The Inference Report

May 29, 2026

Cloud infrastructure is being redesigned for machine-to-machine traffic before regulators can establish rules to govern it, and the winners will be those who move production workloads into the cloud fastest. Anthropic just closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI and signaling that venture-backed AI companies are the dominant path to scale. Snowflake is acquiring Natoma for AI agent governance. Asana is buying StackAI to embed agent builders into workflow software. Visa is investing in Replit for agentic payments. The pattern is unmistakable: enterprises are shipping agents to production now, before legal frameworks solidify, and they're buying tools to manage them at scale.

Regulation is fragmentary and already outpaced by deployment. Illinois passed a safety testing law backed by Anthropic and OpenAI, a signal that major labs prefer a patchwork of state rules over federal enforcement. The EU's AI Regulation is being violated by all major models according to Aithos's LARA testing tool. LLMs continue to assert false statements even after explicit corrections, a failure mode that regulatory frameworks assume won't occur. Meanwhile, Elon Musk publicly reframed SpaceX's compute deal with Anthropic as short-term and cancellable, contradicting SpaceX's own S-1 filing describing payments through May 2029. The gap between stated commitments and actual intent is widening precisely as those commitments become the foundation of AI infrastructure investment.

The labor market is recalibrating around these shifts. Forty-two percent of committed code is now AI-assisted, with roughly 29 percent merged without manual review. H-1B developers face a tighter job market as companies redirect hiring toward AI specialists. Enterprises have moved past asking whether AI is exciting to asking whether it is safe to deploy broadly, which means they are asking for control surfaces, governance, and auditability. IBM and Red Hat are committing $5 billion and 20,000 engineers to Project Lightwell, positioning themselves as the security clearinghouse for open source in the enterprise. The real prize is not model capability but the integration layer between end users and foundation models, and the companies announcing today are racing to lock in that position before the market settles.

Grant Calloway

AI LabsAll labs
From the WireAll feeds
Research Papers — FocusedAll papers
On the Resilience of Text-to-Video Diffusion Models to Hardware Faults cs.LG

We present the first systematic study of the resilience of text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models under random hardware-level faults. While T2V models are widely used for automated video generation due to their ability to produce high-quality, temporally coherent, and realistic videos, their iterative denoising process and spatiotemporal dependencies introduce unique failure modes. We perform an extensive fault-injection study covering both computational and memory faults across three T2V models and a representative benchmark. Our results show that (1) a single fault can degrade overall performance by up to 3.7\%, with semantic correctness more affected than perceptual quality; (2) memory faults are more damaging than computational faults, high-order exponent bits are particularly vulnerable, and the widely-used bfloat16 is more susceptible than alternative formats; and (3) 7-28\% of faults cause visible artifacts, including semantic changes such as added objects, suggesting that single faults are sufficient to alter output semantics. Our findings reveal reliability risks in deployed T2V systems and motivate further research on improving fault resilience. Code: \href{https://github.com/ztcoalson/T2V-Resilience}{https://github.com/ztcoalson/T2V-Resilience}.

Adaptive Doubly Robust Off-Policy Evaluation for Ranking Policies under Diverse User Behavior cs.LG

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) of ranking policies is challenging be- cause selecting and ordering multiple items from a candidate set makes the number of possible rankings grow combinatorially with the number of candidates and the ranking length. Consequently, Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS), whose importance weight is the full-ranking probability ratio under the evaluation and logging policies, can have excessive variance. Independent IPS (IIPS) and Reward Interaction IPS (RIPS) reduce variance by imposing fixed assumptions on how users browse rankings, but may introduce bias when those assumptions mismatch actual behavior. Adaptive Inverse Propensity Scoring (AIPS) addresses this trade-off by adap- tively marginalizing importance weights over the actions that affect each position-wise reward. It attains minimum variance within a class of unbiased IPS-based estimators when the true user be- havior model is observed. However, its estimation accuracy may still degrade for longer rankings, and AIPS does not use a reward model for residual correction. We propose Adaptive Doubly Robust (ADR), which combines adaptive importance weighting with re- ward regression through a control-variate correction. We establish its unbiasedness when the true user behavior model is observed and characterize a sufficient condition under which it reduces vari- ance relative to AIPS. Across synthetic experiments with 10,000 simulations per condition, ADR improves mean squared error over AIPS and conventional ranking OPE estimators across a range of logged-data sizes and ranking lengths.

Wide Learning: Learning to Reach Evidence cs.LG

Machine learning is usually evaluated after an evidence interface has been fixed. A dataset, sensor suite, query language, action set, or experimental protocol determines which observations can be obtained, and learning is judged by what it extracts from them. We study a complementary capability. A learner's state can determine which evidence-generating experiments it can reliably realise under bounded resources, even when primitive affordances remain fixed. We call this learner-relative experiment family its effective epistemic reach, and use Wide Learning for task-relevant learning-induced changes in that family.We formalise effective reach relative to learner state, deployment budget, reliability threshold, and evaluation distribution. In a controlled construction, two hidden worlds have exactly the same public observation law. An informative diagnostic exists in a fixed five-primitive substrate. Before calibration, one address attempt realises it with probability at most $2^{-10} = 1/1024$, below a pre-specified 0.95 threshold; after calibration, held-out realisation is 1. Public-channel total variation is 0, whereas the realised diagnostic has total variation 1, and sealed binary risk moves from approximately 1/2 to 0. The construction establishes that learning can change effective epistemic reach even when primitive affordances and deployment resources are held fixed. It opens a complementary evaluation question for learning systems: not only what they infer from available evidence, but what informative evidence experience teaches them to bring within reach.

Unsupervised Multi-Scale Gromov-Wasserstein Hypergraph Alignment cs.LG

We study unsupervised hypergraph alignment, where the goal is to infer node correspondences between two hypergraphs using only structural information, without node features, labels, seed matches, or side information. Direct higher-order formulations can represent hyperedge interactions faithfully, but they can be computationally demanding and cumbersome for non-uniform hypergraphs. Graph-reduction approaches introduce a different challenge: clique expansions keep the alignment problem on the original node set but collapse all hyperedge evidence into one pairwise graph, whereas bipartite expansions preserve incidence structure but enlarge the problem from nodes to nodes plus hyperedges. We introduce FALCON (Filtration-based hypergrAph aLignment via Cross-scale Optimal traNsport), an unsupervised optimal-transport framework for hypergraph alignment. Instead of representing each hypergraph by a single collapsed clique graph, FALCON constructs a filtration-induced sequence of clique-based co-occurrence dissimilarity matrices and jointly aligns all levels through one shared multi-scale Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) objective. The shared transport plan enforces a globally consistent node correspondence across filtration levels while avoiding the auxiliary hyperedge nodes introduced by bipartite expansion. Experiments on perturbation benchmarks derived from real-world hypergraphs show that FALCON is robust to structural noise and in almost all cases outperforms strong graph- and hypergraph-alignment baselines.

LLMODE: Aligning ODEs with LLMs via Gated Token Injection for Irregular Spatio-Temporal Forecasting cs.LG

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for spatio-temporal forecasting, but existing approaches often rely on regularly sampled token sequences and struggle with irregular observations because of temporal asynchrony, representation-space misalignment, and limited context windows. We propose LLMODE, a token-efficient framework for irregular spatio-temporal forecasting with a frozen LLM backbone. LLMODE first uses a graph-aware ODE encoder to reconstruct irregular graph observations as a continuous-time latent trajectory. A Fixed-Budget Perceiver Resampler then compresses this variable-length trajectory into a fixed number of dynamic memory tokens. In parallel, compact statistical descriptors are encoded and resampled into context memory tokens. A dual-source gated cross-attention module injects both memories into the frozen LLM, enabling controlled utilization of external spatio-temporal evidence. Experiments on three real-world urban datasets and two physical-dynamics benchmarks show competitive overall performance, with clearer advantages under sparse or dynamically complex irregular sampling. Additional evaluations on unseen urban regions further demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization without adaptation.

Reward-guided Fine-Tuning of One-Step Generative Models via Wasserstein Gradient Flow cs.LG

To mitigate the time complexity of generative models, one-step generative models have recently emerged through direct mapping from noise to data in a single forward pass. However, the reward-guided fine-tuning method of one-step generative models remains largely unexplored. To address this, we consider one-step generators from an optimal transport view, investigating Wasserstein Gradient Flow (WGF) for modeling smooth and controlled distributional evolution in probability space. We then propose a novel reward-guided fine-tuning of a one-step generative model via WGF. We derive a practical training method that requires no reward gradients, thereby handling both non-differentiable and differentiable rewards. Moreover, our method provides smooth and stable reward-guided distributional updates while mitigating reward hacking and mode collapse. Experiments on 2D synthetic data, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet 256$\times$256 with diverse rewards, including JPEG (in)compressibility, class probability, Black-and-White and CLIP alignment, show that our method achieves better reward alignment compared to baselines.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1Claude Opus 4.861.465$10.94
2GPT-5.560.278$11.25
3Claude Opus 4.757.353$10.94
4Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview57.2124$4.50
5GPT-5.456.889$5.63
SWE-rebench

Agentic coding on real-world software engineering tasks

#ModelScore
1gpt-5.5-2026-04-23-xhigh62.7%
2Codex60.4%
3Claude Code59.6%
4gpt-5.5-2026-04-23-medium58.9%
5gpt-5.4-2026-03-05-medium54.9%