Knowledge
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Beyond Downstream QA: Rethinking How We Evaluate Agent Memory
2026-10-15 16:58:12Sebastian-Antonio Toma, Jean de Kernier, Mike Ply, Oliviu MateiAbstract
Agent memory benchmarks evaluate whether an agent's responses reflect correct knowledge, measuring downstream question-answering accuracy as a proxy for memory quality. We show this evaluation paradigm is incomplete: it conflates memory correctness with retrieval and generation quality, producing both false positives where correct responses mask broken memory and false negatives where incorrect responses blame correct memory for retrieval failures. We introduce FEB-30, a benchmark of 30 fact-evolution trajectories spanning 6 diagnostic categories and 3 difficulty levels, constructed via paradigm inversion: documents are generated from known fact trajectories, yielding deterministic ground truth without human annotation. Each trajectory defines how a fact should evolve across multi-author artifacts (documents, emails, conversations), enabling direct inspection of the memory store after each ingestion step. Applying FEB-30 to a representative memory system, we demonstrate that intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation diverge by an average of 16 percentage points, with 44% of trajectories exceeding meaningful divergence thresholds. Diagnostic decomposition reveals that the system correctly classifies memory operations (create, update, reinforce, supersede) only 20% of the time, a failure entirely invisible to extrinsic evaluation, and that failure modes differ systematically by category and difficulty. We release the benchmark, document generation pipeline, and scoring framework to support reproducible evaluation of agent memory systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22209
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REKI: Registering Knowledge in VLAs
2026-10-15 16:34:06Juliette Marrie, Paul Pacaud, Adrien Ramanana Rahary, Shizhe Chen, Moritz B\"ohleAbstract
We introduce REKI, a 2.4B vision-language-action model (VLA) pretrained exclusively on public data that sets a new Pareto frontier between performance and model size: on LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin Clean2Rand and RoboCasa365, it is outperformed only by models about twice its size. REKI consists of a vision-language model (VLM) followed by a flow-matching action expert, and is pretrained on a curated mixture of public robot, egocentric human and vision-language data. Additionally, we endow it with a memory that gives the policy access to its recent past at negligible cost: a few register tokens in the action expert summarise the output of the VLM at each frame and persist in the expert's cache. This memory improves success in simulation and on real robots, and makes oscillations between poses about four times rarer. REKI uses a simple model design and training paradigm, and is optimised to be efficient at training and inference. We release the full code across data curation, training, inference and evaluation, deployment, and all pretrained and finetuned model weights: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22178
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Believed but Not Said: Measuring Hidden Belief Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Discussions
2026-10-15 16:12:07Liangjie Huang, Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Wooseong Yang, Yuwei Han, Philip S. YuAbstract
LLM systems increasingly rely on groups of agents that discuss, critique, and check one another, assuming that peers will catch individual errors. We test this assumption against a minimal adversary. In a ten-agent factual discussion, one or three adversarial agents repeatedly assert a plausible false answer. After each round we probe each benign agent's private answer through a separate call whose response is hidden from its peers, and we separately label its public stance toward the claim. Across six models and three factual-QA datasets, groups remain stable without an attacker: only 0.6% of benign agents finish with the false answer. A single adversarial agent increases this rate to 44.8% and three to 60.5%. Studies of conformity typically report public agreement without private change; we find the reverse. With three adversarial agents present, benign agents hold the false answer in 51.6% of exposed turns but publicly endorse it in only 19.7%. Much of the influence therefore remains invisible in the discussion, and the false answers persist when agents are asked for their own views. Agents that retain the true answer often fail to defend it; once adopted, the false answer spreads among benign agents, and baseline knowledge does not predict robustness.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22138
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Progress Reward Model for Reinforcement Learning via Large Language Models
2026-10-15 15:21:25Xiuhui Zhang, Ning Gao, Xingyu Jiang, Yihui Chen, Yuheng Pan, Mohan Zhang, Yue DengAbstract
Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face significant limitations in handling long-term tasks with sparse rewards. Recent advancements have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to enhance RL by utilizing their world knowledge for task planning and reward generation. However, planning-based approaches often depend on pre-defined skill libraries and fail to optimize low-level control policies, while reward-based methods require extensive human feedback or exhaustive searching due to the complexity of tasks. In this paper, we propose the Progress Reward Model for RL (PRM4RL), a novel framework that integrates task planning and dense reward to enhance RL. For high-level planning, a complex task is decomposed into a series of simple manageable subtasks, with a subtask-oriented, fine-grained progress function designed to monitor task execution progress. For low-level reward generation, inspired by potential-based reward shaping, we use the progress function to construct a Progress Reward Model (PRM), providing theoretically grounded optimality and convergence guarantees, thereby enabling effective policy optimization. Experimental results on robotics control tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms both LLM-based planning and reward methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22056
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CARA: Causally Guided Retrieval Agent for Question Answering
2026-10-15 14:57:14Weicheng Liu, Xiangcheng Wu, Depeng Xu, Haopeng Zhang, Xi NiuAbstract
Retrieval-augmented generation over text-rich knowledge graphs requires identifying evidence that contributes to answering a question, rather than merely matching its textual content. Existing agentic retrievers adaptively balance global search and multi-hop exploration but primarily rely on textual similarity to guide retrieval. We propose CARA, a training-free, CAusally guided Retrieval Agent that explicitly evaluates the causal relevance of retrieved evidence through two complementary criteria: consequentiality, measuring whether adding evidence improves answerability, and essentiality, assessing whether removing evidence weakens answerability. CARA integrates these assessments with path consistency to guide graph exploration and employs reciprocal rank fusion to aggregate evidence from multiple agents. We evaluate CARA on three STaRK datasets and augment STaRK with ground-truth answers to enable downstream question answering evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that CARA consistently outperforms existing retrievers. CARA also improves answer quality and faithfulness while examining fewer graph nodes and requiring fewer retrieval operations. These findings demonstrate that causal relevance assessment enables more focused and effective agentic graph retrieval, improving both retrieval performance and downstream question answering.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22017
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OntoAct: Hypothesis-Based Neuro-Symbolic Agents through Ontological Abstraction
2026-10-15 14:34:15Donghyeok Lee, Bong Gyun Kang, Junyong Ahn, Sungroh YoonAbstract
Learning from experience requires recovering reusable knowledge and determining when it applies to a new situation. We introduce OntoAct, a hypothesis-based neuro-symbolic framework built on ontological abstraction. OntoAct turns individual experiences into axioms over entity types, relations, and conditions, making their underlying patterns reusable across situations. A large language model (LLM) uses this world knowledge to propose hypotheses and actions, while a symbolic verifier assesses their supporting conditions against current observations. Verification identifies missing evidence, and new observations and intervention outcomes update hypothesis assessments and guide subsequent actions. We also introduce Tacit-FLE, a benchmark built on the Factorio Learning Environment (FLE) for diagnosing and repairing hidden faults in existing factories using inherited operational records. Its synthetic maintenance corpus distributes evidence across records, and an executed repair may leave the fault unresolved, requiring agents to reassess their diagnoses through interaction. Across Tacit-FLE, Mars, and ALFWorld, OntoAct achieves leading task performance with efficient interaction and inference.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21983
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Learning Speech Attribute Representations via Multi-Teacher Distillation
2026-10-15 14:15:32Maryem Bouziane, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Est\`eveAbstract
Recent post-training approaches have shown that self-supervised speech encoders can be adapted to learn a single utterance-level speech attribute through knowledge distillation. In this work, we investigate whether a single speech encoder can simultaneously preserve multiple complementary utterance-level speech representations. We propose a multi-attribute multi-teacher distillation framework that learns semantic, speaker, language, and emotion representations from four frozen teacher models using a shared SSL backbone and attribute-specific branches. Experiments on multilingual semantic retrieval, speaker verification, language identification, and speech emotion recognition show that the proposed model achieves performance close to dedicated single-task students while requiring only a single shared encoder. Furthermore, the learned layer aggregation strategies reveal that different speech attributes naturally emerge at different depths of the SSL encoder, providing new insights into the organization of speech representations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21941
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Agentic-Priors: Using Large Language Models to Address the Cold Start Problem in Preference Elicitation
2026-10-15 14:14:04Bruno Arcanjo, Zhaoxing Li, Sebastian SteinAbstract
An agent that learns a user's preferences from their choices faces a cold start problem: before any choices are observed, it must rely solely on a prior. Informative priors are usually fitted to historical choice data, which new tasks and deployments lack. To address this, we present Agentic-Priors, which lets agentic systems use the implicit knowledge of large language models (LLMs) instead. Specifically, an LLM states a new user's trade-offs in interpretable terms, such as willingness to pay or value of time, which we map to a prior over multinomial logit coefficients. This prior is then refined by a Bayesian learner as choices are observed. Across seven choice datasets, Agentic-Priors improves cold start accuracy over an uninformed prior by 5-40 percentage points. It also outperforms AutoElicit, a state-of-the-art LLM prior-elicitation method, on three datasets and loses on one. It is up to 18 points more accurate than in-context learning, and never significantly worse. Against hierarchical Bayes models fitted to surveys of increasing size, our approach is worth roughly 6-40 surveyed users, in terms of log-loss, so its value is concentrated in a deployment's first users.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21938
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Seeing is Believing: Benchmarking and Mitigating the Interference of Language Priors on Visual Perception in MLLMs
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Language priors in MLLMs can override visual evidence, impairing visual perception. Existing benchmarks assume shared priors across models and rely solely on accuracy. However, cross-model prior agreement falls below 80%, and over 15% of items can be answered correctly without any image, causing accuracy to overestimate prior resistance. To address these limitations, we introduce ViSiP-Bench, a benchmark grounded in rare-but-real scenarios across six prior categories, with a model-aware dynamic prior induction protocol and three metrics that more precisely and continuously measure prior resistance than accuracy alone. Evaluating 24 models reveals that prior adherence is pervasive, does not improve with scale, and larger models tend to either strongly override their priors or firmly adhere to them. We therefore propose MAPS, which identifies each model's strongest priors and fine-tunes on factually grounded knowledge to soften excessive prior reliance without disrupting general capabilities.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21902
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Anvil: Scaling Embodied Spatial Intelligence through Knowledge Recirculation
2026-10-15 13:47:08Weilin Ruan, Bohan Zhou, Jinghao Li, Yangkai Wei, Wenqian Li, Peiran Dong, Yingjie Xu, Leyi Wu, Haojian Huang, Binghui Xie, Han Yang, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Ying-Cong Chen, James ChengAbstract
Embodied spatial intelligence requires more than visual recognition: models must localize entities, reason about their relations, and express this knowledge in action-relevant forms. Yet joint training can conflate the knowledge needed at different stages because supervision is fragmented across incompatible geometric and semantic outputs. We introduce Anvil, a unified framework for data generation, training, and benchmarking for embodied spatial intelligence. (1) Anvil-Gen is a heterogeneous data flywheel that combines form-specific generation, cross-stage consistency verification, and failure-driven recollection across 11 Ground--Relation--Act forms. (2) Anvil-Ben provides scene-aligned supervision for learning diverse embodied spatial capabilities and scene-linked assessments that distinguish stage competence from error propagation. (3) Anvil-MOPD is a 9B student that consolidates heterogeneous spatial knowledge through distillation from specialist teachers. Semantic-first-fault routing targets teacher supervision to the student's earliest decisive failure, while stage normalization controls the loss scale across native outputs of different lengths. We construct 5.8M source-grounded records spanning 160K images, reserving 580K spatial records for held-out evaluation and using the remaining 5.22M records for training. On average across seven public benchmarks, Anvil-MOPD outperforms Qwen3.5-9B and RynnBrain-8B by 9.29 and 11.03 percentage points, respectively, while reaching 80.67% on VABench-Point. Controlled studies support targeted coverage, selective transfer, and feedback-guided repair as complementary framework components.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21882
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Provably Efficient Risk-Sensitive Offline Reinforcement Learning via Optimized Certainty Equivalents
2026-10-15 13:41:18Hanzhen Wang, Boxiang Lyu, Zhongxiang Dai, Siyang Gao, Dake Zhang, Shuang QiuAbstract
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) addresses decision-making under uncertainty and adverse outcomes. Learning risk-sensitive policies from fixed datasets is important when additional interaction with the environment is costly. Existing work on risk-sensitive RL focuses on online settings or specific risk measures, leaving a general theoretical understanding of its offline setting underdeveloped. In this work, we investigate efficient offline risk-sensitive RL using the optimized certainty equivalent (OCE), a general class of risk measures. We consider two formulations: dynamic-OCE RL, which applies OCE recursively at each step, and static-OCE RL, which applies a single OCE to the cumulative rewards. Under the tabular setting, we develop pessimistic value-iteration algorithms for both formulations and establish tight sublinear suboptimality bounds, explicitly capturing how risk sensitivity, encoded by utility functions, affects learning difficulty. Moreover, we establish minimax suboptimality lower bounds to characterize the problem's fundamental limits. To handle large state spaces, we further develop pessimistic least-squares value-iteration algorithms that incorporate the general OCE risk criterion into linear function approximation. We establish utility-dependent sublinear guarantees with explicit dependence on the feature dimension $d$. To our knowledge, we provide the first offline algorithms along with the first upper and lower suboptimality bounds for both dynamic- and static-OCE RL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21870
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From Adults to Children: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Chest X-Ray Classification under Domain Shift
2026-10-15 12:57:08Sara In\'acio, Hugo Proen\c{c}a, Jo\~ao C. NevesAbstract
Foundation models have shown significant potential across diverse fields and have been applied to medical imaging, but their robustness across patient populations remains unclear. In this work, we investigate foundation models' ability to generalize from adult to pediatric chest X-ray classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark to compare multiple foundation models under a common adult-to-pediatric evaluation setting while also analyzing the effect of adaptation depth. We harmonize VinDr-CXR and PediCXR into a five-label classification task and evaluate six foundation models and two CNN baselines. All models are adapted using adult data only and tested in both the in-domain and pediatric domains using linear probing, partial fine-tuning, and full fine-tuning. The benchmark reveals a clear and consistent trend: all models suffer a substantial performance degradation when transferred from adult to pediatric data, with drops exceeding 10 percentage points. While Macro-AUROC values reach approximately 92% on the adult test set, performance decreases to around 78% on the pediatric domain. Another important finding is that increasing the depth of adaptation does not significantly improve cross-population generalization. Moreover, strong in-domain performance does not translate into better performance on pediatric data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21809
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RoleQ: Role-Aligned Scales for Converting Language Models to Ternary
2026-10-15 12:56:57Johannes Knittel, Alec Helbling, Hanspeter PfisterAbstract
Weight quantization below four bits shrinks memory and bandwidth at a perplexity that looks acceptable, but often at the cost of factual knowledge and task accuracy. Ternary weights have mostly been obtained by training from scratch or long fine-tuning. We introduce RoleQ, a quantization framework that places scales by the functional roles of Transformer units rather than by the layout of the weight matrix, as conventional formats do. Vectors that read from the residual stream take one scale per output unit; those that write to it, one per input unit. The rule is structural, needs no search, calibration or stored state, and holds on integer and ternary grids. In a rotated basis it matches a per-layer axis search at half the solver work, and at ternary it cuts perplexity by up to half against layout-based placement in two families at every size from 0.6B to 14B, where per-row scales leave MMLU at chance. Our lightweight post-training pipeline converts an existing checkpoint to 1.59 bits per weight in a few GPU-hours, a fraction of the cost of learned ternarization, and leads every post-training ternary method at matched or lower memory-resident bits on perplexity, zero-shot accuracy and MMLU, most widely on knowledge. A sparse second ternary plane placed by a per-unit Fisher saliency keeps the matmul multiplication-free and recovers what ternary loses first: at 8B, a fraction of a bit returns about half the MMLU that conversion costs, well ahead of random or Hessian-based placement at equal bits.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21808
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Content associations with answer selection and engagement in supply chain community question answering
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Community question-answering platforms are important ecosystems for knowledge sharing, yet research on what makes an answer best or a question engaging has often focused on either individual lexical features or broad topics. This exploratory study examines both levels in Yahoo! Chiebukuro, asking which nouns and semantic noun clusters are associated with best-answer selection and question engagement. We analyze a large corpus of questions and answer-tier posts collected under the keyword logistics, using an offline machine-translation pipeline with manually validated noun-level fidelity. Best-answer selection is modeled with conditional logistic regression within question threads, controlling for answer length, order, and question-answer noun overlap. Engagement is modeled in two stages: whether a question receives any response and, conditional on receiving one, how many responses it attracts. Operational logistics nouns such as distribution, warehouse, and center are associated with best-answer selection, whereas broader civic and infrastructure nouns such as car, tax, and shinkansen are associated with higher engagement. At the cluster level, most semantic noun clusters are associated with best-answer selection, while the clusters associated with response likelihood and response volume are largely distinct. These findings reveal differentiated content-outcome profiles across answer and question levels and provide a domain-wide descriptive map of engagement and answer selection in logistics-related cQA discourse.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21807
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Co2In: a Bi-level Memory Incremental Learning Framework with Knowledge Encoding, Consolidation, and Integration
2026-10-15 12:54:15Wenju Sun, Qingyong Li, Boyang Li, Wen Wang, Siyu Zhang, Yi Wei, Yangliao GengAbstract
Incremental learning (IL) aims to continually acquire new knowledge (plasticity) while retaining previously learned information (stability). However, striking a balance between plasticity and stability remains a significant challenge for intelligent systems. The human brain achieves exceptional balance, owing to various memory units that collaboratively encode and store information. Inspired by human memory mechanisms, this paper introduces an IL framework with knowledge enCoding, Consolidation, and Integration (Co2In). Co2In is designed as a bi-level memory architecture: a working memory for adaptive knowledge acquisition and a long-term memory dedicated to the persistent retention of information. The two memory modules work cooperatively during IL. The working memory first learns from new data to encode knowledge into parameters. Subsequently, Co2In performs a consolidation process to identify underlying patterns in the learned parameters and re-express them into a compact knowledge representation. Next, the knowledge representation and the identified patterns are transformed into separate network layers and integrated into the long-term memory. These designs empower Co2In to accumulate knowledge with high plasticity and stability. We evaluate Co2In on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet under exemplar-free Class-IL and Task-IL settings. Experimental results show that Co2In achieves state-of-the-art performance with efficient memory consumption.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21804
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Cross-Embodiment Causal Transfer from Human Videos to Robot Manipulation
2026-10-15 12:48:10Xingyu Zhang, Yingchao Li, Peizheng Guo, Jie Hu, Changwen Zheng, Wenwen QiangAbstract
Scaling robot manipulation models requires large amounts of interaction data, yet collecting diverse real-robot experience remains costly. Human manipulation videos, in contrast, provide abundant and diverse task experience that could potentially benefit robot learning. However, differences in morphology, action spaces, and control mechanisms make human motions unsuitable as direct supervision for robot actions, raising a scientific question: what knowledge in human videos should be transferred across embodiments to robot manipulation? To address this question, we analyze subtask transfer through the lens of causal beams, focusing on which contextual conditions and interaction dependencies should be retained to support local task effects. Based on this perspective, we propose Causal-Beam-Guided Subtask Transfer (CBST). CBST learns manipulation-related representations from human videos and grounds them in task-level semantic variables using robot demonstrations. Within a predefined manipulation model, causal-beam constraints guide contextual information selection by requiring retained assignments to sustain local mechanism outputs while preserving nontrivial responsiveness to retained inputs. The selected semantic information conditions a world-action model, allowing the robot to generate actions from its own observations without requiring human-robot motion correspondence. Experiments on robot manipulation benchmarks show improvements in task success over the corresponding world-action model baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21798
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Trajectory-based Diffusion from One-shot Human Video for Generalizable Manipulation
2026-10-15 12:45:26Guoping Pan, Xinmiao Yu, Wannan Cao, Jincheng Li, Baolin Jiang, Yizhe Li, Yi Cheng, Houde LiuAbstract
Imitation learning enables robots to perform complex tasks by leveraging human-collected demonstrations. However, most existing approaches require labor-intensive data collection with additional teleoperation systems, which hinders scalability. Human videos represent a natural source of data that implicitly contain knowledge of manipulation behaviors. However, transferring them to robots remains challenging due to the visual domain gap and the absence of explicit action labels. In this work, we introduce TDV, a trajectory-based framework that leverages data generation to enable generalizable manipulation. TDV focuses on task-relevant objects by leveraging plug-and-play 6D pose estimation techniques to extract object trajectories from human videos, thereby mitigating the impact of irrelevant backgrounds and varying viewpoints. As a modality-agnostic intermediate representation, trajectories are inherently independent of the visual domains and different embodiments, enabling efficient data generation. Our method outperforms previous approaches on RLBench simulation tasks, achieving near 100\% success rates across seven tasks. In real-world experiments, TDV enables cross-embodiment generalization manipulation from one-shot human demonstrations by leveraging efficient trajectory generation techniques.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21792
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Reliable Knowledge Acquisition for Continual Learning Agents
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As agents powered by foundation models move into open-ended environments, continual learning from experience becomes essential. For agents built on models with fixed parameters, this learning requires reusing prior task experience in context to improve performance and efficiency on future tasks. Existing memory and experience-learning systems typically focus on either retained facts or procedures, and lack a mechanism for establishing the reliability of claims extracted from the ongoing task stream. Indeed, we find that approximately 12--33\% of entries produced by representative systems harm future task performance when reused. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{RIKA} (Reliable Knowledge Acquisition), which combines hierarchical extraction of factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge with Evidence-based Knowledge Admission, which uses source evidence and subsequent experience to govern which claims enter the task agent's context, without additional validation tasks. Across six task streams from Continual Learning Bench and four model backbones, RIKA achieves the highest aggregate score on every backbone.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21739
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FIRM: Fisher-Informed Retention Merging for Federated LLM Unlearning
2026-10-15 11:39:55Reeyansh Shah, Maram Hasan, Subhasis Chaudhuri, Biplab BanerjeeAbstract
Federated LLM unlearning addresses targeted knowledge removal when forget and retain data remain distributed across private clients and are inaccessible to the server. The resulting locally trained adapters encode conflicting objectives, making their aggregation fundamentally different from conventional federated optimization. A key failure mode is magnitude explosion, whereby unnormalized cross-client aggregation increases the merged update magnitude and degrades retained utility under stronger unlearning. We propose FIRM (Fisher-Informed Retention Merging), a single-round framework for stable and retention-aware server-side aggregation. FIRM uses client-local Fisher statistics as a unified sensitivity signal to construct a Fisher-normalized base merge and impose explicit control over retain-sensitive parameters. Its second-order retention projection admits a unique minimum-distance solution, while the corresponding dual scales with the number of retain clients rather than the model dimension. Experiments across WMDP, TOFU, and MUSE-HP using Zephyr-7B and Llama-3-8B show utility gains at comparable forgetting on WMDP and MUSE-HP, with metric-dependent trade-offs on TOFU. Controlled comparisons support benefits of the combined base merge and additional retention correction at selected operating points.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21720
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Abstracts or full text? Evaluating input scope and computational efficiency in biomedical lay summarization
2026-10-15 11:13:36Egecan \c{C}elik Evgin, \.{I}lknur Karadeniz, Olcay Taner Y{\i}ld{\i}zAbstract
Biomedical research articles are mainly written for experts and often contain terms that are difficult for the general public to understand. Automated lay summarization has become a solution to make biomedical knowledge easier for patients and the public to understand. However, generating lay summaries from full-text articles requires more computing power because the articles are long and costly to process. Fine-tuning large language models for this task also requires substantial resources. This study asks two questions: (1) whether abstracts contain enough information to produce lay summaries as good as those based on full-text articles, and (2) whether few-shot learning performs as well as task-specific fine-tuning. The study used two public biomedical lay summarization datasets and two recent models, evaluated for readability, factual consistency, semantic similarity, and runtime efficiency. Results show that abstract-based summarization performs better overall. Across both datasets and models, abstract fine-tuning is 4.70 times faster, while abstract zero- and few-shot prompting is 5.31 times faster than full-text methods. These results show that abstract-based prompting reduces runtime cost while maintaining lay summary quality.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21690
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