SciEvent: Benchmarking Multi-domain Scientific Event Extraction

Scientific information extraction (SciIE) has primarily relied on entity-relation extraction in narrow domains, limiting its applicability to interdisciplinary research and struggling to capture the necessary context of scientific information, often resulting in fragmented or conflicting statements. In this paper, we introduce SciEvent, a novel multi-domain benchmark of scientific abstracts annotated via a unified event extraction (EE) schema designed to enable structured and context-aware understanding of scientific content. It includes 500 abstracts across five research domains, with manual annotations of event segments, triggers, and fine-grained arguments. We define SciIE as a multi-stage EE pipeline: (1) segmenting abstracts into core scientific activities--Background, Method, Result, and Conclusion; and (2) extracting the corresponding triggers and arguments. Experiments with fine-tuned EE models, large language models (LLMs), and human annotators reveal a performance gap, with current models struggling in domains such as sociology and humanities. SciEvent serves as a challenging benchmark and a step toward generalizable, multi-domain SciIE.

FocusMed: A Large Language Model-based Framework for Enhancing Medical Question Summarization with Focus Identification

With the rapid development of online medical platforms, consumer health questions (CHQs) are inefficient in diagnosis due to redundant information and frequent non-professional terms. The medical question summary (MQS) task aims to transform CHQs into streamlined doctors' frequently asked questions (FAQs), but existing methods still face challenges such as poor identification of question focus and model hallucination. This paper explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) in the MQS task and finds that direct fine-tuning is prone to focus identification bias and generates unfaithful content. To this end, we propose an optimization framework based on core focus guidance. First, a prompt template is designed to drive the LLMs to extract the core focus from the CHQs that is faithful to the original text. Then, a fine-tuning dataset is constructed in combination with the original CHQ-FAQ pairs to improve the ability to identify the focus of the question. Finally, a multi-dimensional quality evaluation and selection mechanism is proposed to comprehensively improve the quality of the summary from multiple dimensions. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two widely-adopted MQS datasets using three established evaluation metrics. The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across all measures, demonstrating a significant boost in the model's ability to identify critical focus of questions and a notable mitigation of hallucinations. The source codes are freely available at https://github.com/DUT-LiuChao/FocusMed.

Adaptive Event Stream Slicing for Open-Vocabulary Event-Based Object Detection via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation

Event cameras offer advantages in object detection tasks due to high-speed response, low latency, and robustness to motion blur. However, event cameras lack texture and color information, making open-vocabulary detection particularly challenging. Current event-based detection methods are typically trained on predefined categories, limiting their ability to generalize to novel objects, where encountering previously unseen objects is common. Vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled open-vocabulary object detection in RGB images. However, the modality gap between images and event streams makes it ineffective to directly transfer CLIP to event data, as CLIP was not designed for event streams. To bridge this gap, we propose an event-image knowledge distillation framework that leverages CLIP's semantic understanding to achieve open-vocabulary object detection on event data. Instead of training CLIP directly on event streams, we use image frames as inputs to a teacher model, guiding the event-based student model to learn CLIP's rich visual representations. Through spatial attention-based distillation, the student network learns meaningful visual features directly from raw event inputs while inheriting CLIP's broad visual knowledge. Furthermore, to prevent information loss due to event data segmentation, we design a hybrid spiking neural network (SNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) framework. Unlike fixed-group event segmentation methods, which often discard crucial temporal information, our SNN adaptively determines the optimal event segmentation moments, ensuring that key temporal features are extracted. The extracted event features are then processed by CNNs for object detection.

Variational Secret Common Randomness Extraction

This paper studies the problem of extracting common randomness (CR) or secret keys from correlated random sources observed by two legitimate parties, Alice and Bob, through public discussion in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. We propose a practical two-stage CR extraction framework. In the first stage, the variational probabilistic quantization (VPQ) step is introduced, where Alice and Bob employ probabilistic neural network (NN) encoders to map their observations into discrete, nearly uniform random variables (RVs) with high agreement probability while minimizing information leakage to Eve. This is realized through a variational learning objective combined with adversarial training. In the second stage, a secure sketch using code-offset construction reconciles the encoder outputs into identical secret keys, whose secrecy is guaranteed by the VPQ objective. As a representative application, we study physical layer key (PLK) generation. Beyond the traditional methods, which rely on the channel reciprocity principle and require two-way channel probing, thus suffering from large protocol overhead and being unsuitable in high mobility scenarios, we propose a sensing-based PLK generation method for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems, where paired range-angle (RA) maps measured at Alice and Bob serve as correlated sources. The idea is verified through both end-to-end simulations and real-world software-defined radio (SDR) measurements, including scenarios where Eve has partial knowledge about Bob's position. The results demonstrate the feasibility and convincing performance of both the proposed CR extraction framework and sensing-based PLK generation method.

Detecting (Un)answerability in Large Language Models with Linear Directions

Large language models (LLMs) often respond confidently to questions even when they lack the necessary information, leading to hallucinated answers. In this work, we study the problem of (un)answerability detection, focusing on extractive question answering (QA) where the model should determine if a passage contains sufficient information to answer a given question. We propose a simple approach for identifying a direction in the model's activation space that captures unanswerability and uses it for classification. This direction is selected by applying activation additions during inference and measuring their impact on the model's abstention behavior. We show that projecting hidden activations onto this direction yields a reliable score for (un)answerability classification. Experiments on two open-weight LLMs and four extractive QA benchmarks show that our method effectively detects unanswerable questions and generalizes better across datasets than existing prompt-based and classifier-based approaches. Moreover, the obtained directions extend beyond extractive QA to unanswerability that stems from factors, such as lack of scientific consensus and subjectivity. Last, causal interventions show that adding or ablating the directions effectively controls the abstention behavior of the model.

Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma Guided Network for Efficient 3D Medical Segmentation

Lightweight 3D medical image segmentation remains constrained by a fundamental "efficiency / robustness conflict", particularly when processing complex anatomical structures and heterogeneous modalities. In this paper, we study how to redesign the framework based on the characteristics of high-dimensional 3D images, and explore data synergy to overcome the fragile representation of lightweight methods. Our approach, VeloxSeg, begins with a deployable and extensible dual-stream CNN-Transformer architecture composed of Paired Window Attention (PWA) and Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma-guided convolution (JLC). For each 3D image, we invoke a "glance-and-focus" principle, where PWA rapidly retrieves multi-scale information, and JLC ensures robust local feature extraction with minimal parameters, significantly enhancing the model's ability to operate with low computational budget. Followed by an extension of the dual-stream architecture that incorporates modal interaction into the multi-scale image-retrieval process, VeloxSeg efficiently models heterogeneous modalities. Finally, Spatially Decoupled Knowledge Transfer (SDKT) via Gram matrices injects the texture prior extracted by a self-supervised network into the segmentation network, yielding stronger representations than baselines at no extra inference cost. Experimental results on multimodal benchmarks show that VeloxSeg achieves a 26% Dice improvement, alongside increasing GPU throughput by 11x and CPU by 48x. Codes are available at https://github.com/JinPLu/VeloxSeg.

Attention Beyond Neighborhoods: Reviving Transformer for Graph Clustering

Attention mechanisms have become a cornerstone in modern neural networks, driving breakthroughs across diverse domains. However, their application to graph structured data, where capturing topological connections is essential, remains underexplored and underperforming compared to Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly in the graph clustering task. GNN tends to overemphasize neighborhood aggregation, leading to a homogenization of node representations. Conversely, Transformer tends to over globalize, highlighting distant nodes at the expense of meaningful local patterns. This dichotomy raises a key question: Is attention inherently redundant for unsupervised graph learning? To address this, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis, uncovering the complementary weaknesses of GNN and Transformer in graph clustering. Motivated by these insights, we propose the Attentive Graph Clustering Network (AGCN) a novel architecture that reinterprets the notion that graph is attention. AGCN directly embeds the attention mechanism into the graph structure, enabling effective global information extraction while maintaining sensitivity to local topological cues. Our framework incorporates theoretical analysis to contrast AGCN behavior with GNN and Transformer and introduces two innovations: (1) a KV cache mechanism to improve computational efficiency, and (2) a pairwise margin contrastive loss to boost the discriminative capacity of the attention space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AGCN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

MR-UIE: Multi-Perspective Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Universal Information Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate robust capabilities across diverse research domains. However, their performance in universal information extraction (UIE) remains insufficient, especially when tackling structured output scenarios that involve complex schema descriptions and require multi-step reasoning. While existing approaches enhance the performance of LLMs through in-context learning and instruction tuning, significant limitations nonetheless persist. To enhance the model's generalization ability, we propose integrating reinforcement learning (RL) with multi-perspective reasoning for information extraction (IE) tasks. Our work transitions LLMs from passive extractors to active reasoners, enabling them to understand not only what to extract but also how to reason. Experiments conducted on multiple IE benchmarks demonstrate that MR-UIE consistently elevates extraction accuracy across domains and surpasses state-of-the-art methods on several datasets. Furthermore, incorporating multi-perspective reasoning into RL notably enhances generalization in complex IE tasks, underscoring the critical role of reasoning in challenging scenarios.

Combining Knowledge Graphs and NLP to Analyze Instant Messaging Data in Criminal Investigations

Criminal investigations often involve the analysis of messages exchanged through instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp, which can be an extremely effort-consuming task. Our approach integrates knowledge graphs and NLP models to support this analysis by semantically enriching data collected from suspects' mobile phones, and help prosecutors and investigators search into the data and get valuable insights. Our semantic enrichment process involves extracting message data and modeling it using a knowledge graph, generating transcriptions of voice messages, and annotating the data using an end-to-end entity extraction approach. We adopt two different solutions to help users get insights into the data, one based on querying and visualizing the graph, and one based on semantic search. The proposed approach ensures that users can verify the information by accessing the original data. While we report about early results and prototypes developed in the context of an ongoing project, our proposal has undergone practical applications with real investigation data. As a consequence, we had the chance to interact closely with prosecutors, collecting positive feedback but also identifying interesting opportunities as well as promising research directions to share with the research community.

DistillMatch: Leveraging Knowledge Distillation from Vision Foundation Model for Multimodal Image Matching

Multimodal image matching seeks pixel-level correspondences between images of different modalities, crucial for cross-modal perception, fusion and analysis. However, the significant appearance differences between modalities make this task challenging. Due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated datasets, existing deep learning methods that extract modality-common features for matching perform poorly and lack adaptability to diverse scenarios. Vision Foundation Model (VFM), trained on large-scale data, yields generalizable and robust feature representations adapted to data and tasks of various modalities, including multimodal matching. Thus, we propose DistillMatch, a multimodal image matching method using knowledge distillation from VFM. DistillMatch employs knowledge distillation to build a lightweight student model that extracts high-level semantic features from VFM (including DINOv2 and DINOv3) to assist matching across modalities. To retain modality-specific information, it extracts and injects modality category information into the other modality's features, which enhances the model's understanding of cross-modal correlations. Furthermore, we design V2I-GAN to boost the model's generalization by translating visible to pseudo-infrared images for data augmentation. Experiments show that DistillMatch outperforms existing algorithms on public datasets.