18 papers

Applied & Industry

Agents in the real world: supply chain, operations research, business process, discovery.

Papers
18
Read time
5.2h
Avg length
17m
01
Applied & Industry

A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?

Borrowing the SAE self-driving levels, this survey defines a 6-level autonomy ladder (L0–L5) for "data agents," maps every published system onto it, and argues the honest answer to the hype question is "we're stuck at the L2→L3 jump — real autonomous orchestration over messy data doesn't exist yet."

ZHU, WANG, YANG, LI, LUO ET AL. (HKUST-GZ, TSINGHUA, RUC, HUAWEI, DEEPWISDOM)
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22 min
Source
arXiv:2510.23587
02
Applied & Industry

America's AI Action Plan

The U.S. federal government's official roadmap to "win the AI race" by stripping regulation, building energy + data-center infrastructure at speed, and exporting the full American AI stack to allies while locking China out of compute.

THE WHITE HOUSE (KRATSIOS, SACKS, RUBIO) · JULY 2025 · EXECUTIVE ORDER 14179
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18 min
03
Applied & Industry

An Agentic AI for a New Paradigm in Business Process Development

Instead of hard-wiring a business process as a fixed sequence of tasks, describe it as a set of *goals*, the *information objects* that prove each goal is met, and the autonomous *agents* that produce those objects — and let the runnable workflow emerge from which objects are ready.

MOHAMMAD AZARIJAFARI, LUISA MICH, MICHELE MISSIKOFF (UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO / CNR-IASI) · ITAL-IA 2025
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14 min
04
Applied & Industry

Artificial Intelligence for Operations Research: Revolutionizing the OR Process

A field map of where machine learning plugs into the classic "predict → model → solve" optimization pipeline, so you can replace hand-tuned solver heuristics and human modeling with learned components that adapt to your data.

ZHENAN FAN, BISSAN GHADDAR, XINGLU WANG, LINZI XING, YONG ZHANG, ZIRUI ZHOU
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22 min
Source
arXiv:2401.03244
05
Applied & Industry

Clustering Market Regimes Using the Wasserstein Distance

Instead of describing each slice of market history by a handful of summary statistics, treat each slice as a full probability distribution and cluster those distributions directly using optimal-transport distance — a tiny, model-free tweak to k-means that detects bull/bear regimes more robustly than moment-matching or hidden Markov models.

B. HORVATH, Z. ISSA, A. MUGURUZA · 2021
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16 min
Source
arXiv:2006.03487
06
Applied & Industry

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Machine Scheduling: Methodology, the State-of-the-Art, and Future Directions

A field map of how deep reinforcement learning is being used to schedule factory machines — sorting every approach into four "brains" (plain neural nets, encoder-decoders, graph neural nets, and metaheuristic hybrids) and telling you which one wins on speed, scale, and generalization.

KHADIVI, CHARTER, YAGHOUBI, JALAYER, AHANG, SHOJAEINASAB, NAJJARAN (UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA) · OCT 2023
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22 min
Source
arXiv:2310.03195
07
Applied & Industry

Demand Forecasting at Wayfair

Wayfair forecasts 18 months of monthly demand for 4 million products by blending a stable statistical "top-down" forecast with a responsive ML "bottom-up" forecast, mixing them per-item and per-horizon — and it earned tens of millions of dollars a year.

RYAN MITCHELL, GEORGE MONOKROUSSOS, ARSA NIKZAD · FORESIGHT 2025 Q4 (AWARD WINNER) · NO ARXIV
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14 min
08
Applied & Industry

Extract-0: A Specialized Language Model for Document Information Extraction

A 7B-parameter model, fine-tuned for $196 with synthetic data + LoRA + a semantic-similarity reward, beats GPT-4.1 and o3 at pulling structured JSON out of documents.

HENRIQUE GODOY (INTELI, SÃO PAULO) · SEP 2025
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18 min
Source
arXiv:2509.22906
09
Applied & Industry

Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Model for Automated Engineering Drawing Information Extraction

A 0.23B-parameter open-source vision-language model, fully fine-tuned on just 400 expert-labeled engineering drawings, beats zero-shot GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet by 30-52% on extracting tolerancing data — proving that for a narrow visual-extraction task, a tiny tuned model crushes a giant general one.

MUHAMMAD TAYYAB KHAN, LEQUN CHEN, YE HAN NG, WENHE FENG, NICHOLAS YEW JIN TAN, SEUNG KI MOON (A*STAR / NTU SINGAPORE) · 2024
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14 min
10
Applied & Industry

Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce

Stanford asked 1,500 workers across 104 jobs which of their tasks they actually *want* AI agents to take over, scored those same tasks for technical feasibility with 52 AI experts, and built a public map (WORKBank) showing where agent builders are aiming at the wrong targets.

YIJIA SHAO, HUMISHKA ZOPE, YUCHENG JIANG, JIAXIN PEI, DAVID NGUYEN, ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON, DIYI YANG (STANFORD) · 2025
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16 min
Source
arXiv:2506.06576
11
Applied & Industry

How People Use ChatGPT

OpenAI ran LLM classifiers over a privacy-scrubbed sample of ~1.1M real ChatGPT conversations to measure, for the first time from the inside, who uses the product and what they actually do with it — and the headline is that ~70% of usage is non-work, "writing" and "decision support" dominate, and coding/companionship are surprisingly tiny.

CHATTERJI, CUNNINGHAM, DEMING, HITZIG, ONG, SHAN & WADMAN (OPENAI + HARVARD/DUKE/NBER) · NBER WORKING PAPER 34255 · SEPT 2025
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16 min
12
Applied & Industry

Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery

Kosmos is an AI scientist that runs for 12 hours straight — 200 agent rollouts, 42,000 lines of analysis code, 1,500 papers — staying coherent the whole time by routing everything through a shared, structured "world model" instead of one ballooning chat context.

MITCHENER, YIU, CHANG ET AL. (EDISON SCIENTIFIC / FUTUREHOUSE) · NOV 2025
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22 min
Source
arXiv:2511.02824
13
Applied & Industry

Large Language Models and Operations Research: A Structured Survey

A map of how LLMs are eating operations research — turning plain-English problem descriptions into solvable optimization models, generating and evolving the heuristics that solve them, and in some cases solving the problem directly — organized into three clean pillars you can build a service line around.

YANG WANG, KAI LI
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22 min
Source
arXiv:2509.18180
14
Applied & Industry

Large Language Models for Supply Chain Decisions

Put an LLM in front of your optimization solver — not in place of it — so non-technical planners can interrogate, stress-test, and re-run supply-chain models in plain English, cutting decision time from days to minutes while your proprietary data never leaves your walls.

SIMCHI-LEVI (MIT), MELLOU & MENACHE (MICROSOFT RESEARCH), PATHURI (MICROSOFT) · SPRINGER "AI IN SUPPLY CHAINS" CHAPTER, 2024
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16 min
Source
arXiv:2307.03875
15
Applied & Industry

Optimizing Multi-Tier Supply Chain Ordering with LNN+XGBoost: Mitigating the Bullwhip Effect

Pair a tiny, fast "liquid" neural net (great at reading time-series dynamics) with XGBoost (great at squeezing accuracy out of tabular features), then drive a profit-maximizing order simulator with the combined forecast — and you get more profit and less of the demand-amplification ("bullwhip") chaos that wrecks multi-tier supply chains.

CHUNAN TONG (UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND) · 2025
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16 min
Source
arXiv:2507.21383
16
Applied & Industry

Optimizing Supply Chain Networks with the Power of Graph Neural Networks

This paper takes a real-world supply-chain dataset (41 FMCG products, their dependencies, and 221 days of demand), defines "predict next demand for one product" as a benchmark task, and shows that graph-aware neural networks can forecast it far more accurately than a plain neural net — establishing baselines others can build on.

CHI-SHENG CHEN, YING-JUNG CHEN · ARXIV PREPRINT 2025
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14 min
Source
arXiv:2501.06221
17
Applied & Industry

Real-Time Health Supply Chain Optimization Using Digital Twin Technology

Wire live IoT sensor data into a continuously-updating virtual model of a health supply chain so AI can forecast disruptions (spoilage, stockouts, equipment failure) and recommend fixes *before* they happen — instead of after.

SAMEER KHAN · SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY, 2025 · NO ARXIV ID
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14 min
18
Applied & Industry

Tabular Data Understanding with LLMs: A Survey of Recent Advances and Challenges

Feeding a 2D table into a 1D language model is a lossy, format-sensitive mess, and this survey maps out how people represent tables, what tasks they test on, and the three structural gaps (shallow reasoning, fragility on complex inputs, no format generalization) that anyone building table-aware AI keeps tripping over.

XIAOFENG WU, ALAN RITTER, WEI XU (GEORGIA TECH) · JUL 2025
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16 min
Source
arXiv:2508.00217