EdTech Discovery
Argus

Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.

Updated Aug 31, 2026 · 36 ideas · 18402 signals
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Signals

The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.

technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction

arXiv:2604.03136v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing, we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity. We propose StoryScope, a pipeline that automatically induces a fine-grained, interpretable feature space of discourse-level narrative features across 10 dimensions. We apply StoryScope to a parallel corpus of 10,272 writing prompts, each written by a human author and five LLMs, yielding 61,608 stories, each ~5,000 words, and 304 extracted features per story. Narrative features alone achieve 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way autho

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Courtroom-Style Multi-Agent Debate with Progressive RAG and Role-Switching for Controversial Claim Verification

arXiv:2603.28488v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for high-stakes claim verification due to hallucinations and shallow reasoning. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multi-agent debate (MAD) address this, they are limited by one-pass retrieval and unstructured debate dynamics. We propose a courtroom-style multi-agent framework, PROClaim, that reformulates verification as a structured, adversarial deliberation. Our approach integrates specialized roles (e.g., Plaintiff, Defense, Judge) with Progressive RAG (P-RAG) to dynamically expand and refine the evidence pool during the debate. Furthermore, we employ evidence negotiation, self-reflection, and heterogeneous multi-judge aggregation to enforce calibration, robustness, and diversity. In zero-shot evaluations on the Check-COVID benchmark, PROClaim achieves 81.7% accuracy, outperforming standard multi-agent debate by 10.0 percentage points, with P-RAG driving the primary perform

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

MAPLE: Metadata Augmented Private Language Evolution

arXiv:2603.19258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differentially private (DP) fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) requires massive compute and full model access, which rules out state-of-the-art proprietary APIs for general users. Generating DP synthetic data offers a practical workaround. This approach also allows for transparent exploratory data analysis and arbitrary reuse across downstream tasks, sidestepping the rigid constraints of a model's parameter space. Private Evolution (PE) provides a promising API-based framework for generating this data, but its success relies heavily on initialization. If the private data distribution falls too far outside the foundation model's pre-training priors -- a common issue in highly specialized domain -- PE struggles to align with the target data. This misalignment causes poor convergence, degraded utility, and wasted API calls. To solve this initialization bottleneck, we introduce Metadata Augmented Private Language Evolution (MAPLE

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Toward Robust LLM-Based Judges: Taxonomic Bias Evaluation and Debiasing Optimization

arXiv:2603.08091v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based judges are widely adopted for automated evaluation and reward modeling, yet their judgments are often affected by judgment biases. Accurately evaluating these biases is essential for ensuring the reliability of LLM-based judges. However, existing studies typically investigate limited biases under a single judge formulation, either generative or discriminative, lacking a comprehensive evaluation. To bridge this gap, we propose JudgeBiasBench, a benchmark for systematically quantifying biases in LLM-based judges. JudgeBiasBench defines a taxonomy of judgment biases across 4 dimensions, and constructs bias-augmented evaluation instances through a controlled bias injection pipeline, covering 12 representative bias types. We conduct extensive experiments across both generative and discriminative judges, revealing that current judges exhibit significant and diverse bias patterns that often compromise the rel

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

A Comparative analysis of Layer-wise Representational Capacity in AR and Diffusion LLMs

arXiv:2603.07475v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models build representations incrementally via left-to-right prediction, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) are trained through full-sequence denoising. Although recent dLLMs match AR performance, whether diffusion objectives fundamentally reshape internal representations remains unclear. We perform the first layer- and token-wise representational analysis comparing native dLLMs (LLaDA), native AR models (Qwen2.5), and AR-initialized dLLMs (Dream-7B), using cosine similarity across layers and tokens alongside static inference-time layer-skipping as an analytical probe of redundancy. We find that diffusion objectives produce more global representations with substantial early-layer redundancy and reduced recency bias, while AR objectives yield tightly coupled, locally structured representations. AR-initialized dLLMs retain AR-like dynamics despite diffusion training, revealing persistent initialization

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

From We to Me: Theory Informed Narrative Shift with Abductive Reasoning

arXiv:2603.03320v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective communication often relies on aligning a message with an audience's narrative and worldview. Narrative shift involves transforming text to reflect a different narrative framework while preserving its original core message--a task we demonstrate is significantly challenging for current Large Language Models (LLMs). To address this, we propose a neurosymbolic approach grounded in social science theory and abductive reasoning. Our method automatically extracts rules to abduce the specific story elements needed to guide an LLM through a consistent and targeted narrative transformation. Across multiple LLMs, abduction-guided transformed stories shifted the narrative while maintaining the fidelity with the original story. For example, with GPT-4o we outperform the zero-shot LLM baseline by 55.88% for collectivistic to individualistic narrative shift while maintaining superior semantic similarity with the original stories (40.4% im

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation

arXiv:2603.00025v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective for offline alignment but poorly matched to ontology-driven structured prediction, where preferred and rejected JSON often differ by only a few schema-defining tokens. In this low-edit-distance regime, sequence-level DPO spreads gradient mass across non-critical serialization tokens (gradient dilution) and can reduce likelihood on rare preferred schema tokens (token erosion). To address these limitations, we first develop a confusion-aware preference-construction strategy combining expert-curated ambiguity patterns with validation-set SFT structured-error modes, producing minimally perturbed, schema-valid negatives for ontology-level decision errors. We then introduce Token-Adaptive Barrier Preference Optimization (TAB-PO), a post-SFT objective for token-critical structured generation with a confidence-gated token-level barrier that anchors under-confident schema tokens. On SciERC, wit

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

TEAM: Temporal-Spatial Consistency Guided Expert Activation for MoE Diffusion Language Model Acceleration

arXiv:2602.08404v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their inherent support for parallel decoding. Building on this paradigm, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) dLLMs with autoregressive (AR) initialization have further demonstrated strong performance competitive with mainstream AR models. However, we identify a fundamental mismatch between MoE architectures and diffusion-based decoding. Specifically, a large number of experts are activated at each denoising step, while only a small subset of tokens is ultimately accepted, resulting in substantial inference overhead and limiting their deployment in latency-sensitive applications. In this work, we propose TEAM, a plug-and-play framework that accelerates MoE dLLMs by enabling more accepted tokens with fewer activated experts. TEAM is motivated by the observation that expert routing decisions exhibit strong temporal consistency across denoising levels as well a

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

On the Wings of Imagination: Conflicting Script-based Multi-role Framework for Humor Caption Generation

arXiv:2602.06423v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humor is a commonly used and intricate human language in daily life. Humor generation, especially in multi-modal scenarios, is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), which is typically as funny caption generation for images, requiring visual understanding, humor reasoning, creative imagination, and so on. Existing LLM-based approaches rely on reasoning chains or self-improvement, which suffer from limited creativity and interpretability. To address these bottlenecks, we develop a novel LLM-based humor generation mechanism based on a fundamental humor theory, GTVH. To produce funny and script-opposite captions, we introduce a humor-theory-driven multi-role LLM collaboration framework augmented with humor retrieval (HOMER). The framework consists of three LLM-based roles: (1) conflicting-script extractor that grounds humor in key script oppositions, forming the basis of caption generation; (2) retrieval-augmented hierarchi

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captions

arXiv:2602.05220v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current audio foundation models typically rely on rigid, task-specific supervision (e.g., speech recognition), addressing isolated factors of audio rather than the whole. In contrast, human processes audio holistically, seamlessly bridging raw audio waveform with abstract cognitive concepts (e.g., all perception details of audio events) to execute complex tasks. Grounded in this philosophy, we introduce Bagpiper, an 8B audio foundation model that interprets physical audio via rich captions, i.e., comprehensive natural language descriptions that encapsulate the critical cognitive concepts inherent in the audio. By pre-training on a massive corpus of 600B tokens, the model establishes a robust bidirectional mapping between raw audio and this high-level conceptual space. During fine-tuning, Bagpiper adopts a caption-then-process workflow, simulating an intermediate cognitive reasoning step to solve diverse tasks without knowing prior tas

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Transformers perform adaptive partial pooling

arXiv:2602.03980v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any language model must decide what to say in novel contexts based on information from similar contexts. But what about contexts that are not novel but merely infrequent? In hierarchical regression, the model's predictions for behavior in a context are affected by observations from similar contexts to the extent that 1) the current context is infrequent and 2) different contexts behave similarly. This is called adaptive partial pooling. This paper shows that next-word predictions of a transformer (GPT2) are affected by observations from outside the current context, but this pooling reduces with more training. Pooling is affected by context frequency, context number (type frequency) and context variability in a qualitatively similar way to hierarchical regression. However, there is a "sweet spot" in training at which the transformer best matches the behavior of hierarchical regression. This is the point at which the effect of context f

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Don't Judge a Book by its Cover: Testing LLMs' Robustness Under Logical Obfuscation

arXiv:2602.01132v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tasks such as solving arithmetic equations, evaluating truth tables, and completing syllogisms are handled well by large language models (LLMs) in their standard form, but they often fail when the same problems are posed in logically equivalent yet obfuscated formats. To study this vulnerability, we introduce Logifus, a structure-preserving logical obfuscation framework, and, utilizing this, we present LogiQAte, a first-of-its-kind diagnostic benchmark with 1,108 questions across four reasoning tasks: (i) Obfus FOL (first-order logic entailment under equivalence-preserving rewrites), (ii) Obfus Blood Relation (family-graph entailment under indirect relational chains), (iii) Obfus Number Series (pattern induction under symbolic substitutions), and (iv) Obfus Direction Sense (navigation reasoning under altered directions and reference frames). Across all the tasks, evaluating six state-of-the-art models, we find that obfuscation severel

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

MedTextWeaver: Procedural Knowledge Evolution in Agentic Medical Text Editing

arXiv:2602.00740v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Medical text editing is essential for improving communication among diverse stakeholders in clinical settings. However, adapting LLM agents to this task remains challenging because expert supervision is often sparse, fragmented, and distributed across interacting quality dimensions. We identify that direct accumulation or retrieval of individual feedback is insufficient for effective adaptation, as fragmented evaluations do not directly translate into a coherent understanding of medical text quality. Based on this observation, we propose MedTextWeaver, a training-free framework that transforms fragmented evaluative evidence into global quality principles and actionable procedural knowledge for medical text editing. Across three clinical text datasets and a real-world validation experiment, MedTextWeaver consistently improves performance over strong LLM baselines and existing memory-based adaptation approaches. Further analysis demonst

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Can Small Language Models Handle Context-Summarized Multi-Turn Customer-Service QA? A Synthetic Data-Driven Comparative Evaluation

arXiv:2602.00665v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Customer-service question answering (QA) systems increasingly rely on conversational language understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance, their high computational cost and deployment constraints limit practical use in resource-constrained environments. Small Language Models (SLMs) provide a more efficient alternative, yet their effectiveness for multi-turn customer-service QA remains underexplored, particularly in scenarios requiring dialogue continuity and contextual understanding. This study investigates instruction-tuned SLMs for context-summarized multi-turn customer-service QA, using a history summarization strategy to preserve essential conversational state. We also introduce a conversation stage-based qualitative analysis to evaluate model behavior across different phases of customer-service interactions. Nine instruction-tuned low-parameterized SLMs are evaluated against three commercial LLMs

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

When LLM Essays Outscore Student Essays: What a Korean Writing Rubric Rewards and Where Readers Disagree

arXiv:2601.19913v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLMs now help students plan, draft, and revise essays. Educational assessment therefore faces a basic question: how should student and LLM writing be compared? Rubrics assign points to content, organization, and expression. Their total can still hide which criteria drive the comparison, where ratings approach the maximum, and where readers disagree. We therefore conducted a secondary, post hoc audit of a Korean writing study with source-informed scoring. Three Korean language and literature majors used a 16-criterion, 100-point rubric to score six student essays and 24 essays from four LLMs prompted for three school levels. After source disclosure, they helped develop the rubric and, according to the protocol, scored the Phase 2 essays without gold labels while recording source judgments. The pooled LLM mean exceeds the student mean by 18.35 points. Orthographic norms and genre-appropriate register contribute 8.19 points, or 44.7% of

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Hylog: A Hybrid Approach to Logging Text Production in Non-alphabetic Scripts

arXiv:2601.17753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Research keyloggers are essential for cognitive studies of text production, yet most fail to capture the on-screen transformations performed by Input Method Editors (IMEs) for non-alphabetic scripts. To address this methodological gap, we present Hylog, a novel hybrid logging system that combines analytical keylogging with ecological text logging for a more complete and finer-grained analysis. Our modular, open-source system uses plug-ins for standard applications (Microsoft Word, Google Chrome) to capture both keyboard output and rendered text, which a hybridizer module then synchronizes into a dual trace. To validate the system's technical feasibility and demonstrate its analytical capabilities, we conducted a proof-of-concept study where two volunteers translated a text into simplified Chinese. Hylog successfully captured keypresses and temporal intervals between Latin letters, Chinese characters, and IME confirmations -- some meas

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Large Language Models as Automatic Annotators and Annotation Adjudicators for Fine-Grained Opinion Analysis

arXiv:2601.16800v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-grained opinion analysis of text provides a detailed understanding of expressed sentiments and their targets. Although this level of detail is valuable, annotating opinions in datasets for model training requires considerable human effort and substantial cost, especially across diverse domains and real-world applications. To address this shortage of domain-specific labelled datasets, we explore the feasibility of LLMs as automatic annotators for fine-grained opinion analysis. We use a declarative annotation pipeline, an approach that reduces the variability of manual prompt engineering when using LLMs to identify fine-grained opinion spans in text. We also present a dedicated methodology for an LLM to adjudicate multiple labels and produce final annotations, benchmarked against exact, flexible, and element-wise variants of a rule-based voting aggregator. We trial the pipeline with models of different sizes for the Aspect Sentimen

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Visualising Information Flow in Word Embeddings with Diffusion Tensor Imaging

arXiv:2601.05713v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how large language models (LLMs) represent natural language is a central challenge in natural language processing (NLP) research. Many existing methods extract word embeddings from an LLM, visualise the embedding space via point-plots, and compare the relative positions of certain words. However, this approach only considers single words and not whole natural language expressions, thus disregards the context in which a word is used. Here we present a novel tool for analysing and visualising information flow in natural language expressions by applying diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to word embeddings. We find that DTI reveals how embedding space representations change between tokens. Tracking these changes within the layers of an LLM allows for comparing different model structures and could potentially reveal opportunities for pruning an LLM's under-utilised layers. Our results show that our visualisation method permits n

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Intern-S1-MO: Long-horizon Reasoning Agent for Olympiad?Level Mathematical Problem Solving

arXiv:2512.10739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have expanded the mathematical reasoning frontier through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), capable of solving AIME-level problems. However, the performance of LRMs is heavily dependent on the extended reasoning context length. For solving ultra-hard problems like those in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the required reasoning complexity surpasses the space that an LRM can explore in a single round. Previous works attempt to extend the reasoning context of LRMs but remain prompt-based and built upon proprietary models, lacking systematic structures and training pipelines. Therefore, this paper introduces Intern-S1-MO, a long-horizon math agent that conducts multi-round hierarchical reasoning, composed of an LRM-based multi-agent system including reasoning, summary, and verification. By maintaining a compact memory in the form of lem

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Orchestrating Dual-Boundaries: An Arithmetic Intensity Inspired Acceleration Framework for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2511.21759v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have recently gained significant attention for their exceptional performance and inherent potential for parallel decoding. Existing frameworks further enhance its inference efficiency by enabling KV caching. However, its bidirectional attention mechanism necessitates periodic cache refreshes that interleave prefill and decoding phases, both contributing substantial inference cost and constraining achievable speedup. Inspired by the heterogeneous arithmetic intensity of the prefill and decoding phases, we propose ODB-dLLM, a framework that orchestrates dual-boundaries to accelerate dLLM inference. In the prefill phase, we find that the predefined fixed response length introduces heavy yet redundant computational overhead, which affects efficiency. To alleviate this, ODB-dLLM incorporates an adaptive length prediction mechanism that progressively reduces prefill overhead and unnecessary comp

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Revisiting Generalization Across Difficulty Levels: It's Not So Easy

arXiv:2511.21692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation. Existing research is mixed regarding whether training on easier or harder data leads to better results, and whether those gains come on easier or harder test data. We address this question by conducting a systematic evaluation of LLMs' generalization across models, datasets, and fine-grained groups of example difficulty. We rank examples in six datasets using the outputs of thousands of different LLMs and Item Response Theory (IRT), a well-established difficulty metric in educational testing. Unlike prior work, our difficulty ratings are therefore determined solely by the abilities of many different LLMs, excluding human opinions of difficulty. With a more objective, larger-scale, and finer-grained analysis, we show that cross-difficulty generalization is often limited; training

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2511.20639v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence. While existing LLM agents depend on text-based mediation for reasoning and communication, we take a step forward by enabling models to collaborate directly within the continuous latent space. We introduce LatentMAS, an end-to-end training-free framework that enables pure latent collaboration among LLM agents. In LatentMAS, each agent first performs auto-regressive latent thoughts generation through last-layer hidden embeddings instead of text. Then, a shared latent working memory preserves and transfers each agent's internal representations and latent thoughts, ensuring lossless information exchange without re-encoding. We provide detailed theoretical analyses showing that LatentMAS achieves higher expressiveness and lossless information preservation with lower overall complexity than standar

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

LM-mixup: Text Data Augmentation via Language Model based Mixup

arXiv:2510.20449v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction tuning is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the quality of instruction-following data varies significantly. While high-quality data is paramount, it is often scarce; conversely, abundant low-quality data is frequently discarded, leading to substantial information loss. Existing data augmentation methods struggle to augment this low-quality data effectively, and the evaluation of such techniques remains poorly defined. To address this, we formally define the task of Instruction Distillation: distilling multiple low-quality and redundant inputs into high-quality and coherent instruction-output pairs. Specifically, we introduce a comprehensive data construction pipeline to create MIXTURE, a 144K-sample dataset pairing low-quality or semantically redundant imperfect instruction clusters with their high-quality distillations. We then introduce LM-Mixup, by first performing supervised fine-tuning on MIXTURE

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Unpacking Hateful Memes: Presupposed Context and False Claims

arXiv:2510.09935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While memes are often humorous, they are frequently used to disseminate hate, causing serious harm to individuals and society. Current approaches to hateful meme detection mainly rely on pre-trained language models. However, less focus has been dedicated to \textit{what make a meme hateful}. Drawing on insights from philosophy and psychology, we argue that hateful memes are characterized by two essential features: a \textbf{presupposed context} and the expression of \textbf{false claims}. To capture presupposed context, we develop \textbf{PCM} for modeling contextual information across modalities. To detect false claims, we introduce the \textbf{FACT} module, which integrates external knowledge and harnesses cross-modal reference graphs. By combining PCM and FACT, we introduce \textbf{\textsf{SHIELD}}, a hateful meme detection framework designed to capture the fundamental nature of hate. Extensive experiments show that SHIELD outperfo

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

TS-Reasoner: Aligning Time Series Foundation Models with LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2510.03519v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series reasoning is crucial to decision-making in diverse domains, including finance, energy, and scientific discovery. While existing time series foundation models (TSFMs) can capture low-level dynamic patterns and provide accurate forecasting, further analysis usually requires additional background knowledge and sophisticated reasoning, which are lacking in most TSFMs but can be achieved through Large Language Models (LLMs). On the other hand, without expensive post-training, LLMs often struggle with the numerical understanding of time series data. Although it is intuitive to integrate the two types of models, developing effective training recipes that align the two modalities for reasoning tasks is still an open challenge. To this end, we propose TS-Reasoner that aligns the latent representations of TSFMs with the textual inputs of LLMs for downstream understanding/reasoning tasks. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effecti

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning with Reward Models: An Analytical Survey

arXiv:2510.01925v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple candidates during inference. In this paper, we provide a systematic introduction to RMs, along with a comprehensive survey of their applications in LLM reasoning. We first review fundamental concepts of RMs, including their architectures, training methodologies, and evaluation techniques. Then, we explore their key applications: (1) guiding generation and selecting optimal outputs during LLM inference, (2) facilitating data synthesis and iterative self-improvement for LLMs, and (3) providing training signals in RL-based finetuning. Finally, we discuss critical open questions regarding the selection, generalization, evaluation, and enhancement of RMs, based on existing research and our own empirical findin

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

AdaThink-Med: Optimizing Inference-Time Compute for Medical Reasoning via Uncertainty Quantification

arXiv:2509.24560v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly bolstered the capabilities of medical large language models (LLMs). However, current models exhibit static computational expenditure, applying lengthy reasoning processes indiscriminately to both simple queries and complex diagnostic cases. This inefficiency is particularly prohibitive in real-world healthcare, where clinical scenarios range from time-sensitive emergencies requiring rapid response to intricate pathologies demanding deep analysis. To address this, we propose \textbf{AdaThink-Med}\footnote{Code available at https://github.com/shaohao011/AdaThinkMed}, an end-to-end framework for adaptive reasoning via uncertainty-guided length calibration. Although the underlying mechanism is generalizable, we demonstrate its critical value in the medical domain, where balancing inference latency with diagnostic precision is paramount. AdaThink-Med leverages entropy-based uncert

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

A Comprehensive FP8 Training Recipe for Reasoning-Enhanced Language Models

arXiv:2509.22536v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The immense computational cost of training Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a major barrier to innovation. While FP8 training offers a promising solution with significant theoretical efficiency gains, its widespread adoption has been hindered by the lack of a comprehensive, open-source training recipe. To bridge this gap, we introduce an end-to-end FP8 training recipe that seamlessly integrates continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. Our methodology employs a fine-grained, hybrid-granularity quantization strategy to maintain numerical fidelity while maximizing computational efficiency. Through extensive experiments, including the continue pre-training of models on a 160B-token corpus, we demonstrate that our recipe is not only remarkably stable but also essentially lossless, achieving performance on par with the BF16 baseline across a suite of reasoning benchmarks. Crucially, this is achieved with substantial efficienc

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

SoM-1K: A Thousand-Problem Benchmark Dataset for Strength of Materials

arXiv:2509.21079v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models have shown remarkable capabilities in various domains, but their performance on complex, multimodal engineering problems remains largely unexplored. We introduce SoM-1K, the first large-scale multimodal benchmark dataset dedicated to evaluating foundation models on problems in the strength of materials (SoM). The dataset, which contains 1,065 annotated SoM problems, mirrors real-world engineering tasks by including both textual problem statements and schematic diagrams. Due to the limited capabilities of current foundation models in understanding complicated visual information, we propose a novel prompting strategy called Descriptions of Images (DoI), which provides rigorous expert-generated text descriptions of the visual diagrams as the context. We evaluate eight representative foundation models, including both large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs). Our results show that current foundation

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Quick on the Uptake: Eliciting Implicit Intents from Human Demonstrations for Personalized Mobile-Use Agents

arXiv:2508.08645v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As multimodal large language models advance rapidly, the automation of mobile tasks has become increasingly feasible through the use of mobile-use agents that mimic human interactions from graphical user interfaces. To further enhance mobile-use agents, previous studies employ demonstration learning to improve mobile-use agents from human demonstrations. However, these methods focus solely on the explicit intention flows of humans (e.g., step sequences) while neglecting implicit intention flows (e.g., personal preferences), which makes it difficult to construct personalized mobile-use agents. In this work, to evaluate the Intention Alignment Rate between mobile-use agents and humans, we first collect MobileIAR, a dataset covering 40 English- and Chinese-speaking users and containing human-intent-aligned actions and ground-truth actions. This enables a comprehensive assessment of the agents' understanding of human intent. Then we propo

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

CTR-Sink: Attention Sink for Language Models in Click-Through Rate Prediction

arXiv:2508.03668v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, a core task in recommendation systems, estimates user click likelihood using historical behavioral data. Modeling user behavior sequences as text to leverage Language Models (LMs) for this task has gained traction, owing to LMs' strong semantic understanding and contextual modeling capabilities. However, a critical structural gap exists: user behavior sequences consist of discrete actions connected by semantically empty separators, differing fundamentally from the coherent natural language in LM pre-training. This mismatch causes semantic fragmentation, where LM attention scatters across irrelevant tokens instead of focusing on meaningful behavior boundaries and inter-behavior relationships, degrading prediction performance. To address this, we propose $\textit{CTR-Sink}$, a novel framework introducing behavior-level attention sinks tailored for recommendation scenarios. Inspired by attention sink

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Leveraging Synthetic Data for Question Answering with Multilingual LLMs in the Agricultural Domain

arXiv:2507.16974v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling farmers to access accurate agriculture-related information in their native languages in a timely manner is crucial for the success of the agriculture field. Publicly available general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) typically offer generic agriculture advisories, lacking precision in local and multilingual contexts. Our study addresses this limitation by generating multilingual (English, Hindi, Punjabi) synthetic datasets from agriculture-specific documents from India and fine-tuning LLMs for the task of question answering (QA). Evaluation on human-created datasets demonstrates significant improvements in factuality, relevance, and agricultural consensus for the fine-tuned LLMs compared to the baseline counterparts.

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Self-Correction Bench: Uncovering and Addressing the Self-Correction Blind Spot in Large Language Models

arXiv:2507.02778v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI, they still make errors and follow unproductive reasoning paths. Self-correction is vital for safety-critical applications, but studying it requires disentangling activation failure from knowledge deficiency: when a model fails to correct an error, is it because it cannot, or because it does not? We introduce Self-Correction Bench, a controlled evaluation framework that isolates this distinction by injecting the same error as either an external (user-attributed) or internal (model-attributed) error, keeping all other context identical. Testing 14 open-source non-reasoning models reveals a 64.5% Self-Correction Blind Spot: models correct external errors but fail on identical internal ones, proving the capability exists but is not activated. On models' own naturally generated errors, a measurable share of what a model fails to catch in its own output is caught when the identical

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

OpenDebateEvidence: A Massive-Scale Argument Mining and Summarization Dataset

arXiv:2406.14657v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: https://huggingfac

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

GradCuit: Credit-Assigned Gradient Flow Enables Robust and Interpretable Test-Time Latent Reasoning

arXiv:2608.02585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization-based latent reasoning improves large language model outputs by optimizing instance-specific continuous states at test time while keeping model parameters frozen. Existing methods, however, typically connect these states to the reasoning trajectory through decoded tokens, making sequence-level credit assignment indirect and obscuring how latent updates shape subsequent reasoning. We introduce GradCuit (gradient through circuit), which inserts optimizable latent states at a selected Transformer layer between the hidden representations of the prompt and the generated continuation. Causal self-attention provides every continuation-token log-probability with a differentiable path to every preceding latent state through the remaining Transformer blocks, enabling reward-weighted gradients from the entire continuation to be assigned directly to the latents. Across five instruction-tuned backbones, three reasoning benchmarks, and t

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

UEmbed: Unified Sparse and Dense Multimodal Embeddings

arXiv:2608.02583v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse retrieval underpins modern search systems, from web search to retrieval-augmented generation. Existing work has introduced Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) to push beyond exact lexical matching toward richer semantics. Yet LSR has so far remained tied to encoder-style bidirectional architectures, and its extension to multimodal settings still relies heavily on auxiliary cross-modal modules. To address these limitations, we introduce UEmbed (Unified Embedding), a decoder-only multimodal embedding model that produces both sparse lexical and dense representations in one causal forward pass. UEmbed appends N learnable special tokens to the input and partitions the vocabulary into N disjoint subsets. Each token's causal hidden state predicts sparse weights over its assigned subset, and the N subsets are concatenated into the full sparse vector. Trained on public data, we release UEmbed at 2B, 4B, and 9B scales. UEmbed-9B reaches 71.8 (d

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

RoMeRL: Balancing Feedback Coverage and the Memory-Reward Trap in Self-Evolving Agent Memory via Reduced-Order Utility States

arXiv:2608.02508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based memory systems for self-evolving LLM agents face two tightly coupled challenges. First, trajectory-indexed utilities grow with the interaction history, thereby dispersing limited feedback over an ever-expanding state space. Second, because trajectory-level rewards are jointly assigned to co-retrieved memories, irrelevant experiences may receive misleading utility updates and consequently enter the memory-reward trap. To address these challenges, we introduce Reduced-Order Memory Reinforcement Learning (RoMeRL), which represents the growing trajectory-indexed utility space using a fixed-dimensional per-task memory state factorized by outcome polarity and memory dynamics. RoMeRL incorporates new experiences through a fixed set of semantic coordinates whose contents are updated or replaced over time, thereby concentrating feedback over a bounded utility support. Theoretically, we show that this reduced-order parameterization

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

SWE-Touch: Benchmarking Coding Agents When Users Touch the Code

arXiv:2608.02499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world software development requires coding agents to operate in shared workspaces where users may inspect and modify code during an ongoing task, yet existing repository-level benchmarks typically evaluate agents working alone or restrict user participation to messages. This leads us to ask: how do coding agents understand and respond to code changes in a shared workspace? We introduce SWE-Touch, a framework that stress-tests this setting through validated Counter-Edits: plausible edits to task-relevant code that conflict with task completion. SWE-Touch mines task-critical regions from multiple repair trajectories, uses a separate User Patch Generator to construct the edits, and injects them with contextual user messages when agents reach the relevant code. We evaluate nine coding models on SWE-bench Verified, with additional experiments on longer-horizon tasks from SWE-Bench Pro and DeepSWE. Counter-Edit lowers average resolve rat

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Right Answer, Wrong Method: Shortcut Hacking Misleads the Evaluation of LLM Reasoning on Frontier Science Benchmarks

arXiv:2608.02442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific reasoning benchmarks typically evaluate large language models (LLMs) using final-answer accuracy. However, a correct answer does not necessarily demonstrate the reasoning capability targeted by the problem. We identify Solution Hacking, a failure mode in which an LLM reaches the correct answer through invalid shortcuts, such as numerical search, enumeration, guessing, or answer-first verification, without providing a valid task-targeted derivation. We systematically analyze this phenomenon across difficulty levels, scientific domains, and frontier models. Solution hacking increases sharply with benchmark difficulty, from 2.2\% on common problems to 28.3\% on Olympiad-level problems and 37.4\% on HLE. Moreover, 8.2\%-44.1\% of answers credited as correct across frontier models are identified as hacked solutions. We further develop expert-inspired anti-hacking strategies, including an automatic judge and a test-time instruction

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Token-Native Storage: Read and Write in your Agent's Language

arXiv:2608.02376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search and database engines still store text as UTF-8, a format built for humans. But the systems that increasingly read and write that text (embedders, rerankers, and language-model agents) work in token IDs, not characters, so every access pays to translate between the two. As agents become the primary readers and writers of stored text, we argue for token-native storage: keep the text as the model's own byte-pair-encoding (BPE) token IDs. This is both smaller and faster. Packing r50k IDs as uint16 already beats UTF-8 by 2.25x on English with no compression, and an entropy coder reaches 3.30x. Across six tokenizers and three corpora (English, code, Hindi), compressing token IDs matches or beats every byte codec, even a corpus-trained zstd dictionary. Two findings sharpen the case. BPE numbers tokens by merge order, not frequency, and re-ranking by frequency lets a plain integer codec (streamvbyte) recover most of the entropy coder's r

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Qwen-CUA: Native Computer Use for (almost) Everything

arXiv:2608.02352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Native computer use offers a general interface for agents to operate almost any software available to people, but requires long-horizon state tracking, large-scale interactive experience, and learning from sparse yet verifiable outcomes. We introduce Qwen-CUA, a native computer-use agent with a 397B-A17B Qwen mixture-of-experts backbone. It observes only screenshots and acts through keyboard and mouse events, without DOM trees, accessibility metadata, or task-specific APIs. Its scaffold maintains up to 20 active screenshots and folds older visual history in fixed-size blocks to retain recent evidence while preserving reusable prompt prefixes. For training, we build a cloud rollout fleet with access to nearly 100,000 vCPUs and tens of thousands of concurrent environments, construct approximately 40,000 verifiable tasks, and collect personalized long-horizon workflows across everyday and professional software. We optimize complete traject

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval

arXiv:2608.02189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual dense retrieval aims to handle queries and documents across different languages based on a unified retriever model. The challenge lies in enabling robust retrieval transfer to low-resource languages where annotated retrieval data is often scarce. Although previous studies transfer high-resource supervision to low-resource languages in multilingual semantic representation learning, the shared representation often entangles semantic and linguistic features, which may interfere with optimizing semantic relevance for retrieval. Different from existing methods that focus on learning language-agnostic semantic features under such entanglement, we propose a disentangled contrastive learning~(DCL) method for multilingual dense retrieval by separating multilingual representations into semantic and linguistic subspaces. Specifically, we design disentangled optimization objectives based on hierarchical semantic alignment and language

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Douyin Multimodal Embedding Model Technical Report

arXiv:2608.02148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal representation learning is a cornerstone of modern AI. By encoding multimodal queries and targets into vectors, it powers industrial search and recommendation and underpins modern agents. Real-world platforms with complex modalities and massive-scale content, such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and YouTube, demand both efficiency under billion-scale indexing and fine-grained discrimination for hard matching. Existing MLLM embedding models rarely satisfy both. Contrastive models are efficient but rely on pair-level supervision too coarse for fine-grained distinctions, while CoT-based models improve discrimination through explicit generation impractical to serve online. We present Douyin Multimodal Embedding (DME), a model trained in two stages to combine both strengths. Stage 1 performs large-scale contrastive pre-training that establishes a unified multimodal embedding space with broad modality and task coverage. Stage 2 supplements

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

HAFI-VLM: A Frequency Perspective for Diagnosing and Enhancing Visual Perception in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608.02124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable when predictions require fine-grained visual evidence. We identify a previously overlooked cause: spectral response rigidity. Despite substantial frequency variation across images and tasks, pretrained vision encoders exhibit persistent, encoder-specific layerwise spectral profiles that change only marginally under downstream fine-tuning. Since pretrained vision encoders only receive images, they cannot adapt spectral extraction to the evidence required by the current query. We therefore propose HAFI-VLM, which introduces a task-conditioned frequency pathway while preserving the pretrained semantic representation. Hierarchical Adaptive Frequency Injection (HAFI) retrieves complementary low-, mid-, and high-frequency evidence at multiple encoder depths using text-modulated, spatially aligned cross-attention. A Visual Enrichment Layer Adapter further recalibrates shallow LLM attention to eff

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Instruction-Conditioned Exploration with Asymmetric Reinforcement Learning and Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608.02087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an important tool for improving model capabilities, but the LLM action-space structure introduces challenges distinct from classical RL, with implications for inducing exploration. New methods are required that leverage the broad knowledge and flexibility of pre-trained LLMs to deliberately generate diverse experience at training time. We propose Instruction-Conditioned Exploration (ICE), which supplements task prompts during training with one of several distinct instructions, increasing the coverage of behaviours attempted. To facilitate ICE, we propose Asymmetric-RL/SD, a combined Reinforcement Learning and Self-Distillation training objective, to transfer explored behaviours to the unconditioned test-time policy. ICE with the Asymmetric-RL/SD objective improves Qwen3-1.7B held-out pass@1 performance at $4$K response length on mathematical reasoning

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Geometry-Guided Layerwise FFN Width Allocation in Transformers

arXiv:2608.02064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Feed-forward networks (FFNs) account for a large fraction of Transformer parameters, yet their hidden width is usually constant across depth. We ask whether this capacity can instead be allocated from a forward-pass measurement of layer behavior. We view each FFN as transporting a cloud of token representations and quantify the induced geometric change using correspondence-preserving shift, Gromov-Wasserstein distortion, and degree-one persistent homology under raw and scale-normalized metrics. A layerwise approximation surrogate yields an exact fixed-budget optimizer. Across seven pretrained language models, raw Euclidean work largely tracks residual-norm growth, whereas normalized work is predominantly front-loaded. Gromov-Wasserstein work is more consistently associated with perturbation-based layer sensitivity than the finite-sample topological estimate. In paired 128M and 256M training runs, several normalized-work schedules reduce

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

ET-Prune: Evidence-Aware Dynamic Budgeting for Visual Token Pruning in Text-Rich MLLMs

arXiv:2608.01979v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual token pruning reduces the inference cost of multimodal large language models, but a fixed token ratio is poorly matched to text-rich inputs. In OCR-centric tasks, decisive evidence can be a small number, label, or field whose relevance is specified by the question; indiscriminate pruning can erase that evidence while retaining visually salient but irrelevant regions. We present ET-Prune, a training-free framework that casts pruning as evidence allocation. It derives question-conditioned evidence from a decoder-side partial query-key block, safeguards text-like spatial regions, and converts evidence uncertainty and density into a sample-specific token floor. Three progressive middle-layer events then move the sequence toward this budget, retaining more tokens for diffuse or text-dense evidence and pruning concentrated evidence more aggressively. At the observed point estimates from one deterministic pass per configuration, ET-Prun

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

TELLER: Non-intrusive Cross-Layer Root-Cause Analysis for LLM Inference

arXiv:2608.01975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference has evolved from an offline workload into a continuously operated software service, yet root-cause analysis remains difficult because a single request spans the inference engine, Python/C++ backend, host CUDA APIs, GPU kernels, and distributed communication. Existing profilers expose raw timelines, while log-based diagnosis often misses cross-layer execution semantics and request-level structure. We present TELLER, a non-intrusive Trace- and Log-aware LLM inference Root-cause analysis framework. TELLER first collects NVTX/CUPTI traces and service logs without modifying model binaries, then reconstructs per-request call-chain trees and aligns log lines with the corresponding execution steps. We introduce a dependency-aware causal-context slice that preserves parent-child structure, temporal order, and communication relations, and a Trace Pair Encoding (TPE) tokenizer that compresses such slices into c

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

CultureVidBench: Benchmarking Cultural Understanding in Text-to-Video Generation

arXiv:2608.01942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have advanced rapidly, yet their ability to represent diverse cultural contexts remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on perceptual quality, physical plausibility, and text-video alignment, but do not directly assess whether generated videos capture culturally specific objects, actions, rituals, visible text, or audio cues. We introduce CultureVidBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating cultural understanding in T2V generation. CultureVidBench contains 1,000 curated prompts covering 12 countries, 6 continents, 8 cultural regions, and 14 cultural aspects organized into three categories: material culture, social practice & performance, and ritual & ceremony. Designed specifically for video generation, CultureVidBench emphasizes dynamic and multimodal cultural representation, including social interactions, ritual procedure, and culturally appropriate visible text and audio. We

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technology Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses

arXiv:2608.01918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Harness design plays a critical role in agent performance by shaping how large language models (LLMs) perceive, reason over, and act within executable environments. Recent work has proposed automatic harness evolution, which iteratively improves the harness from agent--environment interactions. However, existing methods often overfit to the evolution tasks, rely exclusively on trajectory-derived signals, and optimize harness components jointly, causing interference across components. We propose HarnessCompass, a novel automatic harness evolution framework built around constrained evolution, proactive feedback, and component-wise optimization. HarnessCompass first enforces global constraints on evolution, restricting modifications to task-agnostic harness changes that generalize beyond the evolution tasks. It then augments trajectory-derived evidence with proactive first-person feedback from the agent about harness usage, yielding richer

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