NEC Labs America Attends OECC June 28 – July 2, 2026

NEC Laboratories America is proud to participate in OECC 2026, the 31st Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference, taking place in Busan, South Korea. We look forward to connecting with the international photonics and communications community and sharing the work we’re doing to shape the next generation of optical networks.

Open SAT: How We Taught AI to Search Satellite Images Like a Search Engine

Satellite imagery is vast, high-resolution, and rich with information, but finding specific objects within it using natural language has remained a stubborn challenge. Open-SAT, developed by researchers at NEC Laboratories America and North South University, tackles this problem without retraining any models.

NEC Labs America Attends CVPR 2026 in Denver, CO June 3-7, 2026

NEC Labs America is heading to Denver for CVPR 2026, one of the most prestigious gatherings in computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition. The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition brings innovators from around the world to share breakthroughs.

Automated Negotiation and Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting for Efficient Procurement

Procurement is a key function in supply chain management that involves acquiring goods and services to meet organizational needs. Efficient procurement is crucial for minimizing costs, ensuring timely delivery, and maintaining quality standards. This paper explores the integration of automated negotiation and multimodal time-series forecasting to enhance procurement processes. Automated negotiation can streamline interactions with suppliers, while multimodal time-series forecasting can improve demand prediction accuracy by leveraging diverse data sources leading to better negotiation outputs. By combining these approaches, organizations can optimize procurement strategies, reduce costs, and improve overall supply chain efficiency. We present two case studies using simulations based on real-world data for procurement that show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Training Small AI Models Without Blindly Trusting Big Teacher Models

Machine learning is shifting from learning from data alone to learning from both data and teacher models. Beta-KD uses uncertainty-aware Bayesian weighting to train compact multimodal AI without blindly trusting every teacher signal.

Open-SAT: LLM-Guided Query Embedding Refinement for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval in Satellite Imagery

In satellite applications, user queries often take the form of open-ended natural language, extending beyond a fixed set of predefined categories. This open-vocabulary nature poses significant challenges for retrieving relevant image tiles, as the retrieval system must generalize to a wide range of unseen objects and concepts. While vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP are widely used for text-image retrieval, even fine-tuned variants often struggle to accurately align such queries with satellite imagery. To address this, we propose Open-SAT, a training-free query embedding refinement algorithm that operates at inference time to improve alignment between user queries and satellite image content. Open-SAT uses VLMs to compute embeddings for image tiles, which are stored in a vector database for efficient retrieval. At query time, it leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to refine the text embeddings by incorporating contextual information about objects of interest and their surroundings. A threshold-free retrieval mechanism further enhances accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results in three public benchmarks demonstrate that Open-SAT improves the F1 score by up to 16.04%, while retrieving a comparable number of image tiles. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Open-SAT in open-vocabulary satellite image retrieval, leveraging LLM guidance without the need for additional training or supervision.

How Rule-Driven Routing Makes Retrieval-Augmented Generation Smarter

Most retrieval-augmented generation systems stop at documents, ignoring the relational databases that power finance, healthcare, and research. Our researchers built a rule-driven framework that learns which source to query for each question, delivering better answers at lower computational cost.

Ezra Ip Presents at CLEO 2026 in Charlotte, NC on May 18th

Senior Researcher Ezra Ip has been invited to present Sensors Based on Forward Transmission using the Telecom Infrastructure at CLEO 2026 in Charlotte, NC, on Monday, May 18th, from 5:30-6:00pm. He explores a compelling frontier: using existing telecom networks as environmental sensors.

Closed-Form Statistical Modeling of PDL-Induced SNR Margins for Reliable Optical Networks

We develop closed-form formulas for PDL-induced SNR margins using solutions based on central limit theorem. Experimental validations confirm accurate and conservative performancepredictions, enabling precise quality of transmission assessment and margin-aware design in optical networks.

RunAgent: Interpreting Natural-Language Plans with Constraint-Guided Execution (IEEE)

Humans solve problems by executing targeted plans, yet large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for structured workflow execution. We propose RunAgent, a multiagent plan execution platform that interprets natural-language plans while enforcing stepwise execution through constraints and rubrics. RunAgent bridges the expressiveness of natural language and the determinism of programming languages via an agentic language with explicit control constructs (e.g., IF, GOTO, FORALL). It autonomously derives and verifies constraints at each step; dynamically selects among LLM reasoning, tool use, and Python execution; and integrates error correction to ensure correctness. Evaluations on Natural-plan and SciBench Datasets demonstrate that RunAgent outperforms baseline LLMs and state-of-the-art PlanGEN methods.