PAPERS / annotated
close readings with the background folded in

Papers, read closely.

Research papers are written for the people who already read the last twenty. These are the same papers with that missing context put back — every assumed term, every unexplained design choice, and every quiet trade-off written out beside the original text.

each reading keeps the original text on the left  ·  underlined phrases open explanations on the right  ·  explanations link onward, so you can go as deep as you need

Language models

1 paper
01

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

Kimi Team·2026·technical report

A 2.8T-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 104B activated parameters and a one-million-token context window. The annotations cover the architecture (delta attention, attention residuals, latent MoE), the training recipe, and the infrastructure that makes a model this sparse trainable at all.

technical report mixture of experts linear attention RL post-training training infrastructure

Cryptography & formal methods

2 papers
02

Bob DyLean: Symbolic Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols in Lean

Théophile Wallez, Cas Cremers·CISPA·ePrint 2026/1493

A framework for proving protocols secure in the Lean theorem prover: a general-purpose symbolic (Dolev–Yao) semantics with user-defined equational theories and threat models, plus a trace-invariant proof methodology in the style of DY*. The annotations unpack the symbolic model, the labeling discipline, and what a machine-checked protocol proof actually buys you.

ePrint 2026/1493 symbolic analysis Dolev–Yao Lean protocol verification
03

From Round Skipping to S-Box Skipping: Attacking Poseidon's Partial Layer via Subspace Restriction

Amit Singh Bhati, Sundas Tariq, Tomer Ashur·3MI Labs / COSIC·ePrint 2026/1692

An algebraic attack that spends input degrees of freedom to hold Poseidon's partial-round S-boxes at fixed values, collapsing 22 of 23 partial rounds to degree 1 — and solving CICO-1 over 28 of 31 rounds of the KoalaBear instance Ethereum is evaluating. The annotations cover the HADES strategy, the CICO problem, degree accounting, and why the fix cannot be a better MDS matrix.

ePrint 2026/1692 algebraic cryptanalysis Poseidon CICO arithmetization-oriented