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.
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
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.
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.
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).