Papers for

business analytics teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

RouteDRAG improves multimodal document question answering accuracy

RouteDRAG: Learning to Route and Control Agentic Execution for Multimodal Document RAG

Abstract: Web-based applications increasingly rely on understanding long multimodal documents, where answering questions often requires combining information across pages, tables, and figures. Agentic retrieval-augmented generation addresses these tasks through iterative retrieval and reasoning. However, Agentic execution is not always necessary, introducing additional computation and potentially incorrect answers. Our empirical analysis reveals that Agentic execution provides query-dependent benefits, while additional operations may improve, preserve, or degrade answer accuracy. These findings motivate controlling both Agent invocation and subsequent execution. To address these challenges, we propose RouteDRAG, a learning-based framework comprising four components. Unified Document Index organizes multimodal content into a graph-backed index and derives query representations from initial retrieval. Adaptive Path Routing preserves exact answering and predicts the relative benefit of Agent over shorter execution paths. Dynamic Agent Execution maintains an evolving workspace and refines Planner proposals to control tool use and termination. Sequential Policy Learning first trains operation control from observed outcomes and then trains path routing using the resulting Agent's performance. Across two benchmarks, RouteDRAG achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.47 percentage points over shorter-path-only execution while assigning only 79.3% of queries to Agent. Notably, it also surpasses uniform Agent execution on both benchmarks while requiring fewer answering calls. Our code is now available at https://github.com/Ereshkigal1/RouteDRAG.

Tue 27 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Answering questions from long documents with text, tables, and images can be tricky because it requires combining lots of information. The authors found that sometimes a step-by-step agent approach helps, but not always, and using it too much can slow things down or cause errors. They created RouteDRAG, a method that decides when and how to use this agent approach efficiently. This improves accuracy while cutting down unnecessary extra work in answering questions.
Open → 2610.36444v1

Machine learning models tested under shifts in input data source

Counterfactual Model Testing Under Distribution Shift

Abstract: Deployed machine learning (ML) models can degrade as the distribution of their input data shifts. Such shifts can result from changes in the population or from data integrity issues in the pipeline that materializes model features, two sources that operate through different mechanisms. Because labels are often absent or delayed, it is common practice to track shifts in the data instead, but a detected shift does not indicate how it affects the model. We formulate this problem as online model testing under distribution shift. Testing requires reproducing the shift on a controlled baseline with known labels. Since the same shift can come from either source, doing so requires knowing which mechanism changed. We propose a methodology that reproduces observed changes in both mechanisms to estimate current performance and the potential gain from repairing observed data integrity issues. Experiments on real-world datasets with simulated faults show that separating the two sources generally improves both estimates, supporting this formulation. A churn prediction case illustrates how these tests can support monitoring and repair prioritization

Sat 24 OctArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Machine learning models often perform worse when the data they see changes over time. These changes can come from either actual shifts in the population or problems with how data is collected. The authors propose a way to test models by recreating these changes separately to understand how each affects model performance. This helps estimate current accuracy and decide if fixing data problems can improve results. They show with experiments that treating these sources differently leads to better testing and repair decisions.
Open → 2610.33594v1

ORSMT improves checking and fixing math models in AI optimization tools

ORSMT: Unleashing the Potential of Satisfiability Modulo Theories for Semantic Verification and Repair in LLM-Based Optimization

Abstract: Large language models increasingly automate optimization modeling from natural language problems, producing written mathematics, solver code and a returned report. Verifying one optimization problem across these artifacts requires semantic comparison: unequal models can attain the same objective, equivalent models can use different auxiliary variables, and mutually consistent artifacts can omit the same source requirement. ORSMT provides a typed semantic interface and exact SMT relation queries. It aligns observable decisions, projects auxiliary variables, proves or refutes feasible region and objective relations, localizes refutations to implicated rows or domains and links source texts when available. It then reconstructs one artifact from another, and each adopted candidate passes the required relation checks. Across 3,034 problems and six generator sizes, ORSMT improves the model-code match rate in all 72 benchmark and generator combinations before selection. Protected selection raises the aggregate rate from 43.2% to 88.2% and the share that are both correct and matched from 25.2% to 40.2%. On the 1,905 refuted outputs, certified voting under the shared fallback makes 50.9% of outputs correct and matched, compared with 44.8% for ReLoop and 49.4% for Opt-Verifier. A separate one-round source revision followed by exact reconstruction restores a model-code match for 84.4% of the refuted pairs.

Wed 21 OctArtificial IntelligenceSoftware Engineering
The gist
Optimization problems often come with several different versions, like written math, computer code, and reports. These versions can look different but still mean the same thing, or sometimes they might miss or mix up parts. The authors created ORSMT, a tool that carefully compares these versions to check if they really match in meaning. ORSMT can find where differences come from and even fix mismatches, making the AI-generated optimization results more reliable. Testing on thousands of problems showed ORSMT boosts agreement between model descriptions and code, and it can fix nearly all errors it finds.
Open → 2610.29145v1

Benchmark for question answering over databases covering reasoning and prediction

RDL-Bench: A Benchmark for Task-Aware Question Answering over Relational Databases

Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) remain the primary infrastructure for storing and managing structured data across enterprise and scientific domains. Natural-language (NL) interfaces to RDBs aim to let users ask questions without writing SQL, but real user needs go beyond SQL-style lookup: some questions require reasoning over the observable database state, while others require predictive inference from historical relational records under temporal constraints. Existing benchmarks address these goals in isolation. To address this gap, we introduce RDL-Bench, a benchmark for task-aware question answering (QA) over real RDBs. RDL-Bench organizes diverse user questions into reasoning-oriented questions, whose answers are determined by the current database state, and prediction-oriented questions, whose answers depend on future outcomes under temporal constraints. Each instance contains an NL question, task metadata, schema information, temporal context, either executable evidence or target-construction logic, and denotation-level ground truth. RDL-Bench supports two evaluation settings: native solvers under their intended capabilities, and task-aware modular systems where a router dispatches each question to an appropriate execution module.

Thu 15 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Relational databases store organized information used in many areas, but asking them questions naturally in plain language is hard. Existing tools either handle simple lookups or specific reasoning tasks but don't combine both. The authors created RDL-Bench, a new test set where questions need either reasoning about the current data or predictions about future events. This helps evaluate systems that answer questions from databases in more realistic and varied ways.
Open → 2610.21382v1

Tabfm enables zero-shot predictions for tabular data without tuning

TabFM: A Zero-Shot Foundation Model for Tabular Data

Abstract: Tabular machine learning typically relies on per-dataset workflows, fitting tree ensembles or running AutoML searches from scratch for every task. We present TabFM, a 400M-parameter tabular foundation model that formulates supervised tabular prediction as in-context learning. TabFM produces calibrated zero-shot predictions in a single forward pass without task-specific tuning. Trained entirely on synthetic tables generated from structural causal models, TabFM learns general tabular representations that transfer zero-shot to real-world tasks. Across all 51 benchmark datasets in TabArena (38 classification and 13 regression), zero-shot TabFM ranks first among default tabular foundation models and outperforms tuned AutoML pipelines. Two extensions over the same frozen weights improve performance further on both tracks: multi-view feature expansion with ensembling and post-hoc calibration (TabFM+), and LLM-guided, dataset-specific data processing and feature engineering (TabFM-Auto).

Tue 29 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Making predictions from tables of data usually requires building a model from scratch for each new task, which can take time and effort. The authors show a large model called TabFM that can predict outcomes for new tables without any extra training by learning from many simulated tables. This means it can quickly give good predictions on many different datasets without tuning. Extensions of TabFM improve its accuracy further using feature expansions and guidance from large language models. Across many tests, TabFM even beats standard automated methods that are tuned for each dataset.
Open → 2609.37959v1