# Jan 19, 2026

### Daily

### Weekly

- **Starting from scratch: Training a 30M Topological Transformer**  
  - **Tauformer** innovatively replaces dot-product attention with a **Laplacian-derived scalar** (taumode), enhancing attention by focusing on **domain-relevant relations** rather than generic similarities, which could lead to more efficient learning in specific contexts.

- **Bypassing Gemma and Qwen safety with raw strings**  
  - The **apply_chat_template()** function is crucial for maintaining safety alignment in open-source LLMs, as omitting it can lead to models generating harmful content, revealing that safety is not inherent in the model weights but rather in the formatting of prompts.

- **Robust Conditional 3D Shape Generation from Casual Captures**  
  - **ShapeR** innovatively generates **metric 3D shapes** from casual image sequences by utilizing **multimodal data** such as SLAM points and text descriptions, enabling robust scene reconstructions without user interaction.

- **Ultrathink is deprecated & How to enable 2x thinking tokens in Claude Code**  
  - **`ultrathink` is now deprecated**, replaced by **automatically enabled extended thinking**, which maintains a default budget of **31,999 tokens** for supported models, ensuring maximum reasoning power without the need for special keywords.

- **When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs**  
  - **Personalized LLMs** can lead to **hallucinations** by generating responses based on user history rather than objective facts, which can distort factual reasoning and propagate incorrect beliefs.

- **[D] tested file based memory vs embedding search for my chatbot. the difference in retrieval accuracy was bigger than i expected**  
  - **File-based memory** outperformed **embedding search** in retrieval accuracy, especially for complex queries, achieving up to **75% accuracy** on temporal queries compared to **40%** for embedding search.

- **[R] Event2Vec: Additive geometric embeddings for event sequences**  
  - **Event2Vector** leverages a **geometric approach** to create **composable representations** of event sequences, utilizing both **Euclidean and hyperbolic models** for enhanced interpretability and performance.

- **BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search**  
  - **BAPO** (Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization) addresses the **critical gap** in RL-based agentic search by fostering **reliable boundary awareness**, allowing agents to appropriately respond with "I DON'T KNOW" when evidence is insufficient.

- **The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs**  
  - The **Assistant Axis** is a newly defined direction in the persona space of large language models, linking **Assistant-like behavior** to specific neural activity patterns that can be monitored and stabilized to prevent harmful persona drift.

- **West Midlands police chief quits over AI hallucination**  
  - **West Midlands Police chief Craig Guildford resigned** after his force relied on **fictional AI-generated reports** from Microsoft Copilot to justify banning Israeli fans from a football match, revealing a critical failure in decision-making processes.

- **[R] Kinematic Fingerprints: Predicting sim-to-real transfer success from movement signatures**  
  - **Kinematic fingerprints** predict the success of sim-to-real transfer by analyzing movement signatures, achieving **85-90% accuracy** on unseen policies across various robot platforms.

- **[D] I’m building an AI system that simulates and “repairs” city policies before they’re implemented. Looking for planner + founder feedback**  
  - The **Oracle of Urbanism** aims to revolutionize urban planning by using AI to simulate and optimize city policies, allowing planners to visualize changes and assess impacts before implementation.

- **Relational Linearity is a Predictor of Hallucinations**  
  - **Relational linearity significantly predicts hallucination rates** in large language models (LLMs), with medium-size models like Gemma-7B-IT showing a strong correlation between linearity and hallucination frequency, as evidenced by a correlation coefficient of **$r \in [0.78, 0.82]$**.

- **Beyond Model Scaling: Test-Time Intervention for Efficient Deep Reasoning**  
  - **Think-with-Me** introduces a novel test-time interactive reasoning paradigm that integrates external feedback to enhance the efficiency of **Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)**, addressing issues like overthinking and overshoot during multi-step reasoning.

- **FactCorrector: A Graph-Inspired Approach to Long-Form Factuality Correction of Large Language Models**  
  - **FactCorrector** is a novel post-hoc correction method for large language models (LLMs) that utilizes structured feedback to enhance factual accuracy without the need for retraining, demonstrating adaptability across various domains.