Sarmistha Das

Sarmistha Das, Vaibhav Vishal, Shreyas Guha et al.

In the contemporary epoch of multilingual education, learning idioms provides a fascinating gateway towards creativity, cultural values, historical context, and diverse perspectives inherent to various linguistic traditions. This paper showcases the navigation of retaining figurative and cultural semantics in low-resource Southeast Asian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, and Thai, where culturally rich idioms pose significant obstacles for computational modeling and cross-linguistic transfer due to their deep metaphorical complexity. To tackle such complexity, we present Varnika, a reconstructed multimodal idiom corpus comprising 3,533 multilingual idioms, enriched with seven idiomatic tones aligned with both textual and visual representations. Additionally, to infer informative idiomatic understanding, we introduce a Hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (HybridMoE) framework that embeds multiple idiomatic expert opinions while mitigating expert sparsity by integrating outputs from both selected and unselected experts through controlled hybridization, further augmented with Idiomatic Property Signals via masked multimodal embeddings. To analyze the performance across multiple dimensions, we propose the IDIO-TONE and Idiomatic Validation Score, a three-stage evaluation pipeline measuring (i) literal translation fidelity, (ii) visual-semantic alignment, and (iii) idiomatic meaning retention. Empirical evaluations highlight that HybridMoE achieves 5--6\% performance gains across advanced vision language models, demonstrating improved representation of figurative language and culturally embedded meaning in multilingual multimodal settings

Sarmistha Das, Shreyas Guha, Suvrayan Bandyopadhyay et al.

Idiomatic reasoning, deeply intertwined with metaphor and culture, remains a blind spot for contemporary language models, whose progress skews toward surface-level lexical and semantic cues. For instance, the Bengali idiom \textit{\foreignlanguage{bengali}{\char"0986\char"0999\char"09CD\char"0997\char"09C1 \char"09B0 \char"09AB\char"09B2 \char"099F\char"0995}} (angur fol tok, ``grapes are sour''): it encodes denial-driven rationalization, yet naive models latch onto the literal fox-and-grape imagery. Addressing this oversight, we present ``Mediom,'' a multilingual, multimodal idiom corpus of 3,533 Hindi, Bengali, and Thai idioms, each paired with gold-standard explanations, cross-lingual translations, and carefully aligned text--image representations. We benchmark both large language models (textual reasoning) and vision-language models (figurative disambiguation) on Mediom, exposing systematic failures in metaphor comprehension. To mitigate these gaps, we propose ``HIDE,'' a Hinting-based Idiom Explanation framework that leverages error-feedback retrieval and targeted diagnostic cues for iterative reasoning refinement. Collectively, Mediom and HIDE establish a rigorous test bed and methodology for culturally grounded, multimodal idiom understanding embedded with reasoning hints in next-generation AI systems.

Sarmistha Das, Vaibhav Vishal, Syed Ibrahim Ahmad et al.

Financial decision-making in multilingual settings demands accurate numerical reasoning grounded in diverse modalities, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook this high-stakes, real-world challenge, especially for Indic languages. We introduce FinVQA, a benchmark for evaluating financial numerical and multimodal reasoning in multilingual Indic contexts. FinVQA spans English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil, and comprises 18,900 samples across 14 financial domains. The dataset captures diverse reasoning paradigms under realistic constraints, and is structured across three difficulty levels (easy, moderate, hard) and four question formats: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, table matching, and true/false. To address these challenges, we propose FIND, a framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with constraint-aware decoding to promote faithful numerical reasoning, robust multimodal grounding, and structured decision-making. Together, FinVQA and FIND establish a rigorous evaluation and modeling paradigm for high-stakes multilingual multimodal financial reasoning.

Rishu Kumar Singh, Navneet Shreya, Sarmistha Das et al.

Existing approaches to complaint analysis largely rely on unimodal, short-form content such as tweets or product reviews. This work advances the field by leveraging multimodal, multi-turn customer support dialogues, where users often share both textual complaints and visual evidence (e.g., screenshots, product photos) to enable fine-grained classification of complaint aspects and severity. We introduce VALOR, a Validation-Aware Learner with Expert Routing, tailored for this multimodal setting. It employs a multi-expert reasoning setup using large-scale generative models with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting for nuanced decision-making. To ensure coherence between modalities, a semantic alignment score is computed and integrated into the final classification through a meta-fusion strategy. In alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the proposed framework supports SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) by advancing AI-driven tools for robust, scalable, and context-aware service infrastructure. Further, by enabling structured analysis of complaint narratives and visual context, it contributes to SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by promoting more responsive product design and improved accountability in consumer services. We evaluate VALOR on a curated multimodal complaint dataset annotated with fine-grained aspect and severity labels, showing that it consistently outperforms baseline models, especially in complex complaint scenarios where information is distributed across text and images. This study underscores the value of multimodal interaction and expert validation in practical complaint understanding systems. Resources related to data and codes are available here: https://github.com/sarmistha-D/VALOR

Sarmistha Das, Priya Mathur, Ishani Sharma et al.

The exponential technological breakthrough of the FinTech industry has significantly enhanced user engagement through sophisticated advisory chatbots. However, large-scale fine-tuning of LLMs can occasionally yield unprofessional or flippant remarks, such as ``With that money, you're going to change the world,'' which, though factually correct, can be contextually inappropriate and erode user trust. The scarcity of domain-specific datasets has led previous studies to focus on isolated components, such as reasoning-aware frameworks or the enhancement of human-like response generation. To address this research gap, we present Fin-Solution 2.O, an advanced solution that 1) introduces the multi-turn financial conversational dataset, Fin-Vault, and 2) incorporates a unified model, Fin-Ally, which integrates commonsense reasoning, politeness, and human-like conversational dynamics. Fin-Ally is powered by COMET-BART-embedded commonsense context and optimized with a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) mechanism to generate human-aligned responses. The novel Fin-Vault dataset, consisting of 1,417 annotated multi-turn dialogues, enables Fin-Ally to extend beyond basic account management to provide personalized budgeting, real-time expense tracking, and automated financial planning. Our comprehensive results demonstrate that incorporating commonsense context enables language models to generate more refined, textually precise, and professionally grounded financial guidance, positioning this approach as a next-generation AI solution for the FinTech sector. Dataset and codes are available at: https://github.com/sarmistha-D/Fin-Ally

Sarmistha Das, R E Zera Marveen Lyngkhoi, Sriparna Saha et al.

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

Sarmistha Das, R E Zera Marveen Lyngkhoi, Kirtan Jain et al.

While there exists a lot of work on explainable complaint mining, articulating user concerns through text or video remains a significant challenge, often leaving issues unresolved. Users frequently struggle to express their complaints clearly in text but can easily upload videos depicting product defects (e.g., vague text such as `worst product' paired with a 5-second video depicting a broken headphone with the right earcup). This paper formulates a new task in the field of complaint mining to aid the common users' need to write an expressive complaint, which is Complaint Description from Videos (CoD-V) (e.g., to help the above user articulate her complaint about the defective right earcup). To this end, we introduce ComVID, a video complaint dataset containing 1,175 complaint videos and the corresponding descriptions, also annotated with the emotional state of the complainer. Additionally, we present a new complaint retention (CR) evaluation metric that discriminates the proposed (CoD-V) task against standard video summary generation and description tasks. To strengthen this initiative, we introduce a multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) embedded VideoLLaMA2-7b model, designed to generate complaints while accounting for the user's emotional state. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several Video Language Models on several tasks (pre-trained and fine-tuned versions) with a range of established evaluation metrics, including METEOR, perplexity, and the Coleman-Liau readability score, among others. Our study lays the foundation for a new research direction to provide a platform for users to express complaints through video. Dataset and resources are available at: https://github.com/sarmistha-D/CoD-V.

Sarmistha Das, Basha Mujavarsheik, R E Zera Lyngkhoi et al.

In today's competitive marketing landscape, effective complaint management is crucial for customer service and business success. Video complaints, integrating text and image content, offer invaluable insights by addressing customer grievances and delineating product benefits and drawbacks. However, comprehending nuanced complaint aspects within vast daily multimodal financial data remains a formidable challenge. Addressing this gap, we have curated a proprietary multimodal video complaint dataset comprising 433 publicly accessible instances. Each instance is meticulously annotated at the utterance level, encompassing five distinct categories of financial aspects and their associated complaint labels. To support this endeavour, we introduce Solution 3.0, a model designed for multimodal aspect-based complaint identification task. Solution 3.0 is tailored to perform three key tasks: 1) handling multimodal features ( audio and video), 2) facilitating multilabel aspect classification, and 3) conducting multitasking for aspect classifications and complaint identification parallelly. Solution 3.0 utilizes a CLIP-based dual frozen encoder with an integrated image segment encoder for global feature fusion, enhanced by contextual attention (ISEC) to improve accuracy and efficiency. Our proposed framework surpasses current multimodal baselines, exhibiting superior performance across nearly all metrics by opening new ways to strengthen appropriate customer care initiatives and effectively assisting individuals in resolving their problems.