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Aradhya Dixit

Publications and source records attributed to Aradhya Dixit.

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The Script Tax: Measuring Tokenization-Driven Efficiency and Latency Disparities in Multilingual Language Models

Pretrained multilingual language models are often assumed to be script-agnostic, yet their tokenizers can impose systematic costs on certain writing systems. We quantify this script tax by comparing two orthographic variants with identical linguistic content. Across mBERT and XLM-R, the higher-fragmentation orthography shows a ~3.4x increase in fertility (6.73-6.85 vs. 2.10-2.35 tokens/word), leading to a 16.5x inference slowdown (0.23 vs. 3.8 sentences/second) on identical hardware. Using bits per character (BPC) to avoid the "NLL paradox" from subword fragmentation, we find a substantial increase in information cost: +19.7% for mBERT (8.06->9.65) and +47.1% for XLM-R (12.19->17.94). A round-trip conversion check (CER_rt=0.31) suggests these gaps reflect orthography-conditioned processing rather than mapping noise. Our results highlight tokenization as a key source of inequity in multilingual NLP and motivate script-aware tokenization and pretraining.

cs.CL

PCN-Rec: Agentic Proof-Carrying Negotiation for Reliable Governance-Constrained Recommendation

Modern LLM-based recommenders can generate compelling ranked lists, but they struggle to reliably satisfy governance constraints such as minimum long-tail exposure or diversity requirements. We present PCN-Rec, a proof-carrying negotiation pipeline that separates natural-language reasoning from deterministic enforcement. A base recommender (MF/CF) produces a candidate window of size W, which is negotiated by two agents: a User Advocate optimizing relevance and a Policy Agent enforcing constraints. A mediator LLM synthesizes a top-N slate together with a structured certificate (JSON) describing the claimed constraint satisfaction. A deterministic verifier recomputes all constraints from the slate and accepts only verifier-checked certificates; if verification fails, a deterministic constrained-greedy repair produces a compliant slate for re-verification, yielding an auditable trace. On MovieLens-100K with governance constraints, PCN-Rec achieves a 98.55% pass rate on feasible users (n = 551, W = 80) versus a one-shot single-LLM baseline without verification/repair, while preserving utility with only a 0.021 absolute drop in NDCG@10 (0.403 vs. 0.424); differences are statistically significant (p < 0.05).

cs.AI

Evaluating Self-Correcting Vision Agents Through Quantitative and Qualitative Metrics

Recent progress in multimodal foundation models has enabled Vision-Language Agents (VLAs) to decompose complex visual tasks into executable tool-based plans. While recent benchmarks have begun to evaluate iterative self-correction, its quantitative limits and dominant reasoning bottlenecks remain poorly characterized. This work introduces a Diagnostic Micro-Benchmark. Our analysis decouples Task Success Rate (TSR = 62 percent) from Correction Success Rate (CSR = 25 to 33 percent), revealing that initial competence does not predict repair ability. We explicitly quantify the diminishing returns of correction, which saturates after three retries. Our Failure Taxonomy reveals a frequent factor is Semantic Drift (about 28 percent of failures), a loss of contextual state. By isolating this reasoning bottleneck, this benchmark defines a reproducible framework toward stateful, trustworthy multimodal agents.

cs.CV

Project Aletheia: Verifier-Guided Distillation of Backtracking for Small Language Models

Small Language Models (SLMs, under 10B parameters) are attractive for private, on-device deployment, yet they frequently fail on strict constraint-satisfaction problems due to linear, overconfident reasoning traces that do not recover from early mistakes. We introduce Verifier-Guided Distillation, a training protocol that transfers the process of error repair - explicit conflict detection and backtracking - rather than only correct final answers. By training a 7B model on verified reasoning traces that include mistakes and self-corrections, we show that latent verification behavior can emerge in small models, enabling them to occasionally stop, detect contradictions, and revise earlier assumptions.

cs.CL

Semantic Event Graphs for Long-Form Video Question Answering

Long-form video question answering remains challenging for modern vision-language models, which struggle to reason over hour-scale footage without exceeding practical token and compute budgets. Existing systems typically downsample frames or feed dense visual embeddings to large-context language models, trading off temporal coverage against cost. We propose Semantic Event Graphs (SEG), a lightweight symbolic interface between video and language that replaces raw frames with compact temporal interaction logs. Our pipeline detects and tracks objects with YOLOv11, converts proximity patterns into START/END human-object events, and organizes them into a Temporal Scene Graph (TSG). At inference time, a query-aware pruning module identifies anchor entities and lexically relevant events, returning only a small subgraph which is verbalized and passed to Gemini 2.5 Flash for answer generation. On five YouTube videos (300-500 interactions each) and 120 automatically generated long-horizon questions, SEG achieves 65.0% accuracy using only 3.47k tokens per query, closely matching a full-log baseline (62.5% at 40.39k tokens) while reducing token usage by 91.4%. A short-context baseline restricted to the last 30 seconds collapses to 2.5% accuracy, underscoring the need for explicit temporal memory. These results show that symbolic temporal graphs can serve as an effective, plug-and-play memory layer for off-the-shelf vision-language models, preserving long-range reasoning ability while making long-form video question answering substantially more token- and cost-efficient. Code, logs, and event-extraction tools will be released for reproducibility.

cs.CV