In scope: quantization, mixture-of-experts, distillation, context handling, evals — and the specific-and-local cluster: fine-tuning, personalisation, open-weight releases, and running models on your own compute. Out: general AI research that moves neither cost nor capability per token, and the system around the model, which lives in harnesses.
| Type | Source | Published |
|---|---|---|
| PAPER | Mechanistic Interpretability for Large Language Model Alignment: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions Usman Naseem · Macquarie University Comprehensive survey mapping mechanistic interpretability techniques to LLM alignment objectives, with a future research roadmap emphasizing automated interpretability and interpretability-driven alignment scaling. | 2026-02-01 |
| PAPER | Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup: A New Axis of Sparsity for Large Language Models Xin Cheng, Wangding Zeng, Damai Dai, et al. · DeepSeek / Peking University (collaboration) Conditional memory as a sparsity axis orthogonal to MoE, via Engram (O(1) n-gram lookup). Sparsity Allocation problem yields a U-shaped scaling law (compute vs static memory); scaled to 27B params with gains on BBH +5.0, ARC-C +3.7, MMLU +3.4, NIAH 84.2→97.0. | 2026-01-12 |
| PAPER | LoopFormer: Elastic-Depth Looped Transformers for Latent Reasoning via Shortcut Modulation Ahmadreza Jeddi, Marco Ciccone, Babak Taati · Not specified (ICLR 2026) Looped Transformer with elastic, budget-conditioned depth: a shortcut-consistency training scheme aligns reasoning trajectories of different lengths so one model trades inference depth for compute at test time — latent reasoning in weight-space rather than via explicit CoT tokens. | 2026-02-11 |
| PAPER | Tiered Super-Moore's Law: Price Evolution, Production Frontiers, and Market Competition in LLM Inference Services Mingdeng Du · Independent / not stated in abstract First systematic empirical analysis of LLM token pricing across 3,237+ models (2020-2026); ~600x price decline; 'Tiered Super-Moore' hypothesis (economy 1.10yr / mid 1.55yr price half-life vs 2yr Moore benchmark; flagship/reasoning resists via ~31.5x premium); cost decline ~103.7% software/architecture-driven, ~-0.9% hardware. | 2026-03-30 |
| PAPER | LLM Reasoning Is Latent, Not the Chain of Thought arXiv preprint authors · Multi-institution Argues LLM reasoning should be studied as latent-state trajectory formation, not faithful surface CoT — implications for interpretability, alignment, and training-objective design | 2026-04-23 |