arXiv:2608.13565v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale large language models (LLMs) while preserving computational efficiency through sparse activation. Despite their widespread adoption, the relative importance of individual MoE layers remains insufficiently characterized, particularly for model compression. This paper presents a systematic layer-wise sensitivity analysis of the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model (40 MoE layers, 256 experts per layer, top-8 routing) using magnitude-based expert masking on the XLCoST cross-lingual code translation benchmark. We conduct a multi-phase study spanning 100, 300, and 500 prompt evaluation scales across three H100 GPU servers. Our central finding is that layer sensitivity is strongly depth-dependent: early layers (0-9) and middle layers (10-29) are highly fragile to expert masking, while late layers (30-39), and especially very-late layers (35-39), tolerate aggressive masking of low-magnitude experts. Flat all-layer masking at 30% retains only 150/300 Good+Similar outputs at 300-prompt scale, whereas late-focused policies retain 249-255/300 while masking 640-1,145 experts. On a later 500-prompt held-out validation slice, the narrow very-late policy (layers 35-39 @ 50%) achieves the strongest quality/masked-expert tradeoff among tested candidates, retaining 419/500 Good+Similar outputs while masking only 640 of 10,240 total experts. We additionally characterize top-k routing width reduction from 8 to 6 active experts per token, which shows a large observed wall-clock reduction on a 100-prompt probe with no Good+Similar loss, though it does not yet compose cleanly with aggressive expert masking. These findings provide an empirical foundation for depth-aware MoE expert masking and establish a practical path toward physical weight surgery, activation-based expert scoring, and training-based recovery.

arXiv:2608.13567v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The human brain exhibits a striking degree of functional specialization, with distinct networks supporting language, formal reasoning, reasoning about other minds, and reasoning about the physical world. Is this modular organization a fundamental principle of how intelligent systems must be built, or an evolutionary accident specific to biological brains? Here, we test whether a similar organization emerges in Large Language Models–another class of intelligent systems created through a very different optimization process. Using circuit analyses across N=46 tasks spanning four cognitive domains (language, formal reasoning, social reasoning, physical reasoning), we find that LLMs develop a modular architecture that mirrors the human brain: tasks drawing on the same network in humans recruit overlapping neurons in LLMs, whereas tasks drawing on different networks recruit distinct neurons. The convergent emergence of modularity in brains and neural networks suggests that it may be a fundamental property of intelligent systems.

arXiv:2608.13573v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) serving has become a critical cloud workload, and realistic traces are essential for motivating and benchmarking serving systems. However, existing LLM serving workload studies remain limited in scale and scope. They often observe short time periods and provide limited visibility into how users interact with models in production. As a result, they do not fully capture how LLM serving workloads evolve over time or how user-model interactions shape production traffic.
In this work, we further the understanding of real-world LLM serving workloads through both a global characterization and a longitudinal study of a one-year production trace from Chutes. Unlike prior studies, our trace captures full production behavior across many models and users, including both popular and long-tail models. We analyze the workload from aggregate, temporal, model-level, and user-level perspectives, revealing workload evolution and user-model structure that are typically hidden behind aggregate views. To support future research, we will release the full one-year trace with the paper, enabling downstream studies of production behavior without relying on sampled or synthetically generated workloads.

arXiv:2608.13574v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly operate as execution systems that invoke tools, modify local state, use persistent memory, and interact with external protocols. These capabilities make agents useful, but they also introduce risks related to over-privileged actions, weak auditability, prompt injection, tool poisoning, and uncontrolled side effects. This paper presents Agentao, a governed local-first runtime for tool-using LLM agents. Agentao separates model-generated action proposals from host-authorized execution through a layered architecture consisting of host-facing surfaces, a host contract, a runtime core, a permission-mediated tool system, and supporting subsystems for memory, replay, plugins, skills, sub-agents, and protocol integration. We describe the motivation, threat model, design goals, governance model, execution pipeline, and structured event interface of the system. Agentao does not provide formal safety guarantees; rather, it demonstrates how permissions, state, protocol boundaries, and execution traces can be made explicit runtime abstractions for building agents that are more governable, inspectable, and suitable for host-controlled local environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/jin-bo/agentao.

OpenAI funds 14 independent projects exploring new AI policy ideas to expand economic opportunity and strengthen societal resilience in the Intelligence Age.

arXiv:2608.12325v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Autonomous reasoning is among the most scientifically and economically motivating topics in AI today. Historically the purview of symbolic AI, recent advances have mainly emerged from deep probabilistic generative models. Despite immense interest and rapid progress, the generative AI community has not clearly converged on operational definitions for reasoning and often implicitly rejects the historical treatment of this topic in logic and verifiable automated reasoning. This position contends that definitional ambiguity leaves the construct validity of reasoning evaluation unverifiable, undermining quantifiable progress toward trustworthy autonomous reasoning. We also contend that this ambiguity is addressable. To that end, we provide (1) operational definitions based on a synthesis of the literature, positioning valid and sound reasoning as a learnable rule-based process; and (2) a checklist for best practices in the communication of AI reasoning research.