Vsevolod Kovalev

Vsevolod Kovalev, Parteek Kumar

We study timestamped question answering over educational lecture videos under a single-GPU latency/memory budget. Given a natural-language query, the system retrieves relevant timestamped segments and synthesizes a grounded answer. We present CourseTimeQA (52.3 h, 902 queries across six courses) and a lightweight, latency-constrained cross-modal retriever (CrossFusion-RAG) that combines frozen encoders, a learned 512->768 vision projection, shallow query-agnostic cross-attention over ASR and frames with a temporal-consistency regularizer, and a small cross-attentive reranker. On CourseTimeQA, CrossFusion-RAG improves nDCG@10 by 0.10 and MRR by 0.08 over a strong BLIP-2 retriever while achieving approximately 1.55 s median end-to-end latency on a single A100. Closest comparators (zero-shot CLIP multi-frame pooling; CLIP + cross-encoder reranker + MMR; learned late-fusion gating; text-only hybrid with cross-encoder reranking and its MMR variant; caption-augmented text retrieval; non-learned temporal smoothing) are evaluated under matched hardware and indexing. We report robustness across ASR noise (WER quartiles), diagnostics for temporal localization, and full training/tuning details to support reproducible comparison.

Juejing Liu, Haydn Anderson, Noah I. Waxman et al.

New discoveries in chemistry and materials science, with increasingly expanding volume of requisite knowledge and experimental workload, provide unique opportunities for machine learning (ML) to take critical roles in accelerating research efficiency. Here, we demonstrate (1) the use of large language models (LLMs) for automated literature reviews, and (2) the training of an ML model to predict chemical knowledge (thermodynamic parameters). Our LLM-based literature review tool (LMExt) successfully extracted chemical information and beyond into a machine-readable structure, including stability constants for metal cation-ligand interactions, thermodynamic properties, and other broader data types (medical research papers, and financial reports), effectively overcoming the challenges inherent in each domain. Using the autonomous acquisition of thermodynamic data, an ML model was trained using the CatBoost algorithm for accurately predicting thermodynamic parameters (e.g., enthalpy of formation) of minerals. This work highlights the transformative potential of integrated ML approaches to reshape chemistry and materials science research.