business intelligence analysts

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets a large language model (LLM) answer questions by retrieving relevant passages from a large corpus. However, RAG struggles with multi-hop questions, which require chaining facts spread across several documents through intermediate entities that the question never mentions. Graph-based RAG methods retrieve once from the entities a question names and so rarely recover the full evidence chain. Iterative RAG methods recover it step by step, but their accuracy is limited by the many tasks they ask the LLM to perform, such as planning the sub-questions, deciding their dependencies, rewriting them as answers arrive, and keeping track of what is known. We propose DeFT-RAG, a RAG framework built on three components. First, DeFT-RAG generates one self-contained sub-question at a time from the original question and the sub-questions answered so far with their answers (QA pairs). Each sub-question names every entity it asks about, which removes the need to plan, track dependencies or rewrite, and lets the LLM focus on a single fine-grained task at a time. Second, DeFT-RAG moves the remaining LLM work outside the LLM: rule-based updates to a QA table that keeps track of what is known, and yes/no decisions made by a fine-tuned lightweight decision model. Third, DeFT-RAG caches the QA pairs and reuses an answer when a later question asks a sub-question with the same meaning. On MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA and HotpotQA, DeFT-RAG achieves the best accuracy among thirteen baselines with both gpt-4o-mini and Qwen3.6 as the backbone, while giving the LLM fewer input tokens than any other iterative method. With a QA cache shared across 1,000 MuSiQue questions, 23.1% of sub-questions are answered from the cache, which reduces LLM calls by 12.9% without lowering accuracy.

Abstract: Weighted rectangular matrices record relations between two types of objects, such as occupations and industries, documents and terms, origins and destinations, or annotated classes and computed clusters. Their heatmaps become difficult to read when arbitrary row and column orders scatter related objects, while equal size cells hide large differences in row and column totals. We present MHeatmap (Mosaic Heatmap), which addresses these problems in two stages. Two-Walk spectral seriation first represents the matrix as a weighted bipartite graph. Ordinary bipartite ordering uses only observed row to column links. Two-Walk also uses length-two walks, so rows that share columns and columns that share rows receive explicit similarity links. Sorting a Fiedler vector of the resulting graph Laplacian gives coordinated row and column orders. The Mosaic layout then partitions a unit square so that row height is proportional to the row total and column width is proportional to the column total, while color represents the observed entry. We prove how the Two-Walk energy combines direct alignment with shared-neighbor smoothness, derive an exact matrix vector product that permits sparse computation, and formalize the tiling and area semantics of Mosaic. Across 300 synthetic matrices and seven real data sets, Two-Walk obtains the lowest normalized 2-SUM in all 15 synthetic regimes and the highest Band@10% in 14. The largest gains occur when shared neighborhoods express the latent relational structure.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can perform diverse data tasks when given a small set of relevant tables. However, for complex tasks requiring multiple tables over large data lakes, identifying relevant tables for the task becomes a prerequisite, but remains challenging. This is because there are often many tables in a data lake with similar table and schema names, and limited additional semantic context, thereby forcing agents to spend substantial time exploring tables at online query time, greatly affecting models' ability to perform tasks accurately, while increasing cost/latency substantially. We present Data.Readme, a novel table documentation approach that uses lightweight offline processing to infer and index rich \emph{table-to-table relationships}, including confusable, joinable, and union-able tables. We further develop a suite of agentic tools for LLMs to work with the index, to help agents retrieve relevant tables and perform tasks much more efficiently and effectively. Finally, we study how to optimize our index construction with a budget constraint. On data lakes containing up to 12K tables, Data.Readme improves task accuracy by as much as 40 percentage points across a range of data discovery, data analysis, and data science tasks, outperforming diverse baselines, including powerful coding agents with unlimited time and monetary budgets. We also show that equipping existing methods (such as coding agents) with Data.Readme can not only lead to consistent quality gains, but also significantly reduce their latency by up to 6x, demonstrating the potential of Data.Readme.

Abstract: Discovering what drives an outcome from data is central to science and often requires deciding what is worth investigating before a specific hypothesis is known. Yet most existing hypothesis generation settings substantially narrow this search by providing a research question, target relationship, or curated context. We introduce open-ended multiple hypothesis discovery, where a system receives only a large tabular dataset and an outcome and must discover multiple data-supported hypotheses without knowing in advance the relevant variables, functional forms, conditions, or number of underlying mechanisms. To study this problem, we introduce a benchmark built from structural causal models grounded in real-world data schemas, containing 351 planted hypotheses across 15 tasks and five domains, with 53--65 variables and 1M--10M rows per task. The causal model is hidden from the discovery method and retained only by the evaluator, allowing proposed hypotheses to be tested through interventions and separating observational discovery from causal validation. We further propose HypAgent, which treats the dataset as an interactive environment and performs iterative search by proposing candidate directions, triaging and refining promising hypotheses, and removing explained signal so that each accepted discovery redirects subsequent search. HypAgent achieves 0.47 precision, 0.51 recall, and 0.49 F1, compared with 0.35 F1 for the strongest baseline. Our analysis shows that many failures occur after a relevant variable has already been surfaced, suggesting that correctly characterizing a mechanism's functional form and conditions, rather than merely identifying relevant variables, remains a key challenge in open-ended discovery.

Abstract: Learning a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data is a challenging combinatorial problem due to the exponential growth in the number of candidate parent-set configurations. Existing exact score-based methods often require computationally intensive combinatorial search, whereas constraint-based methods can become unreliable or computationally demanding as graph size and conditioning-set complexity increase. We develop a non-parametric hybrid framework, referred to as DECO (Directional Evidence-guided Configuration Optimization), that extracts dependency and directional evidence from observation data to construct admissible parent sets prior to exact optimization. It reduces the optimization search space by eliminating empirically unsupported parent configurations while preserving flexibility for all plausible edge orientations. Theoretical analysis establishes an exponential reduction in the admissible parent-set configuration space and quantifies how bounded edge-level omission affects the probability of retaining the true parent structure. Experiments on benchmark Bayesian networks and synthetic discrete and continuous DAGs demonstrate substantial search-space reduction while achieving competitive structure-recovery performance, with favorable structural Hamming distance across many evaluated settings. These results show that directional evidence can provide an effective preprocessing mechanism for reducing the computational burden of exact DAG learning without requiring a fixed parametric structural~model.

Abstract: While established literature underscores the pivotal role of preprocessing in forecasting accuracy, this stage remains largely overlooked in current research. Modern benchmarks typically resort to simple scaling, failing to account for critical transformations required to address nonstationarity, such as differencing. This omission creates a significant structural preprocessing bias that favors models with built-in data treatments while obscuring the true potential of simpler architectures. We study this effect through a preprocessing-aware benchmark that evaluates 11 forecasting models across 16 reversible preprocessing pipelines on 29,000 M4 time series. Our results identify preprocessing as a key driver of forecasting performance. Optimizing preprocessing per series yields gains of approximately 27\% to 87\% across all evaluated models, with architectures lacking internalized preprocessing experiencing the most substantial improvements. This allows simpler architectures to become highly competitive with complex, state-of-the-art models in modern forecasting benchmarks. All resources and experimental results from this benchmark are stored in a comprehensive metadataset to support future metalearning tasks.

Abstract: Large language models can extract useful signals from heterogeneous enterprise data, but high-recall extraction often produces outputs that are duplicated, uneven in granularity, semantically overlapping, or too numerous for downstream systems and human reviewers to use effectively. We present a dataset-adaptive post-processing architecture developed for Customer Intent Extraction (CIE), where unstructured customer language is transformed into stable, traceable intent units. The approach separates recall-oriented extraction from utility-oriented reduction. Source-specific preprocessing first isolates evidence from multimodal plans, sparse operational records, and structured opportunity data. Candidate intents are then standardized and deduplicated, optionally enriched with metadata for embedding computation, represented in a shared semantic vector space, and grouped using a clustering strategy selected according to the candidate set's characteristics. Cluster-level keywords provide an explainability layer, while singleton reassignment requires agreement between embedding and keyword similarity. Finally, constrained language-model aggregation produces one concise intent per cluster without introducing unsupported concepts, and the resulting unit retains provenance, clustering, embedding, and generation metadata. This treats post-processing not as cosmetic cleanup, but as a semantic reduction layer converting high-recall LLM outputs into reusable enterprise intelligence. We also describe two downstream applications: Machine-Generated Intents, which infer likely objectives for customers lacking direct evidence from peer customers with similar profiles, and intent-guided semantic retrieval and mapping, which uses the stable intent as a query against a downstream decision space, illustrated here by mapping customer intents to business outcomes.

Abstract: Finding a relevant paper is not the same as producing a verifiable answer from it. LitTraceQA requires canonical paper identifiers, exact evidence at the page or object level, and typed answers that match the evaluator. We call the separation between source access and scorer-visible correctness the grounding contract gap. TRACE - Target-Aware Retrieval, Attributed Evidence, and Contract-Constrained Extraction - addresses this gap with target-grouped retrieval, independent typed evidence localization, multimodal table extraction, schema-driven table construction, and fail-closed validation. It indexes 27,487 papers through passage, object, alias, citation, and dense representations while retaining the question target behind each signal. For tables, TRACE predicts the observation unit before extracting values and assembles rows with evaluator-compatible key normalization. Our audited selected clean-track artifact scores 0.760613 on the official 71-question test set, including 0.9728 paper F1, 0.6847 evidence F1, 0.9800 multiple-choice accuracy, 0.5423 table-row F1, and 0.3508 macro cell accuracy. On 11 public-development table records, a clean baseline and coordinate-aware visual fill obtain row F1 of 0.291 and 0.411, respectively; this diagnostic comparison includes fallback outputs and is not an official-test claim. Remaining errors chiefly concern locator, observation-unit, row-key, and source-value identity.

Abstract: Tabular foundation models achieve strong zero-shot accuracy on structured data by pretraining on synthetic tables, but they ignore the column names, task descriptions, and auxiliary files that carry dataset semantics. Meanwhile, self-evolving machine learning engineering (MLE) agents train models from scratch on each dataset, yet jointly searching over features, architectures, and hyperparameters is noisy and prone to overfitting. We introduce TabFM-Auto, which pairs a tabular foundation model, TabFM, with a language model agent that evolves the data pipeline around it. Guided by dataset metadata and validation feedback, TabFM-Auto iteratively refines data cleaning, feature engineering, context selection, and post-processing to reduce TabFM's error. Across all 51 datasets of the TabArena benchmark, five TabFM-Auto configurations with different agents and language models take the top five overall positions, and the best raises TabFM from 1785 to 2013 Elo. The discovered pipelines also transfer to other frozen tabular foundation models (+69 to +143 Elo) with no further search. On the 8 tabular competitions of MLE-Bench, TabFM-Auto ranks first overall among MLE agents.

Abstract: For decades, statistical inference has largely been developed one problem at a time. Given a scientific target, such as a treatment effect or a regression function, statisticians design a problem-specific estimator together with a procedure for quantifying its uncertainty. This paper proposes a different paradigm. We focus on a classical problem in statistical inference, confidence interval construction, and develop TabCon, an amortized inference system built on a tabular foundation model that produces confidence intervals for new datasets through a simple forward pass. The key methodological ingredients of TabCon are a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture and reinforcement-learning-based post-training that calibrate the resulting confidence intervals to a desired coverage level. Across a wide range of benchmark datasets, TabCon attains near-nominal coverage while producing short confidence intervals. At inference time, it also offers considerably greater computational efficiency, running 50 times faster than the classical bootstrap procedure, even when the latter uses only 50 bootstrap samples.

Abstract: Answer grounding in document visual question answering remains an open challenge: most benchmarks lack grounding annotations or provide limited-quality labels, while constructing grounded datasets still requires costly manual effort. We introduce DocAttriBench (DAB), a large-scale benchmark for fine-grained, element-level source attribution in Document VQA, grounding answers to specific layout elements such as text blocks, tables, and images. To build DAB, we propose a Mask-based Perplexity-Derived Attribution method (MAPPET) that combines document layout and language modeling to identify the most informative element for each answer. MAPPET measures the increase in perplexity after masking candidate elements and attributes the answer to the element contributing most to model confidence. Applying MAPPET to multiple existing Document VQA datasets yields DAB, with 237k documents and 296k question-answer pairs with element-level grounding. We benchmark grounding-capable multimodal LLMs on DAB, evaluating answer accuracy, attribution accuracy, and overall answer quality. Results show that while larger models generally achieve higher answer accuracy, even the strongest models often fail to localize the supporting elements. DAB provides a scalable benchmark for developing grounded, verifiable, and trustworthy Document VQA models. Dataset and code are available at https://aimagelab.github.io/DocAttriBench/.