Panagiotis Vagenas

Lokesh Mishra, Cesar Berrospi, Kasper Dinkla et al.

We present Deep Search DocQA. This application enables information extraction from documents via a question-answering conversational assistant. The system integrates several technologies from different AI disciplines consisting of document conversion to machine-readable format (via computer vision), finding relevant data (via natural language processing), and formulating an eloquent response (via large language models). Users can explore over 10,000 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure reports from over 2000 corporations. The Deep Search platform can be accessed at: https://ds4sd.github.io.

Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee, Aashka Trivedi, Masayasu Muraoka et al.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the closely-related domains of Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics, and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address NLP tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning based text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation for applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets, CLIMATE-CHANGE NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. We show that our models outperform both general-purpose (RoBERTa) and domain-specific (SCIBERT) encoders on these new tasks as well as existing tasks in the domains of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of these models in two industrial settings -- as a retrieval model for large-scale vector search applications and in automatic content tagging systems.

Rafael Teixeira de Lima, Shubham Gupta, Cesar Berrospi et al. · ibm-research

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are a widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the industry. While many tools exist empowering developers to build their own systems, measuring their performance locally, with datasets reflective of the system's use cases, is a technological challenge. Solutions to this problem range from non-specific and cheap (most public datasets) to specific and costly (generating data from local documents). In this paper, we show that using public question and answer (Q&A) datasets to assess retrieval performance can lead to non-optimal systems design, and that common tools for RAG dataset generation can lead to unbalanced data. We propose solutions to these issues based on the characterization of RAG datasets through labels and through label-targeted data generation. Finally, we show that fine-tuned small LLMs can efficiently generate Q&A datasets. We believe that these observations are invaluable to the know-your-data step of RAG systems development.

Nikolaos Livathinos, Christoph Auer, Ahmed Nassar et al.

This technical report documents the development of novel Layout Analysis models integrated into the Docling document-conversion pipeline. We trained several state-of-the-art object detectors based on the RT-DETR, RT-DETRv2 and DFINE architectures on a heterogeneous corpus of 150,000 documents (both openly available and proprietary). Post-processing steps were applied to the raw detections to make them more applicable to the document conversion task. We evaluated the effectiveness of the layout analysis on various document benchmarks using different methodologies while also measuring the runtime performance across different environments (CPU, Nvidia and Apple GPUs). We introduce five new document layout models achieving 20.6% - 23.9% mAP improvement over Docling's previous baseline, with comparable or better runtime. Our best model, "heron-101", attains 78% mAP with 28 ms/image inference time on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments establish best practices for training, evaluating, and deploying document-layout detectors, providing actionable guidance for the document conversion community. All trained checkpoints, code, and documentation are released under a permissive license on HuggingFace.

Ivan Girardi, Panagiotis Vagenas, Dario Arcos-Díaz et al.

We develop various AI models to predict hospitalization on a large (over 110$k$) cohort of COVID-19 positive-tested US patients, sourced from March 2020 to February 2021. Models range from Random Forest to Neural Network (NN) and Time Convolutional NN, where combination of the data modalities (tabular and time dependent) are performed at different stages (early vs. model fusion). Despite high data unbalance, the models reach average precision 0.96-0.98 (0.75-0.85), recall 0.96-0.98 (0.74-0.85), and $F_1$-score 0.97-0.98 (0.79-0.83) on the non-hospitalized (or hospitalized) class. Performances do not significantly drop even when selected lists of features are removed to study model adaptability to different scenarios. However, a systematic study of the SHAP feature importance values for the developed models in the different scenarios shows a large variability across models and use cases. This calls for even more complete studies on several explainability methods before their adoption in high-stakes scenarios.