How do researchers choose what to work on?
A scientist’s account of switching focus to tackle pressing problems, and researchers consider the best way to preserve eggs, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive. Snippets from Nature’s past.
Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily
AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。
A scientist’s account of switching focus to tackle pressing problems, and researchers consider the best way to preserve eggs, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive. Snippets from Nature’s past.
Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.
arXiv:2606.25441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We provide an upper-bound for the L{é}vy concentration function: $$ Q_{S}(\varepsilon):= \sup_{x \in\mathbb{R}}\mathbb{P} (x < S \leq x+\varepsilon) $$ where $S$ is a weighted sum of noncentral chi-square random variables: $$ S:= \sum_{k=1}^\infty \lambda_k (Z_k^2 - 1) + \mu_kZ_k $$ Here, $\{Z_k\}_{k=1}^\infty$ is a sequence of independent standard Gaussian random variables and $\{\lambda_k\}_{k=1}^\infty, \{\mu_k\}_{k=1}^\infty$ are real valued, square summable sequences. Random variables of this type often appear as limiting distributions of second order U-statistics. Our bound is adaptive, in that it recovers (up to constant factors) Gaussian type concentration function estimates if $\|\lambda\|_2$ is negligible compared to $\|\mu\|_2$ and chi-square estimates if $\|\mu\|_{2}$ is negligible compared to $\|\lambda\|_2$. Our bound generalizes existing bounds in various ways. In particular, we make no assumptions regarding the number of nonzero $|\lambda_k|$ or the size of the minimal $|\lambda_k|$, nor do we make any assumptions on the signs of $\lambda_k$. Finally, we apply our bound to some examples of interest, specifically quadratic forms that arise in limit theorems for second-order U-statistics.
Pathway and functional enrichment analysis is a cornerstone of omics data interpretation, enabling researchers to map differentially expressed proteins or genes onto curated biological processes, signaling cascades, and molecular functions. While tools such as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), g:Profiler, and Enrichr are widely used to generate ranked enrichment results, translating these tabular outputs into clear, publication-ready figures remains a time-consuming step that typically requires custom scripting and familiarity with visualization libraries, a significant barrier for researchers without a computational background. Here we present EnrichViz, a self-contained, browser-based R Shiny application that enables interactive, code-free visualization of pathway and functional enrichment results from quantitative proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics experiments. EnrichViz accepts three standard CSV files as input, a normalized abundance matrix, a sample annotation or metadata file, and enrichment results from any platform that exports tabular output, and produces six complementary, publication-ready visualizations: bar and bubble plots for ranking enriched terms by significance, chord diagrams for exploring pathway-molecule connectivity, clustered heatmaps for displaying Z-score normalized expression patterns across experimental groups, and boxplots or violin plots for examining the abundance distribution of individual proteins, genes, or metabolites. The application supports both raw p-values and pre-transformed -log10(p) values through automatic detection, and all plot parameters are adjustable in real time through a graphical sidebar. Every figure can be exported as a high-resolution PNG file at 300 dpi. EnrichViz is implemented in R using the Shiny, ggplot2, pheatmap, and circlize packages, and is freely available at https://rgmilian.shinyapps.io/EnrichViz/
A new benchmark pitting AI against previously unseen maths problems shows systems still fall short of top human expertise. A new benchmark pitting AI against previously unseen maths problems shows systems still fall short of top human expertise.
arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.
arXiv:2606.26076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we develop two many-body quantum electrodynamic methods to calculate the ground-state energies of strongly coupled light-matter molecular systems. Specifically, we extend the second-order many-body Green's function theory (GF2) for electronic systems to incorporate electron-boson couplings. We employ two ansätze to treat the bosonic part of the system, namely the coherent-state (CS) and Lang-Firsov (LF) transformed vacuum state. These are combined with the GF2 method to construct two new approaches, which we refer to as CS-GF2 and LF-GF2. We benchmark CS- and LF-GF2 by studying various molecular systems inside an optical cavity. We investigate $\mathrm{H}_2$ and $\mathrm{LiH}$ potential energy surfaces, keto-eneol tautomerization energy barrier, van-der Waals interactions between two $\mathrm{H_2}$ molecules and the torsional potential energy surface of the ethylene molecule, $\mathrm{C_2H_4}$. Both methods provide highly accurate energies, with only modest additional improvement observed in LF-GF2.
Recent advances in world models have greatly enhanced interactive environment simulation. Existing methods mainly fall into two categories: (1) static world generation models, which construct 3D environments without active agents, and (2) controllable-entity models, which allow a single entity to perform limited actions in an otherwise uncontrollable environment. In this work, we introduce CustomX, leveraging the realism and structural grounding of static world generation while extending controllable-entity models to support user-specified characters capable of performing open-ended actions. Users can provide a 3DGS scene and a character, then use natural language to direct the character to perform diverse behaviors, ranging from basic locomotion to object-centric interactions, while freely exploring the environment. CustomX synthesizes temporally coherent video clips that preserve visual fidelity with the provided scene and character, formulated as a conditional autoregressive video generation problem. Built upon a pre-trained video generator, our training strategy significantly enhances motion dynamics while maintaining generalization across actions and characters. Our evaluation covers a broad range of aspects, including visual quality, character consistency, action controllability, and long-horizon coherence.
Spatial biology has entered a new era of multimodal profiling, with multiple, high-dimensional spatial omics types being measured on consecutive tissue slices, or co-assayed on the same slice. Interest then lies in statistical testing for spatial association between the features of the different modalities, to gain insight in biological processes. One major challenge is the multitude of bivariate combinations, leading to high computational demands. Another difficulty is the difference in spatial resolution between technologies, implying no one-to-one matching between the measurement spots of the two modalities, even after alignment. As a result, common statistical measures such as joint distributions and correlations are not defined, and tests need to rely on spatial vicinity only. Moreover, we argue that many existing bivariate association tests address an inappropriate null hypothesis, or make inappropriate assumptions, both implying absence of spatial autocorrelation in any of the features and leading to misleading conclusions. As a remedy, we modify tests for the detection of spatially variable genes (Moran's I, Gaussian processes and generalized additive models (splines)) to derive bivariate tests across modalities with non-overlapping coordinate sets and provide variance estimators that do account for spatial autocorrelation. We develop inference methods for single sections as well as for replicated experiments with multiple sections, and compare their performance in nonparametric and parametric simulations. Finally, we apply the newly developed methods to two co-assayed spatial transcriptomics and metabolomics datasets from mouse and human. The full suite of tests is available from github.com/sthawinke/sbivar as the R-package sbivar.
arXiv:2606.17013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The well known phenomenon of exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks is analyzed using multiplicative ergodic theory. The effect of adding a residual connection is explained in this context. Specifically, a characterization of Liapunov exponents due to Furstenberg and Kifer is exploited in order to make a precise statement about the Liapunov spectrum and the effect of residual connections on it.
Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.
arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.
Background Despite available lipid-lowering therapies (LLT), many patients fail to achieve low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) targets. This gap persists across clinically relevant subgroups. Bempedoic acid has demonstrated effective LDL-C lowering with a favorable safety profile in the CLEAR Taiwan study; however, its effects across subgroups in Asian populations remains limited. Methods The phase IV CLEAR Taiwan study (NCT06925100) enrolled patients with inadequately controlled hypercholesterolemia who received bempedoic acid for 12 weeks in addition to background LLT. This analysis evaluated changes in lipid parameters, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and safety outcomes in clinically relevant subgroups, including cardiovascular risk, diabetes, age, statin tolerance, and sex. Results A total of 180 patients were included. Bempedoic acid achieved significant LDL-C reductions in all subgroups. Numerically greater LDL-C reductions were observed in primary prevention, statin-intolerant, younger (< 65 years), and female patients, while comparable reductions were observed across diabetes status. Reductions in non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B were consistent with LDL-C findings. Significant decreases in hsCRP were observed in all subgroups, with numerically greater reductions in patients aged < 65 years and those without diabetes. Bempedoic acid was well tolerated, with a low incidence of adverse events and no new safety signals identified. Changes in liver enzymes, renal function, and uric acid were minimal within subgroups. Conclusion Subgroup analyses from the CLEAR Taiwan study demonstrate consistent efficacy and safety of bempedoic acid across clinically relevant subgroups and support its use as a flexible option to address residual gaps in lipid management.
arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.
arXiv:2606.17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets.
arXiv:2606.14639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech generation have significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech, making spoofing detection increasingly challenging. A key limitation of current anti-spoofing systems is their limited robustness to unseen synthesis methods. In this work, we transform a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by multiple expert networks controlled by a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing experts to capture complementary acoustic patterns while preserving the representations learned during self-supervised pretraining. We further analyze the architectural choices affecting the performance of this MoE conversion and investigate the activation behavior of the experts. The proposed approach is evaluated on 14 spoofing datasets and reduces the macro EER from 5.46% to 4.81%, corresponding to 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.
Visual storytelling aims to generate image sequences that are both aligned with narrative prompts and consistent in character appearance across images. Recent training-free methods improve character consistency by reusing attention features, but rely on structured prompts where full character descriptions are repeated in every prompt. This assumption simplifies the task but deviates from natural storytelling, where characters are typically introduced once and later referred to using pronouns or type-based expressions. We propose FreeStory, a training-free framework that reformulates character consistency under free-form prompts as entity-grounded feature reuse. Our method associates reference mentions with their corresponding character descriptions and combines dynamic character masks, correspondence-aware feature matching, key-value injection, and query blending to preserve identity while retaining generation diversity. We also introduce FreeStoryBench, a benchmark for this setting that includes both single- and multi-character stories. Experiments show that FreeStory achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods on structured benchmarks and stronger overall consistency over baselines under free-form prompts.
arXiv:2603.29047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the length of the longest weakly increasing subsequences (weak LIS) of $n$-step random walks with nonzero integer increments $k = \pm 1, \pm 2, \dots$ given by a symmetric heavy tailed mass distribution proportional to $|k|^{-1-\alpha}$ for several values of the real parameter $\alpha > 0$ together with that of the simple random walk ($k=\pm 1$), to which the $n$-step heavy tailed walks reduce when $\alpha$ grows large enough that step jumps beyond $\pm 1$ become essentially absent on the scale of $n$. By means of exploratory fits, weighted nonlinear least squares, and nested-model comparisons, we found that the sample average length $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle$ scales like $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle \sim \sqrt{n}\log{n}$ when the distribution of increments has finite variance ($\alpha > 2$) and $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle \sim n^{\theta}$ with a varying exponent $\theta > 0.5$ when the variance is infinite ($\alpha \leq 2$). Distributional diagnostics indicate that the bulk of the $L_{n}$ distribution is very well-approximated by a lognormal model, though systematic deviations are observed in the tails. Our results corroborate and expand upon previous results for the LIS of other types of heavy-tailed random walks and raise a conjecture as to whether the distribution of $L_{n}$ is given, or can be effectively described, by a lognormal distribution.
arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.
arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.
Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment? Two commonly stated limitations are that LLMs fail to capture full distributions of responses, and that their judgments are unstable across wording variations. We demonstrate simple prompting strategies that mitigate these limitations. Across two datasets–a U.S.-representative set of 144 moral scenarios and 38 moral beliefs from the International Social Survey Programme's Family and Changing Gender Roles module covering 32 countries–we show how simple elicitation techniques help improve AI-human alignment. First, prompting models to report standard deviations and response proportions recovers the full range of human responses better than common strategies. Second, ensuring scenarios are clear to human participants–as reflected in human confusion ratings–boosts model alignment, and LLMs can track human confusion ratings. At the same time, we find that LLMs' estimates of their own error are poorly calibrated, though they can predict human variability relatively well. These results suggest that asking better questions to LLMs can yield better answers.
arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.
Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.
arXiv:2606.18005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.
Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.