Aligning large language models to human-centered objectives is difficult when targets are non-executable and context-dependent, limiting reliable verification and scalable supervision. Although synthetic data expands coverage, weak verification shifts the bottleneck from generation to selection. Noisy signals destabilize iterative refinement and can cause silent regressions. We propose Agentic Data Evolution (ADE), a data-centric framework that organizes synthetic supervision as evolving data snapshots. ADE improves data snapshots through a closed-loop Observation-Variation-Selection (OVS) procedure, where a steady-state admission mechanism acts as a quality ratchet that conservatively gates updates for sustained cross-round improvement. We validate these improvements through complementary intrinsic trend tracking and extrinsic post-training evaluation. On DEV300, ADE raises the intrinsic win rate from 50% to 75.81% and the extrinsic win rate from 55.20% to 68.86%, consistent performance gains across diverse benchmarks. Blind expert evaluation further confirms this, with a 66.11% preference for evolved answers. These gains extend across post-training methods, model scales, and tasks beyond the target weakly verifiable educational objectives. Resources are available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/Agentic-Data-Evolution.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages is constrained by orthographic inconsistency, annotation artifacts, missing audio, speaker and domain imbalance, and evaluation procedures that differ from deployment. We present an end-to-end engineering study adapting NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B to Kikuyu, Dholuo, and Kalenjin. Starting from a Kenyan Swahili-adapted checkpoint, we retain its cache-aware FastConformer RNN-T, prompt conditioning, and streaming decoder during full-parameter fine-tuning. The study covers corpus auditing, Unicode normalization, split checks, duration filtering, low-rate continuation, validation-based checkpoint selection, true-streaming evaluation, artifact preservation, and isolated serving. On internal, adaptively consulted evaluation sets excluded from gradient updates at context [56,13], selected Kikuyu and Dholuo models achieve 42.97% and 33.98% WER, respectively. Dholuo records 9.59% CER and 8.13% no-space CER under its frozen historical label policy; Kikuyu records 7.79% no-space CER. Kalenjin remains a work in progress: v1-v reaches 68.74% WER on a 2,411-row clean-v3 diagnostic subset excluding long-pause annotations, digit-bearing references, and targets shorter than three tokens. Its checkpoint selection used a mixed-source validation manifest containing test-origin rows, so the score is not an independent generalization estimate. We also report negative findings involving non-speech labels, short-utterance over-generation, boundary-sensitive WER, and cloud job-lifecycle failures. We make no state-of-the-art claim because the internal sets, repeated consultation, and normalization differ from public benchmarks. This work provides an auditable account of adapting a multilingual streaming model into language-specific systems without discarding streaming constraints.
Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.