Andre Carvalho

Joao D. S. Marques, Andre V. Duarte, Andre Carvalho et al.

Every year, the European Union and its member states allocate millions of euros to fund various development initiatives. However, the increasing number of applications received for these programs often creates significant bottlenecks in evaluation processes, due to limited human capacity. In this work, we detail the real-world deployment of AI-assisted evaluation within the pipeline of two government initiatives: (i) corporate applications aimed at international business expansion, and (ii) citizen reimbursement claims for investments in energy-efficient home improvements. While these two cases involve distinct evaluation procedures, our findings confirm that AI effectively enhanced processing efficiency and reduced workload across both types of applications. Specifically, in the citizen reimbursement claims initiative, our solution increased reviewer productivity by 20.1%, while keeping a negligible false-positive rate based on our test set observations. These improvements resulted in an overall reduction of more than 2 months in the total evaluation time, illustrating the impact of AI-driven automation in large-scale evaluation workflows.

Nikolaos Livathinos, Cesar Berrospi, Maksym Lysak et al.

The number of published PDF documents has increased exponentially in recent decades. There is a growing need to make their rich content discoverable to information retrieval tools. In this paper, we present a novel approach to document structure recovery in PDF using recurrent neural networks to process the low-level PDF data representation directly, instead of relying on a visual re-interpretation of the rendered PDF page, as has been proposed in previous literature. We demonstrate how a sequence of PDF printing commands can be used as input into a neural network and how the network can learn to classify each printing command according to its structural function in the page. This approach has three advantages: First, it can distinguish among more fine-grained labels (typically 10-20 labels as opposed to 1-5 with visual methods), which results in a more accurate and detailed document structure resolution. Second, it can take into account the text flow across pages more naturally compared to visual methods because it can concatenate the printing commands of sequential pages. Last, our proposed method needs less memory and it is computationally less expensive than visual methods. This allows us to deploy such models in production environments at a much lower cost. Through extensive architectural search in combination with advanced feature engineering, we were able to implement a model that yields a weighted average F1 score of 97% across 17 distinct structural labels. The best model we achieved is currently served in production environments on our Corpus Conversion Service (CCS), which was presented at KDD18 (arXiv:1806.02284). This model enhances the capabilities of CCS significantly, as it eliminates the need for human annotated label ground-truth for every unseen document layout. This proved particularly useful when applied to a huge corpus of PDF articles related to COVID-19.

Kleber Padovani, Roberto Xavier, Rafael Cabral Borges et al.

De novo genome assembly is a relevant but computationally complex task in genomics. Although de novo assemblers have been used successfully in several genomics projects, there is still no 'best assembler', and the choice and setup of assemblers still rely on bioinformatics experts. Thus, as with other computationally complex problems, machine learning may emerge as an alternative (or complementary) way for developing more accurate and automated assemblers. Reinforcement learning has proven promising for solving complex activities without supervision - such games - and there is a pressing need to understand the limits of this approach to 'real' problems, such as the DFA problem. This study aimed to shed light on the application of machine learning, using reinforcement learning (RL), in genome assembly. We expanded upon the sole previous approach found in the literature to solve this problem by carefully exploring the learning aspects of the proposed intelligent agent, which uses the Q-learning algorithm, and we provided insights for the next steps of automated genome assembly development. We improved the reward system and optimized the exploration of the state space based on pruning and in collaboration with evolutionary computing. We tested the new approaches on 23 new larger environments, which are all available on the internet. Our results suggest consistent performance progress; however, we also found limitations, especially concerning the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. Finally, we discuss paths for achieving efficient and automated genome assembly in real scenarios considering successful RL applications - including deep reinforcement learning.