Visual Graph Scaffolds for Structural Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.02673v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graphs have been used to enhance large language models (LLMs) for structured reasoning, mostly as external knowledge sources are provided to models at test time. In this paper, we take a different view: the value of graphs for LLMs lie not only in supplying information, but also in organizing reasoning. Inspired by how humans use graph-structured mind maps to organize branching and converging thoughts, we ask whether graphs can serve as an internal form of reasoning assistance. We study this question on multi-hop question answering tasks, where teacher-provided reasoning traces are rewritten as graph mind maps and used to guide a student model. Our experiments reveal a clear modality gap. When graph structures are flattened into text, their benefits become limited once direct answer hints are removed. Under this abstract guidance setting, both reasoning efficiency and answer quality degrade substantially. In contrast, visual graph guidance remains effective without direct answer clues, and its advantage persists after supervised fine-tuning and KL-based distillation. The above findings support the claim that graphs should be studied not only as external knowledge structures for LLMs, but also as visual scaffolds for organizing reasoning.
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AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM

arXiv:2606.02775v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The KV-cache is the right memory for datacenters but the wrong memory for robots. Datacenter inference batches many short requests and resets them, amortizing an attention cache across a crowd. Embodied agents instead run one long, non-resetting episode on bandwidth-limited edge hardware, where high-bandwidth memory and flash are scarce, flash has finite write endurance, and memory writes rather than compute can become the binding constraint.
AURA-Mem (Action-Utility Recurrent Adaptive Memory) targets this regime. It wraps a frozen vision-language-action backbone with a constant-size recurrent memory and a learned gate that writes only when the current observation would change the next action: memory that knows when to stay silent. Unlike reconstruction-based memory, the gate is trained directly against a closed-loop action-error signal. Its inference state is fixed at 4,224 bytes regardless of horizon, while a KV-cache grows to 6,061 times larger at 100,000 steps.
On a controlled synthetic benchmark, AURA-Mem matches the best O(1) baseline in accuracy while using 5.19-6.13 times fewer writes, and up to 9.19 times fewer writes on easier configurations. Budget-matched random and periodic schedules do not recover this gain, isolating the benefit to the action-surprise signal. On a trained closed-loop OpenVLA-OFT 7B panel on LIBERO-Long (n=60 episodes per arm), the gate does not hurt success: AURA-Mem matches the ungated base policy (0.233) and slightly exceeds an always-write KV arm (0.217), while using 7.0 times fewer writes and constant memory. We also instantiate an approximate-information-state value-loss bound as a methodology demonstration; at this scale, the bound is vacuous rather than a guarantee.
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Evaluating Transformer and LSTM Frameworks for Prediction in Ungauged Basins

arXiv:2606.02791v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Watershed networks exhibit convergent topologies in which multiple tributaries merge into downstream channels,integrating diverse upstream hydrological processes. In ungauged basins, the absence of direct observations increases uncertainty and limits the ability to anticipate extreme events. This study evaluates whether an encoder-only Transformer provides an advantage over an LSTM for upstream streamflow inference under limited hydrologic information, using retrospective simulations from the NOAA National Water Model (NWM). Across both upstream-only and combined configurations, the LSTM showed stronger overall performance than the Transformer model across the two configurations. Incorporating downstream information further boosted performance for all models, increasing median NNSE by more than 60%. Rather than treating this as a leaderboard-style comparison, we interpret the experiments as a test of architectural inductive bias for hydrologic sequence inference. The results indicate that recurrent memory remains better aligned with this upstream reconstruction task than an encoder-only Transformer, while downstream hydrologic context provides a strong auxiliary constraint that substantially improves prediction skill across architectures
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