Research radar (June 2026)
This is the guide's research-direction snapshot — companion to the model snapshot (which owns model names and prices). Themes here shift faster than core curriculum; concepts stay linked to durable lessons. For foundational papers every engineer should know once, see Papers worth reading.
In one line: You do not need to read arXiv daily — you need a map of active themes, anchor papers that define vocabulary, and a triage habit so headlines become actionable or ignored in minutes.
Research moves faster than this guide updates. This page is deliberately dated: it lists what labs were pushing in mid-2026, points at a few papers worth skimming for vocabulary, and reminds you how to filter the rest. When a theme graduates into production practice, it should appear in an evergreen chapter — until then, it lives here.
Active themes (mid-2026)
| Theme | Plain-English summary | Link to this guide |
|---|---|---|
| Agent harnesses & protocols | Standard ways to plug tools, memory, and multi-agent coordination (MCP, A2A) | Agent harnesses, MCP |
| Agentic RAG | Multi-step retrieval, query planning, tool-shaped search | Agentic RAG, RAG basics |
| Process / trajectory evals | Grade tool sequences and safety, not only final answers | Trajectory evals, LLM-as-judge |
| Test-time compute scaling | Spend more inference compute on hard problems via reasoning tokens, search, verifiers | Efficient models, Reasoning models |
| Long-context & memory systems | Million-token windows plus external memory stores — context curation beats raw size | Context window, Memory |
| Efficient architectures | Hybrid SSM+transformer stacks, speculative decoding, diffusion LMs (early) | Efficient models, Inference servers |
| Multimodal agents | Vision + audio + tool use + computer use in one loop | Multimodal overview, Computer use |
| Alignment & safety at scale | Constitutional training, red-teaming automation, governance tooling | Safety overview |
Anchor papers (vocabulary, not homework)
Skim these for ideas that keep appearing in product blogs — not line-by-line reproduction. Full foundational list: Papers worth reading.
| Paper / line of work | Why engineers mention it | Concept to carry |
|---|---|---|
| Attention Is All You Need (2017) | Still the architecture reference | Transformer, attention |
| RAG (Lewis et al., 2020) | Retrieval-augmented generation pattern | One-shot vs. agentic retrieval |
| ReAct (Yao et al., 2022) | Reason + act interleaved in a loop | Agent trace shape |
| Toolformer (2023) | Models learn when to call APIs | Tool routing |
| Mamba / SSM hybrids (2023–2025) | Long-sequence efficiency | Hybrid inference economics |
| Process reward / step supervision (2024–2025) | Reward intermediate steps, not only outcomes | Trajectory evals |
| MCP specification (Anthropic, 2024+) | De facto tool protocol | Harness interoperability |
Titles and authors rot less than model version strings; ideas map to chapters above.
Triage checklist (five minutes per headline)
When a new paper or launch trends:
- Does it change inference economics or reliability for your task? If no, bookmark and move on.
- Is it a protocol or eval discipline? Protocols (MCP) and measurement (trajectory evals) compound — frameworks rarely do.
- Can you try it in a toy repo this week? If not shippable in a month, it belongs on this radar page, not in production.
- Does an evergreen chapter already cover the durable part? Read that first; use this page for what's still moving.
Continuous learning suggests a sustainable cadence: primary sources (lab engineering blogs, protocol docs) weekly; paper deep-dives only when blocked on a specific problem.
What to ignore (June 2026 edition)
- Leaderboard chasing without your eval set — MMLU scores do not predict your RAG faithfulness.
- Fully autonomous everything demos without traces, budgets, or evals — see frontier hype filter.
- Architecture-of-the-week rewrite proposals before a hosted model proves it on your workload.
When this page is stale
If the date above is more than ~6 months old:
- Refresh model names on model snapshot first.
- Scan lab engineering blogs for repeated themes (three mentions = worth a concept note).
- Promote any theme that landed in production patterns into an evergreen lesson; demote what faded.
→ Next: Optional checkpoint · Or skip ahead to the Final capstone