Veeky Baths

Shounak Naik, Rajaswa Patil, Swati Agarwal et al.

Representational Similarity Analysis is a method from cognitive neuroscience, which helps in comparing representations from two different sources of data. In this paper, we propose using Representational Similarity Analysis to probe the semantic grounding in language models of code. We probe representations from the CodeBERT model for semantic grounding by using the data from the IBM CodeNet dataset. Through our experiments, we show that current pre-training methods do not induce semantic grounding in language models of code, and instead focus on optimizing form-based patterns. We also show that even a little amount of fine-tuning on semantically relevant tasks increases the semantic grounding in CodeBERT significantly. Our ablations with the input modality to the CodeBERT model show that using bimodal inputs (code and natural language) over unimodal inputs (only code) gives better semantic grounding and sample efficiency during semantic fine-tuning. Finally, our experiments with semantic perturbations in code reveal that CodeBERT is able to robustly distinguish between semantically correct and incorrect code.

Harini SI, Somesh Singh, Yaman K Singla et al.

Despite the importance of long-term memory in marketing and brand building, until now, there has been no large-scale study on the memorability of ads. All previous memorability studies have been conducted on short-term recall on specific content types like action videos. On the other hand, long-term memorability is crucial for the advertising industry, and ads are almost always highly multimodal. Therefore, we release the first memorability dataset, LAMBDA, consisting of 1749 participants and 2205 ads covering 276 brands. Running statistical tests over different participant subpopulations and ad types, we find many interesting insights into what makes an ad memorable, e.g., fast-moving ads are more memorable than those with slower scenes; people who use ad-blockers remember a lower number of ads than those who don't. Next, we present a model, Henry, to predict the memorability of a content. Henry achieves state-of-the-art performance across all prominent literature memorability datasets. It shows strong generalization performance with better results in 0-shot on unseen datasets. Finally, with the intent of memorable ad generation, we present a scalable method to build a high-quality memorable ad generation model by leveraging automatically annotated data. Our approach, SEED (Self rEwarding mEmorability Modeling), starts with a language model trained on LAMBDA as seed data and progressively trains an LLM to generate more memorable ads. We show that the generated advertisements have 44% higher memorability scores than the original ads. We release this large-scale ad dataset, UltraLAMBDA, consisting of 5 million ads. Our code and the datasets, LAMBDA and UltraLAMBDA, are open-sourced at https://behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/memorability.

Somesh Singh, Harini S, Yaman K Singla et al.

Communication is defined as "Who says what to whom with what effect". A message from a communicator generates downstream receiver effects, also known as behavior. Receiver behavior, being a downstream effect of the message, carries rich signals about it. Even after carrying signals about the message, the behavior data is often ignored while training large language models. We show that training LLMs on receiver behavior can actually help improve their content-understanding abilities. Specifically, we show that training LLMs to predict the receiver behavior of likes and comments improves the LLM's performance on a wide variety of downstream content understanding tasks. We show this performance increase over 46 video and image understanding tasks over 26 benchmark datasets across both 0-shot and fine-tuning settings, outperforming many supervised baselines. Moreover, since receiver behavior, such as likes and comments, is collected by default on the internet and does not need any human annotations to be useful, the performance improvement we get after training on this data is essentially free-lunch. We release the receiver behavior cleaned comments and likes of 750k images and videos collected from multiple platforms along with our instruction-tuning data.

Hugo Laurencon, Yesoda Bhargava, Riddhi Zantye et al.

Homeostasis is a biological process by which living beings maintain their internal balance. Previous research suggests that homeostasis is a learned behaviour. Recently introduced Homeostatic Regulated Reinforcement Learning (HRRL) framework attempts to explain this learned homeostatic behavior by linking Drive Reduction Theory and Reinforcement Learning. This linkage has been proven in the discrete time-space, but not in the continuous time-space. In this work, we advance the HRRL framework to a continuous time-space environment and validate the CTCS-HRRL (Continuous Time Continuous Space HRRL) framework. We achieve this by designing a model that mimics the homeostatic mechanisms in a real-world biological agent. This model uses the Hamilton-Jacobian Bellman Equation, and function approximation based on neural networks and Reinforcement Learning. Through a simulation-based experiment we demonstrate the efficacy of this model and uncover the evidence linked to the agent's ability to dynamically choose policies that favor homeostasis in a continuously changing internal-state milieu. Results of our experiments demonstrate that agent learns homeostatic behaviour in a CTCS environment, making CTCS-HRRL a promising framework for modellng animal dynamics and decision-making.

Niharika Tewari, Nguyen Linh Dan Le, Mujie Liu et al.

Dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder with multiple etiologies, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia, and vascular dementia. Its clinical and biological heterogeneity makes diagnosis and subtype differentiation highly challenging. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently shown strong potential in modeling brain connectivity, but their limited robustness, data scarcity, and lack of interpretability constrain clinical adoption. Explainable Graph Neural Networks (XGNNs) have emerged to address these barriers by combining graph-based learning with interpretability, enabling the identification of disease-relevant biomarkers, analysis of brain network disruptions, and provision of transparent insights for clinicians. This paper presents the first comprehensive review dedicated to XGNNs in dementia research. We examine their applications across Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and multi-disease diagnosis. A taxonomy of explainability methods tailored for dementia-related tasks is introduced, alongside comparisons of existing models in clinical scenarios. We also highlight challenges such as limited generalizability, underexplored domains, and the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) for early detection. By outlining both progress and open problems, this review aims to guide future work toward trustworthy, clinically meaningful, and scalable use of XGNNs in dementia research.

Yash Kumar, Piyush Maheshwari, Shreyansh Joshi et al.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects nearly 50 million individuals across the globe and is one of the leading causes of deaths globally. It is projected that by 2050, the number of people affected by the disease would more than double. Consequently, the growing advancements in technology beg the question, can technology be used to predict Alzheimer's for a better and early diagnosis? In this paper, we focus on this very problem. Specifically, we have trained both ML models and neural networks to predict and classify participants based on their speech patterns. We computed a number of linguistic variables using DementiaBank's Pitt Corpus, a database consisting of transcripts of interviews with subjects suffering from multiple neurodegenerative diseases. We then trained both binary classifiers, as well as multiclass classifiers to distinguish AD from normal aging and other neurodegenerative diseases. We also worked on establishing the link between specific speech factors that can help determine the onset of AD. Confusion matrices and feature importance graphs have been plotted model-wise to compare the performances of our models. In both multiclass and binary classification, neural networks were found to outperform the other models with a testing accuracy of 76.44% and 92.05% respectively. For the feature importance, it was concluded that '%_PRESP' (present participle), '%_3S' (3rd person present tense markers) were two of the most important speech features for our classifiers in predicting AD.

Mahak Kothari, Shreyansh Joshi, Adarsh Nandanwar et al.

Auditory attention is a selective type of hearing in which people focus their attention intentionally on a specific source of a sound or spoken words whilst ignoring or inhibiting other auditory stimuli. In some sense, the auditory attention score of an individual shows the focus the person can have in auditory tasks. The recent advancements in deep learning and in the non-invasive technologies recording neural activity beg the question, can deep learning along with technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG) be used to predict the auditory attention score of an individual? In this paper, we focus on this very problem of estimating a person's auditory attention level based on their brain's electrical activity captured using 14-channeled EEG signals. More specifically, we deal with attention estimation as a regression problem. The work has been performed on the publicly available Phyaat dataset. The concept of Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF) has been used to convert time-series EEG data into an image having 14 channels, enabling us to train various deep learning models such as 2D CNN, 3D CNN, and convolutional autoencoders. Their performances have been compared amongst themselves as well as with the work done previously. Amongst the different models we tried, 2D CNN gave the best performance. It outperformed the existing methods by a decent margin of 0.22 mean absolute error (MAE).

Akshay Valsaraj, Ithihas Madala, Nikhil Garg et al.

Alzheimers disease is a fatal progressive brain disorder that worsens with time. It is high time we have inexpensive and quick clinical diagnostic techniques for early detection and care. In previous studies, various Machine Learning techniques and Pre-trained Deep Learning models have been used in conjunction with the extraction of various acoustic and linguistic features. Our study focuses on three models for the classification task in the ADReSS (The Alzheimers Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech) 2021 Challenge. We use the well-balanced dataset provided by the ADReSS Challenge for training and validating our models. Model 1 uses various acoustic features from the eGeMAPs feature-set, Model 2 uses various linguistic features that we generated from auto-generated transcripts and Model 3 uses the auto-generated transcripts directly to extract features using a Pre-trained BERT and TF-IDF. These models are described in detail in the models section.

Lizy Kanungo, Nikhil Garg, Anish Bhobe et al.

This work proposes a hybrid Brain Computer Interface system for the automation of a wheelchair for the disabled. Herein a working prototype of a BCI-based wheelchair is detailed that can navigate inside a typical home environment with minimum structural modification and without any visual obstruction and discomfort to the user. The prototype is based on a combined mechanism of steady-state visually evoked potential and eye blinks. To elicit SSVEP, LEDs flickering at 13Hz and 15Hz were used to select the left and right direction, respectively, and EEG data was recorded. In addition, the occurrence of three continuous blinks was used as an indicator for stopping an ongoing action. The wavelet packet denoising method was applied, followed by feature extraction methods such as Wavelet Packet Decomposition and Canonical Correlation Analysis over narrowband reconstructed EEG signals. Bayesian optimization was used to obtain 5 fold cross-validations to optimize the hyperparameters of the Support Vector Machine. The resulting new model was tested and the average cross-validation accuracy 89.65% + 6.6% (SD) and testing accuracy 83.53% + 8.59% (SD) were obtained. The wheelchair was controlled by RaspberryPi through WiFi. The developed prototype demonstrated an average of 86.97% success rate for all trials with 4.015s for each command execution. The prototype can be used efficiently in a home environment without causing any discomfort to the user.

Arijit Gupta, Rajaswa Patil, Veeky Baths

Recent work has shown that distributed word representations can encode abstract information from child-directed speech. In this paper, we use diachronic distributed word representations to perform temporal modeling and analysis of lexical development in children. Unlike all previous work, we use temporally sliced corpus to learn distributed word representations of child-speech and child-directed speech under a curriculum-learning setting. In our experiments, we perform a lexical categorization task to plot the semantic and syntactic knowledge acquisition trajectories in children. Next, we perform linear mixed-effects modeling over the diachronic representational changes to study the role of input word frequencies in the rate of word acquisition in children. We also perform a fine-grained analysis of lexical knowledge transfer from adults to children using Representational Similarity Analysis. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the diachronic representations from our model, which reveals the grounding and word associations in the mental lexicon of children. Our experiments demonstrate the ease of usage and effectiveness of diachronic distributed word representations in modeling lexical development.

Rajaswa Patil, Jasleen Dhillon, Siddhant Mahurkar et al.

While there has been significant progress towards developing NLU resources for Indic languages, syntactic evaluation has been relatively less explored. Unlike English, Indic languages have rich morphosyntax, grammatical genders, free linear word-order, and highly inflectional morphology. In this paper, we introduce Vyākarana: a benchmark of Colorless Green sentences in Indic languages for syntactic evaluation of multilingual language models. The benchmark comprises four syntax-related tasks: PoS Tagging, Syntax Tree-depth Prediction, Grammatical Case Marking, and Subject-Verb Agreement. We use the datasets from the evaluation tasks to probe five multilingual language models of varying architectures for syntax in Indic languages. Due to its prevalence, we also include a code-switching setting in our experiments. Our results show that the token-level and sentence-level representations from the Indic language models (IndicBERT and MuRIL) do not capture the syntax in Indic languages as efficiently as the other highly multilingual language models. Further, our layer-wise probing experiments reveal that while mBERT, DistilmBERT, and XLM-R localize the syntax in middle layers, the Indic language models do not show such syntactic localization.

Ajay Subramanian, Sharad Chitlangia, Veeky Baths

Reinforcement learning methods have recently been very successful at performing complex sequential tasks like playing Atari games, Go and Poker. These algorithms have outperformed humans in several tasks by learning from scratch, using only scalar rewards obtained through interaction with their environment. While there certainly has been considerable independent innovation to produce such results, many core ideas in reinforcement learning are inspired by phenomena in animal learning, psychology and neuroscience. In this paper, we comprehensively review a large number of findings in both neuroscience and psychology that evidence reinforcement learning as a promising candidate for modeling learning and decision making in the brain. In doing so, we construct a mapping between various classes of modern RL algorithms and specific findings in both neurophysiological and behavioral literature. We then discuss the implications of this observed relationship between RL, neuroscience and psychology and its role in advancing research in both AI and brain science.

Rajaswa Patil, Veeky Baths

In this paper, we describe an approach for modelling causal reasoning in natural language by detecting counterfactuals in text using multi-head self-attention weights. We use pre-trained transformer models to extract contextual embeddings and self-attention weights from the text. We show the use of convolutional layers to extract task-specific features from these self-attention weights. Further, we describe a fine-tuning approach with a common base model for knowledge sharing between the two closely related sub-tasks for counterfactual detection. We analyze and compare the performance of various transformer models in our experiments. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis with the multi-head self-attention weights to interpret our models' dynamics.

Kratarth Goel, Raunaq Vohra, Anant Kamath et al.

In this paper, we present a novel brain computer interface based home automation system using two responses - Steady State Visually Evoked Potential (SSVEP) and the eye-blink artifact, which is augmented by a Bluetooth based indoor localization system, to greatly increase the number of controllable devices. The hardware implementation of this system to control a table lamp and table fan using brain signals has also been discussed and state-of-the-art results have been achieved.