Information extraction is the process of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured text data.
Background: The identification of optimal signal detection methods is hindered by the lack of reliable reference datasets. Existing datasets do not capture when adverse events (AEs) are officially recognized by regulatory authorities, preventing restriction of analyses to pre-confirmation periods and limiting evaluation of early detection performance. This study addresses this gap by developing a time-indexed reference dataset for the European Union (EU), incorporating the timing of AE inclusion in product labels along with regulatory metadata. Methods: Current and historical Summaries of Product Characteristics (SmPCs) for all centrally authorized products (n=1,513) were retrieved from the EU Union Register of Medicinal Products (data lock: 15 December 2025). Section 4.8 was extracted and processed using DeepSeek V3 to identify AEs. Regulatory metadata, including labelling changes, were programmatically extracted. Time indexing was based on the date of AE inclusion in the SmPC. Results: The database includes 17,763 SmPC versions spanning 1995-2025, comprising 125,026 drug-AE associations. The time-indexed reference dataset, restricted to active products, included 1,479 medicinal products and 110,823 drug-AE associations. Most AEs were identified pre-marketing (74.5%) versus post-marketing (25.5%). Safety updates peaked around 2012. Gastrointestinal, skin, and nervous system disorders were the most represented System Organ Classes. Drugs had a median of 48 AEs across 14 SOCs. Conclusions: The proposed dataset addresses a critical gap in pharmacovigilance by incorporating temporal information on AE recognition for the EU, supporting more accurate assessment of signal detection performance and facilitating methodological comparisons across analytical approaches.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown promising results in enhancing Q&A by incorporating information from the web and other external sources. However, the supporting documents retrieved from the heterogeneous web often originate from multiple sources with diverse writing styles, varying formats, and inconsistent granularity. Fusing such multi-source documents into a coherent and knowledge-intensive context remains a significant challenge, as the presence of irrelevant and redundant information can compromise the factual consistency of the inferred answers. This paper proposes the Concept-oriented Context Reconstruction RAG (CoCR-RAG), a framework that addresses the multi-source information fusion problem in RAG through linguistically grounded concept-level integration. Specifically, we introduce a concept distillation algorithm that extracts essential concepts from Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a stable semantic representation that structures the meaning of texts as logical graphs. The distilled concepts from multiple retrieved documents are then fused and reconstructed into a unified, information-intensive context by Large Language Models, which supplement only the necessary sentence elements to highlight the core knowledge. Experiments on the PopQA and EntityQuestions datasets demonstrate that CoCR-RAG significantly outperforms existing context-reconstruction methods across these Web Q&A benchmarks. Furthermore, CoCR-RAG shows robustness across various backbone LLMs, establishing itself as a flexible, plug-and-play component adaptable to different RAG frameworks.
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) aims to extract the semantic information from the speech utterance of user queries. It is a core component in a task-oriented dialogue system. With the spectacular progress of deep neural network models and the evolution of pre-trained language models, SLU has obtained significant breakthroughs. However, only a few high-resource languages have taken advantage of this progress due to the absence of SLU resources. In this paper, we seek to mitigate this obstacle by introducing SLURP-TN. This dataset was created by recording 55 native speakers uttering sentences in Tunisian dialect, manually translated from six SLURP domains. The result is an SLU Tunisian dialect dataset that comprises 4165 sentences recorded into around 5 hours of acoustic material. We also develop a number of Automatic Speech Recognition and SLU models exploiting SLUTP-TN. The Dataset and baseline models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Elyadata/SLURP-TN.
Documentation of airport operations is inherently complex due to extensive technical terminology, rigorous regulations, proprietary regional information, and fragmented communication across multiple stakeholders. The resulting data silos and semantic inconsistencies present a significant impediment to the Total Airport Management (TAM) initiative. This paper presents a methodological framework for constructing a domain-grounded, machine-readable Knowledge Graph (KG) through a dual-stage fusion of symbolic Knowledge Engineering (KE) and generative Large Language Models (LLMs). The framework employs a scaffolded fusion strategy in which expert-curated KE structures guide LLM prompts to facilitate the discovery of semantically aligned knowledge triples. We evaluate this methodology on the Google LangExtract library and investigate the impact of context window utilization by comparing localized segment-based inference with document-level processing. Contrary to prior empirical observations of long-context degradation in LLMs, document-level processing improves the recovery of non-linear procedural dependencies. To ensure the high-fidelity provenance required in airport operations, the proposed framework fuses a probabilistic model for discovery and a deterministic algorithm for anchoring every extraction to its ground source. This ensures absolute traceability and verifiability, bridging the gap between "black-box" generative outputs and the transparency required for operational tooling. Finally, we introduce an automated framework that operationalizes this pipeline to synthesize complex operational workflows from unstructured textual corpora.
Assuming that neither source data nor the source model is accessible, black box domain adaptation represents a highly practical yet extremely challenging setting, as transferable information is restricted to the predictions of the black box source model, which can only be queried using target samples. Existing approaches attempt to extract transferable knowledge through pseudo label refinement or by leveraging external vision language models (ViLs), but they often suffer from noisy supervision or insufficient utilization of the semantic priors provided by ViLs, which ultimately hinder adaptation performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a dual teacher distillation with subnetwork rectification (DDSR) model that jointly exploits the specific knowledge embedded in black box source models and the general semantic information of a ViL. DDSR adaptively integrates their complementary predictions to generate reliable pseudo labels for the target domain and introduces a subnetwork driven regularization strategy to mitigate overfitting caused by noisy supervision. Furthermore, the refined target predictions iteratively enhance both the pseudo labels and ViL prompts, enabling more accurate and semantically consistent adaptation. Finally, the target model is further optimized through self training with classwise prototypes. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating consistent improvements over state of the art methods, including those using source data or models.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet they struggle with spatial tasks that require mental simulation, such as mental rotation. This paper investigates whether equipping an LLM with an external ``Imagery Module'' -- a tool capable of rendering and rotating 3D models -- can bridge this gap, functioning as a ``cognitive prosthetic.'' We conducted experiments using a dual-module architecture in which a reasoning module (an MLLM) interacts with an imagery module on 3D model rotation tasks. Performance was lower than expected, with accuracy reaching at most 62.5%. Further investigation suggests that even when the burden of maintaining and manipulating a holistic 3D state is outsourced, the system still fails. This reveals that current frontier models lack the foundational visual-spatial primitives required to interface with imagery. Specifically, they lack: (1) the low-level sensitivity to extract spatial signals such as (a) depth, (b) motion, and (c) short-horizon dynamic prediction; and (2) the capacity to reason contemplatively over images, dynamically shifting visual focus and balancing imagery with symbolic and associative information.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a biologically inspired computing paradigm with significant potential for energy-efficient neural processing. Among neural coding schemes of SNNs, Time-To-First-Spike (TTFS) coding, which encodes information through the precise timing of a neuron's first spike, provides exceptional energy efficiency and biological plausibility. Despite its theoretical advantages, existing TTFS models lack efficient training methods, suffering from high inference latency and limited performance. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework, which enables the efficient training of deep TTFS-coded SNNs by employing backpropagation throuh time (BPTT) algorithm. We name the generalized TTFS coding method in our framework as latency coding. The framework includes: (1) a latency encoding (LE) module with feature extraction and straight-through estimators to address severe information loss in direct intensity-to-latency mapping and ensure smooth gradient flow; (2) relaxation of the strict single-spike constraint of traditional TTFS, allowing neurons of intermediate layers to fire multiple times to mitigating gradient vanishing in deep networks; (3) a temporal adaptive decision (TAD) loss function that dynamically weights supervision signals based on sample-dependent confidence, resolving the incompatibility between latency coding and standard cross-entropy loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in comparison to existing TTFS-coded SNNs with ultra-low inference latency and superior energy efficiency. The framework also demonstrates improved robustness against input corruptions. Our study investigates the characteristics and potential of latency coding in scenarios demanding rapid response, providing valuable insights for further exploiting the temporal learning capabilities of SNNs.
The accurate prediction of protein-RNA binding affinity remains an unsolved problem in structural biology, limiting opportunities in understanding gene regulation and designing RNA-targeting therapeutics. A central obstacle is the structural flexibility of RNA, as, unlike proteins, RNA molecules exist as dynamic conformational ensembles. Thus, committing to a single predicted structure discards information relevant to binding. Here, we show that this obstacle can be addressed by extracting pre-structural embeddings, which are intermediate representations from a biomolecular foundation model captured before the structure decoding step. Pre-structural embeddings implicitly encode conformational ensemble information without requiring predicted structures. We build ZeroFold, a transformer-based model that combines pre-structural embeddings from Boltz-2 for both protein and RNA molecules through a cross-modal attention mechanism to predict binding affinity directly from sequence. To support training and evaluation, we construct PRADB, a curated dataset of 2,621 unique protein-RNA pairs with experimentally measured affinities drawn from four complementary databases. On a held-out test set constructed with 40% sequence identity thresholds, ZeroFold achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.65, a value approaching the ceiling imposed by experimental measurement noise. Under progressively fairer evaluation conditions that control for training-set overlap, ZeroFold compares favourably with respect to leading structure-based and leading sequence-based predictors, with the performance gap widening as sequence similarity to competitor training data is reduced. These results illustrate how pre-structural embeddings offer a representation strategy for flexible biomolecules, opening a route to affinity prediction for protein-RNA pairs for which no structural data exist.
Wi-Fi sensing has emerged as a promising technique for gesture recognition, yet its practical deployment is hindered by environmental sensitivity and device placement challenges. To overcome these limitations we propose Wi-Fi Range and Doppler (WiRD)-Gest, a novel system that performs gesture recognition using a single, unmodified Wi-Fi transceiver on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) laptop. The system leverages an monostatic full duplex sensing pipeline capable of extracting Range-Doppler (RD) information. Utilizing this, we present the first benchmark of deep learning models for gesture recognition based on monostatic sensing. The key innovation lies in how monostatic sensing and spatial (range) information fundamentally transforms accuracy, robustness and generalization compared to prior approaches. We demonstrate excellent performance in crowded, unseen public spaces with dynamic interference and additional moving targets even when trained on data from controlled environments only. These are scenarios where prior Wi-Fi sensing approaches often fail, however, our system suffers minor degradation. The WiRD-Gest benchmark and dataset will also be released as open source.
Many recent long-context and agentic systems address context-length limitations by adding hierarchical memory: they extract atomic units from raw data, build multi-level representatives by grouping and compression, and traverse this structure to retrieve content under a token budget. Despite recurring implementations, there is no shared formalism for comparing design choices. We propose a unifying theory in terms of three operators. Extraction ($α$) maps raw data to atomic information units; coarsening ($C = (π, ρ)$) partitions units and assigns a representative to each group; and traversal ($τ$) selects which units to include in context given a query and budget. We identify a self-sufficiency spectrum for the representative function $ρ$ and show how it constrains viable retrieval strategies (a coarsening-traversal coupling). Finally, we instantiate the decomposition on eleven existing systems spanning document hierarchies, conversational memory, and agent execution traces, showcasing its generality.