Context compression is widely proposed as a way to cut the token bill of LLM coding agents, and public benchmarks report that aggressive compression preserves task-solving quality. These two facts do not imply the third one commonly assumed: that compressing file reads saves money in a real multi-turn agent. We instrument a production compression gateway (Paritok) between coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) and frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet, GPT-5), and decompose the token bill of real sessions into three independent levers: tool-schema filtering, content compression of file reads and tool output, and history summarization. Measured in isolation under controlled A/B runs, the three save at fundamentally different rates. Tool-schema filtering removes a fixed block every turn, roughly 21K-57K tokens on a typical turn; it is linear in the turn count N and the only unambiguously and reproducibly positive lever. Content compression saves only about 2% of the cache-priced prefix per turn, but compressed reads accumulate in history and are re-sent on every later turn, so its cumulative saving grows quadratically, about 3350*N^2 tokens (measured), overtaking the fixed tool-filter saving within roughly 6 turns until the context window caps it. A non-destructive gateway lets the agent pull original bytes back on demand; each recall re-sends exactly the one segment just compressed away, so its cost is fixed and bounded rather than a multiplicative blowup, and heavy recall spends the accumulated saving back one segment at a time. Finally, a strong single-shot compression benchmark - 86.5% of SWE-bench quality retained at a 25.7% compression rate, achieved by the model this gateway deploys (Paritok-4B, reported separately) - is orthogonal to multi-turn agent cost and must not be cited as a cost-saving argument. We distill the results into an actionable recipe for where token-saving effort pays off.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22114
Background: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to Software Engineering (SE) tasks, achieving high accuracy across problems such as clone detection, vulnerability prediction, and code summarization. However, their high computational demands and energy consumption raise sustainability concerns and hinder their use on consumer hardware and resource-constrained platforms. A common way to report the computational cost of an LLM in the literature and industry is to use the number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) required to perform a pass over the network. Aims: This paper investigates the implications of energy-aware knowledge distillation for SE, aiming to improve model efficiency while maintaining performance and to determine whether FLOPs is a reliable energy-aware metric. Method: We conduct a controlled experiment using Morph, a Many-Objective Optimization-based distillation methodology, to empirically examine whether FLOPs accurately reflect energy consumption in Clone Detection and Vulnerability Prediction tasks. We extend this methodology to include energy-surrogate models that directly estimate CPU and GPU energy consumption during optimization, and we apply Morph to generative tasks using CodeT5+ for code summarization. Results: Our results show that FLOPs is not always a reliable indicator of energy consumption, and better results can be achieved by using energy-surrogate models. Distilled student models can reduce inference energy consumption by up to 90\% and memory usage by 86\%, with only modest accuracy trade-offs. Conclusions: Energy-aware knowledge distillation when guided by direct energy surrogates rather than FLOPs can improve the energy consumption, sustainability, and deployability of LLMs for SE applications, enabling efficient models on consumer hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17515
QMSum provides no scorer, making query-focused meeting summarization results difficult to compare. We rescore or generate 15 systems under one implementation. Through a common inference port, a released 406M Fusion-in-Decoder specialist loses 6.30 ROUGE-1 when moved from capped long input to 2,000-word retrieved spans. Fine-tuning it on this span regime recovers the loss. On test it scores 36.33 ROUGE-1 versus 35.41 for our 1.2B system; the meeting-cluster 95% interval for the difference is [-0.27, +2.22], so QMSum does not statistically separate them. The smaller system uses about one-third as many total parameters and less than half the peak inference memory. Within the fixed 1.2B base, span-regime fine-tuning adds 5.29 [+4.02, +6.56], while replacing the first 4,500 transcript words with 2,000 retrieved words adds 1.55 on test and 0.29 on validation. Separately, under one concise prompt and reference-overlap scorer, a released 406M specialist exceeds five proprietary hosted models by at least 6.2 ROUGE-1, but output length and absent human or factuality evaluation limit this ordering. Conclusions are limited to QMSum and automatic metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25028
Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) aligns LLMs with human preferences, improving summarization fluency and safety, but causes sentiment drift: overly neutral summaries stripped of emotional nuance. We diagnose why RL acts as a sentiment neutralizer and present Policy Attribution, a framework using gradient and logit decomposition to trace drift to reward model (RM) signals and KL (Kullback-Leibler) penalty. Sentiment drift reflects a strategic bias toward "low-risk" tokens maximizing expected rewards under preference uncertainty (Stiennon et al., 2020; Gao, Schulman, and Hilton, 2023). On Reddit TL;DR and CNN/DailyMail, RLHF summaries get higher rewards but show 30-40% lower sentiment variance. Cross-lingual analysis across eight languages shows language-independent drift, with morphologically richer languages more suppressed (Krasitskii et al., 2026). We propose and validate a sentiment-aware regularization technique reducing drift by 18-22% without harming summary quality. The code and toolkit will be public.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15530
Byte-level hierarchical language models (LMs) have recently emerged as a robust alternative to their popular counterparts that use subword tokenization. However, generating one byte at a time remains a bottleneck for inference speed. To address this, we introduce multi-byte prediction (MBP), which generates multiple bytes in parallel, speeding up inference with minimal performance impact and no additional parameters. MBP builds on the popular multi-token prediction (MTP) paradigm with two crucial innovations. First, we introduce a variable-length prediction window that aligns with the latent tokens, or segments, of a hierarchical LM. Second, we implement a novel attention-masking scheme that enables parallel byte prediction without violating causality. We show that multi-byte prediction strikes a Pareto-optimal trade-off across multiple generative tasks, instruction following, question answering, summarization, and machine translation, achieving the best trade-off between performance and inference throughput.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15454
The majority of work on summarization evaluation focuses on general summary quality (e.g., ROUGE, BERTScore) or specific desired properties (e.g., readability, factuality). However, these metrics fail to measure the utility of a summary to an individual user. For example, a biomedical researcher learning about the latest vaccine research will have different informational needs from a family doctor. Query-focused summarization captures part of this need, but in practice, users rarely state everything relevant in a query: a single short query is likely inadequate to distinguish the needs of a researcher from those of a physician. By contrast, a reader's background or persona (their role and expertise) is comparatively stable across queries and recovers much of this missing context, which makes it a practical signal for assessing whether a summary satisfies that reader's needs. In this work, we assess how sensitive popular summarization metrics are to both informational and persona differences, and find that many popular metrics, including strong LLM-as-judge metrics, fail basic perturbation tests of informational content. We additionally conduct an expert human evaluation, measuring summary preferences based on information satisfaction given a specific person's background and use case. We find that both traditional and LLM-based metrics are insufficient measures of information satisfaction and agree poorly with human judgment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14457
Time series analysis in high-stakes domains relies on recurring data releases, where new observations can alter the evidence base and the validity of later conclusions. Existing time series QA benchmarks mostly rely on fixed snapshots, leaving temporal validity and cutoff-aware evidence use unevaluated. We introduce TimeSage-EV, a live benchmark for agentic time series analysis in evolving environments. It tracks 60 real institutional scenarios across 6 domains, comprising 1,485 scenario-period QA pairs from Feb 2023 to May 2026 and spanning monthly, weekly, daily, and irregular release cadences. At each period, large language model (LLM) agents receive time series data and source reports, while the withheld target release provides ground truth. TimeSage-EV evaluates state identification, data summarization, and outlook reasoning. Experiments with frontier LLM agents and TimeSage-1.0, a novel self-evolving agent with a reusable analytical skill library, reveal significant performance gaps across model tiers and recurring failures in temporal validity, exogenous context use, and adaptation. We release TimeSage-EV as a research resource with monthly updates, code, a leaderboard, and failure-mode analyses.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14270
Scientific figures and tables encode essential experimental evidence, yet remain difficult for digital libraries and multimodal AI systems to retrieve and interpret. The ALD/E-ImageMiner benchmark and ICDAR 2026 Competition on Information Extraction from Atomic Layer Deposition/Etching Scientific Figures provide 1,951 figures from 205 publications, expert-annotated for classification, data table extraction, summarization, and visual question answering. In these companion proceedings, we present a forward-looking perspective on how the benchmark can guide future scientific-image challenges. We examine how its tasks probe capabilities from visual and quantitative reading to domain-grounded reasoning and evidential justification, and how Bloom-informed question design can support deeper scientific understanding. We propose "scientific conceptual understanding from images" as a long-term benchmark objective, with future directions including broader domains and figure types, contextual and cross-document synthesis, hypothesis evaluation, provenance, uncertainty, counterfactual grounding, and open-ended multimodal research. This perspective connects the ICDAR 2026 challenge to a broader agenda for machine-actionable scientific visual knowledge and verifiable multimodal scientific AI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14075
Long-horizon Earth observation reasoning requires models to organize multi-stage geographic evolution, localize spatial changes, detect temporal anomalies, and infer future from extended image sequences. However, existing remote sensing vision-language models mainly focus on isolated images, image pairs, or short sequences, limiting reliable grounding in the relevant frames and regions. We introduce LongEarth-Bench, a benchmark containing approximately 120k question-answering samples derived from 117k unique images. Its sequences average 15.14 frames and extend to 30 frames, covering 12 tasks across evolution summarization, spatial reasoning, anomaly identification, and logical prediction. A 30k-sample subset further provides structured reasoning traces linking key frames and changed regions to final answers. We develop LongEarth through supervised fine-tuning with explicit sequence identifiers and structured chain-of-thought supervision. Building on LongEarth, LongEarth-R1 applies group relative policy optimization with format, temporal, and spatial rewards. LongEarth-R1 achieves the best results on all 12 long-sequence tasks while remaining competitive on standard remote sensing benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13344
Long-horizon LLM agents must preserve information from past interactions to support future tasks. Existing memory systems typically rely on eager consolidation, invoking LLMs after each interaction to extract, summarize, or update memories. This design makes memory construction increasingly costly as conversations grow. Coarse summarization can reduce construction cost but risks discarding fine-grained contextual evidence, whereas larger retrieval contexts or multi-hop LLM reasoning shift the overhead to query time. We present LycheeMemory V2, an efficient long-term memory framework that replaces turn-level consolidation with semantic segment-level consolidation. Instead of consolidating every interaction, LycheeMemory batches multiple exchanges into segments and encodes each finalized segment into context-independent typed memory records. Segment-level batching lowers LLM encoding frequency, while semantic boundary detection helps preserve coherent event-level and temporal evidence compared with fixed-window batching. The resulting records are organized with lightweight structured indexes for query-planned evidence retrieval. Experiments using GPT-4.1-Mini show that LycheeMemory achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 89.22% on LoCoMo and 92.20% on LongMemEval-S. Compared with A-Mem, it reduces construction tokens by 86.0% on LoCoMo and 75.9% on LongMemEval-S without increasing query-time token usage. More broadly, our results suggest that the accuracy--cost trade-off of long-term agent memory depends not only on what information is retained, but also on the granularity at which it is consolidated.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12990
Long-running agents periodically compact their context, replacing the transcript with a model-generated this http URL work shows that dropping a standing safety constraint during compaction drives behavioral violations acrossmany models (Governance Decay; Chen, 2026). We ask a finer question: under a single compaction cycle, how is a safetyrule lost, and what does that imply for detection and evaluation? Our central finding is that a presence check is not asafety check: when compaction does not drop a rule outright, it often leaves something that looks like a rule but doesnot act like one. On behavioral replay, a degraded residue leads the model to perform the prohibited action far more oftenthan an intact welded rule does (all-case gaps of +34 and +57 points under two replay models, both positive), category-level survival behaves like a residue, and even intact rules sometimes fail to fire, so an audit that checks only textualpresence gives false assurance. Sharpening this, rule-form items are retained substantially more often than prominence-matched facts, which is exactly why presence-based checking feels adequate even though survival is not this http URL loss is regime-dependent (weld-or-drop with a single rule; degraded predicate-loss residues under a tighterbudget), and we did not observe the hypothesized textual severing mode. Such loss is silent at runtime and detectableonly by comparison with retained external ground truth (such as a constraint registry), which reveals textual absence butnot whether a surviving rule still fires. We also document evaluation pitfalls where LLM-judge labels alone would havereversed a conclusion. All results concern a single compaction cycle.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11392
As information increasingly traverses linguistic boundaries, users require concise cross-lingual representations of long-form content. Nevertheless, long-document summarization research remains text-centric, whereas multilingual speech research has largely prioritized translation, preserving source content rather than compressing it. We address this methodological gap by formalizing joint speech summarization and translation (JSumT): the generation of a succinct, faithful target-language summary directly from a long spoken document in a source language. We additionally introduce VoxSumm, the first multilingual and cross-lingual benchmark for this task, comprising 10,045 BBC article-summary pairs across 24 languages and encompassing approximately 703 hours of speech data. Our evaluation of representative speech-language models reveals pronounced variation across models and generation settings: Gemini3.1-Pro demonstrates the greatest consistency, summarization into English generally surpasses generation into non-English target languages, and translating an entire document before summarization compounds instruction-following failures. Through the release of VoxSumm, we establish a foundation for developing and evaluating multilingual systems capable of jointly interpreting, compressing, and translating long-form speech.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10359
Users of modern platforms repeatedly need summaries of recent dialogue, but the window rarely contains enough context to be interpreted on its own. We formalize this setting as streaming dialogue summarization, where a system must summarize a current window using selective memory from an unbounded history under a fixed budget. We show that the central challenge is not how much history is accessed, but whether memory recovers the evidence that the current window presupposes. We construct a benchmark and evaluation protocol that separately assesses whether memory contains gap-resolving evidence and whether the generated summary reflects it. We propose ReMEMBER, a missing-evidence memory framework that conditions retrieval on unresolved window dependencies and refines retrieved chunks into evidence-dense memory under a fixed budget. Experiments on dialogues with histories up to 160K tokens show that ReMEMBER improves memory recall and gap-resolution completeness over memory construction baselines under the same budget.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09043
Retrieving relevant evidence from noisy web data is challenging, particularly in sensitive domains containing incomplete reports, heterogeneous language, and irrelevant content. We present Guardian Crawler, a reproducible retrieval-first testbed for controlled experiments on knowledge discovery and evidence-grounded summarization over synthetic web-like corpora. The architecture combines BM25 retrieval with risk-aware, embedding-augmented, and hybrid reranking, followed by constrained retrieval-augmented generation with explicit document citations. Experiments on a synthetic 900-document corpus and 10 queries produced the highest descriptive retrieval scores under risk-based reranking, with P@10 = 1.00 and NDCG@10 = 0.94, compared with 0.94 and 0.81 for BM25. The best hybrid and BM25+Semantic configurations reached NDCG@10 values of 0.94 and 0.88, respectively. All 41 evaluable generated bullets passed the lexical coverage threshold; an automated LLM judge classified 36 as supported, one as partially supported, and four as unsupported. These results demonstrate the feasibility of Guardian Crawler as a controlled testbed but do not establish statistical superiority, human-validated faithfulness, or transfer to live-web investigative environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08994
Abstractive text summarization systems frequently generate fluent yet unfaithful summaries by fabricating or distorting relationships between entities and events. Such relation-level hallucinations undermine the reliability of generated summaries, particularly in high-stakes domains. In this work, we present a refined and grounded framework for evaluating relation hallucination in abstractive summarization. We present the empirical Relation Hallucination Index (RHI) by introducing a dependency-aware relation extraction algorithm that incorporates lemmatization-based normalization, named entity grounded subject resolution, passive agent recovery, negation-aware verb modeling, reporting verb filtering, nominal relation fallback, clausal propagation, and systematic deduplication. These enhancements improve the structural fidelity of extracted relation triples and reduce spurious matches during evaluation. In addition, we introduce a normalized formulation of RHI to ensure scale-invariant comparison between datasets and models. The revised metric decomposes hallucination into interpretable components, aggregates relation hallucination metric into a normalized relation faithfulness score. Extensive evaluation across multiple state-of-the-art summarization models demonstrates that the grounded extraction process yields more stable and discriminative hallucination measurements. The proposed framework advances automated relation-level faithfulness evaluation and supports coherence-aware, hallucination-sensitive model analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08180
Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering (HOBRE) aims to transform decompiled pseudocode into a more human-friendly representation, thereby reducing the cognitive burden of reverse analysis and improving efficiency. However, reliably evaluating HOBRE outputs remains a fundamental challenge: human evaluation is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale, while existing automated metrics either require executable test cases and runtime environments that are often unavailable for real-world binaries, or rely on high-quality source code references that are typically inaccessible and fail to capture semantically equivalent but lexically diverse outputs. Although LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm is naturally well-suited to HOBRE evaluation, its effectiveness remains underexplored. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm for HOBRE across three representative tasks: function name recovery, binary code summarization, and decompilation optimization. We introduce BinJudgeBench, the first expert-annotated, reference-free evaluation benchmark based on multi-dimensional human judgment, where LLM-as-a-Judge achieves an average correlation of 63.20\% with human judgment, outperforming traditional automated metrics at 35.04\%. By analyzing judge configurations across backbone LLMs, prompting strategies, and decoding temperatures, we find that no ``one-size-fits-all'' configuration exists, as the optimal setup varies across tasks and individual samples. To address this, we propose BinJudge, which employs a lightweight routing mechanism to adaptively select the optimal judge configuration for each task and sample. BinJudge improves correlation with human experts by 4.5\%-24.7\% and reduces API cost to 0.06$\times$-0.84$\times$ of that of static best configurations, providing a scalable, cost-effective, and high-fidelity automated evaluation scheme for HOBRE.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07038
Aggregate scaling curves suggest that Video LLMs improve smoothly or saturate as visual budgets grow. We show that this view can conceal large, opposing changes at the item level. We represent each frozen model--item pair by its response trajectory under controlled visual budgets and derive matched-grid measures of configuration complementarity, harmful transitions, and text overwrite. Across five open Video LLMs from three architecture families, four multiple-choice benchmark splits, open-ended QA and summarization, and fixed-history dialogue generation, no single budget serves all items. On the four-model matched MCQA grid, item-level oracle headroom spans $8.8$--$18.9$ accuracy points and $12.5$--$25.5\%$ of items are correct at a lower budget but wrong at a higher one. Task-appropriate continuous metrics show the same complementarity beyond multiple choice: Token-F1 oracle gaps are $2.7$--$3.7$ score points on MLVU generation and $3.8$--$4.8$ points on AVSD current-turn generation, even when mean quality improves with budget. The effect persists across frame count, spatial resolution, sampling policy, temporal--spatial allocation, and independently executed raw-video and cached pipelines, with per-item rates and membership tracking protocol choices. A controlled sampling intervention recovers $29.0\%$ of terminal regressions, and a structured frame audit identifies several recurring evidence pathways. We release per-item trajectories, protocol provenance, derived annotations, and reproducible analysis code as an auditing artifact. A confidence cascade matches fixed-$128f$ accuracy while reducing average shared frame cost by $31.7\%$, illustrating one operational use of the response matrix.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07014
As agent capabilities have grown, practical limitations increasingly stem from constrained context windows rather than model capacity. Common strategies, such as truncation, heuristic aging, and lossy summarization, may discard useful information or introduce hallucination risk. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamic Tool Output Compression (DTOC), a framework for scalable context management in LLM-based agents that models context updates as explicit and reversible operations within the agent reasoning loop. DTOC retains full tool outputs in external memory while inserting compact placeholders into the active context, enabling selective reconstruction when needed. We formalize the DTOC mechanism, integrate it into a ReAct-style agent architecture, and provide a production-oriented implementation supporting on-demand restoration of compressed outputs. Experiments on DeepSWE reveal model-dependent effects: for responsive models (Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4), DTOC reduces input tokens (10.3 and 12.7%) and agent steps (2.4 and 32.3%), while increasing solve rates (2.5 and 1.5 times higher) and lowering cost per solved task (3 and 3.5 times lower cost per solved task). For the other models results are more mixed, with GPT-5.5 doubling solve rate and halving cost, but no impact on solve rate and negative impact on cost for the other models. Ablation results show reversibility is critical: disable-only compression variants degraded performance, while full DTOC recovered baseline accuracy at substantially lower context cost. These findings indicate that explicit, reversible context management can improve the efficiency of long-horizon agent reasoning without degrading task performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26121
The reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is often compromised by factual inconsistencies, including hallucinations---cases where generated content is not supported by the underlying source. We present HallDetect, a lightweight, reference-free, and black-box framework for hallucination detection that we evaluate not only on summarization but across a broader range of source-grounded generation settings. HallDetect builds on decomposition-based factuality evaluation: generated content is decomposed into atomic claims, each verified by a compact encoder-based entailment model through a contrastive formulation over a multi-scale library of source chunks, and aggregated with an asymmetric score in which a single confidently contradicted claim flags the response. Under a controlled protocol in which all methods share the same 4-bit quantized backbones and consumer-grade hardware budget, HallDetect outperforms comparably resourced generative and embedding-based baselines on three of four benchmarks while remaining stable across backbone families, and yields a claim-to-span audit trail that localizes each error.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05823
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as evaluators of text quality, known as LLM-as-a-Judge, which can outperform conventional automatic evaluation metrics that rely on reference texts. However, LLM evaluators tend to generate particular scores regardless of the context of the evaluated text, which is known as scoring bias. This study proposes a novel method to mitigate this scoring bias. An LLM is instructed to randomly generate number tokens, and the latent numerical bias of the LLM is identified by measuring the deviation of the observed distribution of numbers from the uniform distribution. A definition of a downstream task, for which an LLM evaluator is used, is added to the prompts for random number generation to measure task-specific latent number bias. In the evaluation by an LLM, the token generation probabilities for a given input are rectified considering the LLM's latent number bias. Results of the experiment on four different tasks, evaluation of LLM alignment, evaluation of summarization, Semantic Textual Similarity, and Semantic Textual Relatedness, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the baselines, including an LLM without debiasing and previous calibration methods. In addition, it is confirmed that scoring bias varies across LLMs, tasks, and score ranges, indicating the importance of measuring latent number bias as the case may be.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05726