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Prism: Spectral-Aware Block-Sparse Attention

arXiv:2602.08426v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block-sparse attention is promising for accelerating long-context LLM pre-filling, yet identifying relevant blocks efficiently remains a bottleneck. Existing methods typically employ coarse-grained attention as a proxy for block importance estimation, but often resort to expensive token-level searching or scoring, resulting in significant selection overhead. In this work, we trace the inaccuracy of standard coarse-grained attention via mean pooling to a theoretical root cause: the interaction between mean pooling and Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE). We prove that mean pooling acts as a low-pass filter that induces destructive interference in high-frequency dimensions, effectively creating a "blind spot" for local positional information (e.g., slash patterns). To address this, we introduce Prism, a training-free spectral-aware approach that decomposes block selection into high-frequency and low-frequency branches. By applying energy-based temperature calibration, Prism restores the attenuated positional signals directly from pooled representations, enabling block importance estimation using purely block-level operations, thereby improving efficiency. Extensive evaluations confirm that Prism maintains accuracy parity with full attention while delivering up to $\mathbf{5.1\times}$ speedup.

TRACE: A Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Physical Reasoning in Seismological

arXiv:2603.21152v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inferring the physical mechanisms that govern earthquake sequences from indirect geophysical observations remains difficult, particularly across tectonically distinct environments where similar seismic patterns can reflect different underlying processes. Current interpretations rely heavily on the expert synthesis of catalogs, spatiotemporal statistics, and candidate physical models, limiting reproducibility and the systematic transfer of insight across settings. Here we present TRACE (Trans-perspective Reasoning and Automated Comprehensive Evaluator), a multi-agent system that combines large language model planning with formal seismological constraints to derive auditable, physically grounded mechanistic inference from raw observations. Applied to the 2019 Ridgecrest sequence, TRACE autonomously identifies stress-perturbation-induced delayed triggering, resolving the cascading interaction between the Mw 6.4 and Mw 7.1 mainshocks; in the Santorini-Kolumbo case, the system identifies a structurally guided intrusion model, distinguishing fault-channeled episodic migration from the continuous propagation expected in homogeneous crustal failure. By providing a generalizable logical infrastructure for interpreting heterogeneous seismic phenomena, TRACE advances the field from expert-dependent analysis toward knowledge-guided autonomous discovery in Earth sciences.
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