Prateek Agnihotri

Prateek Agnihotri, Sanchit Jain, Prabhat Agnihotri et al.

This paper presents our algorithmic innovations for the NVIDIA Nemotron Model Reasoning Challenge, focusing on Bit Manipulation Puzzles. In this task, the objective is to discover a hidden logical rule transforming input binary strings to outputs, then apply it to unseen inputs. Large Language Models (LLMs) notoriously struggle here; traditional methods force them to simulate complex boolean logic and arithmetic, leading to hallucinations. Furthermore, the search space of bitwise operations (combinations of shifts, rotations, and logic gates) suffers from a severe combinatorial explosion. To overcome this computational intractability, we present a novel approach that abandons arithmetic logic entirely in favor of string similarity, structured search, and autonomous error recovery. Our core contributions are: 1. Bases and Truth Table Formulation: We reframe logic-gate deduction into a base-selection task, leveraging string similarity (minimal bit flips) to isolate primitive transformations ("bases") and deduce truth tables without complex arithmetic. 2. Backtracking DFS and Error Recovery: We formalize a search process that tests candidate bases, detects logical collisions across examples, and backtracks upon failure to perform robust error recovery. 3. Bit Tokenization and Interactive Reasoning SFT: We force the tokenizer to encode binary strings as individual single-bit tokens. We use dynamic masking to simulate external oracle feedback, training the model to hypothesize, self-evaluate, and backtrack natively. Evaluated on bit manipulation puzzles, our approach achieved over 96% validation accuracy. This represents the highest performance in this category, driving our 7th Place overall finish in the contest.

Marcos V. Conde, Kumar Shubham, Prateek Agnihotri et al.

It is easier to hear birds than see them, however, they still play an essential role in nature and they are excellent indicators of deteriorating environmental quality and pollution. Recent advances in Machine Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks allow us to detect and classify bird sounds, by doing this, we can assist researchers in monitoring the status and trends of bird populations and biodiversity in ecosystems. We propose a sound detection and classification pipeline for analyzing complex soundscape recordings and identify birdcalls in the background. Our pipeline learns from weak labels, classifies fine-grained bird vocalizations in the wild, and is robust against background sounds (e.g., airplanes, rain, etc). Our solution achieved 10th place of 816 teams at the BirdCLEF 2021 Challenge hosted on Kaggle.