arXiv:2610.28759v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The Gabriel graph is a proximity graph widely used in computational geometry and geometric machine learning, underlying large-margin classifiers and, as we show in this work, density-aware clustering methods. Its construction, however, has cubic time complexity $O(N^3)$ in the naive formulation, which severely limits its use on datasets beyond a few thousand samples. This paper presents a set of GPU parallelization strategies, implemented in CUDA, that make Gabriel graph construction practical at scale. We introduce (i) an implicit closed-form mapping from a linear thread index to the corresponding vertex pair $(i,j)$, which removes the need for an explicit $O(N^2)$ adjacency structure and lets every thread locate its pair in constant time and constant memory; (ii) a two-pass, bitmask-based, atomically-compacted edge-list construction that produces a dense edge array proportional only to the number of edges actually found; and (iii) a thread-coarsening strategy in which each thread evaluates several candidate pairs, trading launch and scheduling overhead against load balance. We evaluate these strategies on the acceleration of a Gabriel-graph-based large-margin classifier (NN-clas) and on a novel Gabriel-graph clustering algorithm that identifies connected components on a residual graph and performs GPU-parallel Union-Find with hierarchical edge-based merging. On 14 public benchmark datasets, the GPU implementation reduces Gabriel graph construction time by two to nearly four orders of magnitude relative to a sequential CPU baseline (up to 8484x), without loss of classification accuracy, and the proposed clustering method is statistically competitive with DBSCAN on the topological validity index Dunn while eliminating the need for an explicit density radius parameter.
Diego Sanches Nere dos Santos, Luiz Carlos Bambirra Torres
arXiv:2610.28716v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Effective decision-making in human-centric environments such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and clinical healthcare requires policies that are adaptive, data-efficient, and ethically deployable. Apprenticeship Learning (AL) infers policies directly from expert demonstrations by recovering the underlying reward structure, enabling strictly offline learning without environment interaction. This dissertation develops a progression of offline AL frameworks organized around two challenges: reward modeling and demonstration quality. For reward modeling, EM-EDM clusters demonstrations by latent reward functions and induces cluster-specific policies, and THEMES partitions trajectories into temporally coherent sub-trajectories guided by a hierarchically learned reward regulator; across one educational and three clinical datasets, THEMES outperforms flat and hierarchical AL baselines. For demonstration quality, HALIDE integrates continuous quality signals into hierarchical policy induction, enabling principled reuse of mixed-quality data under distribution shift. CCHAL further attributes quality to individual decisions via Bayesian credit assignment, dual-arm criticality scoring that contrasts expert and non-expert behavior, and a Bradley-Terry contrastive IRL objective over failure trajectories, outperforming baselines including HALIDE on three clinical EHR datasets and an ITS dataset. Finally, a real-world classroom evaluation of StuEDM, an EDM-induced policy that preserves student agency and intervenes only on disagreement, shows significant learning gains over an Expert baseline and a higher pretest-adjusted posttest score than a CQL policy trained on a far larger corpus, while overriding students less than half as often. Together, this work establishes offline AL as a practical, data-efficient, and ethically viable paradigm for human-centric environments.
arXiv:2610.28709v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Evaluating the energy transmission ratio of an X-ray beam through a polymer composite is a challenging task in radiation shielding studies. The reference solution with Monte Carlo transport simulation is highly accurate but computationally expensive: each of our reference simulations is capped at $4\times10^9$ photon histories and a 20,000 s (over 5 hours) time limit, while closed-form analytical methods fail to represent such complex scenarios. We present an artificial neural network model that maps the unordered multi-set of molecular constituents, their mass fractions, and four bulk physical descriptors directly to the transmission ratio $I(t)/I_0$ in 1-3 milliseconds. The model is a Set Transformer, which makes it permutation invariant by construction and accepts mixtures of different sizes up to 11 constituents within a fixed-size padded set. Each constituent is embedded with a chemistry-pretrained transformer language model, ChemBERTa. In our proposed method, training data are produced by an automated PENELOPE/penEasy pipeline using the radiation source at 30, 80, 100, and 120 kV tube voltages over polyethylene-based shielding composite slabs of thicknesses spanning 0.15-2.5 mm. After preprocessing, the dataset contains $n = 4697$ simulated configurations on which a leakage-free, jointly stratified 10-fold cross-validation is performed, attaining mean squared error MSE = $(1.12 \pm 0.56)\times10^{-4}$, normalized-MSE percentage NMSE% = 0.0294% $\pm$ 0.0147%, and $R^2 = 0.9988$. The corresponding per-sample percentage errors give an alpha-trimmed ($\alpha = 0.10$) absolute percentage error (APE) of 1.66% and a median APE of 1.15%. Our model's inference is several orders of magnitude faster than the underlying Monte Carlo simulation (sub-millisecond per query vs. several hours for the reference run) with effective accuracy in predicting $I(t)/I_0$.
Can Erer, H. Birkan Yilmaz, Nebahat Aral
arXiv:2610.28699v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables adaptive and autonomous decision-making in embedded, edge, and heterogeneous computing systems. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and integrated circuits (ICs) offer low latency, energy efficiency, and architectural flexibility for RL deployment, while introducing challenges in resource constraints, implementation complexity, and hardware-algorithm co-design. This review surveys more than 100 studies on RL implementations across FPGA and IC platforms, emphasizing architectures, implementation strategies, performance evaluation, and applications. The literature is organized by RL family, including model-based Markov decision processes, classical value-based methods, deep RL, actor-critic, policy-gradient, and multi-agent approaches. We further classify studies by abstraction level, hardware realization strategy, and application domain, examining how RL algorithms map onto reconfigurable and fixed hardware. Unlike surveys restricted to particular algorithms or platforms, this work provides a unified analysis of FPGA and IC implementations, covering acceleration, reconfigurable architectures, energy-aware control, and system-level optimization. Comparative assessments consider resource utilization, latency, throughput, power consumption, and reported performance gains. Finally, we identify recurring architectural patterns, practical limitations, open challenges, and research directions for efficient RL-driven hardware systems. The survey offers a consolidated reference for researchers developing and evaluating RL solutions on specialized hardware.
arXiv:2610.28693v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) enables low-cost and non-invasive heart rate (HR) monitoring but remains sensitive to waveform distortion, physiological variability, and measurement interference. Temporal waveform characteristics and frequency-domain periodicity provide complementary information for HR estimation; however, effectively exploring and integrating these representations within a compact model remains challenging. This paper proposes TF-IG, a parameter-efficient interaction-gated time-frequency learning framework for PPG-based HR estimation. TF-IG employs a dual-branch architecture in which a temporal branch captures pulse morphology via dilated depthwise-separable convolutions, while a frequency branch extracts cardiac periodicity information from bounded log-spectrogram representations. To combine the two domains, we introduce an interaction-gated fusion module that explicitly models feature agreement and discrepancy, while also learning feature-wise weights to balance temporal and spectral information. A parameter-shared regression head further maps the temporal, spectral, and fused representations into the final HR prediction space. Experiments on the benchmark BIDMC PPG and Respiration Dataset using a subject-exclusive training, validation, and test protocol show that TF-IG achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.227 BPM, a root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.060 BPM, a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.9934, and 92.28 percent of estimates within 3 BPM, while remaining parameter-efficient with only 84.6K parameters. Ablation results further demonstrate the complementary contributions of the temporal and frequency branches, interaction-gated fusion, and shared regression head. These results indicate that explicitly modeling cross-domain interactions provides an effective accuracy-complexity trade-off for lightweight PPG-based HR estimation.
Anh Khoi Pham, Phat Lam, Thien Truong Nguyen Ly, Lam Pham
arXiv:2610.28679v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agents need reliable ways to validate their outputs, both when completing tasks and when filtering synthetic training data. We study verifier generation: from the instruction and environment available for solving a task, an agent writes an executable verifier that must accept every valid solution and reject invalid ones. We introduce VerifierBench, a benchmark of 222 tasks from six agent benchmarks spanning tool-call, state-based, and code verification, with 4,993 hidden test cases that include alternative valid solutions and attacks; Verifier4Verifier (V4V), a six-check audit, screens its source verifiers and test suites. Across 19 models in a common agent harness, normalized balanced accuracy ranges from 10.6 to 62.1, with generated verifiers consistently rejecting invalid solutions more reliably than they accept valid ones. This apparent strength can mask overly restrictive verification: most false rejections in the analyzed records come from verifiers that accept no tested solution to a task. Case studies reveal unsupported assumptions about solution formats, tool use, and code changes that exclude valid solutions. These errors survive self-testing because agents test solutions that share the verifier's mistaken assumptions, or submit verifiers without confirming that any correct solution passes. These findings suggest testing both whether a verifier accepts a correct solution and whether it accepts other solutions permitted by the task. The project page and dataset are publicly available.
Jianing Yin, Ziyi Chen, Hao Wang, Yiyou Sun, Zijian Jin, Dawn Song, Daoan Zhang
arXiv:2610.28676v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The rapid evolution of digital circuit complexity demands innovative approaches to hardware design automation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have influenced software development, their application to Hardware Description Language (HDL) generation remains largely unexplored, particularly for VHDL. This paper presents a comprehensive study for AI-assisted digital circuit design, addressing gaps in current Electronic Design Automation workflows. The work introduces a VHDL dataset of 18,500+ syntax-verified examples from open-source repositories and converted Verilog designs. Five 7B-parameter LLMs were fine-tuned using parameter-efficient QLoRA technique, enabling deployment in resource-constrained environments. To evaluate model efficacy, a rigorous three-level pipeline was established: (1) syntax and synthesis validation, (2) functional simulation with testbenches, and (3) FPGA prototyping on Zynq SoCs. Results show fine-tuned models achieve up to 92% syntax correctness and 73% functional accuracy on common design tasks, with DeepSeek-Coder demonstrating the highest performance gains. Generated designs were successfully deployed on real hardware, confirming not only syntactic but operational viability. This work demonstrates that LLMs, when tailored with domain-specific data and lightweight fine-tuning can contribute meaningfully to the future of generative EDA workflows.
Patrik Drazic, Benaoumeur Senouci, Boualem Benatallah
arXiv:2610.28667v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Coding agents can now implement a specification, write and run tests, repair failures, and declare the result ready for release. When the same agentic system produces both the software and the evidence of its correctness, a passing test suite is no longer independent evidence: visible tests become an optimization target, code and tests may share one misinterpretation of the specification, and the builder's own tests may simply be incomplete. This paper argues that agent-produced software requires an assurance plane that is structurally independent of the build plane. We characterize four gaps between stakeholder intent and production (requirement, conformance, evaluation, and model gaps) and identify which of them verification can close. We propose a framework that separates building from verifying, introduces a Verification Contract stating what must be demonstrated before release, and organizes verification in a specification-first phase without access to the implementation and an implementation-aware phase based on mutation analysis, property-based testing, and fuzzing, with an assurance report that leaves the release decision to a human. We evaluate the framework in a pre-registered study on three stateful services, two of them written by third-party models, and an EvalPlus pilot. The builder's programs were correct, but its own tests missed subtle interactions: a verifier in a fresh context detected more of the 46 seeded faults than the builder's tests (Holm-corrected p = 0.006) and surfaced the ambiguities of the specification, at the price of rare false oracles. A verifier from another provider did not add detection.
Sion Israel Sion, Alain April
arXiv:2610.28666v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reviewer lottery error describes error due to a small set of peer reviews attending to only some of the issues with a paper that a larger pool of eligible reviewers would raise. We show this error can be reduced by surfacing a checklist of criticisms learned from a historical review corpus. Our approach generates a tree of checklists representing coarsenings of the atomic review claim space, then selects the coarsening that maximizes a theoretically-motivated measure of correlated agreement among reviewers. We realize this approach with an LLM-assisted pipeline and test it on NeurIPS 2021 and ICLR 2022 review data. In simulated review with LLM reviewers, the learned checklist reduces the mean squared error (MSE) of a three reviewer committee by 58% on NeurIPS and 21% on ICLR, and on both venues the checklist with the highest correlated agreement has the lowest error for committees of three or more. In a human study with 20 participants, the learned NeurIPS checklist lowers the MSE of a paper ranking, measured against the NeurIPS 2021 order, from 0.48 to 0.22.
Xuanyou Liu, Ziyang Guo, Jason Hartline, Jessica Hullman
arXiv:2610.28663v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A knowledge graph needs a stable address for its evidence even where the literature offers competing classifications and agrees on none. Yet an address chosen for retrieval readily passes for the only classification available. This happens whenever records gathered under one name concern units that differ in boundaries, rank, or the criteria by which they are described or counted. In Sinitic dialectology the same localities recur in schemes whose units differ in membership and rank, and a unit may change its affiliation when the evidence for its diagnosis changes. Two tone counts, each quoted faithfully, may still count different things. The taxonomy of an entire field thus comes to rest on the unstable frame of a literature that contradicts itself. Neither verifying a quotation nor searching for conflicting values detects these differences. I distinguish the working address that gathers candidate evidence, the category that the source defines and the decision that admits a passage to a particular comparison, and argue that such decisions, together with the dependence among records, belong to the provenance of a comparison. On four re-runnable cases, the accompanying PaRAGraph Casebook shows where such differences arise among claims extracted by a language model and verified before entering the graph. The platform now stores the corresponding decisions as objects for one dimension of comparability, the address of a record: the placement of a locality in each source's scheme, the decision that a name in a given publication denotes a unit rather than a place, and the origin of every address. The working taxonomy can then be revised as new sources yield new claims, while the path from each comparison to its evidence stays fixed. Keywords: knowledge graphs; source attribution; classification; claim extraction; comparative concepts; Sinitic dialectology; Yue
Ksenia Kozha (American University of Cyprus), PaRAGraph Research Project
arXiv:2610.28658v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: How much can we trust an agent to find the paper we need? As researchers, we search the literature from what we have read toward what we have not. We thus describe what we want in our own terms, which a paper may show only implicitly; our requirements grow as we read; and what we seek may lie in an empty region no paper yet covers. We introduce CompLit, a literature search benchmark spanning all eight arXiv domains, with one diagnostic setting for each of these needs. The strongest agents, Codex (GPT-5.6-Sol) and Claude Code (Opus 4.8), answer 86-87% of Standard queries, yet fall to 66-68% when requirements are implicit (implicit), lose another 6 and 15pp, respectively, as they accumulate (cumulative), and abstain on at most 53% of the queries no paper satisfies (unmet). No agent leads in every domain, and all are less accurate on papers from before 2019 or after 2023. Tracing their search, we find that agents often reach the right paper, or the closest one, yet misjudge it. Doing well on CompLit is a step toward agents that we can trust to find the paper we need, or to tell us that none exists.
Dayoon Ko, Jihyuk Kim, Soyeong Jeong, Young-jun Lee, Dahyun Lee, Juyeon Kim, Gunhee Kim, Moontae Lee, Kyungjae Lee
arXiv:2610.28656v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Future-work statements offer a record of the questions researchers choose to leave open. Using them to describe a field, however, requires separating thematic change from changes in document coverage, topic assignment, and scholarly writing. FutureLens examines these measurement issues in a recovered snapshot of 5,655 ACL papers published during 2012--2022, including 4,005 with supplied future-work reference text. We compare non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), aggregate topic presence at the paper level, and examine normalized prevalence, exploratory trend statistics, assignment stability, and agreement between input-derived text and references. Across available seeds, NMF has higher mean normalized pointwise mutual information (0.1387 versus 0.1280) and higher pairwise assignment stability, while LDA has greater keyword diversity (0.8900 versus 0.7750). Seed-zero results show increasing prevalence of broad model-training and question-related vocabulary, alongside substantial citation and document-structure content. Mean input/reference topic-set overlap is 0.5191 for NMF and 0.4924 for LDA; temporal rank agreement varies widely and does not imply agreement in prevalence levels. These findings support a descriptive account of the available corpus, with explicit qualifications for missing references, incomplete runs, and unverified reference provenance. The contribution is an empirical measurement study of longitudinal scholarly signals, not a new topic-modeling algorithm or a forecasting system.
Ibrahim Al Azher, Hamed Alhoori
arXiv:2610.28655v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Publishers and funders increasingly ask authors to disclose how AI tools contributed to a piece of research. In computational work the repository is where an author or an auditor would look for the answer, and we ask what it can actually supply. We audit two single-investigator repositories by the same author in the same field, each carrying a different class of agent residue: a prescriptive trace of standing rule files and a narrative trace of a running agent scratchpad, in repositories of 466 and 103 commits. The two are legible in opposite ways. 85.6% of the lines ever committed to the prescriptive trace are visible at the current revision, and a standing rule states a conclusion and discards the episode behind it; the narrative trace records episodes and shows 21.8%. Counted by revision the gap is far smaller: 15 of the prescriptive trace's 41 revisions leave no visible line, against 18 of the narrative trace's 41. The Co-Authored-By trailer, the field an automated audit reads, is one of three AI trailer keys Project A carries and covers 66 of the 121 commits carrying any. In Project B it has low sensitivity against an explicit within-repository proxy: 39 commits revise a file maintained to hold an agent's working notes and 1 (2.6%) carries the trailer. Project A's repository-level rate is unstable in time too, stepping from 2.7% to 17.7% across a boundary we did not specify in advance. Repository channels disagree, and neither rate can be read as an involvement rate; we do not isolate the cause, and say so. We give a field-by-field account of which provenance claims such traces support, which they cannot, and which they answer confidently and wrongly, construct an auditable evidence ledger, and derive the requirements this places on any system meant to record research provenance as it happens.
Koutian Wu, Zesen Huang, Hejia Geng
arXiv:2610.28650v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The CIDOC CRM family is not only a schema for museum collections. Its extensions formalise the apparatus through which research knowledge is produced and justified: CRMsci models scientific observation and measurement, CRMdig the provenance of digital processes, CRMinf inference and belief. Together they constitute a schema for research data, and the obstacle to their adoption is documentary rather than theoretical: four normative documents, four code conventions, and eighty-nine typed links crossing document boundaries. This paper presents the CIDOC CRM Periodic Table, a single-page browser rendering 131 classes and 480 property entries from CIDOC CRM 7.1.3, CRMsci 3.2, CRMdig 5.0 and CRMinf 1.2.1 as one navigable surface, with two inference facilities: a one-step triple builder admitting only the class-property combinations licensed by declared domains, ranges and the subclass closure, and a multi-step path finder enumerating property chains between two classes. Because all loaded models are merged into one code-keyed dictionary before the hierarchy closures are computed, both resolve chains that cross model boundaries; we document the addition of CRMsci and the three cross-model tests it made possible, and report preliminary uptake signals from 56 months of analytics, with the reading they support.
arXiv:2610.28649v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Generative AI's growing role in academic writing has driven a rise in fabricated references across dissertations and student reports. We present the Fabrication Severity Stack (FSS), a three-tiered framework classifying citation fabrications by detection complexity - from non-existent references to subtle content misattribution. Building on the FSS, we propose a staged heuristic verification workflow, executable through mainstream LLM interfaces. We argue that this framework offers computer science educators/examiners a practical, zero-cost basis for embedding reference verification into the assessment of dissertation and students' reports. In a pilot study on 100 citations (20% seeded with Level 1 and Level 2 fabrications), the proposed heuristic workflow enabled mainstream LLM interfaces to correctly flag 9-10 of 10 non-existent references and partially detect metadata corruption. These preliminary results suggest that freely accessible, general-purpose LLMs can achieve high recall on citation verification without reliance on proprietary detection tools.
Hazrat Ali, Mohamed Elawady
arXiv:2610.22714v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Augmenting softmax attention with forget gates typically relies on summing decay contributions along the key--query path. Because such accumulation is monotonic, these mechanisms cannot selectively erase intermediate context while preserving older, structurally relevant tokens. We propose First Passage Attention (FPA), which shifts from path summation to path extrema by lowering a key's logit proportionally to the deepest dip of a learned scalar field below that key's level over the intervening span. FPA encompasses the Forgetting Transformer (FoX) as a special case, and when the field and levels follow a shared learned walk, the alive keys with unpenalised logits naturally form a stack. We show that a constant-dimension FPA head realises any subset of keys left alive by subsequent dips, whereas softmax heads with positional biases or token-level forget gates require a head dimension linear in the number of keys. In synthetic experiments, one-layer FPA heads converge to these target sets while comparable softmax and FoX baselines fail on every seed. Scaling to a 110M-parameter language model, FPA matches FoX in perplexity and uniquely achieves perfect passkey retrieval at $8\times$ the training length, even with its key--value cache compressed to about $25\%$.
arXiv:2610.30072v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Data agents built on ReAct-style loops now execute complex analytical workflows over structured data, yet their intermediate reasoning still runs almost entirely through text. Human analysts instead move between numbers, tables, and charts, reading visual evidence to expose trends and anomalies that text summaries drop. We ask whether charts can serve as internal epistemic actions inside a data agent's reasoning loop, and how to teach an agent to use them. We first build \probe{}, a suite of 200 controlled tasks under four matched interface conditions, and find a persistent gap between what agents can read and what they choose to use. Agents score as well from self-generated charts as from numeric output, yet plotting access alone does not translate into consistent use. Task slices show that charts lead on temporal, pattern, and anomaly reasoning, while text leads on precise reading and conditional verification. We then propose \method{}, which distils two families of experience from conditioned trajectory rollouts. One family records how to select and verify analytical operations, and the other records when to invoke text, charts, or both. A trajectory judge scores outcomes and labels intermediate steps, and a validation gate admits only experience that improves held-out performance. On three held-out benchmarks with four LLM backbones, \method{} raises analytical accuracy and visual evidence quality over matched baselines, and backbones that never drew charts begin using them, all without touching model parameters.
Xinzhe Wang, Xudong Weng, Zang Li, Shaolei Zhang
arXiv:2610.30045v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Decision models map stated rules and observed states to discrete answers. Aggregate accuracy leaves unresolved which rule and information changes guide those answers. We connect controlled input changes to transfer, joint reliability, and directed information use through executable arithmetic rules. Semantic rule separation and crossed rule and state tests make transfer and joint success separately measurable. We compare equivalent wordings, calibrate joint correctness through marginal-preserving reassociation, and alter tables to define alternative answer targets. Adaptation gains increase with nearest-source answer agreement; fully conflicting quartets yield small pooled gains and different gain signs across source splits. Equivalent rewrites have opposing task-level effects, linking transfer gains to rule presentation. Joint-score departures depend on which rule and state associations the reference preserves. A decision service changes answers more across equivalent wordings than across identical-text repeats and usually follows the answer targets implied by altered table values or mappings.
Tianyou Lai, Wentao Yue, Zhiwei Zuo, Qilei Li
arXiv:2610.30042v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Harness optimization, which improves an agent's prompts, tools, and workflows, is an increasingly effective way to enhance agents built on frozen or closed-source LLMs. Leading approaches such as the Darwin--Godel Machine and the Huxley--Godel Machine (HGM) rely on recursive self-improvement and were developed mainly for coding, where the competence needed to improve the agent coincides with the competence being improved. Planning tasks, in which an agent must produce a sequence of tool calls that jointly satisfies interacting constraints, break this alignment. There, open-ended self-modification repeatedly explores ineffective changes and consumes substantial evaluation budgets. We introduce HGM-Dual, a diagnostic-guided framework for budget-efficient harness evolution for planning agents. First, HGM-Dual represents agent evolution as lineage-aware context. This context records what each ancestor changed, which behaviors improved or regressed, and which modifications were ineffective, giving the editor explicit edit-outcome attribution instead of an unstructured archive of past agents. Second, HGM-Dual introduces error-conditioned dual-path child generation. For each selected parent, it generates a general child that preserves open-ended exploration and specialized children that target the harness components most likely responsible for the parent's highest-ranked constraint violations. HGM-Dual outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 14.45% relative improvement in case accuracy while matching HGM variants' final performance with 2x-4x fewer evaluation budget.
Sudipta Paul, Pengrui Quan, Aounon Kumar, Nicholas Tzou, Vivek Kulkarni, Srinivas Chappidi
arXiv:2610.30041v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text skills can extend the capabilities of tool-using agents, but long skill descriptions increase computational costs. Soft prompts provide a compact alternative, yet learning from entire successful trajectories may also introduce unnecessary behavioral changes. We find that the useful effect of a text skill is highly concentrated in a small subset of trajectory positions. Based on this observation, we propose Behavioral Localization, which compares the frozen agent with and without the text skill to identify positions where the skill both increases the likelihood of successful tokens and meaningfully changes the next token distribution. We use these localized positions to supervise a short soft prompt. Experiments on SpreadsheetBench with a frozen Qwen3.6-35B-A3B agent show that the top 10\% of trajectory positions capture 96.12\% of the total positive skill gain. In the shared prompt setting, selective supervision improves success from 30.36\% with full trajectory to 36.79\%. Under task-specific conditions, using the top 10\% localized positions achieves 57.38\%, outperforming both the full text skill and the on-policy OPCD baseline. These results show that a small set of behaviorally relevant trajectory positions can provide effective supervision of soft skills.
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