A Google Research ICLR 2026 paper traces diffusion model creativity to score smoothing from regularisation such as weight decay. Smoother learned score functions let denoising interpolate between training points, generating new samples rather than simply memorising them.
Hume released Real World VoiceEQ, a speech evaluation benchmark covering over 40 proprietary and open-source voice models, more than 15 evaluation dimensions and over 60 metrics across ASR, TTS, S2S and speech understanding.
Google Research and Google DeepMind proposed SensorFM, a large sensor foundation model learning directly from unlabelled wearable data. Pretraining uses over 1 trillion minutes of multimodal sensor signals from 5 million consenting participants across more than 100 countries and over 20 Fitbit and Pixel Watch devices.
Google Research published the first large-scale real-world study in Nature Cities, redirecting under 2% of trips to alternative routes through Google Maps changes across ten US cities for six months. Median target-road speed rose around 2% and median fuel consumption rates fell 0.5–1.0%, potentially saving thousands of tonnes of CO2e per city annually.
Hugging Face released ScarfBench (Self-Contained Application Refactoring Benchmark) to evaluate AI agents migrating enterprise Java applications between Spring, Jakarta EE and Quarkus.
Dharma AI discusses Goldfeder, Wyder, LeCun and Shwartz-Ziv's 2026 paper AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence.
Hugging Face proposed DiScoFormer (Density and Score Transformer), estimating a distribution's density and score simultaneously in one forward pass from a set of data points, without retraining for new distributions.
Google Research published an architecture attaching multi-token prediction (MTP) heads to frozen Gemini Nano v3 models, accelerating on-device inference without changing backbone weights. It has shipped with the Pixel 9 and 10 series.
Google Research proposed linear elastic caching, modelling page eviction as a ski-rental problem and using shallow decision trees to predict page TTLs, dynamically resizing caches to minimise total ownership cost. After months in Spanner production, memory fell 15.5%, cache misses rose only 5.5%, TCO dropped around 5% and actual I/O cost impact was just 0.5%. It was also validated on several public cache traces.
A Google Research paper at COLM 2026 finds reasoning traces unlock factual knowledge LLMs otherwise cannot recall, even for simple single-hop questions. Tests on Gemini-2.5 Flash and Pro and Qwen3-32B identify two mechanisms: extra tokens act as a 'computation buffer', and 'factual priming' produces related facts to semantically prepare the correct answer. Self-generated intermediate facts can also introduce hallucination risks.
Google Research released vector data converting Farmscapes 2020 high-resolution raster maps into usable inventories of hedgerows, stone walls and coppices across over 130,000 square kilometres of the UK. The framework fine-tunes an RSF Vision-Transformer pretrained on over 300 million global satellite images with around 247 square kilometres of labelled data. Polsby–Popper compactness distinguishes woodland, clusters of trees and hedgerows, with a threshold below 0.5 for linear features.
Google DeepMind released AI Control Roadmap, a framework for building and managing advanced AI deployed inside Google. It applies defence in depth, adding system-level safety layers beyond model alignment to provide protection even when alignment is imperfect.
Google published two studies on AI-assisted understanding of skin problems. In a survey of 2,345 participants, over 62% using AI tried to name a skin condition versus 41% in the control group, with 23% accuracy, nearly triple the control group's 8%. A mixed-methods study examined how people use these tools for their own skin concerns, their understanding and differences in doctor communication. AI offered limited help in deciding the next steps for seeking care.
At AISTATS 2026, Google Research proposed Regularized f-Divergence Kernel Tests for machine unlearning audits, using relative distances to determine whether models are closer to safely retrained versions or original compromised models.
Google DeepMind published results from a preregistered randomised controlled trial in Sierra Leone. Over eight weeks, students using Guided Learning improved maths scores by 0.258 standard deviations over controls, equivalent to around 1.2–1.7 years of conventional progress.
Google Research published a study in Nature introducing PHRM, which records video with a phone’s front camera in the seconds after face unlock and uses deep learning to estimate heart rate and resting heart rate in the background.
Google combined a new single-message encrypted aggregation protocol with TEEs, letting devices submit without multiple online rounds. Google receives only anonymised group insights; raw data is neither exposed nor reconstructed even within hardware protection. TEE attestation proves execution follows public code.
Calico Life Sciences' Matt Onsum and Katherine Labbé use Google DeepMind Co-Scientist to integrate scattered ageing biology findings and generate testable hypotheses.
Gary Peltz's Stanford medical team used Google Co-Scientist to screen drugs. Two of three suggested candidates blocked fibrosis and promoted regeneration in living human liver cells, while both Peltz-selected drugs failed. Cancer drug vorinostat blocked 91% of damage responses driving scarring. The work appeared in Advanced Science.
Google DeepMind published Co-Scientist research in Nature, describing a Gemini-based multi-agent AI system that iteratively generates, debates and evolves scientific hypotheses.
Google DeepMind announced AI co-clinician research to explore AI agents assisting patient care under clinical supervision. In blinded assessments of 98 real primary-care queries, 97 responses had no critical errors, and doctors preferred them to existing evidence-synthesis tools. Across 140 consultation skills, AI matched or exceeded primary-care doctors on 68, but expert doctors were better overall at recognising red flags and guiding key physical examinations.
Google Research described how scientists use Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) to advance research in four areas: epidemic forecasting, cosmology, carbon monitoring and neuroscience.
Google DeepMind published a paper proposing Decoupled DiLoCo, splitting large-scale training into decoupled compute islands that communicate through asynchronous data streams, isolating local hardware failures.
Google Research released the ICLR paper ReasoningBank, an open-source agent memory framework that distils high-level reasoning patterns from successful and failed experiences.
Berkeley AI Research proposed GRASP, a gradient-based planner for learned world models. It lifts trajectories into virtual states for parallel optimisation across time, injects randomness directly into state iterations for exploration and reshapes gradients to give actions clear signals. Avoiding fragile state-input gradients in high-dimensional visual models makes long-horizon planning more practical and robust.
Google proposed Simula, a reasoning-first synthetic data framework reframing dataset construction as mechanism design. It builds datasets from scratch without seed data through global diversification, local diversification, complexification and dual-critic quality checks.
Google Research proposed MoGen (Neuronal Morphology Generation), using PointInfinity point-cloud flow matching to generate synthetic neuronal shapes and supplement PATHFINDER reconstruction training. It reduced reconstruction error by 4.4% on held-out mouse axons, mainly by reducing merge errors.
Google released Vantage, a research experiment using generative AI simulated conversations to assess future skills such as problem-solving and collaboration in school and university students, with English registration open on Google Labs. An Executive LLM dynamically guides dialogue and an AI Evaluator scores against rubrics. A study with New York University involving 188 US participants aged 18–25 found AI–expert scoring agreement close to agreement between two human experts.
Google Research released ConvApparel, with over 4,000 human–machine multi-turn clothing-shopping conversations, nearly 15,000 turns, to quantify realism gaps between LLM user simulators and real people.
Google released PaperVizAgent for paper illustrations and ScholarPeer for automated peer review. PaperVizAgent combines retrieval, planning, style, visualisation and review agents, scoring 60.2 on a 0–100 evaluation, ahead of GPT-Image-1.5, Nano-Banana-Pro and Paper2Any. It was the only framework above the 50.0 human baseline.
Google Research proposed situational judgement tests (SJT) adapted from psychological questionnaires such as IRI and ERQ to evaluate alignment between LLM behaviours and human consensus in real user–assistant scenarios.
Google Research studied trade-offs between evaluation item counts and annotators per item in Forest vs Tree: The (N, K) Trade-off in Reproducible ML Evaluation. Common counts of one, three or five annotators are often insufficient; reflecting human disagreement frequently requires more than ten.
Google Quantum AI published a white paper saying future quantum computers would require fewer qubits and gates than previously estimated to break the elliptic-curve cryptography protecting cryptocurrencies.
Google Research released TurboQuant, compressing the KV cache to three bits without loss of model accuracy or training and fine-tuning, alongside the QJL and PolarQuant methods.
S2Vec uses S2 Geometry partitions and rasterised features to turn buildings and roads into multilayer images, learning general embeddings with masked autoencoding (MAE). It beats SATCLIP and GEOCLIP on zero-shot geographic socioeconomic extrapolation such as US population density and median income, but needs improvement on tree cover and elevation.
The AIMS collaboration between Google Research and several NHS organisations published two companion studies in Nature Cancer evaluating an AI breast cancer detection system within NHS screening workflows.
Google and Cornell published a PNAS study asking GPT-4o, Perplexity, Claude 3.5, Gemini Advanced Pro 1.5, NotebookLM and a custom RAG system 67 expert superconductivity questions. Twelve international experts blindly assessed balance, comprehensiveness, concision, evidence, image relevance and qualitative feedback.
Berkeley AI Research proposed SPEX and ProxySPEX to identify key interactions driving LLM outputs at scale in feature, data and model-component attribution. SPEX turns interaction search into sparse recovery using sparsity and low order; ProxySPEX exploits hierarchy to match SPEX with roughly ten times fewer ablations.
Google Research launched Groundsource, using Gemini to extract structured historical disaster data from global news. Its first open dataset contains 2.6 million urban flash-flood records across over 150 countries, spanning 2000 to the present.
Google Research and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center conducted a prospective, single-centre feasibility study in which AMIE held text consultations with patients before outpatient primary care visits, under live physician supervision by video.