Insights
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11 papers in the last four weeks, up 120% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
Latest papers 86
The integration of machine learning (ML) into complex software systems has increased challenges in collaboration and communication (CoCo) of the teams building these systems. ML engineering (MLE) teams often involve diverse roles, ML engineers, data scientists, software engineers, and domain experts, each bringing unique goals, experiences, and jargon. These interdisciplinary dynamics can make it challenging to deploy, reproduce, and maintain ML-enabled systems over the long term. Previous studies have uncovered several CoCo challenges and practices, but most have focused on software-centric companies, leaving limited empirical understanding of how these dynamics unfold in hardware-centric contexts. In hardware-centric environments, CoCo challenges are shaped by additional constraints such as strict data governance, long development cycles, and tight coupling with physical processes, which amplify coordination complexity and reduce flexibility. To strengthen empirical understanding in such settings, we present a qualitative investigation of MLE teams within a global semiconductor company, where ML-enabled systems and manufacturing processes introduce additional complexity. We interviewed 12 practitioners regarding CoCo practices, tools, challenges, and approaches. Through analysis, we identified 16 recurring challenges, with unclear roles and responsibilities emerging as the most critical, and common practices and recommendations practitioners considered effective in mitigating CoCo problems. While grounded in a single organizational context, our findings align with known issues in interdisciplinary ML-enabled systems development, but also demonstrate how these challenges manifest differently under hardware-driven constraints. Our results highlight directions for future research and tool support to strengthen CoCo in MLE projects and ensure the success of ML-enabled systems.
Towards Autonomous Business Intelligence via Data-to-Insight Discovery Agent
Transforming fragmented enterprise data into actionable insights remains a significant challenge for LLMs, constrained by complex database schemas, limitations in dynamic SQL generation, and the need for deep multi-dimensional analysis.In this paper, we propose AIDA(Autonomous Insight Discovery Agent), the first end-to-end framework designed for autonomous exploration in complex business environments. We establish a highly flexible instant retail environment encompassing 200+ metrics and 100+ dimensions, and integrates a proprietary Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that bridges semantic reasoning with precise SQL execution. Our reinforcement learning system subsequently formulates business analysis as a Pareto Principle-guided cumulative reasoning process. Experimental results demonstrate that AIDA significantly outperforms workflow-based agents, and extensive evaluations further reveal that AIDA achieves superior environmental perception and more in-depth analysis from diverse perspectives. Our work ultimately establishes the transformative potential of autonomous intelligence for industrial-scale business intelligence systems.
Advancing Reliable Synthetic Video Detection: Insights from the SAFE Challenge
The proliferation of generative video technologies has intensified the need for reliable methods to detect and characterize synthetic media. To address this challenge, we organized the \href{https://safe-video-2025.dsri.org}{SAFE: Synthetic Video Detection Challenge}, co-located with the \textit{Authenticity and Provenance in the Age of Generative AI (APAI) Workshop }at ICCV 2025. The competition invited participants to develop and evaluate algorithms capable of distinguishing real from synthetic videos under fully blind evaluation conditions with over 600 submissions from 12 teams over a 90 day span. Hosted on the Hugging Face platform, the challenge comprised two primary tasks: (1) detection of synthetic video content generated by diverse state-of-the-art models, and (2) detection of synthetic content following common post-processing operations such as resizing, re-compression, motion blur and others. The challenge data consisted of 13 modern high quality synthetic video models with generated content matched to real videos from 21 diverse and challenge sources, all adding up to 20 hours of 6,000 video samples. This paper describes the challenge design, dataset construction, evaluation methodology, and outcomes, offering insights into the generalization and robustness of contemporary synthetic video detection methods. Our findings highlight measurable progress in cross-generator generalization but also persistent vulnerabilities to post-processing artifacts. https://safe-video-2025.dsri.org
Agentic Coding Needs Proactivity, Not Just Autonomy
Coding agents are rapidly changing the landscape of software development, moving from inline completion to autonomous systems that edit repositories, open pull requests, respond to issues, and run scheduled or webhook triggered routines across the development life cycle. The next generation is increasingly described as proactive and long-horizon: agents should notice relevant changes before the developer asks, connect signals across tools, decide when to interrupt, and carry preferences across sessions. Yet the field still lacks a clear account of what proactivity means for software development, how it differs from autonomy, what acceptance criteria proactive long-horizon tasks should satisfy, and which metrics determine whether unsolicited agent behavior is useful rather than merely active. Proactive coding agents should be evaluated by the quality and improvement of their insight policy: the policy that decides what matters next, what evidence supports it, whether to show it, and how to adapt after feedback. This view is grounded in the principles of mixed initiative interaction. We propose a three level taxonomy of proactivity (Reactive, Scheduled, and Situation Aware), compare contemporary coding agents against five practical criteria, and sketch an active user simulation protocol with three evaluation targets: Insight Decision Quality (IDQ), Context Grounding Score (CGS), and Learning Lift
From Sensors to Insight: Rapid, Edge-to-Core Application Development for Sensor-Driven Applications
Scientists increasingly rely on sensor-based data, yet transforming raw streams into insights across the edge-to-cloud continuum remains difficult. Provisioning heterogeneous infrastructure and managing execution on emerging platforms like Data Processing Units typically requires cross-domain expertise, creating significant barriers to rapid prototyping. This paper introduces an experience-driven methodology for the rapid development of sensor-driven applications. By combining pattern-based workflow engineering with AI-assisted development-implemented via Pegasus on the FABRIC testbed - we utilize an existing Orcasound hydrophone workflow as a reusable template. We introduce a pattern-based engineering methodology to generate and refine workflows for air quality, earthquake, and soil moisture monitoring. Furthermore, we show how these abstract structures are extended to edge resources through modular configuration and placement. Our evaluation focuses on user productivity and practical lessons rather than peak performance. Through these case studies, we illustrate how AI-assisted, pattern-based development lowers the entry barrier for non-experts and enables iterative exploration of sensor-driven applications across distributed infrastructures.
(POSTER) From Sensors to Insight: Rapid, Edge-to-Core Application Development for Sensor-Driven Applications
Scientists increasingly rely on sensor-based data; however transforming raw streams into insights across the edge-to-cloud continuum remains difficult due to the breadth of expertise required to coordinate the necessary data and computation flow. This paper introduces a pattern-based, AI-assisted methodology for rapid development of sensor-driven applications. Using Pegasus workflows executing on the FABRIC testbed, we demonstrate a 5-step development loop that shifts workflow construction and deployment from code-first to intent-first design. Starting from an existing Orcasound hydrophone workflow as a reusable template, we generate and refine workflows for air quality, earthquake, and soil moisture monitoring applications. We further show how these workflows extend to edge resources-including BlueField-3 DPUs and Raspberry Pis-through configuration and placement rather than workflow redesign. Our evaluation, from the perspective of a novice Pegasus user, shows that AI-assisted pattern reuse compresses multi-stage workflow development to 1-1.5 days per workflow while preserving the rigor and portability of workflow-based execution.
AI Adoption Among Teachers: Insights on Concerns, Support, Confidence, and Attitudes
The study examines the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in education by analyzing the roles of institutional support, teacher confidence, and teacher concerns. It aims to determine whether teacher concerns moderate the relationship between institutional support and two outcomes: teacher confidence and attitudes toward AI adoption. The sample included 260 teachers from the Philippines. Composite scores were calculated for institutional support, confidence, concerns, and attitudes. Moderated multiple regression analysis showed that institutional support significantly predicted both teacher confidence and attitudes toward AI. However, teacher concerns did not significantly moderate these relationships. A follow-up mediation analysis tested whether confidence explains the effect of institutional support on attitudes. Results showed full mediation. The indirect effect was significant based on the Sobel test, and the direct effect became non-significant when confidence was included in the model. This shows that institutional support improves teacher attitudes by increasing their confidence. The study recommends that institutions provide structured and ongoing support to strengthen teacher confidence. Professional development, mentoring, and AI integration in teacher education programs can increase readiness and support effective AI adoption.
Assessing the Role of Intersection Proximity in Pedestrian Crashes: Insights from Data Mining Approach
Although intersections are the most complex parts of the roadway network, pedestrian crashes at non-intersection locations are disproportionately frequent, highlighting a serious traffic safety concern. This study investigates non-intersection crashes involving pedestrians using a crash database (2017-2021) collected from Louisiana State. As the risk of pedestrian crashes tends to vary with distance from the intersection, the research team utilized a unique framework "distance to intersection" to capture the differences in crash patterns at non-intersection locations. The study identified that around 50% of non-intersection pedestrian crashes occurred within 198 ft. of the intersection. In the next step, the collected 3,135 pedestrian crashes at non-intersection locations during the study period were subdivided into three zones: D1 zone designates crashes occurring within 150 ft. of an intersection (1,277 crashes), D2 zone designates crashes occurring within 151 ft. to 435 ft. of an intersection (1,060 crashes) and D3 zone designates crashes occurring at 435 ft. or higher from an intersection (798 crashes). To explore the complex interaction of multiple factors, an intuitive data mining technique, Association Rules Mining was used. A total of the top 60 interesting association rules (20 for each zone) were identified by the algorithm (based on lift and support measures). In addition, a total of 124 rules were explored based on Lift Increase Criterion (LIC) measure. The findings of this research provide critical insights into pedestrian crash involvement at non-intersection locations and the variation in crash patterns according to the "distance to intersection". Based on the findings, some of the targeted problem-specific countermeasures are also recommended to address the crash patterns at non-intersection locations.
Are Data Augmentation and Segmentation Always Necessary? Insights from COVID-19 X-Rays and a Methodology Thereof
Purpose: Rapid and reliable diagnostic tools are crucial for managing respiratory diseases like COVID-19, where chest X-ray analysis coupled with artificial intelligence techniques has proven invaluable. However, most existing works on X-ray images have not considered lung segmentation, raising concerns about their reliability. Additionally, some have employed disproportionate and impractical augmentation techniques, making models less generalized and prone to overfitting. This study presents a critical analysis of both issues and proposes a methodology (SDL-COVID) for more reliable classification of chest X-rays for COVID-19 detection. Methods: We use class activation mapping to obtain a visual understanding of the predictions made by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), validating the necessity of lung segmentation. To analyze the effect of data augmentation, deep learning models are implemented on two levels: one for an augmented dataset and another for a non-augmented dataset. Results: Careful analysis of X-ray images and their corresponding heat maps under expert medical supervision reveals that lung segmentation is necessary for accurate COVID-19 prediction. Regarding data augmentation, test accuracy significantly drops beyond a certain threshold with additional augmented images, indicating model overfitting. Conclusion: Our proposed methodology, SDL-COVID, achieves a precision of 95.21% and a lower false negative rate, ensuring its reliability for COVID-19 detection using chest X-rays.
From Insight to Action: A Novel Framework for Interpretability-Guided Data Selection in Large Language Models
While mechanistic interpretability tools like Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can uncover meaningful features within Large Language Models (LLMs), a critical gap remains in transforming these insights into practical actions for model optimization. We bridge this gap with the hypothesis that data selection guided by a model's internal task features is a effective training strategy. Inspired by this, we propose Interpretability-Guided Data Selection (IGDS), a framework that first identifies these causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering, then selects ``Feature-Resonant Data'' that maximally activates task features for fine-tuning. We validate IGDS on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks within Gemma-2, LLaMA-3.1, and Qwen3 models. Our experiments demonstrate exceptional data efficiency: on the Math task, IGDS surpasses full-dataset fine-tuning by a remarkable 17.4% on Gemma-2-2B while using only 50% of the data, and outperforms established baselines focused on data quality and diversity. Analysis confirms a strong positive correlation between feature amplification and task performance improvement. IGDS thus provides a direct and effective framework to enhance LLMs by leveraging their internal mechanisms, validating our core hypothesis.
INSIGHT: Indoor Scene Intelligence from Geometric-Semantic Hierarchy Transfer for Public~Safety
Indoor environments lack the spatial intelligence infrastructure that GPS provides outdoors; first responders arriving at unfamiliar buildings typically have no machine-readable map of safety equipment. Prior work on 3D semantic segmentation for public safety identified two barriers: scarcity of labeled indoor training data and poor recognition of small safety-critical features by native point-cloud methods. This paper presents INSIGHT, a zero-target-domain-annotation pipeline that projects 2D image understanding into 3D metric space via registered RGB-D data. Two interchangeable vision stacks share a common 3D back end: a SAM3 foundation-model stack for text-prompted segmentation, and a traditional CV stack (open-set detection, VQA, OCR) whose intermediate outputs are independently inspectable. Evaluated on all seven subareas of Stanford 2D-3D-S (70{,}496 images), the pipeline produces Pointcept-schema-compatible labeled point clouds and ISO19164-compliant scene graphs with compression; role-filtered payloads transmit in ,s at 1,Mbps over FirstNet Band14. We report per-point labeling accuracy on 7 shared classes, detection sensitivity for 15 safety-critical classes absent from public 3D benchmarks alongside code-capped deployable estimates, and inter-pipeline complementarity, demonstrating that 2D-to-3D semantic transfer addresses the labeled-data bottleneck while scene graphs provide building intelligence compact enough for field deployment.
On Benchmark Hacking in ML Contests: Modeling, Insights and Design
Benchmark hacking refers to tuning a machine learning model to score highly on certain evaluation criteria without improving true generalization or faithfully solving the intended problem. We study this phenomenon in a generic machine learning contest, where each contestant chooses two types of effort: creative effort that improves model capability as desired by the contest host, and mechanistic effort that only improves the model's fitness to the particular task in contest without contributing to true generalization. We establish the existence of a symmetric monotone pure strategy equilibrium in this competition game. It also provides a natural definition of benchmark hacking in this strategic context by comparing a player's equilibrium effort allocation to that of a single-agent baseline scenario. Under our definition, contestants with types below certain threshold (low types) always engage in benchmark hacking, whereas those above the threshold do not. Furthermore, we show that more skewed reward structures (favoring top-ranked contestants) can elicit more desirable contest outcomes. We also provide empirical evidence to support our theoretical predictions.
Towards Event-Aware Forecasting in DeFi: Insights from On-chain Automated Market Maker Protocols
Automated Market Makers (AMMs), as a core infrastructure of decentralized finance (DeFi), uniquely drive on-chain asset pricing through a deterministic reserve ratio mechanism. Unlike traditional markets, AMM price dynamics is triggered largely by on-chain events (e.g., swap) that change the reserve ratio, rather than by continuous responses to off-chain information. This makes event-level analysis crucial for understanding price formation mechanisms in AMMs. However, existing research generally neglects the micro-structural dynamics at the AMMs level, lacking both a comprehensive dataset covering multiple protocols with fine-grained event classification and an effective framework for event-aware modeling. To fill this gap, we construct a dataset containing 8.9 million on-chain event records from four representative AMMs protocols: Pendle, Uniswap v3, Aave and Morpho, with precise annotations of transaction type and block height timestamps. Furthermore, we propose an Uncertainty Weighted Mean Squared Error (UWM) loss function, which incorporates the block interval regression term into the traditional Time-Point Process (TPP) objective function by weighting the uncertainty with homoscedasticity. Extensive experiments on eight advanced TPP architectures demonstrate that this loss function reduces the time prediction error by an average of 56.41% while maintaining the accuracy of event type prediction, establishing a robust benchmark for event-aware prediction in the AMMs ecosystem. This work provides the necessary data foundation and methodological framework for modeling the discreteness and event-driven characteristics of on-chain price discovery. All datasets and source code are publicly available. https://github.com/yosen-king/Deep-AMM-Events
Rethinking Intrinsic Dimension Estimation in Neural Representations
The analysis of neural representation has become an integral part of research aiming to better understand the inner workings of neural networks. While there are many different approaches to investigate neural representations, an important line of research has focused on doing so through the lens of intrinsic dimensions (IDs). Although this perspective has provided valuable insights and stimulated substantial follow-up research, important limitations of this approach have remained largely unaddressed. In this paper, we highlight a crucial discrepancy between theory and practice of IDs in neural representations, theoretically and empirically showing that common ID estimators are, in fact, not tracking the true underlying ID of the representation. We contrast this negative result with an investigation of the underlying factors that may drive commonly reported ID-related results on neural representation in the literature. Building on these insights, we offer a new perspective on ID estimation in neural representations.
An Answer is just the Start: Related Insight Generation for Open-Ended Document-Grounded QA
Answering open-ended questions remains challenging for AI systems because it requires synthesis, judgment, and exploration beyond factual retrieval, and users often refine answers through multiple iterations rather than accepting a single response. Existing QA benchmarks do not explicitly support this refinement process. To address this gap, we introduce a new task, document-grounded related insight generation, where the goal is to generate additional insights from a document collection that help improve, extend, or rethink an initial answer to an open-ended question, ultimately supporting richer user interaction and a better overall question answering experience. We curate and release SCOpE-QA (Scientific Collections for Open-Ended QA), a dataset of 3,000 open-ended questions across 20 research collections. We present InsightGen, a two-stage approach that first constructs a thematic representation of the document collection using clustering, and then selects related context based on neighborhood selection from the thematic graph to generate diverse and relevant insights using LLMs. Extensive evaluation on 3,000 questions using two generation models and two evaluation settings shows that InsightGen consistently produces useful, relevant, and actionable insights, establishing a strong baseline for this new task.
FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings
This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.
Federation over Text: Insight Sharing for Multi-Agent Reasoning
Modern agents specialize in varying domains while there is no clear approach combining different domain skills. We propose a federated learning-like framework, Federation over Text (FoT), that enables multiple clients solving different tasks to collectively generate a shared library of metacognitive insights by iteratively federating their local reasoning processes without sharing actual problem instances. Instead of federation over gradients (e.g., as in distributed training), FoT operates at the semantic level without any gradient optimization or supervision signal. At each round, client LLM agents independently apply arbitrary local reasoning and self-improvement procedures to their own tasks and share the resulting reasoning traces with a central server. The server then aggregates, distills, and consolidates knowledge across tasks and domains into a shared insight library, which can be reused by current and future agents to improve their reasoning. Experiments show that FoT improves reasoning effectiveness and efficiency across real-world daily tasks, cross-domain collaboration, and research insight discovery, achieving an average performance gain of 11.9 absolute percentage points while reducing client-generated task-completion tokens by 5.5%.
Migrant Voices, Local News: Insights on Bridging Community Needs with Media Content
Research shows news consumption differs across demographics, yet little is known about non-mainstream audiences, especially in relation to local media. Our study addresses this gap by examining how French-speaking migrants in a mid-size European city engage with local news, and whether their needs are reflected in coverage. Eight community members participated in focus groups, whose insights guided the selection of natural language processing methods (topic modeling, information retrieval, sentiment analysis, and readability) applied to over 2000 hyper-local news articles. Results showed that while articles frequently covered local events, gaps remained in topics important to participants. Sentiment analysis revealed a generally positive tone, and readability measures indicated an intermediate-advanced French level, raising questions about accessibility for integration. Our work contributes to bridging the gap between local news platforms' content and diverse readers' needs, and could inform local media organizations about opportunities to expand their current news story coverage to appeal to more diverse audiences.
Learning to Reason with Insight for Informal Theorem Proving
Although most of the automated theorem-proving approaches depend on formal proof systems, informal theorem proving can align better with large language models' (LLMs) strength in natural language processing. In this work, we identify a primary bottleneck in informal theorem proving as a lack of insight, namely the difficulty of recognizing the core techniques required to solve complex problems. To address this, we propose , a unified training framework designed to cultivate this essential reasoning skill and enable LLMs to perform insightful reasoning. Our framework consists of three components: (1) , a hierarchical dataset that structures informal proofs by explicitly extracting core techniques and proof sketches alongside the final proof; (2) a Progressive Multi-Stage SFT strategy that mimics the human learning process, teaching the model proof writing, planning, and insight identification; and (3) , a policy optimization method that assigns structured rewards over this insight hierarchy. Our experiments on challenging mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that this insight-aware generation strategy significantly outperforms baselines. These results demonstrate that teaching models to identify and apply core techniques can substantially improve their mathematical reasoning.
A Multi-Agent Human-LLM Collaborative Framework for Closed-Loop Scientific Literature Summarization
Scientific discovery is slowed by fragmented literature that requires excessive human effort to gather, analyze, and understand. AI tools, including autonomous summarization and question answering, have been developed to aid in understanding scientific literature. However, these tools lack the structured, multi-step approach necessary for extracting deep insights from scientific literature. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for literature analysis, but remain unreliable due to hallucinations and incomplete extraction. We introduce Elhuyar, a multi-agent, human-in-the-loop system that integrates LLMs, structured AI, and human scientists to extract, analyze, and iteratively refine insights from scientific literature. The framework distributes tasks among specialized agents for filtering papers, extracting data, fitting models, and summarizing findings, with human oversight ensuring reliability. The system generates structured reports with extracted data, visualizations, model equations, and text summaries, enabling deeper inquiry through iterative refinement. Deployed in materials science, it analyzed literature on tungsten under helium-ion irradiation, showing experimentally correlated exponential helium bubble growth with irradiation dose and temperature, offering insight for plasma-facing materials (PFMs) in fusion reactors. This demonstrates how AI-assisted literature review can uncover scientific patterns and accelerate discovery.
Phantom-Insight: Adaptive Multi-cue Fusion for Video Camouflaged Object Detection with Multimodal LLM
Video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) is challenging due to dynamic environments. Existing methods face two main issues: (1) SAM-based methods struggle to separate camouflaged object edges due to model freezing, and (2) MLLM-based methods suffer from poor object separability as large language models merge foreground and background. To address these issues, we propose a novel VCOD method based on SAM and MLLM, called Phantom-Insight. To enhance the separability of object edge details, we represent video sequences with temporal and spatial clues and perform feature fusion via LLM to increase information density. Next, multiple cues are generated through the dynamic foreground visual token scoring module and the prompt network to adaptively guide and fine-tune the SAM model, enabling it to adapt to subtle textures. To enhance the separability of objects and background, we propose a decoupled foreground-background learning strategy. By generating foreground and background cues separately and performing decoupled training, the visual token can effectively integrate foreground and background information independently, enabling SAM to more accurately segment camouflaged objects in the video. Experiments on the MoCA-Mask dataset show that Phantom-Insight achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics. Additionally, its ability to detect unseen camouflaged objects on the CAD2016 dataset highlights its strong generalization ability.
EM3M: An Electron Micrograph Dataset for Microstructural Segmentation and Generation
Quantitative microstructural characterization is fundamental to materials science, and electron micrographs (EMs) provide indispensable high-resolution insights. However, progress in deep learning-based analysis of EMs has been hampered by the scarcity of large-scale, expert-annotated public datasets. To address this issue, we introduce EM3M, a large-scale and multimodal dataset for instance-level understanding of EMs. EM3M comprises 5,091 high-quality EMs, approximately 3 million instance segmentation annotations, and image-level textual descriptions with disentangled attributes. The dataset is constructed through a rigorous multi-stage curation and validation pipeline, with comprehensive statistical analyses to ensure reliability and reproducibility. Building upon these curated image-text pairs, we further provide a text-to-image diffusion model that serves as a controllable data augmentation engine, demonstrating that synthetic augmentation consistently improves downstream segmentation performance. To establish a systematic benchmark, we evaluate representative instance segmentation methods on EM3M. Our results reveal that conventional detection-based and query-based methods struggle with the extreme instance densities and textural complexities inherent in EMs. We additionally provide an optimized flow-based baseline to facilitate fair comparison and future research. EM3M {Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/UniParser/EM3M}, the generative engine {Generation: https://huggingface.co/UniParser/EM3M-Gen}, and an online demo {Segmentation demo: https://www.bohrium.com/apps/uni-aims} are publicly available to support future research in automated materials analysis.
InsurTech innovation using natural language processing
With the rapid rise of InsurTech, traditional insurance companies are increasingly exploring alternative data sources and advanced technologies to sustain their competitive edge. This paper provides both a conceptual overview and practical case studies of natural language processing (NLP) and its emerging applications within insurance operations, focusing on transforming raw, unstructured text into structured data suitable for actuarial analysis and decision-making. Leveraging real-world alternative data provided by an InsurTech industry partner that enriches traditional insurance data sources, we apply various NLP techniques to demonstrate feature de-biasing, feature compression, and industry classification in the commercial insurance context. These enriched, text-derived insights not only add to and refine traditional rating factors for commercial insurance pricing but also offer novel perspectives for assessing underlying risk by introducing novel industry classification techniques. Through these demonstrations, we show that NLP is not merely a supplementary tool but a foundational element of modern, data-driven insurance analytics.
Insights on Harmonic Tones from a Generative Music Experiment
The ultimate purpose of generative music AI is music production. The studio-lab, a social form within the art-science branch of cross-disciplinarity, is a way to advance music production with AI music models. During a studio-lab experiment involving researchers, music producers, and an AI model for music generating bass-like audio, it was observed that the producers used the model's output to convey two or more pitches with a single harmonic complex tone, which in turn revealed that the model had learned to generate structured and coherent simultaneous melodic lines using monophonic sequences of harmonic complex tones. These findings prompt a reconsideration of the long-standing debate on whether humans can perceive harmonics as distinct pitches and highlight how generative AI can not only enhance musical creativity but also contribute to a deeper understanding of music.
Uncovering Insights of Compound Flooding with Data-Driven AI
Compound flooding, driven by nonlinear interactions between multiple hydrometeorological factors, poses a significant challenge to hazard prevention. Existing forecasting approaches, whether physics-based or data-driven, often emphasize temporal patterns while underexploring how multiple interacting factors jointly shape flood dynamics. To address this problem, we conduct a large-scale data-driven analysis of compound flooding in South Florida, a typical area for compound flooding, by integrating tidal conditions, rainfall, groundwater stage, and human water management activities. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (i) models that capture temporal dynamics alone fail to represent multi-factor interactions during compound events; (ii) subsurface saturation, as reflected by groundwater levels, emerges as a dominant predictor of flood severity, often outweighing immediate rainfall intensity in this porous coastal region; and (iii) the spatial state of surrounding monitoring stations within a finite effective radius provides critical causal context for flooding, while extending temporal history yields diminishing returns during extreme events. These findings suggest that compound flooding is governed more by spatially coupled system states than by long-term temporal dependencies, challenging rain-centric and sequence-dominated forecasting paradigms. By framing data-driven models as tools for scientific inquiry rather than prediction alone, this study offers new insights into the mechanisms of compound flooding and informs the design of more physically grounded early-warning systems for coastal environments. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/AslanDing/SFBench.
In Dialogue with Intelligence: Toward Insightful Co-Augmentation
Dialogue with a large language model can lead a person to insight: a sudden change in how they understand a problem. This perspective asks how model activity relates to insight as a dialogue unfolds. I propose that part of the intelligence expressed in dialogue arises from two interacting recurrences: each generated token becomes context for the next, and each response returns through the person, whose interpretation and new observations reshape what the model receives. Within this loop, the model's contribution shifts between modes, from echoing familiar formulations to offering a framing that opens a new direction for the person to develop. These modes may correspond to distinguishable patterns of model activity. A memory "spine" that selects which context is carried forward could elicit productive patterns again while the ideas themselves change. Public records of human-model dialogue, activity recorded from open-weight models and tools from computational neuroscience make these proposals testable.