Abstract Forecasting the behaviour of industrial robots, power grids or pandemics under changing external inputs requires accurate dynamical models that can adapt to varying signals and capture long-term effects such as delays or memory. While recent neural approaches address some of these challenges individually, their reliance on computationally intensive solvers and their black-box nature limit their practical utility. In this work, we propose Laplace-Net, a decoupled, solver-free neural framework for learning forced and delay-aware dynamical systems. It uses the Laplace transform to (i) bypass computationally intensive solvers, (ii) enable the learning of delays and memory effects and (iii) decompose each system into interpretable control-theoretic components. Laplace-Net also enhances transferability, as its modular structure allows for targeted re-training of individual components to new system setups or environments. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets–including linear, nonlinear and delayed systems–demonstrate the method’s improved accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in handling complex and previously unseen inputs.

The increasing operational demands in maritime contexts, particularly during time-sensitive missions like search and rescue, necessitate reliable, intelligent support systems. These systems depend on semantically structured and interoperable models to integrate and interpret complex sensor data as well as facilitate informed decision-making. We introduce MontoFlow, a semantic integration framework that combines dynamic data access with domain-specific knowledge representation. It links static properties with dynamic sensory measurements, forming the foundation for advanced maritime diagnostics. At its core, MontoFlow incorporates the SHIP Ontology, a maritime-focused SSN/SOSA extension that provides a comprehensive semantic model describing onboard sensors, vessel components, and their observations. We illustrate the practical relevance and rationale behind the development of MontoFlow through real-world examples, with emphasis on ship maintenance and onboard anomaly detection. The SHIP Ontology is thoroughly evaluated based on domain coverage and a use case in the maritime context, demonstrating both high quality and practical applicability. This work presents a reusable and extensible resource for semantically enriching maritime sensory data, supporting advanced analytics and dynamic data monitoring. Ontology: https://burbachs.github.io/ShipSensoryOntology/SHIP.owl GitHub: https://github.com/BurbachS/ShipSensoryOntology License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15390282

This paper addresses the task of conversational question answering (ConvQA) over knowledge graphs (KGs). The majority of existing ConvQA methods rely on full supervision signals with a strict assumption of the availability of gold logical forms of queries to extract answers from the KG. However, creating such a gold logical form is not viable for each potential question in a real-world scenario. Hence, in the case of missing gold logical forms, the existing information retrieval-based approaches use weak supervision via heuristics or reinforcement learning, formulating ConvQA as a KG path ranking problem. Despite missing gold logical forms, an abundance of conversational contexts, such as entire dialog history with fluent responses and domain information, can be incorporated to effectively reach the correct KG path. This work proposes a contrastive representation learning-based approach to rank KG paths effectively. Our approach solves two key challenges. Firstly, it allows weak supervision-based learning that omits the necessity of gold annotations. Second, it incorporates the conversational context (entire dialog history and domain information) to jointly learn its homogeneous representation with KG paths to improve contrastive representations for effective path ranking. We evaluate our approach on standard datasets for ConvQA, on which it significantly outperforms existing baselines on all domains and overall. Specifically, in some cases, the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and [email protected] ranking metrics improve by absolute 10 and 18 points, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art performance.

In this paper, we introduce the MLM (Multiple Languages and Modalities) dataset - a new resource to train and evaluate multitask systems on samples in multiple modalities and three languages. The generation process and inclusion of semantic data provide a resource that further tests the ability for multitask systems to learn relationships between entities. The dataset is designed for researchers and developers who build applications that perform multiple tasks on data encountered on the web and in digital archives. A second version of MLM provides a geo-representative subset of the data with weighted samples for countries of the European Union. We demonstrate the value of the resource in developing novel applications in the digital humanities with a motivating use case and specify a benchmark set of tasks to retrieve modalities and locate entities in the dataset. Evaluation of baseline multitask and single task systems on the full and geo-representative versions of MLM demonstrate the challenges of generalising on diverse data. In addition to the digital humanities, we expect the resource to contribute to research in multimodal representation learning, location estimation, and scene understanding.

Question Answering (QA) systems over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) aim to provide a concise answer to a given natural language question. Despite the significant evolution of QA methods over the past years, there are still some core lines of work, which are lagging behind. This is especially true for methods and datasets that support the verbalization of answers in natural language. Specifically, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing Question Answering datasets provide any verbalization data for the question-query pairs. Hence, we aim to fill this gap by providing the first QA dataset VQuAnDa that includes the verbalization of each answer. We base VQuAnDa on a commonly used large-scale QA dataset – LC-QuAD, in order to support compatibility and continuity of previous work. We complement the dataset with baseline scores for measuring future training and evaluation work, by using a set of standard sequence to sequence models and sharing the results of the experiments. This resource empowers researchers to train and evaluate a variety of models to generate answer verbalizations.