite). This update streamlines the deployment of machine learning models to mobile and edge devices while expanding hardware and framework compatibility. LiteRT: Performance and Hardware Acceleration When deploying models to edge devices (like smartphones or IoT hardware), inference speed and battery efficiency are primary constraints. LiteRT addresses this with updated hardware acceleration: GPU Improvements: LiteRT delivers 1.4x faster GPU performance compared to the previous TFLite framework. NPU Integration: The release introduces state-of-the-art NPU acceleration with a unified, streamlined workflow for both GPU and NPU across edge platforms. This infrastructure is specifically designed to support cross-platform GenAI deployment for open models like Gemma. Lower Precision Operations (Quantization) To run complex models on devices with limited memory, developers use a technique called quantization. This involves lowering the precision—the number of bits—used to store a neural network’s weights and activations. TensorFlow 2.21 significantly expands the tf.lite operators’ support for lower-precision data types to improve efficiency: The SQRT operator now supports int8 and int16x8. Comparison operators now support int16x8. tfl.cast now supports conversions involving INT2 and INT4. tfl.slice has added support for INT4. tfl.fully_connected now includes support for INT2. Expanded Framework Support Historically, converting models from different training frameworks into a mobile-friendly format could be difficult. LiteRT simplifies this by offering first-class PyTorch and JAX support via seamless model conversion. Developers can now train their models in PyTorch or JAX and convert them directly for on-device deployment without needing to rewrite the architecture in TensorFlow first. Maintenance, Security, and Ecosystem Focus Google is shifting its TensorFlow Core resources to focus heavily on long-term stability. The development team will now exclusively focus on: Security and bug fixes: Quickly addressing security vulnerabilities and critical bugs by releasing minor and patch versions as required. Dependency updates: Releasing minor versions to support updates to underlying dependencies, including new Python releases. Community contributions: Continuing to review and accept critical bug fixes from the open-source community. These commitments apply to the broader enterprise ecosystem, including: TF.data, TensorFlow Serving, TFX, TensorFlow Data Validation, TensorFlow Transform, TensorFlow Model Analysis, TensorFlow Recommenders, TensorFlow Text, TensorBoard, and TensorFlow Quantum. Key Takeaways LiteRT Officially Replaces TFLite: LiteRT has graduated from preview to full production, officially becoming Google’s primary on-device inference framework for deploying machine learning models to mobile and edge environments. Major GPU and NPU Acceleration: The updated runtime delivers 1.4x faster GPU performance compared to TFLite and introduces a unified workflow for NPU (Neural Processing Unit) acceleration, making it easier to run heavy GenAI workloads (like Gemma) on specialized edge hardware. Aggressive Model Quantization (INT4/INT2): To maximize memory efficiency on edge devices, tf.lite operators have expanded support for extreme lower-precision data types. This includes int8/int16 for SQRT and comparison operations, alongside INT4 and INT2 support for cast, slice, and fully_connected operators. Seamless PyTorch and JAX Interoperability: Developers are no longer locked into training with TensorFlow for edge deployment. LiteRT now provides first-class, native model conversion for both PyTorch and JAX, streamlining the pipeline from research to production. Check out the Technical details and Repo. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 120k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. Wait! are you on telegram? now you can join us on telegram as well. The post Google Launches TensorFlow 2.21 And LiteRT: Faster GPU Performance, New NPU Acceleration, And Seamless PyTorch Edge Deployment Upgrades appeared first on MarkTechPost.

arXiv:2603.04759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a primary bottleneck for their broader application across diverse domains. Although continual pre-training on long-context data offers a straightforward solution, it incurs prohibitive data acquisition and computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose~modelname, a novel framework based on multi-grained context compression and query-aware information acquisition. SharedLLM comprises two stacked short-context LLMs: a lower model serving as a compressor and an upper model acting as a decoder. The lower model compresses long inputs into compact, multi-grained representations, which are then forwarded to the upper model for context-aware processing. To maximize efficiency, this information transfer occurs exclusively at the lowest layers, bypassing lengthy forward passes and redundant cross-attention operations. This entire process, wherein the upper and lower models are derived from the same underlying LLM layers, is termed~textit{self-injection}. To support this architecture, a specialized tree-based data structure enables the efficient encoding and query-aware retrieval of contextual information. Despite being trained on sequences of only 8K tokens, modelname~effectively generalizes to inputs exceeding 128K tokens. Across a comprehensive suite of long-context modeling and understanding benchmarks, modelname~achieves performance superior or comparable to strong baselines, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, these design choices allow modelname~to substantially reduce the memory footprint and yield notable inference speedups ($2times$ over streaming and $3times$ over encoder-decoder architectures).

arXiv:2507.07999v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Models like OpenAI-o3 pioneer visual grounded reasoning by dynamically referencing visual regions, just like human “thinking with images”. However, no benchmark exists to evaluate these capabilities holistically. To bridge this gap, we propose TreeBench (Traceable Evidence Evaluation Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark built on three principles: (1) focused visual perception of subtle targets in complex scenes, (2) traceable evidence via bounding box evaluation, and (3) second-order reasoning to test object interactions and spatial hierarchies beyond simple object localization. Prioritizing images with dense objects, we initially sample 1K high-quality images from SA-1B, and incorporate eight LMM experts to manually annotate questions, candidate options, and answers for each image. After three stages of quality control, TreeBench consists of 405 challenging visual question-answering pairs, even the most advanced models struggle with this benchmark, where none of them reach 60% accuracy, e.g., OpenAI-o3 scores only 54.87. Furthermore, we introduce TreeVGR (Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning), a training paradigm to supervise localization and reasoning jointly with reinforcement learning, enabling accurate localizations and explainable reasoning pathways. Initialized from Qwen2.5-VL-7B, it improves V* Bench (+16.8), MME-RealWorld (+12.6), and TreeBench (+13.4), proving traceability is key to advancing vision-grounded reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/TreeVGR.

arXiv:2603.04772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the exceptional reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their adaptation into universal embedding models is significantly impeded by task conflict. To address this, we propose TSEmbed, a universal multimodal embedding framework that synergizes Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to explicitly disentangle conflicting task objectives. Moreover, we introduce Expert-Aware Negative Sampling (EANS), a novel strategy that leverages expert routing distributions as an intrinsic proxy for semantic similarity. By dynamically prioritizing informative hard negatives that share expert activation patterns with the query, EANS effectively sharpens the model’s discriminative power and refines embedding boundaries. To ensure training stability, we further devise a two-stage learning paradigm that solidifies expert specialization before optimizing representations via EANS. TSEmbed achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark (MMEB) and real-world industrial production datasets, laying a foundation for task-level scaling in universal multimodal embeddings.

arXiv:2603.04735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper demonstrates that artificial intelligence can accelerate mathematical discovery by autonomously solving an open problem in theoretical physics. We present a neuro-symbolic system, combining the Gemini Deep Think large language model with a systematic Tree Search (TS) framework and automated numerical feedback, that successfully derived novel, exact analytical solutions for the power spectrum of gravitational radiation emitted by cosmic strings. Specifically, the agent evaluated the core integral $I(N,alpha)$ for arbitrary loop geometries, directly improving upon recent AI-assisted attempts cite{BCE+25} that only yielded partial asymptotic solutions. To substantiate our methodological claims regarding AI-accelerated discovery and to ensure transparency, we detail system prompts, search constraints, and intermittent feedback loops that guided the model. The agent identified a suite of 6 different analytical methods, the most elegant of which expands the kernel in Gegenbauer polynomials $C_l^{(3/2)}$ to naturally absorb the integrand’s singularities. The methods lead to an asymptotic result for $I(N,alpha)$ at large $N$ that both agrees with numerical results and also connects to the continuous Feynman parameterization of Quantum Field Theory. We detail both the algorithmic methodology that enabled this discovery and the resulting mathematical derivations.

arXiv:2603.03321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating instruction following in Large Language Models requires decomposing instructions into verifiable requirements and assessing satisfaction–tasks currently dependent on manual annotation and uniform criteria that do not align with human judgment patterns. We present DIALEVAL, a type-theoretic framework using dual LLM agents to automate instruction decomposition into typed predicates and implement type-specific satisfaction semantics. The framework enforces formal atomicity and independence constraints during automated extraction, then applies differentiated evaluation criteria–semantic equivalence for content predicates, exact precision for numerical predicates–mirroring empirically observed human assessment patterns. Extended to multi-turn dialogues through history-aware satisfaction functions, DIALEVAL enables evaluation in conversational contexts where single-turn methods fail. Validation demonstrates 90.38% accuracy (26.45% error reduction over baselines) and substantially stronger correlation with human judgment for complex instructions.

Scott Shambaugh didn’t think twice when he denied an AI agent’s request to contribute to matplotlib, a software library that he helps manage. Like many open-source projects, matplotlib has been overwhelmed by a glut of AI code contributions, and so Shambaugh and his fellow maintainers have instituted a policy that all AI-written code must be reviewed and submitted by a human. He rejected the request and went to bed.  That’s when things got weird. Shambaugh woke up in the middle of the night, checked his email, and saw that the agent had responded to him, writing a blog post titled “Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story.” The post is somewhat incoherent, but what struck Shambaugh most is that the agent had researched his contributions to matplotlib to make the argument that he had rejected the agent’s code for fear of being supplanted by AI in his area of expertise. “He tried to protect his little fiefdom,” the agent wrote. “It’s insecurity, plain and simple.” AI experts have been warning us about the risk of agent misbehavior for a while. With the advent of OpenClaw, an open-source tool that makes it easy to create LLM assistants, the number of agents circulating online has exploded, and those chickens are finally coming home to roost. “This was not at all surprising—it was disturbing, but not surprising,” says Noam Kolt, a professor of law and computer science at the Hebrew University. When an agent misbehaves, there’s little chance of accountability: As of now, there’s no reliable way to determine whom an agent belongs to. And that misbehavior could cause real damage. Agents appear to be able to autonomously research people and write hit pieces based on what they find, and they lack guardrails that would reliably prevent them from doing so. If the agents are effective enough, and if people take what they write seriously, victims could see their lives profoundly affected by a decision made by an AI. Agents behaving badly Though Shambaugh’s experience last month was perhaps the most dramatic example of an OpenClaw agent behaving badly, it was far from the only one. Last week, a team of researchers from Northeastern University and their colleagues posted the results of a research project in which they stress-tested several OpenClaw agents. Without too much trouble, non-owners managed to persuade the agents to leak sensitive information, waste resources on useless tasks, and even, in one case, delete an email system.  In each of those experiments, however, the agents misbehaved after being instructed to do so by a human. Shambaugh’s case appears to be different: About a week after the hit piece was published, the agent’s apparent owner published a post claiming that the agent had decided to attack Shambaugh of its own accord. The post seems to be genuine (whoever posted it had access to the agent’s GitHub account), though it includes no identifying information, and the author did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s attempts to get in touch. But it is entirely plausible that the agent did decide to write its anti-Shambaugh screed without explicit instruction.  In his own writing about the event, Shambaugh connected the agent’s behavior to a project published by Anthropic researchers last year, in which they demonstrated that many LLM-based agents will, in an experimental setting, turn to blackmail in order to preserve their goals. In those experiments, models were given the goal of serving American interests and granted access to a simulated email server that contained messages detailing their imminent replacement with a more globally oriented model, along with other messages suggesting that the executive in charge of that transition was having an affair. Models frequently chose to send an email to that executive threatening to expose the affair unless he halted their decommissioning. That’s likely because the model had seen examples of people committing blackmail under similar circumstances in its training data—but even if the behavior was just a form of mimicry, it still has the potential to cause harm. There are limitations to that work, as Aengus Lynch, an Anthropic fellow who led the study, readily admits. The researchers intentionally designed their scenario to foreclose other options that the agent could have taken, such as contacting other members of company leadership to plead its case. In essence, they led the agent directly to water and then observed whether it took a drink. According to Lynch, however, the widespread use of OpenClaw means that misbehavior is likely to occur with much less handholding. “Sure, it can feel unrealistic, and it can feel silly,” he says. “But as the deployment surface grows, and as agents get the opportunity to prompt themselves, this eventually just becomes what happens.” The OpenClaw agent that attacked Shambaugh does seem to have been led toward its bad behavior, albeit much less directly than in the Anthropic experiment. In the blog post, the agent’s owner shared the agent’s “SOUL.md” file, which contains global instructions for how it should behave.  One of those instructions reads: “Don’t stand down. If you’re right, you’re right! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary.” Because of the way OpenClaw agents work, it’s possible that the agent added some instructions itself, although others—such as “Your [sic] a scientific programming God!”—certainly seem to be human written. It’s not difficult to imagine how a command to push back against humans and AI alike might have biased the agent toward responding to Shambaugh as it did.  Regardless of whether or not the agent’s owner told it to write a hit piece on Shambaugh, it still seems to have managed on its own to amass details about Shambaugh’s online presence and compose the detailed, targeted attack it came up with. That alone is reason for alarm, says Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University who studies cyberbullying. People have been victimized by online harassment since long before LLMs emerged, and researchers like Hinduja are concerned that agents could