arXiv subjects

Mingzhe Lu

Publications and source records attributed to Mingzhe Lu.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

S^2tory: Story Spine Distillation for Movie Script Summarization

Movie scripts pose a fundamental challenge for automatic summarization due to their non-linear, cross-cut narrative structure, which makes surface-level saliency methods ineffective at preserving core story progression. To address this, we introduce S^2tory (Story Spine Distillation), a narratology-grounded framework that leverages character development trajectories to identify plot nuclei, the essential events that drive the narrative forward, while filtering out peripheral satellite events that merely enrich atmosphere or emotion. Our Narrative Expert Agent (NEAgent) performs theory-constrained reasoning, whose distilled knowledge conditions a small model to identify plot nuclei. Another model then uses these plot nuclei to generate the summary. Experiments on the MovieSum dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art semantic fidelity at approximately 3.5x compression, and zero-shot evaluation on BookSum confirms strong out-of-domain generalization. Human evaluation further validates that narratological theory provides an indispensable foundation for modeling complex, non-linear narratives.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Controllable Narrative Rendering for Enhanced Assisted Writing

Despite the remarkable proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in basic writing assistance, their utility in creative writing is fundamentally hindered by a persistent binary failure. This issue manifests as an oscillation between safe, surface-level editing, referred to as remedial polishing, and destructive, uncontrolled plot expansion. This dilemma defines a critical trade-off between narrative fidelity and descriptive intensity. We propose Loom, an assisted writing framework grounded in the narratological distinction between story and discourse. Loom employs a three-layer pipeline that operationalizes an intent-centered semiotic chain-of-thought to enforce precise control over narrative intent and rendering density. This architecture separates the generation of perceptual material from syntactic insertion, ensuring that enhancement occurs without violating the original event structure. Our comprehensive evaluation, which includes LLM-based metrics and human assessment, demonstrates that Loom successfully resolves this fundamental tension. Loom achieves the highest overall quality score, yielding substantial gains in factual integrity and descriptive intensity compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

LitVISTA: A Benchmark for Narrative Orchestration in Literary Text

Computational narrative analysis aims to capture rhythm, tension, and emotional dynamics in literary texts. Existing large language models can generate long stories but overly focus on causal coherence, neglecting the complex story arcs and orchestration inherent in human narratives. This suggests a structural misalignment between model- and human-generated narratives. We therefore position narrative analysis as a diagnostic proxy for generation and propose VISTA Space, a high-dimensional framework for narrative orchestration that unifies human and model perspectives while jointly characterizing narrative function and structure in a common space. We further introduce LitVISTA, a structurally annotated benchmark grounded in literary texts, which operationalizes VISTA Space for systematic evaluation of models' narrative orchestration capabilities. Under an oracle setting with gold event anchors, we evaluate frontier LLMs including GPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. Results reveal systematic deficiencies, as current models struggle to jointly capture narrative function and structure and fail to form an integrated global view of literary narrative orchestration. End-to-end analysis further shows that failures are dominated by anchor identification and localization errors. Even advanced thinking modes yield mixed and often limited gains for literary narrative understanding.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Finch: Benchmarking Finance & Accounting across Spreadsheet-Centric Enterprise Workflows

We introduce FinWorkBench (a.k.a. Finch) for evaluating AI agents on real-world, enterprise-grade finance and accounting workflows that interleave data entry, structuring, formatting, web search, cross-file retrieval, calculation, modeling, validation, translation, visualization, and reporting. Finch is sourced from authentic enterprise workspaces from Enron (15,000 files and 500,000 emails) and other financial institutions, covering the period 2000--2025 and preserving the in-the-wild messiness of multimodal artifacts such as tables and charts across diverse domains including budgeting, trading, asset management, and operational management. We propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted mining of workflows from authentic enterprise environments with expert annotation: (1) LLM-assisted, expert-verified derivation of workflows from real-world email threads and spreadsheet version histories, and (2) meticulous annotation requiring over 700 hours of expert effort. This yields 172 composite workflows with 384 tasks, involving 1,710 spreadsheets with 27 million cells, along with PDFs and other artifacts, capturing the intrinsically messy, long-horizon, knowledge-intensive, and collaborative nature of real-world enterprise work. We conduct both human and automated evaluations of frontier AI systems, including GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4, and Qwen 3 Max. Under human evaluation, GPT-5.1 Pro spends an average of 16.8 minutes per workflow yet passes only 38.4% of workflows. Comprehensive case studies further surface the challenges that real-world enterprise workflows pose for AI agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

MachineLearningLM: Scaling Many-shot In-context Learning via Continued Pretraining

Large language models (LLMs) possess broad world knowledge and strong general-purpose reasoning ability, yet they struggle to learn from many in-context examples on standard machine learning (ML) tasks, that is, to leverage many-shot demonstrations purely via in-context learning (ICL) without gradient descent. We introduce MachineLearningLM, a portable continued-pretraining framework that equips a general-purpose LLM with robust in-context ML capability while preserving its general knowledge and reasoning for broader chat workflows. Our pretraining procedure synthesizes ML tasks from millions of structural causal models (SCMs), spanning shot counts up to 1,024. We begin with a random-forest teacher, distilling tree-based decision strategies into the LLM to strengthen robustness in numerical modeling. All tasks are serialized with a token-efficient prompt, enabling 3x to 6x more examples per context window and delivering up to 50x amortized throughput via batch inference. Despite a modest setup (Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct with LoRA rank 8), MachineLearningLM outperforms strong LLM baselines (e.g., GPT-5-mini) by an average of about 15% on out-of-distribution tabular classification across finance, physics, biology, and healthcare domains. It exhibits a striking many-shot scaling law: accuracy increases monotonically as in-context demonstrations grow from 8 to 1,024. Without any task-specific training, it attains random-forest-level accuracy across hundreds of shots. General chat capabilities, including knowledge and reasoning, are preserved: it achieves 75.4% on MMLU.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Accuracy: A Cognitive Load Framework for Mapping the Capability Boundaries of Tool-use Agents

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to use external tools unlocks powerful real-world interactions, making rigorous evaluation essential. However, current benchmarks primarily report final accuracy, revealing what models can do but obscuring the cognitive bottlenecks that define their true capability boundaries. To move from simple performance scoring to a diagnostic tool, we introduce a framework grounded in Cognitive Load Theory. Our framework deconstructs task complexity into two quantifiable components: Intrinsic Load, the inherent structural complexity of the solution path, formalized with a novel Tool Interaction Graph; and Extraneous Load, the difficulty arising from ambiguous task presentation. To enable controlled experiments, we construct ToolLoad-Bench, the first benchmark with parametrically adjustable cognitive load. Our evaluation reveals distinct performance cliffs as cognitive load increases, allowing us to precisely map each model's capability boundary. We validate that our framework's predictions are highly calibrated with empirical results, establishing a principled methodology for understanding an agent's limits and a practical foundation for building more efficient systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

PEARL: Plan Exploration and Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Multihop Tool Use

Large Language Models show great potential with external tools, but face significant challenges in complex, multi-turn tool invocation. They often exhibit weak planning, tool hallucination, erroneous parameter generation, and struggle with robust interaction. To tackle these issues, we present PEARL, a novel framework to enhance LLM planning and execution for sophisticated tool use. PEARL adopts a two-stage approach: an offline phase where the agent explores tools to learn valid usage patterns and failure conditions, and an online reinforcement learning phase. In the online phase, a dedicated Planner is trained via group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a carefully designed reward function that provides distinct signals for planning quality. Experiments on the ToolHop and T-Eval benchmarks show PEARL significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a new state-of-the-art success rate of \textbf{56.5\%} on ToolHop while maintaining a low invocation error rate. Our work marks a key advance in addressing the complex planning challenges of tool use, contributing to the development of more robust and reliable LLM-based agents.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Pixel-wise Graph Attention Networks for Person Re-identification

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) is widely used to handle irregular data since it updates node features by using the structure information of graph. With the help of iterated GCN, high-order information can be obtained to further enhance the representation of nodes. However, how to apply GCN to structured data (such as pictures) has not been deeply studied. In this paper, we explore the application of graph attention networks (GAT) in image feature extraction. First of all, we propose a novel graph generation algorithm to convert images into graphs through matrix transformation. It is one magnitude faster than the algorithm based on K Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Then, GAT is used on the generated graph to update the node features. Thus, a more robust representation is obtained. These two steps are combined into a module called pixel-wise graph attention module (PGA). Since the graph obtained by our graph generation algorithm can still be transformed into a picture after processing, PGA can be well combined with CNN. Based on these two modules, we consulted the ResNet and design a pixel-wise graph attention network (PGANet). The PGANet is applied to the task of person re-identification in the datasets Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and Occluded-DukeMTMC (outperforms state-of-the-art by 0.8\%, 1.1\% and 11\% respectively, in mAP scores). Experiment results show that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance. \href{https://github.com/wenyu1009/PGANet}{The code is available here}.

cs.CV↗