B2B Customer Conversion Prediction: A Document Representation, Graph Theory, and CatBoost Driven Methodology

In the one-time selling B2B context, the buying cycle may last months or even years. During the long process, targeting customers that have a high potential to make purchases and recommending personalized campaigns accordingly are important for effective marketing. For this goal, we study the following problems, B2B customer data aggregation, customer feature generation, and prediction of whether a B2B customer would show interest in making a purchase (i.e., prediction of conversion into sales funnel). We propose an algorithm to aggregate individual contacts to the B2B customer level based on multiple keys. For non-standardized keys such as company names, we propose a novel architecture to cluster them in a domain encompassing irregularities such as spelling mistakes and spelling variants. We then define and generate a set of features and apply the CatBoost model for customer conversion prediction. Our framework achieves 91\% prediction accuracy. Based on the prediction results and analysis of the model, we then discuss personalized campaign recommendations to foster conversion.

SLIDEFORGE: An LLM Agent for Controllable Editing of Slides as Structured Artifacts

Current AI agents compellingly describe slides. However, AI-assisted slide editing requires more than understanding: the output must retain layout, style, component structure, and native editability. Towards, AI-assisted slide editing, existing agents operate on screenshots or weak document representations and often fragment coherent visual units, rasterize editable content, or break layout. In contrast, for controllable slide editing, we introduce an agentic framework, SLIDEFORGE, which builds a Deck State Graph, an executable slide state that links visual decomposition, native pptx object structure, and perceptual organization. By recovering human-referable components while retaining fine-grained editable structure, SLIDEFORGE supports theme-preserving reconstruction through slide-native operations and rendered-state verification. We further introduce an evaluation paradigm for controllable slide transformation that jointly measures component recovery, preservation, restyling consistency, visual quality, and native editability. Experiments show that SLIDEFORGE outperforms direct prompting, screenshot-based agents, and generic code-agent baselines across these dimensions. Code is available at https://github.com/UIUC-MONET/SLIDEFORGE.

VaRS-Doc: Interpretation-Aware Variant Representations via Latent Self-Probing for Visual Document Retrieval

Visual document retrieval has recently become increasingly important in applications such as enterprise search, scientific literature discovery, and retrieval-augmented generation. These applications depend on efficiently identifying query-relevant pages across large collections of visually rich documents. Existing methods commonly adopt late-interaction architectures that encode and index documents offline to enable scalable and low-latency online retrieval. Despite its efficiency, this paradigm requires each document to be encoded into a fixed representation before the query is known. However, the same content in a visual document may induce different interpretations depending on the query intent, which a fixed representation struggles to capture. Yet postponing document encoding until the query arrives would incur prohibitive online retrieval latency. To address this gap, we propose VaRS-Doc, a visual document retrieval framework that diversifies document representations by enabling the model to actively explore variant latent interpretations during document encoding, while preserving efficient late-interaction retrieval in which each query adaptively selects the best-fit representation. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy that encourages the model to capture complementary semantic interpretations and prevents it from falling back to train a single dominant representation. Experiments on visual document retrieval benchmarks show that VaRS-Doc achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance, offering a practical solution to the mismatch between query-agnostic document encoding and query-specific retrieval needs. Code is available at https://github.com/bokufa/VaRS-Doc.

Asymmetric Within-Document Predictive Learning for Scientific Document Representation

We study predictive pretraining for scientific document representation using the discourse structure of papers. We propose SciJEPA, a citation-free framework that learns through asymmetric within-document prediction: title and abstract representations are used to predict method representations, and method representations are used to predict conclusion representations. Experiments on RELISH, high-influence citation, SciDocs, and cite prediction show that plain predictive training is viable but weaker than a controlled contrastive baseline using the same section pairs. Adding Sliced Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) substantially improves performance and narrows this gap. The effect of regularization is task-dependent: moderate SIGReg helps fine-grained ranking, while stronger regularization can weaken local alignment. We further show that different encoding branches support different retrieval regimes. These results position within-document predictive learning as a promising citation-free complement for scientific document representation, provided that embedding geometry is carefully controlled.

AutoIndex: Learning Representation Programs for Retrieval

We present AutoIndex, a framework for learning representation programs: executable transformations that map raw documents into the representations exposed to a retrieval system. Rather than tuning retrievers, rerankers, or a small set of preprocessing hyperparameters, AutoIndex searches over programs that slice, enrich, normalize, reweight, or reorganize documents before indexing. At each iteration, AutoIndex performs validation-guided program search, in which agents diagnose failures of the current program and synthesize candidate updates, retaining only updates that improve retrieval quality under the resulting index. We evaluate AutoIndex on CRUMB, a benchmark of heterogeneous retrieval tasks, with BM25 held fixed across all experiments. The learned programs improve recall over a static full-document BM25 baseline on all 8 tasks, with average gains of +8.4% in Recall@100 and +8.3% in nDCG@10, and largest gains of +30.5% in Recall@100 and +43.6% in nDCG@10. These results suggest that document representation should not be treated as a fixed preprocessing choice made before retrieval begins, but as an explicit optimization target. Code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/auto-index/autoindex.