AutoConcept: Training-Free Concept-Guided Reranking for Metadata-Available Composed Image Retrieval

Composed image retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a text modification. This paper studies metadata-available CIR reranking, where a fixed CIR model first returns a candidate pool and gallery metadata is then used for second-stage concept-guided scoring. We introduce AutoConcept, a training-free reranker that converts concept evidence into an interpretable memory. AutoConcept filters noisy concepts, activates query-relevant positive constraints with an auxiliary negative penalty, and combines base retrieval scores with metadata-based concept-candidate alignment through inference-time calibration. On FashionIQ, AutoConcept yields significant early-rank improvements over WeiMoCIR and consistent plug-in gains on LinCIR candidate pools. Metadata-aware controls show that structured concept memory adds signal beyond direct query-text and extracted-attribute matching, while a query-only variant further supports the effectiveness of concept-level reranking. A supplementary real-human concept-label study indicates that the same memory interface can consume participant-provided evidence. These results position AutoConcept as an interpretable concept-memory reranker for product-style CIR galleries with available metadata.

Discovering Relationships in Data Lakes Using Large Language Models: An Industrial Case

Data lakes rely on metadata to remain usable, yet this meta data is often limited or weakly informative for column relationship discovery, especially in ERP-derived datasets with coded or abbreviated schema labels. We propose ColRel, a two-stage method that builds column embeddings from metadata and data available at ingestion time. In difficult cases, such as coded schemata, business dictionaries help better interpret column names and support the generation of short natural-language descriptions used in the second stage. Experiments on public benchmarks and an industrial ERP dataset show that ColRel is particularly effective in semantically related, weak-signal settings.

Profiling What Matters: Context-Aware Item Profiles from Large-Scale Metadata for LLM Recommenders

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced reranking in recommendation, effectively leveraging item-side information remains challenging. Real-world items are described by vast, heterogeneous, and unstructured metadata, where decision-relevant signals are often implicit, noisy, or buried in long descriptions. Moreover, feature salience is highly context-dependent, varying not only across items but also across users. Existing methods often rely on item titles, fixed attributes, or static item summaries, which limit personalized and fine-grained item understanding. To bridge this gap, we propose CAIRO, a user context-aware item profiling framework for LLM-based reranking. CAIRO first structures raw metadata and reviews into objective features and subjective traits, and employs a lightweight profiler to select the most relevant information for each user-item pair with limited serving-time overhead. The resulting profiles are concise and context-specific, providing relevant item-side evidence for the LLM's ranking decision. Experiments show that CAIRO consistently improves LLM-based reranking, highlighting the importance of item profiling that effectively exploits vast item-side information.

Smart Compaction: Predicting Compaction Utility from Lakehouse Table Metadata

Open lakehouse table formats accumulate small data files over time, which degrades query performance. Deciding when compaction is worthwhile remains threshold-driven, but which metadata features actually determine compaction utility is not well understood. We present an open simulation framework that generates 2,376 Apache Iceberg tables spanning three orders of magnitude in file size, extracts 17 metadata features from manifest files without reading data, and trains XGBoost to predict the continuous file-reduction ratio (R2 = 0.998, RMSE= 0.013). The binary compaction decision turns out to be trivially separable by a single partition-level threshold max_files_per_partition> 4, requiring no learned model. Cross-schema validation on 96 TPC-H tables confirms generalisation without retraining (R2 = 0.976). A query benchmark reveals that compaction benefits metadata-heavy queries but can slow full-scan aggregations by reducing task parallelism. All code and data are publicly available.

An Ontology for Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) approximate quantum-mechanical energies and forces---conventionally computed by density functional theory (DFT) or wave-function methods---at a fraction of the cost. The field encompasses a growing ecosystem of algorithms, training datasets, hyperparameters, and target materials, yet the metadata needed to systematically compare, reproduce, and build upon MLIP studies remains scattered across papers, scripts, and ad-hoc file formats. We present the MLIPs ontology, an OWL 2 DL ontology that captures the concepts needed to describe MLIP methods, their hyperparameters, training datasets with DFT provenance, and published benchmarks. The ontology is organized into three modules---Method, Training Data, and Benchmark---and connects existing ontologies in materials science (MDO, CMSO/ASMO) and machine learning (ML-Schema), complementing dataset-side schemas such as Croissant. It declares 27 formal axioms enforcing data completeness and consistency, including property chains that link trained models to their methods and training data. We demonstrate the ontology through a running example based on Moment Tensor Potentials and evaluate it through competency-question execution on a 20-paper seeded knowledge graph, OWL reasoning, and comparison with existing ontologies.

Natural Language Access to Domain-Specific Metadata: A Reusable Framework for LLM Query Generation

Researchers need to answer ad-hoc questions about the contents of domain-specific archives but often lack the expertise to write structured queries on the metadata. We show that when domain vocabulary and semantics are captured in a well-designed Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology, Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate accurate structured queries zero-shot, without fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, or multi-agent orchestration. We present the Natural Language Knowledge Graph Query (NLKGQ) system, a framework and development process that enables natural language access to metadata in such archives. The framework includes a web interface that helps researchers pose natural language questions, which a domain-agnostic harness translates to SPARQL via an LLM and executes against a knowledge graph. The development process begins with capturing domain vocabulary and semantics in a formal OWL ontology. Domain-specific code then extracts metadata from archive sources and imports it into a knowledge graph defined by the ontology. Both are designed for reuse across domains. We demonstrate the system on metadata derived from a large-scale neuroimaging research archive, evaluating multiple LLMs and ontology representations. The best configurations achieve 100% accuracy on a competence and regression question set developed with domain experts. An ablation study across eight ontology representations reveals that readable entity names and semantic annotations are the dominant factors in accuracy, more significant than model choice or prompt engineering. We also compare SPARQL to an auto-generated SQL database as query backends, showing that OWL's structural features provide a substantial advantage over SQL DDL for LLM-driven query generation. Our demonstration domain also requires local LLMs on modest institutional hardware to address privacy concerns for human subject data.

MetaPerch: Learning from metadata for bioacoustics foundation models

Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs. In this work, we explore the use of metadata -- such as location and time -- as auxiliary supervision signals, allowing the model to leverage species-metadata correlations in its learned representation. Auxiliary metadata losses provide additional information beyond vocalizations alone that can encourage a richer, more robust representation that generalizes better to species distribution and acoustic domain shifts -- important challenges for deployment in real-world passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) settings. We introduce MetaPerch, a new foundation model that achieves strong species identification performance across multiple challenging domains and present an extensive empirical study of the effects of 9 diverse metadata sources on 17 bioacoustic datasets.

Beyond Metadata: CAPRA for Hidden Subgroup Analysis under Missing Metadata in Medical Imaging

Medical imaging models are often deployed without the demographic, acquisition, and quality metadata needed for subgroup auditing. Once those metadata disappear, clinically critical failure modes can be masked by strong aggregate performance, and many robust-learning methods lose the group structure they rely on. We present CAPRA, a calibrated proxy-axis framework for hidden subgroup analysis under missing metadata. CAPRA predicts image-derived semantic axes, calibrates axis posteriors on a small metadata-labeled split via patient-level cross-fitting, and organizes those posteriors into a calibrated subgroup interface that supports both deployment-time failure analysis and downstream robust learning without requiring subgroup labels at deployment. Across fundus, dermoscopy, and chest radiography, CAPRA reveals disparity patterns missed by metadata-only slicing, remains informative under dataset shift, and produces subgroup partitions that align more closely with explicit failure axes than image-only or latent-slice baselines. The same interface can also be reused by downstream robust learners, although those gains are domain-dependent. Overall, CAPRA turns hidden subgroup analysis under missing metadata into a calibrated, interpretable, and reusable subgroup interface for deployment-time analysis and robust transfer.

Brick-DICL: Dynamic In-Context Learning for Automated Brick Schema Classification

Building Management Systems (BMS) are essential for optimizing energy efficiency and operational performance in modern buildings. However, the lack of standardization across BMS points from different manufacturers creates significant barriers to integration and data utilization. While the Brick schema offers a standardized ontology for building systems, mapping BMS points to appropriate Brick classes presents three critical challenges: (i) the extensive number of Brick classes (936 in the latest version), (ii) limited domain-specific knowledge in large language models (LLMs), and (iii) substantial manual effort required for verification. To address these challenges, we propose Brick-DICL, a two-stage dynamic in-context learning framework for automated Brick schema classification. Brick-DICL consists of two primary components: metadata-RAG, which retrieves relevant examples to enhance LLMs' domain knowledge, and class-RAG, which narrows down potential Brick classes to address the large classification space. Additionally, we implement a multi-LLM filtering mechanism that compares predictions across multiple models, flagging low-confidence classifications for human review. As a result: (i) General: Brick-DICL is applicable to any building management system regardless of manufacturer or metadata format; (ii) Novel and Powerful: as the first dynamic in-context learning approach for Brick schema classification, Brick-DICL achieves significant classification accuracy improvements on building datasets, outperforming existing methods; (iii) Efficient: our multi-LLM filtering strategy reduces manual verification effort, enabling rapid digital building onboarding. Extensive experiments demonstrate Brick-DICL's effectiveness across diverse building datasets, accelerating the path toward standardized, interoperable building management systems.

Who Needs Labels? Adapting Vision Foundation Models With the Metadata You Already Have

We propose a label-free approach to adapt powerful but generic vision foundation models to specialized scientific domains. Standard supervised fine-tuning is often ill-suited to these settings: labels are scarce, and task-specific training can collapse the model's generality and hurt robustness. We instead leverage metadata to adapt representations to new domains in a self-supervised manner. Our method, FINO, combines a standard self-supervised objective with flexible metadata guidance that handles both highly granular discrete metadata and continuous metadata. It encourages the representation to preserve informative factors while suppressing spurious ones. Across subcellular fluorescence microscopy, Earth observation, wildlife monitoring, and medical imaging, FINO consistently outperforms standard unsupervised domain adaptation and fully supervised adaptation. It also exceeds highly-specialized domain-specific state of the art, while using no task labels for backbone adaptation and only lightweight probes for supervision.