MADE: A Living Benchmark for Multi-Label Text Classification with Uncertainty Quantification of Medical Device Adverse Events

Machine learning in high-stakes domains such as healthcare requires not only strong predictive performance but also reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) to support human oversight. Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is a central task in this domain, yet remains challenging due to label imbalances, dependencies, and combinatorial complexity. Existing MLTC benchmarks are increasingly saturated and may be affected by training data contamination, making it difficult to distinguish genuine reasoning capabilities from memorization. We introduce MADE, a living MLTC benchmark derived from {m}edical device {ad}verse {e}vent reports and continuously updated with newly published reports to prevent contamination. MADE features a long-tailed distribution of hierarchical labels and enables reproducible evaluation with strict temporal splits. We establish baselines across more than 20 encoder- and decoder-only models under fine-tuning and few-shot settings (instruction-tuned/reasoning variants, local/API-accessible). We systematically assess entropy-/consistency-based and self-verbalized UQ methods. Results show clear trade-offs: smaller discriminatively fine-tuned decoders achieve the strongest head-to-tail accuracy while maintaining competitive UQ; generative fine-tuning delivers the most reliable UQ; large reasoning models improve performance on rare labels yet exhibit surprisingly weak UQ; and self-verbalized confidence is not a reliable proxy for uncertainty. Our work is publicly available at https://hhi.fraunhofer.de/aml-demonstrator/made-benchmark.

MetaDent: Labeling Clinical Images for Vision-Language Models in Dentistry

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medical image analysis, yet their application in intraoral photography remains largely underexplored due to the lack of fine-grained, annotated datasets and comprehensive benchmarks. To address this, we present MetaDent, a comprehensive resource that includes (1) a novel and large-scale dentistry image dataset collected from clinical, public, and web sources; (2) a semi-structured annotation framework designed to capture the hierarchical and clinically nuanced nature of dental photography; and (3) comprehensive benchmark suites for evaluating state-of-the-art VLMs on clinical image understanding. Our labeling approach combines a high-level image summary with point-by-point, free-text descriptions of abnormalities. This method enables rich, scalable, and task-agnostic representations. We curated 60,669 dental images from diverse sources and annotated a representative subset of 2,588 images using this meta-labeling scheme. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we derive standardized benchmarks: approximately 15K Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs and an 18-class multi-label classification dataset, which we validated with human review and error analysis to justify that the LLM-driven transition reliably preserves fidelity and semantic accuracy. We then evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs across VQA, classification, and image captioning tasks. Quantitative results reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with a fine-grained understanding of intraoral scenes, achieving moderate accuracy and producing inconsistent or incomplete descriptions in image captioning. We publicly release our dataset, annotations, and tools to foster reproducible research and accelerate the development of vision-language systems for dental applications.

AstroConcepts: A Large-Scale Multi-Label Classification Corpus for Astrophysics

Scientific multi-label text classification suffers from extreme class imbalance, where specialized terminology exhibits severe power-law distributions that challenge standard classification approaches. Existing scientific corpora lack comprehensive controlled vocabularies, focusing instead on broad categories and limiting systematic study of extreme imbalance. We introduce AstroConcepts, a corpus of English abstracts from 21,702 published astrophysics papers, labeled with 2,367 concepts from the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus. The corpus exhibits severe label imbalance, with 76% of concepts having fewer than 50 training examples. By releasing this resource, we enable systematic study of extreme class imbalance in scientific domains and establish strong baselines across traditional, neural, and vocabulary-constrained LLM methods. Our evaluation reveals three key patterns that provide new insights into scientific text classification. First, vocabulary-constrained LLMs achieve competitive performance relative to domain-adapted models in astrophysics classification, suggesting a potential for parameter-efficient approaches. Second, domain adaptation yields relatively larger improvements for rare, specialized terminology, although absolute performance remains limited across all methods. Third, we propose frequency-stratified evaluation to reveal performance patterns that are hidden by aggregate scores, thereby making robustness assessment central to scientific multi-label evaluation. These results offer actionable insights for scientific NLP and establish benchmarks for research on extreme imbalance.

MONETA: Multimodal Industry Classification through Geographic Information with Multi Agent Systems

Industry classification schemes are integral parts of public and corporate databases as they classify businesses based on economic activity. Due to the size of the company registers, manual annotation is costly, and fine-tuning models with every update in industry classification schemes requires significant data collection. We replicate the manual expert verification by using existing or easily retrievable multimodal resources for industry classification. We present MONETA, the first multimodal industry classification benchmark with text (Website, Wikipedia, Wikidata) and geospatial sources (OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery). Our dataset enlists 1,000 businesses in Europe with 20 economic activity labels according to EU guidelines (NACE). Our training-free baseline reaches 62.10% and 74.10% with open and closed-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM). We observe an increase of up to 22.80% with the combination of multi-turn design, context enrichment, and classification explanations. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines.

Towards Generalizable Representations of Mathematical Strategies

Pretrained encoders for mathematical texts have achieved significant improvements on various tasks such as formula classification and information retrieval. Yet they remain limited in representing and capturing student strategies for entire solution pathways. Previously, this has been accomplished either through labor-intensive manual labeling, which does not scale, or by learning representations tied to platform-specific actions, which limits generalizability. In this work, we present a novel approach for learning problem-invariant representations of entire algebraic solution pathways. We first construct transition embeddings by computing vector differences between consecutive algebraic states encoded by high-capacity pretrained models, emphasizing transformations rather than problem-specific features. Sequence-level embeddings are then learned via SimCSE, using contrastive objectives to position semantically similar solution pathways close in embedding space while separating dissimilar strategies. We evaluate these embeddings through multiple tasks, including multi-label action classification, solution efficiency prediction, and sequence reconstruction, and demonstrate their capacity to encode meaningful strategy information. Furthermore, we derive embedding-based measures of strategy uniqueness, diversity, and conformity that correlate with both short-term and distal learning outcomes, providing scalable proxies for mathematical creativity and divergent thinking. This approach facilitates platform-agnostic and cross-problem analyses of student problem-solving behaviors, demonstrating the effectiveness of transition-based sequence embeddings for educational data mining and automated assessment.

BiST: A Gold Standard Bangla-English Bilingual Corpus for Sentence Structure and Tense Classification with Inter-Annotator Agreement

High-quality bilingual resources remain a critical bottleneck for advancing multilingual NLP in low-resource settings, particularly for Bangla. To mitigate this gap, we introduce BiST, a rigorously curated Bangla-English corpus for sentence-level grammatical classification, annotated across two fundamental dimensions: syntactic structure (Simple, Complex, Compound, Complex-Compound) and tense (Present, Past, Future). The corpus is compiled from open-licensed encyclopedic sources and naturally composed conversational text, followed by systematic preprocessing and automated language identification, resulting in 30,534 sentences, including 17,465 English and 13,069 Bangla instances. Annotation quality is ensured through a multi-stage framework with three independent annotators and dimension-wise Fleiss Kappa ($κ$) agreement, yielding reliable and reproducible labels with $κ$ values of 0.82 and 0.88 for structural and temporal annotation, respectively. Statistical analyses demonstrate realistic structural and temporal distributions, while baseline evaluations show that dual-encoder architectures leveraging complementary language-specific representations consistently outperform strong multilingual encoders. Beyond benchmarking, BiST provides explicit linguistic supervision that supports grammatical modeling tasks, including controlled text generation, automated feedback generation, and cross-lingual representation learning. The corpus establishes a unified resource for bilingual grammatical modeling and facilitates linguistically grounded multilingual research.

An Extreme Multi-label Text Classification (XMTC) Library Dataset: What if we took "Use of Practical AI in Digital Libraries" seriously?

Subject indexing is vital for discovery but hard to sustain at scale and across languages. We release a large bilingual (English/German) corpus of catalog records annotated with the Integrated Authority File (GND), plus a machine-actionable GND taxonomy. The resource enables ontology-aware multi-label classification, mapping text to authority terms, and agent-assisted cataloging with reproducible, authority-grounded evaluation. We provide a brief statistical profile and qualitative error analyses of three systems. We invite the community to assess not only accuracy but usefulness and transparency, toward authority-anchored AI co-pilots that amplify catalogers' work.

MATA-Former & SIICU: Semantic Aware Temporal Alignment for High-Fidelity ICU Risk Prediction

Forecasting evolving clinical risks relies on intrinsic pathological dependencies rather than mere chronological proximity, yet current methods struggle with coarse binary supervision and physical timestamps. To align predictive modeling with clinical logic, we propose the Medical-semantics Aware Time-ALiBi Transformer (MATA-Former), utilizing event semantics to dynamically parameterize attention weights to prioritize causal validity over time lags. Furthermore, we introduce Plateau-Gaussian Soft Labeling (PSL), reformulating binary classification into continuous multi-horizon regression for full-trajectory risk modeling. Evaluated on SIICU -- a newly constructed dataset featuring over 506k events with rigorous expert-verified, fine-grained annotations -- and the MIMIC-IV dataset, our framework demonstrates superior efficacy and robust generalization in capturing risks from text-intensive, irregular clinical time series.

Semi-Supervised Learning with Balanced Deep Representation Distributions

Semi-Supervised Text Classification (SSTC) mainly works under the spirit of self-training. They initialize the deep classifier by training over labeled texts; and then alternatively predict unlabeled texts as their pseudo-labels and train the deep classifier over the mixture of labeled and pseudo-labeled texts. Naturally, their performance is largely affected by the accuracy of pseudo-labels for unlabeled texts. Unfortunately, they often suffer from low accuracy because of the margin bias problem caused by the large difference between representation distributions of labels in SSTC. To alleviate this problem, we apply the angular margin loss, and perform several Gaussian linear transformations to achieve balanced label angle variances, i.e., the variance of label angles of texts within the same label. More accuracy of predicted pseudo-labels can be achieved by constraining all label angle variances balanced, where they are estimated over both labeled and pseudo-labeled texts during self-training loops. With this insight, we propose a novel SSTC method, namely Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Balanced Deep representation Distributions (S2TC-BDD). We implement both multi-class classification and multi-label classification versions of S2TC-BDD by introducing some pseudo-labeling tricks and regularization terms. To evaluate S2 TC-BDD, we compare it against the state-of-the-art SSTC methods. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of S2 TC-BDD, especially when the labeled texts are scarce.

ActivityNarrated: An Open-Ended Narrative Paradigm for Wearable Human Activity Understanding

Wearable HAR has improved steadily, but most progress still relies on closed-set classification, which limits real-world use. In practice, human activity is open-ended, unscripted, personalized, and often compositional, unfolding as narratives rather than instances of fixed classes. We argue that addressing this gap does not require simply scaling datasets or models. It requires a fundamental shift in how wearable HAR is formulated, supervised, and evaluated. This work shows how to model open-ended activity narratives by aligning wearable sensor data with natural-language descriptions in an open-vocabulary setting. Our framework has three core components. First, we introduce a naturalistic data collection and annotation pipeline that combines multi-position wearable sensing with free-form, time-aligned narrative descriptions of ongoing behavior, allowing activity semantics to emerge without a predefined vocabulary. Second, we define a retrieval-based evaluation framework that measures semantic alignment between sensor data and language, enabling principled evaluation without fixed classes while also subsuming closed-set classification as a special case. Third, we present a language-conditioned learning architecture that supports sensor-to-text inference over variable-length sensor streams and heterogeneous sensor placements. Experiments show that models trained with fixed-label objectives degrade sharply under real-world variability, while open-vocabulary sensor-language alignment yields robust and semantically grounded representations. Once this alignment is learned, closed-set activity recognition becomes a simple downstream task. Under cross-participant evaluation, our method achieves 65.3% Macro-F1, compared with 31-34% for strong closed-set HAR baselines. These results establish open-ended narrative modeling as a practical and effective foundation for real-world wearable HAR.