DFKI auf der IJCAI-ECAI 2026

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) dominate both everyday and specialized applications, but their high computational demand, energy consumption, and privacy risks are increasingly critiqued. Small language models (SLMs) mitigate these drawbacks and are gaining momentum in scenarios where full LLM capabilities are not required, such as agents, industrial systems, or edge devices. Nevertheless, a systematic comparison of model capabilities, energy usage, and scaling behavior has not been conducted yet. We evaluate 70+ SLMs from 2023–2025 on five task-specific benchmarks and compare them with two popular LLMs, revealing key trade-offs between energy, performance, and model selection. Our findings challenge common assumptions: First, smaller models are not automatically more efficient, and energy increases do not guarantee performance gains. Second, newer SLMs show clear improvements in performance–energy trade-offs, though the progress begins to plateau. Last, the efficiency landscape forms a clear Pareto frontier: initial energy increases yield substantial gains, but the last percentage points of performance need orders of magnitude more energy. These results highlight diminishing returns of scaling and emphasize the need for informed, task-aware model selection rather than size-driven choices.

Autor:innen: Fabian Reichwald, Lukas Schiesser, Christiane Plociennik, Leonhard Kunz, Simon Pukrop, Martin Ruskowski, Oliver Thomas

Abstract: In nuclear power plant accidents, airborne radioiodine poses major health risks, making reliable reconstructions of its spatiotemporal distribution crucial for emergency management. Current state-of-the-art prognosis systems use atmospheric dispersion modeling but ignore posterior evidence from emergency care centers, comprising movement profiles and thyroid measurements of affected individuals. A first study showed that the AI method Cuboid Splatting can reconstruct iodine air concentrations from such data but it ignores simulations from established prognosis systems.

Our multidisciplinary team extends Cuboid Splatting by incorporating these simulations as priors and subsequently correcting them using movement and thyroid data. Several ways to translate and correct priors are developed. The best-performing approaches are combined into a novel Cuboid Splatting-with-prior mechanism, which we evaluate using constructed prior scenarios representing different error types and intensities.

Using Cuboid Splatting-with-prior yields more accurate reconstructions than (i) the used dispersion simulations alone and (ii) plain Cuboid Splatting without prior. Across reconstructions, the mean scenario error is 19.61%, improving on (i) by 28.02pp and on (ii) by 89.86pp, the latter with particularly large gains at high spatial resolution. These results demonstrate that combining simulation-based priors with measurement-based posterior inference can substantially improve the reconstruction of iodine air activity concentrations in nuclear emergencies.

Autor:innen: Mareike Böckel, Stephan Doerfel, Kathrin Meisenberg, Oliver Meisenberg, Max Friedrich, Mattis Hartwig

Abstract: While Open-Set Semantic Mapping and 3D Semantic Scene Graphs (3DSSGs) have become established paradigms in robotic perception in recent years, most existing works are limited to small environments or sacrifice geometric detail and instance granularity for scalability. Deploying these systems at scale for large multi-room environments remains a major challenge due to the computational overhead of high-dimensional feature integration and the maintenance of the 3DSSG structure. In this paper, we demonstrate a modular mapping architecture that establishes 3D Semantic Scene Graphs (3DSSGs) as its foundational backend. Unlike approaches that generate scene graphs as a post-processing step, our system maintains the graph as the primary, incrementally updated knowledge representation. Our architecture is optimized for GPU-accelerated operations, enabling the dense representation of extensive environments containing thousands of unique object instances, supporting open-vocabulary queries via CLIP features without requiring any additional post-processing steps. In this live demonstration, we showcase our pipeline processing large-scale data from the Habitat Matterport 3D (HM3D) dataset as well as live data collected from a handheld device. Attendees will interact with the generated maps by performing real-time, open-set queries (e.g., “find the vintage wooden chair”) across complex, multi-story environments, highlights the system's capability to represent dynamic, human-aligned environmental understanding suitable for downstream robotic tasks.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/ZpUPamQJ18c

Autor:innen: Felix Igelbrink, Lennart Niecksch, Martin Günther, Marian Renz, Oscar Lima, Martin Atzmueller

Abstract: Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), an increasingly popular method for wildlife monitoring, generates large volumes of data whose analysis depends on instance-level annotations that are costly to obtain. Archival sound collections provide weak labels that lack temporal localisation. In prior work, we demonstrated that Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) can extract approximate event locations from weakly labelled PAM data, suggesting it may be applied to sound collection data.

This demo operationalizes that approach within an interactive workflow that connects weakly annotated sound collections to downstream PAM deployment. The system supports configurable MIL-based localisation, lightweight interactive refinement, and transfer to an independent PAM dataset.

We carried out a preliminary evaluation with an actual sound library from a museum collection and a benchmark PAM dataset. Results confirm that weakly annotated sound collections can serve as a viable training signal for downstream PAM detection and illustrate differences between alternative MIL instantiations under real transfer conditions.

Demo video: cst.dfki.de/projects-weak-supervision-demo

Autor:innen: Novruz Mammadli, Rida Saghir, Kanwar Ammar Ali, Prathmesh Doddanawar, Thiago S. Gouvêa, Daniel Sonntag

Abstract: Active learning reduces annotation effort by selecting informative samples, yet most approaches remain model-driven, offering users little control over training or support for understanding model behaviour. Human-centric active learning brings users further into the loop by introducing additional points of interaction, particularly in the sample selection process. However, such systems are typically demonstrated using fixed feature projections or visualizations of shallow classifier outputs. We present a representation-centric active learning tool in which interaction takes place directly within the model’s representation space. By operating in the same space the model uses for decision making, the interface supports the co-evolution of representations and user understanding. We additionally report initial qualitative (think-aloud) and quantitative findings from a pilot study, illustrating that such representation-centric frameworks can achieve comparable performance to standard baselines while fostering improved human–model collaboration.

Video and the code available at https://cst.dfki.de/demo-interacting-model-space

Autor:innen: Rida Saghir, Thiago S. Gouvêa, Daniel Sonntag

Abstract: Event extraction is fundamental to information extraction. Prior approaches often separate event detection and argument extraction or depend on dataset-specific designs, limiting scalability and cross-domain generalization. We propose a unified generative, sequence-to-sequence framework that performs all event extraction subtasks jointly and supports both end-to-end and pipeline configurations. We fine-tune pre-trained language models on multiple event datasets across diverse domains, enabling a single model to retain domain-specific semantics while generalizing over large, evolving label spaces. Cross-domain experiments show strong, robust performance across datasets, demonstrating a scalable solution for real-world event extraction. We demonstrate these capabilities through a web-based application tailored for researchers and practitioners. The platform supports inspection of different configurations and facilitates cross-domain comparisons.

Autor:innen: Siting Liang, Omar Adjali, Bhatti Omair, Daniel Sonntag

Der SAFER-Workshop bringt Forschende, Industrieexpert:innen, politische Entscheidungsträger:innen und Studierende zusammen, um gemeinsam eine Roadmap für vertrauenswürdige agentische KI-Systeme zu entwickeln. Angesichts wachsender Autonomie und gesellschaftlicher Relevanz stehen insbesondere technische, regulatorische und ethische Fragestellungen im Fokus.

Auf Basis von Positionspapieren und strukturierten Diskussionen entwickeln die Teilnehmenden ein gemeinsames Verständnis von Risiken, Chancen und Governance-Ansätzen. Der Workshop schafft damit einen Rahmen für interdisziplinären Austausch und setzt Impulse für die Gestaltung sicherer und verantwortungsvoller agentischer KI-Ökosysteme.

Weitere Informationen & Workshop-Teilnahme:  https://github.com/mtmaybury/SafeAgents

Der SuRE-Workshop widmet sich den wachsenden ökologischen und rechnerischen Anforderungen moderner KI-Systeme. Mit zunehmender Größe von Modellen, Datenmengen und Rechenaufwänden rücken Energieverbrauch, Ressourceneffizienz und der gerechte Zugang zu KI-Technologien immer stärker in den Fokus. Der Workshop beschäftigt sich mit messbaren und reproduzierbaren Ansätzen für nachhaltige KI, einschließlich Effizienzmetriken, Benchmarks und empirischen Systemanalysen. 

Durch die Verbindung methodischer Forschung mit praktischen Anwendungen – etwa in Edge- und Embedded-Systemen – werden zentrale Zielkonflikte und Designentscheidungen diskutiert. Beiträge, die sowohl Leistungsfähigkeit als auch Nachhaltigkeit von KI-Systemen weiterentwickeln, sind ausdrücklich willkommen.

Weitere Informationen & Workshop-Teilnahme: https://sure-wshop.github.io/

Der ETHICAIA-Workshop konzentriert sich auf die ethischen und gesellschaftlichen Aspekte von KI im Gesundheitswesen. Da KI-Systeme zunehmend klinische Entscheidungsprozesse und medizinische Arbeitsabläufe unterstützen, gewinnen Fragen der Fairness, Robustheit, Verantwortung und gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen stark an Bedeutung.

Der Workshop bringt Forschende aus verschiedenen KI-Disziplinen zusammen, darunter maschinelles Lernen, Sprachverarbeitung, Computer Vision und multimodale Systeme, mit einem gemeinsamen Fokus auf klinische Anwendungen. In Form von Fachbeiträgen, eingeladenen Vorträgen und Diskussionsformaten wird erarbeitet, wie ethische Perspektiven stärker in die klinische KI-Forschung integriert werden können. Ziel ist es, verantwortungsvolle Innovationen an der Schnittstelle von KI und Medizin zu stärken.

Weitere Informationen & Workshop-Teilnahme: https://ethicaia.loria.fr/

Dieser Workshop bietet Forschenden und Praktiker:innen aus Künstlicher Intelligenz, Robotik, Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion (HRI), Biomechanik sowie angrenzenden Disziplinen eine interdisziplinäre Plattform, um neue Ansätze für Design und Steuerung humanoider Systeme zu diskutieren. Im Zusammenspiel technischer und biologisch inspirierter Perspektiven entstehen dabei neue Impulse für die nächste Generation humanoider Robotik.

Im Fokus stehen zentrale Herausforderungen wie der Sim-to-Real-Transfer, Adaptivität und menschenzentrierte Gestaltung. Beiträge und Diskussionen eröffnen neue Perspektiven auf Robotermorphologie, Steuerung und Interaktion und leisten einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Entwicklung robuster, alltagstauglicher Systeme mit wachsender gesellschaftlicher Relevanz.

Weitere Informationen & Workshop-Teilnahme: https://hominoid-robot.dfki-bremen.de/