In the age of Transformers and neural nets that write poetry, it’s tempting to assume deep learning dominates every corner of AI. But in quantitative investing, the roots tell a different story. A recent paper—QuantBench: Benchmarking AI Methods for Quantitative Investment1—delivers a grounded reminder: tree-based models still outperform deep learning (DL) methods across key financial prediction tasks. ...
When large language models (LLMs) learned to think step-by-step, the world took notice. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning breathed new life into multi-step arithmetic, logic, and even moral decision-making. But as multimodal AI evolved, researchers tried to bring this paradigm into the visual world — by editing images step-by-step instead of all at once. And it failed. In the recent benchmark study Complex-Edit: CoT-Like Instruction Generation for Complexity-Controllable Image Editing Benchmark1, the authors show that CoT-style image editing — what they call sequential editing — not only fails to improve results, but often worsens them. Compared to applying a single, complex instruction all at once, breaking it into sub-instructions causes notable drops in instruction-following, identity preservation, and perceptual quality. ...
In the high-stakes world of business process automation (BPA), it’s not enough for AI agents to just complete tasks—they need to complete them correctly, consistently, and transparently. At Cognaptus, we believe in treating automation with the same scrutiny you’d expect from a court of law. That’s why we’re introducing CognaptusJudge, our novel framework for evaluating business automation, inspired by cutting-edge research in LLM-powered web agents. ⚖️ Inspired by Online-Mind2Web Earlier this year, a research team from OSU and UC Berkeley published a benchmark titled An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents (arXiv:2504.01382). Their findings? Many agents previously hailed as top performers were failing nearly 70% of tasks when evaluated under more realistic, human-aligned conditions. ...