We introduce VideoComp, a benchmark and learning framework for advancing video-text compositionality understanding, aimed at improving vision-language models (VLMs) in fine-grained temporal alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks focused on static image-text compositionality or isolated single-event videos, our benchmark targets alignment in continuous multi-event videos. Leveraging video-text datasets with temporally localized event captions (e.g. ActivityNet-Captions, YouCook2), we construct two compositional benchmarks, ActivityNet-Comp and YouCook2-Comp. We create challenging negative samples with subtle temporal disruptions such as reordering, action word replacement, partial captioning, and combined disruptions. These benchmarks comprehensively test models’ compositional sensitivity across extended, cohesive video-text sequences. To improve model performance, we propose a hierarchical pairwise preference loss that strengthens alignment with temporally accurate pairs and gradually penalizes increasingly disrupted ones, encouraging fine-grained compositional learning. To mitigate the limited availability of densely annotated video data, we introduce a pretraining strategy that concatenates short video-caption pairs to simulate multi-event sequences. We evaluate video-text foundational models and large multimodal models (LMMs) on our benchmark, identifying both strengths and areas for improvement in compositionality. Overall, our work provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating and enhancing model capabilities in achieving fine-grained, temporally coherent video-text alignment.

Gen-AI techniques are able to improve understanding of context and nuances in language modeling, translation between languages, handle large volumes of data, provide fast, low-latency responses and can be fine-tuned for various tasks and domainsIn this manuscript, we present a comprehensive overview of the applications of Gen-AI techniques in the finance domain. In particular, we present the opportunities and challenges associated with the usage of Gen-AI techniques. We also illustrate the various methodologies which can be used to train Gen-AI techniques and present the various application areas of Gen-AI technologies in the finance ecosystemTo the best of our knowledge, this work represents the most comprehensive summarization of Gen-AI techniques within the financial domain. The analysis is designed for a deep overview of areas marked for substantial advancement while simultaneously pin-point those warranting future prioritization. We also hope that this work would serve as a conduit between finance and other domains, thus fostering the cross-pollination of innovative concepts and practices.