The Inference Report

March 22, 2026

The market is sorting itself by who owns the customer relationship and can credibly deliver results, not by who controls the most advanced technology. OpenAI is doubling headcount to 8,000 by end of 2026 while Nvidia's latest conference failed to move Wall Street, a divergence that reflects investor clarity about which companies extract value versus which merely supply it. Open-weight models like Nvidia's Nemotron-Cascade 2 are hitting Gold Medal performance at 30B parameters with only 3B active, directly undercutting the efficiency moat of frontier models, yet this technical progress hasn't translated into market share because distribution and trust still dominate. Meanwhile, the compliance layer is cracking: Delve stands accused of selling fake compliance to hundreds of customers, a publisher rejected an AI-generated novel outright, and Anthropic's survey of 80,000 Claude users shows hallucinations trouble people far more than job displacement fears. Trust, not capability, is the actual constraint.

Research across multi-agent systems, interpretability, and domain-specific applications reveals a consistent finding: observability alone does not guarantee control. Mechanistic methods achieve near-perfect representation of task-relevant information yet fail to translate that knowledge into corrected outputs, while steering approaches show brittleness under deployment stress. Performance gains come from encoding domain structure into training and evaluation rather than scaling generic models. Pedagogically grounded fine-tuning, clinical benchmarks aligned to real-world needs, and neuro-symbolic architectures with declarative constraint specification all demonstrate that what matters for deployment is generalization to unseen tasks and robustness under perturbation, not aggregate metrics on standard leaderboards.

The infrastructure layer is reasserting itself. Trivy dominates vulnerability scanning with consolidated threat detection, while systemd and protobuf remain the unglamorous backbone everything depends on. On GitHub, the secondary pattern is tooling for AI operations and observability: Phoenix and Claude HUD address the friction point that models and agents are now complex enough to require visibility into internal behavior, while opendataloader and Clawith solve the unglamorous problem of getting messy PDFs and enterprise data into usable formats. The gap between what's trendy and what's useful is narrowing. Compensation is shifting too, with tokens becoming a fourth pillar of engineer pay and companies like DoorDash paying gig workers to train AI, suggesting the real pressure is showing up as cost arbitrage rather than capability breakthroughs. Whoever controls the customer relationship wins; everyone else is either a cost center or selling narrative.

Grant Calloway

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Research Papers — FocusedAll papers
When Correct Solutions Repeat: Rarity-Aware Credit Redistribution for GRPO cs.AI

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) com- monly optimizes each correct completion as an independent learning signal. In GRPO, this completion-level uniformity creates structure-level skew: recurring correct solution forms accumulate positive coefficient mass in proportion to how often they are sampled, while rare forms receive limited credit. We formalize this behavior as multiplicity-induced structure-level credit concentration and introduce a partition- conditioned rule that redistributes positive advantages accord- ing to cluster rarity. Cue-GRPO instantiates this rule with- out auxiliary-model inference by using deterministic Strategy Cues to construct rollout-local partitions of verified-correct traces. Across Qwen2.5-Math-7B and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Cue-GRPO improves AIME repeated-sampling performance, with the largest gains at high sampling budgets. Credit Re- distribution (CR) under Judge Partitions (JP) further indi- cates that the proposed redistribution mechanism can oper- ate with judge-derived partitions. Cue-GRPO adds only 6% wall-clock training overhead over GRPO. These results sup- port structure-level credit redistribution as a practical design axis for RLVR, with Strategy Cues providing a low-overhead implementation for competition mathematics. Code is avail- able at https://github.com/CzZ12/When-Correct-Solutions- Repeat-Rarity-Aware-Credit-Redistribution-for-GRPO.

PhyAI: Real-Time Physical AI at the Edge, Scalable Rollouts in the Cloud cs.AI

Physical AI policies require inference throughout their lifecycle, including model evaluation, cloud reinforcement learning rollout, edge GPU serving, and onboard deployment. Although these settings share the same checkpoint and action semantics, they often rely on separate inference programs. To unify them, we build PhyAI, a Physical AI inference engine with a single runtime that keeps architecture-specific conditioning, solver, cache, and output logic in model adapters while sharing graph execution, kernels, memory management, and parallel services. The same codebase runs vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs) on single or multiple GPUs across onboard, edge, and cloud deployments. We used the adapter interface to add MiniCPM-Robot on the day of its release. PhyAI achieves 1.40x-4.65x speedups over the official implementations of pi0, pi0.5, GR00T N1.7, and MiniCPM-Robot. On Cosmos3-Nano-Policy-DROID it reduces latency from 2.46 to 1.18 s on eight H20 GPUs (CFG=2, TP=4), a 2.08x speedup. Specialized runtimes remain faster in several configurations, so our goal is one runtime with competitive latency rather than the fastest result in every case. Detailed profiles reveal why different models need different execution policies: on a Hopper-series GPU at batch size one, the pi0.5 action expert accounts for 8.8% of FLOPs but 57.2% of latency; at batch size 32 its share drops to 13.5% and throughput reaches about 100 samples/s. Cosmos3 remains generation-dominated and gains only 14.3% throughput as batch size increases from 1 to 16. We further introduce the control-time Roofline, which distinguishes inference-bound from environment-bound control; the measured pi0.5 points on four LIBERO suites are environment-bound while Cosmos3 stays inference-bound. Code and benchmarks: https://github.com/mingti-org/phyai.

When Outputs Disperse, Does Epistemic Revision Follow? A Black-Box Diagnostic for Machine Collectives cs.AI

Collective intelligence research treats disagreement as evidence of epistemic diversity: if agents express different views, the group should retain capacity to revise. In LLM collectives this proxy can break: agents can produce diverse-looking arguments while preserving the same conclusion. We operationalize dispersion-revision coupling: the degree to which an intervention that verifiably increases the dispersion of a collective's outputs in embedding space is accompanied by genuine revision of its epistemic stance rather than premise-preserving reformulation. The diagnostic is black-box: it operates on generated text alone and makes no claims about the internal representations of the generating models. Two channels are measured independently: an output channel, the Coherence Index (CI), verifies that the intervention changed output dispersion; an epistemic channel, per-turn stance annotation, measures whether the collective revised. We propose CI with the Meta-Predictive Clarity System (MPCS), which inserts a Re-Differentiation Protocol (RDP) when outputs over-converge, as a reusable method for estimating this coupling regime. We evaluate five-agent collectives from two configurations (gpt-4o-mini and gemini-2.5-flash; 310 paired episodes per condition). On gpt-4o-mini, conditional dissent improves false-premise recovery by +17.7 points (p<1e-6) while static persona diversity harms recovery (-8.1, p=.007). On gemini-2.5-flash, the same intervention at a comparable budget yields no gain (26.1% vs 27.1%, p=.84) despite a verified dispersion drop; the two treatment effects differ from each other (z=3.79, p<.001). Mechanism tagging shows Gemini preserves the false premise via intra-framework dissent: 94% of tagged post-RDP responses reformulate rather than concede (vs 24% on GPT). We recommend reporting per-intervention stance shift and premise-preservation rate alongside accuracy.

The LLM Proposes, the Executive Disposes: A Self-Verifying Agent Instrument that Dissociates Commitment Drift from Binding Drift in Long-Horizon Agents cs.AI

How do you verify a long-horizon agent when its own state and self-reports are exactly what you cannot trust? We present an agent instrument built so that verification is structural rather than post-hoc. A deterministic Executive owns all belief; a language model may only file typed proposals, and a claim is admitted only when a prediction pre-registered before acting is matched against observation by code. Two properties make the instrument a verifier of its own science, not just of the agent: every run invalidates itself when per-organ write-error, render-size, or salted-canary-echo floors are breached (four of the first eight architecture runs were invalidated, each localizing a real defect); and a render-invisible shadow reference compiles the plan the full system would have committed in every ablation cell, so drift metrics are defined even where the mechanism under test has been removed. Using this instrument we report a clean, single-variable result on a failure every long-horizon agent suffers: ablating the commitment mechanism flips goal-abandonment from 0.00 to 1.00 while binding error stays flat at 0.00 (three seeds per cell, up to 394 reference beats per run, every run gated valid). The binding channel, by contrast, does not reappear as per-beat drift when its repair is ablated -- because binding is code-owned, the failure class is structurally absorbed, its only residue appearing one layer upstream as a collapse in hypothesis formation. We report these under full disclosure that task efficacy is null (zero level completions across 52 gated runs on ARC-AGI-3), pre-registered as a structural defeater. The contribution is a verification methodology for agent development and the drift decomposition it makes measurable.

Monte Carlo Tree Search for Table-to-Multimodal Report Generation cs.AI

Automatically generating professional multimodal reports comprising both textual analysis and visual charts from structured tabular data is a critical challenge in data intelligence. Existing methods suffer from fixed linear pipelines and isolated subtask processing, which hinder joint optimization of factual accuracy, visual quality, and narrative coherence. To address these issues, this paper proposes MCTS-Report, a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-driven framework that formulates multimodal table-to-report generation as a progressive construction process over a structured search space. The core idea is to decompose report generation into atomic actions, including chapter planning, visualization task identification, chart generation, insight organization, and narrative refinement, each executed by an LLM based on dynamic reasoning conditioned on the current report state. We use an LLM to generate step-by-step reasoning and actions during MCTS, storing the reasoning trajectory in each node for context-aware, coherent report construction. To guide the search, we design a multi-dimensional reward function that jointly evaluates numerical fact consistency (via SQL), chart quality, chart-text alignment, and structural completeness, while incorporating a diversity penalty to suppress repeated charts and a precondition check to prune invalid actions. We also construct MMRBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising real-world tables from six domains, paired with expert-refined reference report structures and verifiable key insights. Experiments on MMRBench demonstrate that MCTS-Report significantly outperforms strong baselines across structural completeness, numerical accuracy, chart-text alignment, and insight novelty, achieving a 77.9 overall score.

FinProBench: Evaluating Financial AI Agents with Role-Grounded Rubrics Derived from Professional Deliverables cs.AI

Evaluating financial AI agents requires criteria aligned with real professional work. Existing rubric methods typically derive criteria from task prompts or model outputs, overlooking tacit standards visible only in practitioner deliverables. We introduce FinProBench, a benchmark for professional financial tasks, and Role-Grounded Rubric Construction (RGRC), a reusable pipeline that derives rubrics from deliverables produced by practitioners in the same role. RGRC comprises four stages: Deliverable Collection, Competency Extraction, Rubric Synthesis, and Validation. Its rubrics capture tacit standards, distinguish quality levels, and transfer across tasks within a role. Before analysis, we classified 57 occupations by deliverable genre into 30 prior-rich conventional roles and 27 prior-sparse role-specialized roles. Across all roles, Prompt-only nearly matches RGRC for conventional roles (89.2% vs. 90.7%), but RGRC substantially outperforms it for role-specialized roles (99.1% vs. 78.0%). This split indicates that prompt engineering can approximate rubrics when conventions are well represented in model priors, while professional grounding is essential for standards beyond those priors. FinProBench is built from 1,723 curated deliverables spanning 57 occupations, 8 financial sub-industries, and 161 deliverable types, and releases an initial evaluation set of 20 complete tasks covering 20 roles in 7 sub-industries. With heterogeneous LLM judges and role-level rubrics, human deliverables rank first on average (73.7 vs. 70.3, 70.2, and 69.6 out of 100), while all four systems show overlapping 95% confidence intervals and complementary strengths. Reusing rubrics at the role level reduces estimated per-task construction effort by 6.7 times relative to authoring each rubric from scratch.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1GPT-5.457.285$5.63
2Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview57.2118$4.50
3GPT-5.3 Codex5471$4.81
4Claude Opus 4.65351$10.00
5Claude Sonnet 4.651.766$6.00
SWE-rebench

Agentic coding on real-world software engineering tasks

#ModelScore
1Claude Code52.9%
2Junie52.1%
3Claude Opus 4.651.7%
4gpt-5.2-2025-12-11-xhigh51.7%
5gpt-5.2-2025-12-11-medium51.0%