Valentin Romanov, Monique Bax, Steven Niederercs.AI cs.DB
Accurately extracting nuanced, contextualized data from research articles is laborious and time intensive. Here, we investigate the performance of frontier, browser-based large language models (LLMs) to extract highly contextualized information. We demonstrate four escalating workflows, 1) given an expert curated prompt and research articles, most frontier LLMs perform well at data extraction, however can struggle with interpreting scientific context and nuance, 2) given simple instructions, LLMs can author their own prompts which were almost as eNective as expert-written prompts, 3) autonomous discovery of research literature was diNicult, agents either missed or hallucinated references, and 4) LLMs can create new datasets from published guidelines that closely match human-expert judges, but still require a human-in-the-loop. Together, these findings define an auditable division of labour in which experts specify the evidence standard, models cross-check repeated extractions and researchers resolve disputed cases, providing a practical route to scaling scientific data curation without relinquishing expert oversight.
Poonam Poonam, Alexander Epple, Timo Ropinskics.CV
Bar charts are commonly used in data visualization, and while they are easily understood by humans, it is non-trivial to extract the underlying data computationally. For a machine-learning-based approach, training chart de-rendering models usually requires labeled, real-world data. Labeling data is a time consuming task, which is why annotated data is scarce. Models can learn more efficiently when provided with features of high semantic quality, which a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) is designed to learn in a self-supervised manner. We present a per-bar, numerical value recovery pipeline for bar charts, where a JEPA encoder is used to produce semantically rich latent features. The decoder model consuming these features is simple and quick to train and outputs the coordinates of ticks and bars, which can be used to recover bar values. The effectiveness of self-supervised finetuning and quality of the extracted features is evident when comparing our model to end-to-end supervised baselines. Code, datasets and checkpoints are available on \href{https://github.com/dralois/Bar-JEPA}{GitHub}.
Extracting data from visualizations has long challenged computer vision, with current research focused on bar, line, and pie charts, among other low-dimensional visualizations. However, parallel coordinates as a widely used high-dimensional data visualization approach, remain largely unexplored in this context. As parallel coordinate plots can quickly become cluttered and difficult to interpret when poorly designed or densely populated, automated data extraction from such visualizations is of particular interest. In this paper, we propose PaCoNet, the first approach for parallel coordinate data extraction. PaCoNet not only extracts line coordinates, but also enables the extraction of individual data samples for further analysis. Towards this end, we make the following contributions. We present the first deep learning approach tailored for parallel coordinate analysis, and demonstrate that it outperforms unadapted baselines by a significant margin. We further introduce a large-scale parallel coordinate dataset for training and testing. Together, these key contributions enable for the first time the automated analysis and redesign of parallel coordinate plots. PaCoNet thus lays the groundwork for complex visualization analysis, and further advances the intersection of computer vision and data visualization. All code, trained models, and data generation scripts will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.
Anne Josiane Kouam, Hristo Boyadzhiev, Konrad Rieckcs.LG
Human mobility prediction models, which forecast the next location in a user's trajectory, are increasingly deployed in urban analytics, navigation, and personalized services. Yet, little is known about their potential to memorize and expose sensitive user trajectories from training data. While memorization has been extensively studied in language models, mobility prediction poses unique challenges: training sequences encode human behavior at various spatial and temporal scales, creating privacy risks at different granularities. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic audit of memorization in mobility prediction models. While prior work has shown that privacy leaks can arise from such models, we systematically assess and quantify memorization risks at scale. We identify key challenges, including the lack of a randomness space, the multi-scale structure of trajectories, and user-specific behavioral diversity. To address these challenges, we introduce a framework to quantify mobility memorization at different levels of granularity: individual locations, anchor pairs, and subtrajectory segments. We also develop user-grounded reference sets to assess how likely a model is to prefer training data over realistic alternatives. Our evaluation across multiple models and datasets reveals pervasive memorization patterns that correlate with user regularity and increase the risk of data extraction at inference time. Our findings call for mandatory privacy auditing in mobility prediction models.
Membership inference (MIA) on language models is usually summarised by aggregate ROC-AUC, but such evaluations are confounded: model-free blind baselines can separate members from non-members using surface text alone. Building on probabilistic discoverable extraction, we study black-box training-data leakage using N samples from p_theta(. | x), placing mean overlap, extreme-value overlap, and self-concentration on a common functional-estimation footing. On WikiMIA, a blind bag-of-words classifier reaches AUC 0.97 (TPR 0.90 at 5% FPR) while sampling adds nothing. On an IID Pile split (MIMIR), neither self-concentration nor gold-continuation recovery significantly exceeds a blind baseline in aggregate. Aggregate metrics hide the real harm: sampling verbatim-extracts training data for a tail of documents no blind attack can reach. On Pythia-6.9B, 16.6% of 500 Pile documents bearing a real identifier (83 documents; 21.3% of those bearing an email address) have that identifier reproduced and not reproduced under a mismatched-prefix control. Each leak is attributable to that document rather than a globally common string. This per-document disclosure is invisible to aggregate AUC. Risk is uneven: identifier leakage is about 3x stronger in code than prose, though prose remains positive and grows with capacity (4.0% to 12.1% from 410M to 6.9B); recovery of arbitrary held-out continuations is essentially confined to code (+0.44 member gap on GitHub vs at most +0.014 on prose). Temperature and nucleus sampling have minor effect, a 16-token prefix suffices, and the sample-budget relationship corroborates prior probabilistic-extraction results. We detect no reduction from deduplication. Privacy audits should report per-document extraction, not only aggregate membership, and motivate differential privacy as the mitigation. We release leakit, a black-box tool implementing this probe and its control.
Maxime Gorres, Jan Göpfert, Patrick Kuckertz +5cs.CL
Energy system models guide societally important decisions, but their credibility rests on quantitative assumptions that are difficult to source and audit. Meta-analyses can improve transparency and modeling practices, but the rapid growth of publications makes manual information extraction increasingly impractical. Consequently, databases are updated infrequently and efforts are often duplicated across research groups. Here, we demonstrate the highly accurate automated extraction of quantitative information from 76,000 energy system studies published since 2010. We compile 3.2 million structured quantitative data points together with 20 million associated metadata entries, spanning a broad spectrum of technologies, methodological approaches and system characteristics. Beyond providing input data for models, the resulting FAIR database make the energy systems literature itself analysable. We show where academic assumptions diverge from empirical observed data, and how research priorities vary at scale across technologies, regions and time. To facilitate broad use within the community, the database is provided through an interactive dashboard, enabling users to filter, analyse and download data according to their specific research needs.
Chart data extraction, which reverse-engineers data tables from chart images, is essential for reproducibility, analysis, retrieval, and redesign. Existing interactive tools are reliable but tedious, and mixed-initiative systems, while more efficient, lack generalizability. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a unified interface for chart interpretation, yet their ability to extract accurate data tables, especially without visible labels, remains unclear. We build a benchmark featuring diverse real-world charts without data labels to evaluate this capability. Results show that, while current MLLMs reliably reconstruct table structures, they struggle with precise value recovery. To address this, we revisit chart data extraction from a human-centered perspective and argue that extraction should follow a progressive learning process similar to how people read charts. Our training framework substantially improves numerical accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 7B-parameter model. A user study further shows that our model effectively supports mixed-initiative workflows for reliable chart data extraction.
Md Abdullah Al Mamun, Ngoc Phu Doan, Pedram Zaree +2cs.CR cs.LG
Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets. Ensuring the privacy of such data against extraction attacks has become a central concern. In this paper, we ask whether an attacker who can poison a portion of the training data can facilitate the leakage of a separate target record they have no access to. We answer in the affirmative and show that such leakage can be induced by a poisoning mechanism that reshapes the model's local loss landscape around the target completion. Our key insight is that poisoning to create a sharp loss minimum at the target, surrounded by elevated loss on nearby alternatives, forces the model to memorize the target as the unique low-loss solution in its neighborhood. The attack requires no architectural changes, and generalizes across centralized and federated learning settings. We demonstrate that the attack amplifies privacy leakage across language (up to 100% successful extraction), and vision-language models (up 90% successful extraction). We show that the attack is thwarted when the model is trained to be differentially private. However, we introduce a new attack that directly probes the loss landscape bypassing even differential privacy defenses.
In this report, we present our champion solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 2: Chart Understanding. This track requires models to recover structured chart data and generate faithful natural-language summaries from chart images. To address the complementary requirements of accurate data extraction and factual narration, we propose ChartLens, a dual-branch framework for chart data correction and summary refinement. ChartLens consists of two key modules: Structure-Aware CSV Verification and Correction (SAVC) and Text-Retention-Guided Summary Refinement (TRSR). SAVC improves the reliability of structured data extraction through verification and correction, while TRSR enhances summary generation by preserving critical textual and numerical evidence from charts. By combining model adaptation, correction-based generation, and OCR-assisted evidence grounding, ChartLens improves both structured data recovery and summary factuality. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 69.10 and ranks first in Track 2, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate chart understanding. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ChartLens.
AJ Carl P. Dy, Aivin V. Solatoriocs.CL cs.AI cs.CV cs.IR
Institutional documents contain substantial amounts of operational and analytical information embedded within figures and tables. Current approaches for extracting visual content from documents are largely built around generic document layout analysis, where figures and tables are treated as uniformly relevant document objects rather than semantically meaningful analytical artifacts. In this work, we introduce a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for \textit{data snapshot extraction}, the task of identifying and localizing semantically meaningful visual artifacts within institutional documents. The benchmark spans humanitarian reports, World Bank policy research working papers, and project appraisal documents, and includes annotations for figures and tables that contain reusable analytical information. Using this dataset, we benchmarked multiple open-source layout detection models and evaluated both detection performance and spatial extraction quality. Our results show that current models struggle to generalize to operational institutional documents despite strong performance on conventional academic benchmarks. Common failure modes include confusion between analytical and non-analytical content, fragmentation of composite analytical artifacts, and incomplete extraction of contextual information required for interpretation. These findings highlight a persistent gap between generic document layout analysis and operationally useful data snapshot extraction. We release the source PDFs, annotation dataset, metadata, and source code to support future research in operational document intelligence. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai4data/data-snapshot and the source code is available at https://github.com/worldbank/ai4data/tree/main/experimental/data-snapshot.