This paper presents the Stabilarity Research Platform — an open, API-accessible research infrastructure exposing validated machine learning models, geopolitical risk datasets, and decision optimization tools to the global research community at no cost. The platform implements FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016), providing composable, versioned endpoints for: (1) medical imaging classi...
Living NPCs: Zero-Script LLM Characters on a Shared Engine — Live Results from a 2D Village and a 3D Mage Isle
Can a game character run with no scripted behaviour at all, so that every step, word, blow and spell starts from one language-model decision, and still be fast, cheap and sensible enough for real-time play? We built a shared engine for such characters and ran two games on it: Oakhollow, a 2D medieval village, and Quarthaven, a 3D isle of twelve elemental mages. On private copies of both games, ...
Living NPCs: A Classification of AI Integration Approaches for Game Characters
Where should a language model attach to a game, and which faculties of a character should it control? We propose a two-axis classification: the integration surface (a mod of a shipped game, an engine SDK, an agent on an authoritative server, or an agent that reads pixels and presses keys) and seven augmentation types graded 0 to 3 (dialogue, vision, hearing, memory, time perception, action, soc...
How the KV Cache Works: Why Cached Tokens Stay Valid When Later Tokens Change Their Meaning
Decoder-only language models keep a key-value (KV) cache: the key and value vectors of every token read so far, reused at each generation step. A common worry is that the cache goes stale when later text changes what an earlier word means, as in "The bank" followed by "of the river" or "approved the loan". We ask whether the cache is exact, where re-interpretation happens, and where exactness e...
Open-Source Model Auditing Infrastructure: Third-Party Verification of Training Data Claims
Open-weight models let anyone compute token probabilities, but their training corpora are rarely public, so claims about training data are hard to check. We ask what a third party holding only the weights can verify. We scored 2,400 matched member and non-member documents from the Pile train and test splits, 400 Wikipedia articles created in October 2026 and the WikiMIA benchmark with three Pyt...
Cross-Agent Traceability: Propagating Observability Context Through Multi-Agent Tool Chains
When one user request fans out across agents, tool servers, queues and callbacks, one missing trace header splits its evidence into traces that no backend can rejoin by trace ID. We built a two-agent, six-tool chain instrumented with the OpenTelemetry Python SDK 1.45.1 over real localhost transports (a thread-pool hand-off, agent-to-agent JSON-RPC over HTTP, Model Context Protocol (MCP) calls w...
Explainability-as-a-Service: Comparing Managed XAI Platforms Against In-House Observability Stacks
Teams that must explain and trace production models can rent the capability or build it from open-source parts; we ask what each choice costs in latency, fidelity and money. We benchmarked the estimators that managed tabular services expose (Kernel SHAP, as in SageMaker Clarify, and sampled Shapley with a path count, as in Vertex Explainable AI) against exact TreeSHAP and gradient methods on XG...
Prompt Caching ROI: When Repeated-Context Discounts Actually Offset Engineering Overhead
Providers price a cached input token at 2% to 50% of a fresh one, and several charge 1.25 to 2.5 times the base price to write the cache. We ask when that trade pays off once real request timing and engineering effort are counted. We collected prices, time-to-live (TTL) options and minimum cacheable lengths for 18 model and cache-mode pairs from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek on 21 Octo...
Model Routing at Scale: Cost-Quality Arbitrage Across Frontier and Open-Weight Model Tiers
Model routers send each query to a cheaper model when they predict it will do as well as the frontier model, and planning estimates put the resulting saving at well over half of the frontier bill. We ask how much of that saving survives once a router is trained, calibrated and evaluated on prompts it has not seen. We used the public SPROUT routing dataset, which records judged scores and token ...
KV-Cache Compression Techniques in Production: Cost Savings vs Quality Degradation Trade-offs
Compressing the key-value (KV) cache is the most direct lever for cutting the cost of long-context inference, but published results usually report memory savings or benchmark scores in isolation. We ask what compression buys in a production serving unit and what it costs in quality. We built a deterministic model from public numbers: attention configurations of five open-weight models, HBM capa...
The Context-Window Premium: Why Long-Context Models Command Higher Prices Than Token Count Alone Explains
Providers now advertise context windows of one million tokens as a headline feature, but their price lists treat that capability in very different ways. We ask whether long context is priced as a distinct feature or bundled into ordinary per-token rates. We built a dataset of 83 offerings from 14 model developers, sold first-party or through three hosts, read directly from public pricing pages ...