Industry
Arctic-Extract Technical Report
Chiliński, Mateusz, Ołtusek, Julita, Jaśkowski, Wojciech
Arctic-Extract is a state-of-the-art model designed for extracting structural data (question answering, entities and tables) from scanned or digital-born business documents. Despite its SoTA capabilities, the model is deployable on resource-constrained hardware, weighting only 6.6 GiB, making it suitable for deployment on devices with limited resources, such as A10 GPUs with 24 GB of memory. Arctic-Extract can process up to 125 A4 pages on those GPUs, making suitable for long document processing. This paper highlights Arctic-Extract's training protocols and evaluation results, demonstrating its strong performance in document understanding.
Optimizing Quantum Key Distribution Network Performance using Graph Neural Networks
Anchan, Akshit Pramod, Acharya, Ameiy, Thungon, Leki Chom
This paper proposes an optimization of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) Networks using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) framework. Today, the development of quantum computers threatens the security systems of classical cryptography. Moreover, as QKD networks are designed for protecting secret communication, they suffer from multiple operational difficulties: adaptive to dynamic conditions, optimization for multiple parameters and effective resource utilization. In order to overcome these obstacles, we propose a GNN-based framework which can model QKD networks as dynamic graphs and extracts exploitable characteristics from these networks' structure. The graph contains not only topological information but also specific characteristics associated with quantum communication (the number of edges between nodes, etc). Experimental results demonstrate that the GNN-optimized QKD network achieves a substantial increase in total key rate (from 27.1 Kbits/s to 470 Kbits/s), a reduced average QBER (from 6.6% to 6.0%), and maintains path integrity with a slight reduction in average transmission distance (from 7.13 km to 6.42 km). Furthermore, we analyze network performance across varying scales (10 to 250 nodes), showing improved link prediction accuracy and enhanced key generation rate in medium-sized networks. This work introduces a novel operation mode for QKD networks, shifting the paradigm of network optimization through adaptive and scalable quantum communication systems that enhance security and performance.
PersonaDrift: A Benchmark for Temporal Anomaly Detection in Language-Based Dementia Monitoring
People living with dementia (PLwD) often show gradual shifts in how they communicate, becoming less expressive, more repetitive, or drifting off-topic in subtle ways. While caregivers may notice these changes informally, most computational tools are not designed to track such behavioral drift over time. This paper introduces PersonaDrift, a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate machine learning and statistical methods for detecting progressive changes in daily communication, focusing on user responses to a digital reminder system. PersonaDrift simulates 60-day interaction logs for synthetic users modeled after real PLwD, based on interviews with caregivers. These caregiver-informed personas vary in tone, modality, and communication habits, enabling realistic diversity in behavior. The benchmark focuses on two forms of longitudinal change that caregivers highlighted as particularly salient: flattened sentiment (reduced emotional tone and verbosity) and off-topic replies (semantic drift). These changes are injected progressively at different rates to emulate naturalistic cognitive trajectories, and the framework is designed to be extensible to additional behaviors in future use cases. To explore this novel application space, we evaluate several anomaly detection approaches, unsupervised statistical methods (CUSUM, EWMA, One-Class SVM), sequence models using contextual embeddings (GRU + BERT), and supervised classifiers in both generalized and personalized settings. Preliminary results show that flattened sentiment can often be detected with simple statistical models in users with low baseline variability, while detecting semantic drift requires temporal modeling and personalized baselines. Across both tasks, personalized classifiers consistently outperform generalized ones, highlighting the importance of individual behavioral context.
ESGBench: A Benchmark for Explainable ESG Question Answering in Corporate Sustainability Reports
George, Sherine, Saji, Nithish
We present ESGBench, a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework designed to assess explainable ESG question answering systems using corporate sustainability reports. The benchmark consists of domain-grounded questions across multiple ESG themes, paired with human-curated answers and supporting evidence to enable fine-grained evaluation of model reasoning. We analyze the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs on ESGBench, highlighting key challenges in factual consistency, traceability, and domain alignment. ESGBench aims to accelerate research in transparent and accountable ESG-focused AI systems.
From Prompts to Printable Models: Support-Effective 3D Generation via Offset Direct Preference Optimization
Wu, Chenming, Li, Xiaofan, Dai, Chengkai
The transition from digital 3D models to physical objects via 3D printing often requires support structures to prevent overhanging features from collapsing during the fabrication process. While current slicing technologies offer advanced support strategies, they focus on post-processing optimizations rather than addressing the underlying need for support-efficient design during the model generation phase. This paper introduces SEG (\textit{\underline{S}upport-\underline{E}ffective \underline{G}eneration}), a novel framework that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with an Offset (ODPO) into the 3D generation pipeline to directly optimize models for minimal support material usage. By incorporating support structure simulation into the training process, SEG encourages the generation of geometries that inherently require fewer supports, thus reducing material waste and production time. We demonstrate SEG's effectiveness through extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Thingi10k-Val and GPT-3DP-Val, showing that SEG significantly outperforms baseline models such as TRELLIS, DPO, and DRO in terms of support volume reduction and printability. Qualitative results further reveal that SEG maintains high fidelity to input prompts while minimizing the need for support structures. Our findings highlight the potential of SEG to transform 3D printing by directly optimizing models during the generative process, paving the way for more sustainable and efficient digital fabrication practices.
From generative AI to the brain: five takeaways
The big strides seen in generative AI are not based on somewhat obscure algorithms, but due to clearly defined generative principles. The resulting concrete implementations have proven themselves in large numbers of applications. We suggest that it is imperative to thoroughly investigate which of these generative principles may be operative also in the brain, and hence relevant for cognitive neuroscience. In addition, ML research led to a range of interesting characterizations of neural information processing systems. We discuss five examples, the shortcomings of world modelling, the generation of thought processes, attention, neural scaling laws, and quantization, that illustrate how much neuroscience could potentially learn from ML research.
Graph Neural Networks for Surgical Scene Segmentation
Li, Yihan, Churamani, Nikhil, Robu, Maria, Luengo, Imanol, Stoyanov, Danail
Purpose: Accurate identification of hepatocystic anatomy is critical to preventing surgical complications during laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Deep learning models often struggle with occlusions, long-range dependencies, and capturing the fine-scale geometry of rare structures. This work addresses these challenges by introducing graph-based segmentation approaches that enhance spatial and semantic understanding in surgical scene analyses. Methods: We propose two segmentation models integrating Vision Transformer (ViT) feature encoders with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to explicitly model spatial relationships between anatomical regions. (1) A static k Nearest Neighbours (k-NN) graph with a Graph Convolutional Network with Initial Residual and Identity Mapping (GCNII) enables stable long-range information propagation. (2) A dynamic Differentiable Graph Generator (DGG) with a Graph Attention Network (GAT) supports adaptive topology learning. Both models are evaluated on the Endoscapes-Seg50 and CholecSeg8k benchmarks. Results: The proposed approaches achieve up to 7-8% improvement in Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) and 6% improvement in Mean Dice (mDice) scores over state-of-the-art baselines. It produces anatomically coherent predictions, particularly on thin, rare and safety-critical structures. Conclusion: The proposed graph-based segmentation methods enhance both performance and anatomical consistency in surgical scene segmentation. By combining ViT-based global context with graph-based relational reasoning, the models improve interpretability and reliability, paving the way for safer laparoscopic and robot-assisted surgery through a precise identification of critical anatomical features.
Generative Modeling of Clinical Time Series via Latent Stochastic Differential Equations
Aslanimoghanloo, Muhammad, ElGazzar, Ahmed, van Gerven, Marcel
Clinical time series data from electronic health records and medical registries offer unprecedented opportunities to understand patient trajectories and inform medical decision-making. However, leveraging such data presents significant challenges due to irregular sampling, complex latent physiology, and inherent uncertainties in both measurements and disease progression. To address these challenges, we propose a generative modeling framework based on latent neural stochastic differential equations (SDEs) that views clinical time series as discrete-time partial observations of an underlying controlled stochastic dynamical system. This formulation naturally handles irregularly sampled observations, learns complex non-linear interactions, and captures the stochasticity of disease progression and measurement noise within a unified scalable probabilistic framework. Results show that our framework outperforms ordinary differential equation and long short-term memory baseline models in accuracy and uncertainty estimation. These results highlight its potential for enabling precise, uncertainty-aware predictions to support clinical decision-making. Introduction Predicting patient trajectories is critical for enabling timely interventions, better understanding of disease progression, and developing personalized medicine [1]. For instance, early detection of sepsis has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of organ failure and mortality [2]. This potential is increasingly becoming feasible due to the rapid growth of available healthcare data like electronic health records (EHRs) [3]. A defining feature of healthcare data are their temporal nature, reflecting the dynamic evolution of patient conditions over time. These temporal patterns highlight the need for time series models specifically tailored to the complexities of clinical data. However, healthcare time series have unique characteristics such as missing values, irregular sampling, aleatoric uncertainty, and patient-specific variability, that make modeling them particularly challenging [5, 6]. Traditional time series models, such as autoregressive moving average (ARIMA) models, have been applied to healthcare data but often struggle with its complexity and irregularity [7].
FreqFlow: Long-term forecasting using lightweight flow matching
Moghadas, Seyed Mohamad, Cornelis, Bruno, Munteanu, Adrian
Multivariate time-series (MTS) forecasting is fundamental to applications ranging from urban mobility and resource management to climate modeling. While recent generative models based on denoising diffusion have advanced state-of-the-art performance in capturing complex data distributions, they suffer from significant computational overhead due to iterative stochastic sampling procedures that limit real-time deployment. Moreover, these models can be brittle when handling high-dimensional, non-stationary, and multi-scale periodic patterns characteristic of real-world sensor networks. We introduce FreqFlow, a novel framework that leverages conditional flow matching in the frequency domain for deterministic MTS forecasting. Unlike conventional approaches that operate in the time domain, FreqFlow transforms the forecasting problem into the spectral domain, where it learns to model amplitude and phase shifts through a single complex-valued linear layer. This frequency-domain formulation enables the model to efficiently capture temporal dynamics via complex multiplication, corresponding to scaling and temporal translations. The resulting architecture is exceptionally lightweight with only 89k parameters - an order of magnitude smaller than competing diffusion-based models-while enabling single-pass deterministic sampling through ordinary differential equation (ODE) integration. Our approach decomposes MTS signals into trend, seasonal, and residual components, with the flow matching mechanism specifically designed for residual learning to enhance long-term forecasting accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world traffic speed, volume, and flow datasets demonstrate that FreqFlow achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance, on average 7\% RMSE improvements, while being significantly faster and more parameter-efficient than existing methods
TOFA: Training-Free One-Shot Federated Adaptation for Vision-Language Models
Zhang, Li, Han, Zhongxuan, Feng, XiaoHua, Zhang, Jiaming, Li, Yuyuan, Jiang, Linbo, Lin, Jianan, Chen, Chaochao
Efficient and lightweight adaptation of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks through collaborative interactions between local clients and a central server is a rapidly emerging research topic in federated learning. Existing adaptation algorithms are typically trained iteratively, which incur significant communication costs and increase the susceptibility to potential attacks. Motivated by the one-shot federated training techniques that reduce client-server exchanges to a single round, developing a lightweight one-shot federated VLM adaptation method to alleviate these issues is particularly attractive. However, current one-shot approaches face certain challenges in adapting VLMs within federated settings: (1) insufficient exploitation of the rich multimodal information inherent in VLMs; (2) lack of specialized adaptation strategies to systematically handle the severe data heterogeneity; and (3) requiring additional training resource of clients or server. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel Training-free One-shot Federated Adaptation framework for VLMs, named TOFA. To fully leverage the generalizable multimodal features in pre-trained VLMs, TOFA employs both visual and textual pipelines to extract task-relevant representations. In the visual pipeline, a hierarchical Bayesian model learns personalized, class-specific prototype distributions. For the textual pipeline, TOFA evaluates and globally aligns the generated local text prompts for robustness. An adaptive weight calibration mechanism is also introduced to combine predictions from both modalities, balancing personalization and robustness to handle data heterogeneity. Our method is training-free, not relying on additional training resources on either the client or server side. Extensive experiments across 9 datasets in various federated settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TOFA method.