Multimodal Learning

Opening — Why this matters now Multimodal models can answer visual questions with alarming confidence. They can also be catastrophically wrong while sounding perfectly reasonable. The uncomfortable truth is that many vision–language models succeed without actually seeing what matters. They talk first. They look later—if at all. The paper behind LaViT puts a name to this failure mode: the Perception Gap. It is the gap between saying the right thing and looking at the right evidence. And once you see it quantified, it becomes hard to ignore. ...

Opening — Why this matters now AI has become remarkably good at reading emotions—just not the kind that actually matter in classrooms. Most sentiment models are trained on people being honest with their feelings: tweets, movie reviews, reaction videos. Teachers, unfortunately for the models, are professionals. They perform. They regulate. They smile through frustration and project enthusiasm on command. As a result, generic sentiment analysis treats classrooms as emotionally flat—or worse, mislabels them entirely. ...

Opening — Why this matters now In 2025, AI agents are no longer confined to text boxes. They’re moving across screens—scrolling, tapping, and swiping their way through the digital world. Yet the dream of a truly general-purpose mobile control agent—an AI that can use your phone like you do—has remained out of reach. The problem isn’t just teaching machines to see buttons; it’s teaching them to understand intent. ...

In the world of quantitative investing, the line between data and story has long been clear. Numbers ruled the models; narratives belonged to the analysts. But the recent paper “Exploring the Synergy of Quantitative Factors and Newsflow Representations from Large Language Models for Stock Return Prediction” from RAM Active Investments argues that this divide is no longer useful—or profitable. Beyond Factors: Why Text Matters Quantitative factors—valuation, momentum, profitability—are the pillars of systematic investing. They measure what can be counted. But markets move on what’s talked about, too. Corporate press releases, analyst notes, executive reshuffles—all carry signals that often precede price action. Historically, this qualitative layer was hard to quantify. Now, LLMs can translate the market’s chatter into vectors of meaning. ...