We introduce Lumos, the first end-to-end multimodal question-answering system with text understanding capabilities. At the core of Lumos is a Scene Text Recognition (STR) component that extracts text from first person point-of-view images, the output of which is used to augment input to a Multimodal Large Language Model (MM-LLM). While building Lumos, we encountered numerous challenges related to STR quality, overall latency, and model inference. In this paper, we delve into those challenges, and discuss the system architecture, design choices, and modeling techniques employed to overcome these obstacles. We also provide a comprehensive evaluation for each component, showcasing high quality and efficiency.

Many data are modeled as tensors, or multi dimensional arrays. Examples include the predicates (subject, verb, object) in knowledge bases, hyperlinks and anchor texts in the Web graphs, sensor streams (time, location, and type), social networks over time, and DBLP conference-author-keyword relations. Tensor decomposition is an important data mining tool with various applications including clustering, trend detection, and anomaly detection. However, current tensor decomposition algorithms are not scalable for large tensors with billions of sizes and hundreds millions of nonzeros: the largest tensor in the literature remains thousands of sizes and hundreds thousands of nonzeros.

Personalized search systems have evolved to utilize heterogeneous features including document hyperlinks, category labels in various taxonomies and social tags in addition to free-text of the documents. Consequently, classifiers, PageRank algorithms and Collaborative Filtering methods are often used as intermediate steps in such personalized retrieval systems. Thorough comparative evaluation of such complex systems has been difficult due to the lack of appropriate publicly available datasets that provide such diverse feature sets. To remedy the situation, we have created CiteData, a new dataset for benchmark evaluations of personalized search performance, that will be made publicly accessible. CiteData is a collection of academic articles extracted from CiteULike and CiteSeer repositories, with rich feature sets such as authors, author-affiliations, topic labels, social tags and citation information. We further supplement it with personalized queries and relevance judgments which were obtained from volunteer users. This paper starts with a discussion of the design criteria and characteristics of the CiteData dataset in comparison with current benchmark datasets, followed by a set of task-oriented empirical evaluations of popular algorithms in statistical classification, collaborative filtering and link analysis as intermediate steps for personalized search. Our results show significant performance improvement of personalized approaches, over that of unpersonalized approaches. We also observe that a meta personalized search engine that leverages information from multiple sources of features performs better than algorithms that use only one of the constituent source of features.

We present the first interdisciplinary work on transforming a popular problem in proteomics, i.e. protein identification from tandem mass spectra, to an Information Retrieval (IR) problem. We present an empirical comparison of popular IR approaches, such as those available from Indri and Lemur toolkits on benchmark datasets, to representative popular baselines in the proteomics literature. Our experiments demonstrate statistically significant evidence that popular IR approaches outperform representative baseline approaches in proteomics.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) requires user-rated training examples for statistical inference about the preferences of new users. Active learning strategies identify the most informative set of training examples through minimum interactions with the users. Current active learning approaches in CF make an implicit and unrealistic assumption that a user can provide rating for any queried item. This paper introduces a new approach to the problem which does not make such an assumption. We personalize active learning for the user, and query for only those items which the user can provide rating for. We propose an extended form of Bayesian active learning and use the Aspect Model for CF to illustrate and examine the idea. A comparative evaluation of the new method and a well-established baseline method on benchmark datasets shows statistically significant improvements with our method over the performance of the baseline method that is representative for existing approaches which do not take personalization into account. 1.

This paper examines a new approach to information distillation over temporally ordered documents, and proposes a novel evaluation scheme for such a framework. It combines the strengths of and extends beyond conventional adaptive filtering, novelty detection and non-redundant passage ranking with respect to long-lasting information needs ("tasks" with multiple queries). Our approach supports fine-grained user feedback via highlighting of arbitrary spans of text, and leverages such information for utility optimization in adaptive settings. For our experiments, we defined hypothetical tasks based on news events in the TDT4 corpus, with multiple queries per task. Answer keys (nuggets) were generated for each query and a semi-automatic procedure was used for acquiring rules that allow automatically matching nuggets against system responses. We also propose an extension of the NDCG metric for assessing the utility of ranked passages as a combination of relevance and novelty. Our results show encouraging utility enhancements using the new approach, compared to the baseline systems without incremental learning or the novelty detection components.