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small language model

709 papers

From PDF to Dataset: Semi-Automated Extraction of Fine-Tuning Data

Preparing fine-tuning datasets for large language models (LLMs) commonly involves substantial manual effort, particularly in extracting, structuring, and validating data from unstructured sources. This study proposes a semi-automated, human-in-the-loop approach for generating fine-tuning question–answer (QA) pairs from PDF documents. The research investigates how unstructured textual content can be systematically transformed into validated QA data suitable for fine-tuning, while mitigating the risks associated with hallucinated or low-quality model outputs.The proposed system consists of a web-based architecture combining a React frontend with a Flask backend interfacing with the OpenAI API. Users provide a PDF document and a target page range, after which the system extracts text and generates candidate QA pairs. These candidates are presented for manual inspection, filtering, and refinement, prior to export in a structured JSON format compatible with fine-tuning pipelines.The results indicate that the proposed approach reduces the effort required for manual dataset construction while preserving data quality through mandatory human validation. The study highlights the effectiveness of hybrid automation workflows in accelerating fine-tuning dataset preparation without compromising reliability, and contributes design insights for human-centered tools supporting LLM customization.

Niklas Suvitie, Mika Saari, Pekka Abrahamsson · 1 citation
#computer vision Preprint Jul 2026

Zero-Shot Heart Rate Variability Forecasting from Consumer Wearables Using Time Series Foundation Models

Short-term Heart Rate Variability (HRV) forecasting could provide clinicians with actionable lead time for detecting autonomic dysfunction and adverse cardiac events. Consumer wearable devices generate fragmented, artifact-rich HRV signals that challenge conventional forecasting approaches. In this study, we evaluated the forecasting ability of three Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), TimesFM, Chronos, and MOIRAI, against traditional baselines (Mean, Exponential Smoothing, and Exponentially Weighted Moving Average) on real-world wearable data collected from 49 healthy individuals. To address data fragmentation, we introduce a variability-preserving imputation method that augments linear interpolation with locally adaptive stochastic noise, retaining physiological dynamics essential for accurate forecasting. The results show that TSFMs outperformed all baselines without fine-tuning, achieving average Mean Absolute Scaled Error (MASE) between 0.81 and 0.87 across TSFMs and both context lengths (32 and 64 time steps), with Chronos and TimesFM as the top models, though MOIRAI showed limited gains over baselines. With up to a 2-hour forecast horizon, the results establish a baseline for TSFMs'performance on a real-world dataset, highlighting domain-specific fine-tuning as a promising direction for clinical deployment.

Luukas Peräkylä, F. Sohrab, Ville Hautamäki et al. · 0 citations

Context Before Code: An Experience Report on Vibe Coding in Practice

Code-generating tools are increasingly used in software development, yet experience reports on conversational"vibe coding"under production constraints remain limited. This paper presents an experience report from a small full-stack team that applied contextual prompting and explicit architectural constraints to build (i) a multi-project agent learning platform designed for sustained, production-oriented use and (ii) an academic retrieval-augmented generation system. The agent platform supports multiple isolated projects, each with structured memory and background processing, thereby enforcing project-level isolation. The RAG system provides citation-grounded answers, role-based access control, and evaluation tracking. Across both systems, vibe coding accelerated scaffolding and integration. However, the generated code often under-specified isolation rules and infrastructure constraints when these were not explicitly defined. Consequently, aspects such as multi-tenancy, access control, memory policies, and asynchronous processing required deliberate architectural design and verification. We observe a shift in engineering effort from boilerplate implementation toward constraint specification and enforcement auditing. We also identify recurring architectural"non-delegation zones"where conversational code generation remains insufficient for production reliability.

Md Nasir Uddin Shuvo, M. Islam, Mahade Hasan et al. · 0 citations
#computer vision Preprint Jul 2026

Epic-Organized vs. Requirement-Aligned Gherkin: An Empirical Evaluation of LLM-Based Acceptance Criteria Generation

Automated authoring of Gherkin Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria remains a manual bottleneck in requirements engineering. This study investigates whether epic-organized LLM-generated Gherkin produces higher quality and coverage than requirement-aligned generation. We compare our Timeless (an epic-organized LLM pipeline) approach against a naive large language model (LLM) baseline on four requirements documents (107 requirements) from the PURE dataset. Evaluation covers structural metrics, automated requirement coverage via TF-IDF and dense embeddings, and blind expert assessment by four researchers. In our evaluation, the JSON-constrained pipeline produced structurally valid scenarios across all generated outputs, while the zero-shot baseline achieved 99% structural validity. Semantic coverage was comparable to the baseline, with Timeless achieving 94.3% semantic Requirement Coverage Rate compared with 92.9% for the baseline. TF-IDF produced lower coverage scores for the epic-organized output, suggesting that lexical metrics may miss coverage when scenarios paraphrase requirements at a higher level of abstraction. Expert raters prefer the epic-organized strategy on Correctness (4.61 vs 4.14), Executability (4.61 vs 4.07), and Completeness (4.31 vs 3.50). Overall, the results suggest that epic-organized generation can improve perceived Gherkin quality while maintaining comparable semantic coverage, although broader replication is needed before generalizing this finding.

Shahbaz Siddeeq, M. Abbasi, Jussi Rasku et al. · 0 citations
#computer vision Open access Mar 2024

LLM-based agents for automating the enhancement of user story quality: An early report

In agile software development, maintaining high-quality user stories is crucial, but also challenging. This study explores the use of large language models to automatically improve the user story quality in Austrian Post Group IT agile teams. We developed a reference model for an Autonomous LLM-based Agent System and implemented it at the company. The quality of user stories in the study and the effectiveness of these agents for user story quality improvement was assessed by 11 participants across six agile teams. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs in improving user story quality, contributing to the research on AI role in agile development, and providing a practical example of the transformative impact of AI in an industry setting.

Zheying Zhang, M. Rayhan, Tomas Herda et al. · 48 citations · ⚡4
#machine learning Open access Jun 2025

Engineering RAG Systems for Real-World Applications: Design, Development, and Evaluation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are emerging as a key approach for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in external knowledge, addressing limitations in factual accuracy and contextual relevance. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that report on the development of RAG-based implementations grounded in real-world use cases, evaluated through general user involvement, and accompanied by systematic documentation of lessons learned. This paper presents five domain-specific RAG applications developed for real-world scenarios across governance, cybersecurity, agriculture, industrial research, and medical diagnostics. Each system incorporates multilingual OCR, semantic retrieval via vector embeddings, and domain-adapted LLMs, deployed through local servers or cloud APIs to meet distinct user needs. A web-based evaluation involving a total of 100 participants assessed the systems across six dimensions: (i) Ease of Use, (ii) Relevance, (iii) Transparency, (iv) Responsiveness, (v) Accuracy, and (vi) Likelihood of Recommendation. Based on user feedback and our development experience, we documented twelve key lessons learned, highlighting technical, operational, and ethical challenges affecting the reliability and usability of RAG systems in practice.

M. Hasan, Muhammad Waseem, Kai-Kristian Kemell et al. · 10 citations · ⚡1
#computer vision Open access Jun 2025

LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Intelligent Refactoring of Haskell Code

Refactoring is a constant activity in software development and maintenance. Scale and maintain software systems are based on code refactoring. However, this process is still labor intensive, as it requires programmers to analyze the codebases in detail to avoid introducing new defects. In this research, we put forward a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent system to automate the refactoring process on Haskell code. The objective of this research is to evaluate the effect of LLM-based agents in performing structured and semantically accurate refactoring on Haskell code. Our proposed multi-agent system based on specialized agents with distinct roles, including code analysis, refactoring execution, verification, and debugging. To test the effectiveness and practical applicability of the multi-agent system, we conducted evaluations using different open-source Haskell codebases. The results of the experiments carried out showed that the proposed LLM-based multi-agent system could average 11.03% decreased complexity in code, an improvement of 22.46% in overall code quality, and increase performance efficiency by an average of 13.27%. Furthermore, memory allocation was optimized by up to 14.57%. These results highlight the ability of LLM-based multi-agent in managing refactoring tasks targeted toward functional programming paradigms. Our findings hint that LLM-based multi-agent systems integration into the refactoring of functional programming languages can enhance maintainability and support automated development workflows.

Shahbaz Siddeeq, Muhammad Waseem, Z. Rasheed et al. · 4 citations
#machine learning Open access Feb 2025

Anomaly detection in smart power grids with graph-regularized MS-SVDD: a multimodal subspace learning approach

A generalized Multimodal Subspace Support Vector Data Description model with graph-embedded regularization is proposed, illustrating how relational and structural information can be systematically embedded into one-class models, enabling robust learning under complex, high-dimensional, and multimodal conditions.

Thomas Debelle, F. Sohrab, Pekka Abrahamsson et al. · 1 citation
#computer vision Book Open access Apr 2026

From Business Meetings to Requirement Artifacts: An Agentic AI Approach with MARARE

This paper presents MARARE, a real-time multi-agent system that transforms meeting dialogues into structured software requirements. One agent interacts with participants, while background agents extract and verify requirements collaboratively. Evaluation using the LLM-as-a-Judge method across five meetings (5–8 minutes each) shows a mean coverage of 80.0 ± 11.2 % (mean ± SD), semantic similarity of 0.86 ± 0.05, and hallucination rate of 14.3 ± 6.2 %. Preliminary results indicate performance differences across LLMs, suggesting that model choice influences coverage, consistency, and hallucination rates.

Malik Abdul Sami, Gessé Evangelista, Kai-Kristian Kemell et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Open access 2026

Bridging Humans and LLMs: Investigating Human-AI Collaboration in Multi-agent Requirements Analysis for Organizational AI Adoption

Context: Organizations adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) face challenges in eliciting and analyzing requirements that align with strategic objectives, especially when human oversight and iterative refinement are needed. Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Multi-agent systems provide a potential solution by supporting structured and collaborative Requirements Engineering (RE) processes for AI adoption planning. Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate whether a multi-agent system, built on LLMs and supported by human input, can assist in requirements analysis for AI adoption. Method: We used a mixed-method approach: (i) designed and developed a multi-agent system to support the generation and prioritization of requirements for AI adoption, (ii) conducted multiple case studies with four companies to evaluate the system, and (iii) collected data through post-session questionnaires from nine participants and follow-up interviews, one per company. Results: Questionnaire and interview findings together indicate that the system may assist in identifying relevant and goal-aligned requirements. Seven participants considered the generated requirements relevant, and six found them aligned with organizational goals. Participants noted that iterative feedback improved completeness and feasibility, often within two feedback rounds. Both data sources show that human input was essential to clarify technical details, ensure contextual accuracy, and validate prioritization results. Participants from all companies also identified usability, transparency, and scalability as areas requiring further refinement for broader organizational use. Conclusions: LLM-based multi-agent systems can support strategic AI planning by enabling iterative refinement with human experts. Future work will include more interviews with stakeholders and adjustments to system features to improve transparency, usability, and scalability.

Malik Abdul Sami, Zheying Zhang, Muhammad Waseem et al. · 6 citations
#computer vision Review Aug 2026

REFINE: A Multi-Agent LLM Approach for Evidence-Guided Code Refactoring

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automated code refactoring. However, generated changes must reduce targeted quality problems without introducing new issues or altering behaviour-relevant code structures. We introduce REFINE (Refactoring with Evidence-aware Flow for Integrated ageNtic Execution), a tool-agnostic, evidence-aware multi-agent approach for generating Java file-level refactoring candidates. REFINE combines static-analysis-guided smell identification, smell-informed planning, LLM-based transformation, automated re-analysis, preservation checks, and structured reporting. We evaluate REFINE on 450 Java files from 15 open-source systems, producing 1,350 model-pass outputs using OpenAI GPT-5.5, Google Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, and Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8. REFINE reduces detected code smells by 68.26%, 72.79%, and 68.49% across the three configurations, respectively, with the strongest reductions observed for major smells. A matched 150-file direct-prompt baseline shows that REFINE achieves a higher median code-smell reduction with smaller edits and fewer public-method removals. However, broader quality improvements are inconsistent, and preservation checks reveal residual risks, including assert/fail-call changes and public-method removal. Therefore, REFINE outputs should be treated as refactoring candidates requiring compilation, testing, dependency analysis, and human review before adoption in repository- or system-level settings.

Muhammad Waseem, Aakash Ahmad, Pekka Abrahamsson · 0 citations
#small language model Preprint Aug 2026

HEPToolBench 1.2: Testing How Reliably Language Models Can Drive Particle Physics Software

HEPToolBench is introduced, a benchmark of 28 collider-simulation tasks scored by deterministic, task-specific scorers, plus a three-task structured-debugging extension, and moving syntax generation into deterministic software can substantially improve reliability for both small local and frontier models.

Aadarsh Singh, Sudhir Vempati · 1 citation

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Microsoft Research Blog Aug 31, 2026

GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Toward population-scale discovery with efficient pathology foundation models

What if pathology foundation models could do more with less? GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash cut computational demands while maintaining strong performance, opening the door to larger studies and broader exploration. The post GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Toward population-scale discovery with efficient pathology foundation models appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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