The dynamic propagation of social media has broadened the reach of financial advisory content through podcast videos, yet extracting insights from lengthy, multimodal segments (30-40 minutes) remains challenging. We introduce FASTER (Financial Advisory Summariser with Textual Embedded Relevant images), a modular framework that tackles three key challenges: (1) extracting modality-specific features, (2) producing optimized, concise summaries, and (3) aligning visual keyframes with associated textual points. FASTER employs BLIP for semantic visual descriptions, OCR for textual patterns, and Whisper-based transcription with Speaker diarization as BOS features. A modified Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)-based loss function, equipped with BOS-specific fact-checking, ensures precision, relevance, and factual consistency against the human-aligned summary. A ranker-based retrieval mechanism further aligns keyframes with summarized content, enhancing interpretability and cross-modal coherence. To acknowledge data resource scarcity, we introduce Fin-APT, a dataset comprising 470 publicly accessible financial advisory pep-talk videos for robust multimodal research. Comprehensive cross-domain experiments confirm FASTER's strong performance, robustness, and generalizability when compared to Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). By establishing a new standard for multimodal summarization, FASTER makes financial advisory content more accessible and actionable, thereby opening new avenues for research. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/sarmistha-D/FASTER

Tool calling is a critical capability that allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external systems, significantly expanding their utility. However, research and resources for tool calling are predominantly English-centric, leaving a gap in our understanding of how to enable this functionality for other languages, such as Arabic. This paper investigates three key research questions: (1) the necessity of in-language (Arabic) tool-calling data versus relying on cross-lingual transfer, (2) the effect of general-purpose instruction tuning on tool-calling performance, and (3) the value of fine-tuning on specific, high-priority tools. To address these questions, we conduct extensive experiments using base and post-trained variants of an open-weight Arabic LLM. To enable this study, we bridge the resource gap by translating and adapting two open-source tool-calling datasets into Arabic. Our findings provide crucial insights into the optimal strategies for developing robust tool-augmented agents for Arabic.

We present an advanced approach to mobile app review analysis aimed at addressing limitations inherent in traditional star-rating systems. Star ratings, although intuitive and popular among users, often fail to capture the nuanced feedback present in detailed review texts. Traditional NLP techniques -- such as lexicon-based methods and classical machine learning classifiers -- struggle to interpret contextual nuances, domain-specific terminology, and subtle linguistic features like sarcasm. To overcome these limitations, we propose a modular framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) enhanced by structured prompting techniques. Our method quantifies discrepancies between numerical ratings and textual sentiment, extracts detailed, feature-level insights, and supports interactive exploration of reviews through retrieval-augmented conversational question answering (RAG-QA). Comprehensive experiments conducted on three diverse datasets (AWARE, Google Play, and Spotify) demonstrate that our LLM-driven approach significantly surpasses baseline methods, yielding improved accuracy, robustness, and actionable insights in challenging and context-rich review scenarios.

Flow matching has recently emerged as a powerful alternative to diffusion models, providing a continuous-time formulation for generative modeling and representation learning. Y et, we show that this framework suffers from a fundamental instability in the low-noise regime. As noise levels approach zero, arbitrarily small perturbations in the input can induce large variations in the velocity target, causing the condition number of the learning problem to diverge. This ill-conditioning not only slows optimization but also forces the encoder to reallocate its limited Jaco-bian capacity toward noise directions, thereby degrading semantic representations. We provide the first theoretical analysis of this phenomenon, which we term the low-noise pathology, establishing its intrinsic link to the structure of the flow matching objective. Building on these insights, we propose Local Contrastive Flow (LCF), a hybrid training protocol that replaces direct velocity regression with contrastive feature alignment at small noise levels, while retaining standard flow matching at moderate and high noise. Empirically, LCF not only improves convergence speed but also stabilizes representation quality. Our findings highlight the critical importance of addressing low-noise pathologies to unlock the full potential of flow matching for both generation and representation learning.

Acquiring high-quality knowledge is a central focus in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA). Recent methods use large language models (LLMs) as knowledge engines for answering. These methods generally employ image captions as visual text descriptions to assist LLMs in interpreting images. However, the captions frequently include excessive noise irrelevant to the question, and LLMs generally do not comprehend VQA tasks, limiting their reasoning capabilities. To address this issue, we propose the Summarized Caption-Rerank Augmented VQA (SCRA-VQA), which employs a pre-trained visual language model to convert images into captions. Moreover, SCRA-VQA generates contextual examples for the captions while simultaneously summarizing and reordering them to exclude unrelated information. The caption-rerank process enables LLMs to understand the image information and questions better, thus enhancing the model's reasoning ability and task adaptability without expensive end-to-end training. Based on an LLM with 6.7B parameters, SCRA-VQA performs excellently on two challenging knowledge-based VQA datasets: OK-VQA and A-OKVQA, achieving accuracies of 38.8% and 34.6%.

The effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) is heavily influenced by the reasoning strategies, or styles of thought, employed in their prompts. However, the interplay between these reasoning styles, model architecture, and task type remains poorly understood. To address this, we introduce StyleBench, a comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating reasoning styles across diverse tasks and models. We assess five representative reasoning styles--Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Tree-of-Thought (ToT), Algorithm-of-Thought (AoT), Sketch-of-Thought (SoT), and Chain-of-Draft (CoD)--on five reasoning tasks, using 15 open-source models from major families (LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, Gemma, GPT -OSS, Phi, and DeepSeek) ranging from 270M to 120B parameters. Our large-scale analysis reveals that no single style is universally optimal. We demonstrate that strategy efficacy is highly contingent on both model scale and task type: search-based methods (AoT, ToT) excel in open-ended problems but require large-scale models, while concise styles (SoT, CoD) achieve radical efficiency gains on well-defined tasks. Furthermore, we identify key behavioral patterns: smaller models frequently fail to follow output instructions and default to guessing, while reasoning robustness emerges as a function of scale. Our findings offer a crucial roadmap for selecting optimal reasoning strategies based on specific constraints, We open source the benchmark in https://github.com/JamesJunyuGuo/Style_Bench. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a diverse range of tasks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and complex question answering (Imani et al., 2023; Wang & Chen, 2023; Tan et al., 2023). A key insight from prior work is that their performance on challenging problems is not merely a function of scale, but is critically dependent on the methods used to guide reasoning (Huang & Y ang, 2025). This has spurred the development of sophisticated prompting techniques designed to structure the model's internal reasoning process. Notable among these are Chain-of-Thought (CoT) (Wei et al., 2022), which decomposes problems into sequential steps, and more advanced paradigms like Tree-of-Thought (ToT) (Y ao et al., 2023), which explores multiple reasoning paths in parallel, and Rea-sonflux (Y ang et al., 2025b), employing high-level templates to explore potential solutions. Performance remains highly sensitive to prompt phrasing and frequently necessitates iterative feedback to achieve robust results (Sel et al., 2023). In response, recent work has sought to automate reasoning strategy selection.

Vision-Language Models(VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet a substantial gap remains between their current capabilities and the reliability necessary for real-world deployment. A critical challenge is their fragility, characterized by hallucinations and poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MTRDrive, a novel framework that integrates procedural driving experiences with a dynamic toolkit to enhance generalization and proactive decision-making. MTRDrive addresses these limitations through a closed-loop system that combines a memory-based experience retrieval mechanism with dynamic toolkits. This synergy enables the model to interact more effectively with its environment, improving both reasoning and decision-making capabilities with the help of our memory-tool synergistic reasoning. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark based on complex Roadwork construction scenarios to rigorously evaluate zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our approach. On the public NAVSIM benchmark, our 3B-parameter MTRDrive model achieves an exceptional PDMS of 88.3 without chain-of-thought and sets a state-of-the-art performance bar on high-level planning, with a driving metric score of 79.8\% and a planning accuracy of 82.6\%. Rigorous zero-shot evaluation on the new Roadwork-VLM benchmark shows a strong ability to reason robustly in unseen scenarios, achieving a driving metric score of 80.2\%. These results highlight MTRDrive's potential to advance autonomous driving toward safer and more reliable systems.

The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in cloud-based services has raised significant privacy concerns, as user inputs may inadvertently expose sensitive information. Existing text anonymization and de-identification techniques, such as rule-based redaction and scrubbing, often struggle to balance privacy preservation with text naturalness and utility. In this work, we propose a zero-shot, tree-search-based iterative sentence rewriting algorithm that systematically obfuscates or deletes private information while preserving coherence, relevance, and naturalness. Our method incrementally rewrites privacy-sensitive segments through a structured search guided by a reward model, enabling dynamic exploration of the rewriting space. Experiments on privacy-sensitive datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a superior balance between privacy protection and utility preservation.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable effective in-context learning (ICL) with many-shot examples, but at the cost of high computational demand due to longer input tokens. To address this, we propose cheat-sheet ICL, which distills the information from many-shot ICL into a concise textual summary (cheat sheet) used as the context at inference time. Experiments on challenging reasoning tasks show that cheat-sheet ICL achieves comparable or better performance than many-shot ICL with far fewer tokens, and matches retrieval-based ICL without requiring test-time retrieval. These findings demonstrate that cheat-sheet ICL is a practical alternative for leveraging LLMs in downstream tasks.

Low back pain affects millions worldwide, driving the need for robust diagnostic models that can jointly analyze complex medical images and accompanying text reports. We present LumbarCLIP, a novel multimodal framework that leverages contrastive language-image pretraining to align lumbar spine MRI scans with corresponding radiological descriptions. Built upon a curated dataset containing axial MRI views paired with expert-written reports, LumbarCLIP integrates vision encoders (ResNet-50, Vision Transformer, Swin Transformer) with a BERT-based text encoder to extract dense representations. These are projected into a shared embedding space via learnable projection heads - configurable as linear or non-linear--and normalized to facilitate stable contrastive training using a soft CLIP loss. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on downstream classification, reaching up to 95.00% accuracy and 94.75% F1-score on the test set, despite inherent class imbalance. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that linear projection heads yield more effective cross-modal alignment than non-linear variants. LumbarCLIP offers a promising foundation for automated musculoskeletal diagnosis and clinical decision support.