Ademola Okerinde

Wolfgang M. Pauli, Sarah Panda, Kidus Admassu et al.

Recent advances in large language models have accelerated deployment of agentic systems in operational finance. Existing benchmarks emphasize measuring general capabilities, instruction following, or safety, but few directly address the operational finance workflows that agentic systems are now being deployed to automate. Finance professionals require agents to not only provide factually sound and properly grounded information, but also ensure that this information is verifiable and consistently adheres to rules and constraints of the operational finance domain. We introduce FORCE-Bench, which contains 251 expert-annotated queries and evaluates responses using a rubric-based framework calibrated to the requirements of the operational finance domain, across eight dimensions: accuracy, citations, clarity, depth, groundedness, recency, relevance, and structure. FORCE-Bench assesses agentic systems on three task types: financial obligation research (querying ERP systems for accounts receivable and payable data), financial entity performance research (answering time-bound questions from public filings and market data), and business brief generation (synthesising multi-source company intelligence reports). To reflect real deployment conditions, we evaluate our purpose-built agent, as well as the general-purpose agentic systems, under common tool access and latency-bounded settings. Results show that general-purpose agentic systems do not consistently meet finance-domain quality requirements under operational constraints, while the purpose-built Finance Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot is more reliable across dimensions. We release the dataset, rubrics, harness, and analysis code as open-source to support reproducible comparison and adaptation to other enterprise finance environments.

Ademola Okerinde, Sam Hoggatt, Divya Vani Lakkireddy et al.

In recent years, self-supervised learning has had significant success in applications involving computer vision and natural language processing. The type of pretext task is important to this boost in performance. One common pretext task is the measure of similarity and dissimilarity between pairs of images. In this scenario, the two images that make up the negative pair are visibly different to humans. However, in entomology, species are nearly indistinguishable and thus hard to differentiate. In this study, we explored the performance of a Siamese neural network using contrastive loss by learning to push apart embeddings of bumblebee species pair that are dissimilar, and pull together similar embeddings. Our experimental results show a 61% F1-score on zero-shot instances, a performance showing 11% improvement on samples of classes that share intersections with the training set.

Ademola Okerinde, Lior Shamir, William Hsu et al.

Class imbalance is an inherent problem in many machine learning classification tasks. This often leads to trained models that are unusable for any practical purpose. In this study we explore an unsupervised approach to address these imbalances by leveraging transfer learning from pre-trained image classification models to encoder-based Generative Adversarial Network (eGAN). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle this problem using GAN without needing to augment with synthesized fake images. In the proposed approach we use the discriminator network to output a negative or positive score. We classify as minority, test samples with negative scores and as majority those with positive scores. Our approach eliminates epistemic uncertainty in model predictions, as the P(minority) + P(majority) need not sum up to 1. The impact of transfer learning and combinations of different pre-trained image classification models at the generator and discriminator is also explored. Best result of 0.69 F1-score was obtained on CIFAR-10 classification task with imbalance ratio of 1:2500. Our approach also provides a mechanism of thresholding the specificity or sensitivity of our machine learning system. Keywords: Class imbalance, Transfer Learning, GAN, nash equilibrium

Ademola Okerinde, Lior Shamir, William Hsu et al.

Ceramic insulators are important to electronic systems, designed and installed to protect humans from the danger of high voltage electric current. However, insulators are not immortal, and natural deterioration can gradually damage them. Therefore, the condition of insulators must be continually monitored, which is normally done using UAVs. UAVs collect many images of insulators, and these images are then analyzed to identify those that are damaged. Here we describe AdeNet as a deep neural network designed to identify damaged insulators, and test multiple approaches to automatic analysis of the condition of insulators. Several deep neural networks were tested, as were shallow learning methods. The best results (88.8\%) were achieved using AdeNet without transfer learning. AdeNet also reduced the false negative rate to $\sim$7\%. While the method cannot fully replace human inspection, its high throughput can reduce the amount of labor required to monitor lines for damaged insulators and provide early warning to replace damaged insulators.