MiA-Signature: Approximating Global Activation for Long-Context Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Yuqing, Li, Jiangnan, Yu, Mo, Lin, Zheng, Wang, Weiping, Zhou, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Yuqing
Li, Jiangnan
Yu, Mo
Lin, Zheng
Wang, Weiping
Zhou, Jie
author_facet Li, Yuqing
Li, Jiangnan
Yu, Mo
Lin, Zheng
Wang, Weiping
Zhou, Jie
contents A growing body of work in cognitive science suggests that reportable conscious access is associated with \emph{global ignition} over distributed memory systems, while such activation is only partially accessible as individuals cannot directly access or enumerate all activated contents. This tension suggests a plausible mechanism that cognition may rely on a compact representation that approximates the global influence of activation on downstream processing. Inspired by this idea, we introduce the concept of \textbf{Mindscape Activation Signature (MiA-Signature)}, a compressed representation of the global activation pattern induced by a query. In LLM systems, this is instantiated via submodular-based selection of high-level concepts that cover the activated context space, optionally refined through lightweight iterative updates using working memory. The resulting MiA-Signature serves as a conditioning signal that approximates the effect of the full activation state while remaining computationally tractable. Integrating MiA-Signatures into both RAG and agentic systems yields consistent performance gains across multiple long-context understanding tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06416
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MiA-Signature: Approximating Global Activation for Long-Context Understanding
Li, Yuqing
Li, Jiangnan
Yu, Mo
Lin, Zheng
Wang, Weiping
Zhou, Jie
Computation and Language
A growing body of work in cognitive science suggests that reportable conscious access is associated with \emph{global ignition} over distributed memory systems, while such activation is only partially accessible as individuals cannot directly access or enumerate all activated contents. This tension suggests a plausible mechanism that cognition may rely on a compact representation that approximates the global influence of activation on downstream processing. Inspired by this idea, we introduce the concept of \textbf{Mindscape Activation Signature (MiA-Signature)}, a compressed representation of the global activation pattern induced by a query. In LLM systems, this is instantiated via submodular-based selection of high-level concepts that cover the activated context space, optionally refined through lightweight iterative updates using working memory. The resulting MiA-Signature serves as a conditioning signal that approximates the effect of the full activation state while remaining computationally tractable. Integrating MiA-Signatures into both RAG and agentic systems yields consistent performance gains across multiple long-context understanding tasks.
title MiA-Signature: Approximating Global Activation for Long-Context Understanding
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06416