Low-Resource, High-Impact: Building Corpora for Inclusive Language Technologies

This tutorial (https://tum-nlp.github.io/low-resource-tutorial) is designed for NLP practitioners, researchers, and developers working with multilingual and low-resource languages who seek to create more equitable and socially impactful language technologies. Participants will walk away with a practical toolkit for building end-to-end NLP pipelines for underrepresented languages -- from data collection and web crawling to parallel sentence mining, machine translation, and downstream applications such as text classification and multimodal reasoning. The tutorial presents strategies for tackling the challenges of data scarcity and cultural variance, offering hands-on methods and modeling frameworks. We will focus on fair, reproducible, and community-informed development approaches, grounded in real-world scenarios. We will showcase a diverse set of use cases covering over 10 languages from different language families and geopolitical contexts, including both digitally resource-rich and severely underrepresented languages.

Text2Graph: Combining Lightweight LLMs and GNNs for Efficient Text Classification in Label-Scarce Scenarios

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become effective zero-shot classifiers, but their high computational requirements and environmental costs limit their practicality for large-scale annotation in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. To support more sustainable workflows, we present Text2Graph, an open-source Python package that provides a modular implementation of existing text-to-graph classification approaches. The framework enables users to combine LLM-based partial annotation with Graph Neural Network (GNN) label propagation in a flexible manner, making it straightforward to swap components such as feature extractors, edge construction methods, and sampling strategies. We benchmark Text2Graph on a zero-shot setting using five datasets spanning topic classification and sentiment analysis tasks, comparing multiple variants against other zero-shot approaches for text classification. In addition to reporting performance, we provide detailed estimates of energy consumption and carbon emissions, showing that graph-based propagation achieves competitive results at a fraction of the energy and environmental cost.

Item Region-based Style Classification Network (IRSN): A Fashion Style Classifier Based on Domain Knowledge of Fashion Experts

Fashion style classification is a challenging task because of the large visual variation within the same style and the existence of visually similar styles. Styles are expressed not only by the global appearance, but also by the attributes of individual items and their combinations. In this study, we propose an item region-based fashion style classification network (IRSN) to effectively classify fashion styles by analyzing item-specific features and their combinations in addition to global features. IRSN extracts features of each item region using item region pooling (IRP), analyzes them separately, and combines them using gated feature fusion (GFF). In addition, we improve the feature extractor by applying a dual-backbone architecture that combines a domain-specific feature extractor and a general feature extractor pre-trained with a large-scale image-text dataset. In experiments, applying IRSN to six widely-used backbones, including EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, and Swin Transformer, improved style classification accuracy by an average of 6.9% and a maximum of 14.5% on the FashionStyle14 dataset and by an average of 7.6% and a maximum of 15.1% on the ShowniqV3 dataset. Visualization analysis also supports that the IRSN models are better than the baseline models at capturing differences between similar style classes.

Fixed-Budget Parameter-Efficient Training with Frozen Encoders Improves Multimodal Chest X-Ray Classification

Multimodal chest X-Ray analysis often fine-tunes large vision-language models, which is computationally costly. We study parameter-efficient training (PET) strategies, including frozen encoders, BitFit, LoRA, and adapters for multi-label classification on the Indiana University Chest X-Ray dataset (3,851 image-report pairs; 579 test samples). To mitigate data leakage, we redact pathology terms from reports used as text inputs while retaining clinical context. Under a fixed parameter budget (2.37M parameters, 2.51% of total), all PET variants achieve AUROC between 0.892 and 0.908, outperforming full fine-tuning (0.770 AUROC), which uses 94.3M trainable parameters, a 40x reduction. External validation on CheXpert (224,316 images, 58x larger) confirms scalability: all PET methods achieve >0.69 AUROC with <9% trainable parameters, with Adapter achieving best performance (0.7214 AUROC). Budget-matched comparisons reveal that vision-only models (0.653 AUROC, 1.06M parameters) outperform budget-matched multimodal models (0.641 AUROC, 1.06M parameters), indicating improvements arise primarily from parameter allocation rather than cross-modal synergy. While PET methods show degraded calibration (ECE: 0.29-0.34) compared to simpler models (ECE: 0.049), this represents a tractable limitation addressable through post-hoc calibration methods. These findings demonstrate that frozen encoder strategies provide superior discrimination at substantially reduced computational cost, though calibration correction is essential for clinical deployment.

Hallucination Detection and Evaluation of Large Language Model

Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) pose a significant challenge, generating misleading or unverifiable content that undermines trust and reliability. Existing evaluation methods, such as KnowHalu, employ multi-stage verification but suffer from high computational costs. To address this, we integrate the Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM), a lightweight classification-based framework that operates independently of LLM-based judgments, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining high detection accuracy. We conduct a comparative analysis of hallucination detection methods across various LLMs, evaluating True Positive Rate (TPR), True Negative Rate (TNR), and Accuracy on question-answering (QA) and summarization tasks. Our results show that HHEM reduces evaluation time from 8 hours to 10 minutes, while HHEM with non-fabrication checking achieves the highest accuracy \(82.2\%\) and TPR \(78.9\%\). However, HHEM struggles with localized hallucinations in summarization tasks. To address this, we introduce segment-based retrieval, improving detection by verifying smaller text components. Additionally, our cumulative distribution function (CDF) analysis indicates that larger models (7B-9B parameters) generally exhibit fewer hallucinations, while intermediate-sized models show higher instability. These findings highlight the need for structured evaluation frameworks that balance computational efficiency with robust factual validation, enhancing the reliability of LLM-generated content.

Retrieving Objects from 3D Scenes with Box-Guided Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

Locating and retrieving objects from scene-level point clouds is a challenging problem with broad applications in robotics and augmented reality. This task is commonly formulated as open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. Although recent methods demonstrate strong performance, they depend heavily on SAM and CLIP to generate and classify 3D instance masks from images accompanying the point cloud, leading to substantial computational overhead and slow processing that limit their deployment in real-world settings. Open-YOLO 3D alleviates this issue by using a real-time 2D detector to classify class-agnostic masks produced directly from the point cloud by a pretrained 3D segmenter, eliminating the need for SAM and CLIP and significantly reducing inference time. However, Open-YOLO 3D often fails to generalize to object categories that appear infrequently in the 3D training data. In this paper, we propose a method that generates 3D instance masks for novel objects from RGB images guided by a 2D open-vocabulary detector. Our approach inherits the 2D detector's ability to recognize novel objects while maintaining efficient classification, enabling fast and accurate retrieval of rare instances from open-ended text queries. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/ndkhanh360/BoxOVIS.

Seeing Beyond the Scene: Analyzing and Mitigating Background Bias in Action Recognition

Human action recognition models often rely on background cues rather than human movement and pose to make predictions, a behavior known as background bias. We present a systematic analysis of background bias across classification models, contrastive text-image pretrained models, and Video Large Language Models (VLLM) and find that all exhibit a strong tendency to default to background reasoning. Next, we propose mitigation strategies for classification models and show that incorporating segmented human input effectively decreases background bias by 3.78%. Finally, we explore manual and automated prompt tuning for VLLMs, demonstrating that prompt design can steer predictions towards human-focused reasoning by 9.85%.

LabelFusion: Learning to Fuse LLMs and Transformer Classifiers for Robust Text Classification

LabelFusion is a fusion ensemble for text classification that learns to combine a traditional transformer-based classifier (e.g., RoBERTa) with one or more Large Language Models (LLMs such as OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, or DeepSeek) to deliver accurate and cost-aware predictions across multi-class and multi-label tasks. The package provides a simple high-level interface (AutoFusionClassifier) that trains the full pipeline end-to-end with minimal configuration, and a flexible API for advanced users. Under the hood, LabelFusion integrates vector signals from both sources by concatenating the ML backbone's embeddings with the LLM-derived per-class scores -- obtained through structured prompt-engineering strategies -- and feeds this joint representation into a compact multi-layer perceptron (FusionMLP) that produces the final prediction. This learned fusion approach captures complementary strengths of LLM reasoning and traditional transformer-based classifiers, yielding robust performance across domains -- achieving 92.4% accuracy on AG News and 92.3% on 10-class Reuters 21578 topic classification -- while enabling practical trade-offs between accuracy, latency, and cost.

Application of deep learning approaches for medieval historical documents transcription

Handwritten text recognition and optical character recognition solutions show excellent results with processing data of modern era, but efficiency drops with Latin documents of medieval times. This paper presents a deep learning method to extract text information from handwritten Latin-language documents of the 9th to 11th centuries. The approach takes into account the properties inherent in medieval documents. The paper provides a brief introduction to the field of historical document transcription, a first-sight analysis of the raw data, and the related works and studies. The paper presents the steps of dataset development for further training of the models. The explanatory data analysis of the processed data is provided as well. The paper explains the pipeline of deep learning models to extract text information from the document images, from detecting objects to word recognition using classification models and embedding word images. The paper reports the following results: recall, precision, F1 score, intersection over union, confusion matrix, and mean string distance. The plots of the metrics are also included. The implementation is published on the GitHub repository.

Coarse-to-Fine Open-Set Graph Node Classification with Large Language Models

Developing open-set classification methods capable of classifying in-distribution (ID) data while detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is essential for deploying graph neural networks (GNNs) in open-world scenarios. Existing methods typically treat all OOD samples as a single class, despite real-world applications, especially high-stake settings such as fraud detection and medical diagnosis, demanding deeper insights into OOD samples, including their probable labels. This raises a critical question: can OOD detection be extended to OOD classification without true label information? To address this question, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine open-set Classification (CFC) framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for graph datasets. CFC consists of three key components: a coarse classifier that uses LLM prompts for OOD detection and outlier label generation, a GNN-based fine classifier trained with OOD samples identified by the coarse classifier for enhanced OOD detection and ID classification, and refined OOD classification achieved through LLM prompts and post-processed OOD labels. Unlike methods that rely on synthetic or auxiliary OOD samples, CFC employs semantic OOD instances that are genuinely out-of-distribution based on their inherent meaning, improving interpretability and practical utility. Experimental results show that CFC improves OOD detection by ten percent over state-of-the-art methods on graph and text domains and achieves up to seventy percent accuracy in OOD classification on graph datasets.