Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires visual language models (VLMs) to integrate visual understanding with external knowledge retrieval. Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) achieves significant advances in this task by combining knowledge-base querying, it still struggles with the quality of multimodal queries and the relevance of retrieved results. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage method, termed Wiki-PRF, including Processing, Retrieval and Filtering stages.

With the rapid advancement of multimodal retrieval and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs, increasingly complex retrieval tasks have emerged. Existing methods predominantly rely on task-specific fine-tuning of vision-language models and are limited to single-modality queries or documents. In this paper, we propose ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that supports multimodal queries, composed of both images and text, and searches across multimodal document collections where text and images coexist. ReT-2 leverages multi-layer representations and a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating mechanisms to dynamically integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. We evaluate ReT-2 on the challenging M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks across different retrieval configurations. Results demonstrate that ReT-2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings, while offering faster inference and reduced memory usage compared to prior approaches. When integrated into retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, ReT-2 also improves downstream performance on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek datasets. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT-2

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various applications. However, their use as writing assistants in specialized domains like finance, medicine, and law is often hampered by a lack of deep domain-specific knowledge and a tendency to hallucinate. Existing solutions, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), can suffer from inconsistency across multiple retrieval steps, while online search-based methods often degrade quality due to unreliable web content. To address these challenges, we introduce DeepWriter, a customizable, multimodal, long-form writing assistant that operates on a curated, offline knowledge base. DeepWriter leverages a novel pipeline that involves task decomposition, outline generation, multimodal retrieval, and section-by-section composition with reflection. By deeply mining information from a structured corpus and incorporating both textual and visual elements, DeepWriter generates coherent, factually grounded, and professional-grade documents. We also propose a hierarchical knowledge representation to enhance retrieval efficiency and accuracy. Our experiments on financial report generation demonstrate that DeepWriter produces high-quality, verifiable articles that surpasses existing baselines in factual accuracy and generated content quality.

This paper presents the ReXCL tool, which automates the extraction and classification processes in requirement engineering, enhancing the software development lifecycle. The tool features two main modules: Extraction, which processes raw requirement documents into a predefined schema using heuristics and predictive modeling, and Classification, which assigns class labels to requirements using adaptive fine-tuning of encoder-based models. The final output can be exported to external requirement engineering tools. Performance evaluations indicate that ReXCL significantly improves efficiency and accuracy in managing requirements, marking a novel approach to automating the schematization of semi-structured requirement documents.

Many communities, including the scientific community, develop implicit writing norms. Understanding them is crucial for effective communication with that community. Writers gradually develop an implicit understanding of norms by reading papers and receiving feedback on their writing. However, it is difficult to both externalize this knowledge and apply it to one's own writing. We propose two new writing support concepts that reify document and sentence-level patterns in a given text corpus: (1) an ordered distribution over section titles and (2) given the user's draft and cursor location, many retrieved contextually relevant sentences. Recurring words in the latter are algorithmically highlighted to help users see any emergent norms. Study results (N=16) show that participants revised the structure and content using these concepts, gaining confidence in aligning with or breaking norms after reviewing many examples. These results demonstrate the value of reifying distributions over other authors' writing choices during the writing process.

Cross-modal retrieval is gaining increasing efficacy and interest from the research community, thanks to large-scale training, novel architectural and learning designs, and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs. In this paper, we move a step forward and design an approach that allows for multimodal queries, composed of both an image and a text, and can search within collections of multimodal documents, where images and text are interleaved. Our model, ReT, employs multi-level representations extracted from different layers of both visual and textual backbones, both at the query and document side. To allow for multi-level and cross-modal understanding and feature extraction, ReT employs a novel Transformer-based recurrent cell that integrates both textual and visual features at different layers, and leverages sigmoidal gates inspired by the classical design of LSTMs. Extensive experiments on M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks show that ReT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT.

Why do we care about transfer learning in the first place? And possibly give a short explanation: what is transfer learning. You could also refer to a survey paper for readers that are interested.

Identifying the reason for which an author cites another work is essential to understand the nature of scientific contributions and to assess their impact. Citations are one of the pillars of scholarly communication and most metrics employed to analyze these conceptual links are based on quantitative observations. Behind the act of referencing another scholarly work there is a whole world of meanings that needs to be proficiently and effectively revealed. This study emphasizes the importance of trustfully classifying citation intents to provide more comprehensive and insightful analyses in research assessment. We address this task by presenting a study utilizing advanced Ensemble Strategies for Citation Intent Classification (CIC) incorporating Language Models (LMs) and employing Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to enhance the interpretability and trustworthiness of models' predictions. Our approach involves two ensemble classifiers that utilize fine-tuned SciBERT and XLNet LMs as baselines. We further demonstrate the critical role of section titles as a feature in improving models' performances. The study also introduces a web application developed with Flask and currently available at http://137.204.64.4:81/cic/classifier, aimed at classifying citation intents. One of our models sets as a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) with an 89.46% Macro-F1 score on the SciCite benchmark. The integration of XAI techniques provides insights into the decision-making processes, highlighting the contributions of individual words for level-0 classifications, and of individual models for the metaclassification. The findings suggest that the inclusion of section titles significantly enhances classification performances in the CIC task. Our contributions provide useful insights for developing more robust datasets and methodologies, thus fostering a deeper understanding of scholarly communication.