Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks. However, current training approaches combine standard cross-entropy loss with extensive data, human feedback, or ad hoc methods to enhance performance. These solutions are often not scalable or feasible due to their associated costs, complexity, or resource requirements. This study investigates the use of established semantic segmentation loss functions in natural language generation to create a versatile, practical, and scalable solution for fine-tuning different architectures. We evaluate their effectiveness in solving Math Word Problems and question answering across different models of varying sizes. For the analyzed tasks, we found that the traditional Cross-Entropy loss represents a sub-optimal choice, while models trained to minimize alternative (task-dependent) losses, such as Focal or Lovász, achieve a mean improvement of +36% on exact match without requiring additional data or human feedback. These findings suggest a promising pathway for more efficient and accessible training processes.

In the banking and finance sectors, members of the business units focused on Trend and Risk Analysis daily process internal and external visually-rich documents including text, images, and tables. Given a facet (i.e., topic) of interest, they are particularly interested in retrieving the top trending keywords related to it and then use them to annotate the most relevant document elements (e.g., text paragraphs, images or tables). In this paper, we explore the use of both open-source and proprietary Large Language Models to automatically generate lists of facet-relevant keywords, automatically produce free-text descriptions of both keywords and multimedia document content, and then annotate documents by leveraging textual similarity approaches. The preliminary results, achieved on English and Italian documents, show that OpenAI GPT-4 achieves superior performance in keyword description generation and multimedia content annotation, while the open-source Meta AI Llama2 model turns out to be highly competitive in generating additional keywords.