Rahee Walambe

Rahee Walambe, Pranav Nayak, Ashmit Bhardwaj et al.

In the current age, human lifestyle has become more knowledge oriented leading to generation of sedentary employment. This has given rise to a number of health and mental disorders. Mental wellness is one of the most neglected but crucial aspects of today's world. Mental health issues can, both directly and indirectly, affect other sections of human physiology and impede an individual's day-to-day activities and performance. However, identifying the stress and finding the stress trend for an individual leading to serious mental ailments is challenging and involves multiple factors. Such identification can be achieved accurately by fusing these multiple modalities (due to various factors) arising from behavioral patterns. Certain techniques are identified in the literature for this purpose; however, very few machine learning-based methods are proposed for such multimodal fusion tasks. In this work, a multimodal AI-based framework is proposed to monitor a person's working behavior and stress levels. We propose a methodology for efficiently detecting stress due to workload by concatenating heterogeneous raw sensor data streams (e.g., face expressions, posture, heart rate, computer interaction). This data can be securely stored and analyzed to understand and discover personalized unique behavioral patterns leading to mental strain and fatigue. The contribution of this work is twofold; proposing a multimodal AI-based strategy for fusion to detect stress and its level and secondly identify a stress pattern over a period of time. We were able to achieve 96.09% accuracy on the test set in stress detection and classification. Further, we reduce the stress scale prediction model loss to 0.036 using these modalities. This work can prove important for the community at large, specifically those working sedentary jobs to monitor and identify stress levels, especially in current times of COVID-19.

Gargi Joshi, Ananya Srivastava, Bhargav Yagnik et al.

In this work, the integration of two machine learning approaches, namely domain adaptation and explainable AI, is proposed to address these two issues of generalized detection and explainability. Firstly the Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) develops a generalized misinformation detector across multiple social media platforms DANN is employed to generate the classification results for test domains with relevant but unseen data. The DANN-based model, a traditional black-box model, cannot justify its outcome, i.e., the labels for the target domain. Hence a Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) explainable AI model is applied to explain the outcome of the DANN mode. To demonstrate these two approaches and their integration for effective explainable generalized detection, COVID-19 misinformation is considered a case study. We experimented with two datasets, namely CoAID and MiSoVac, and compared results with and without DANN implementation. DANN significantly improves the accuracy measure F1 classification score and increases the accuracy and AUC performance. The results obtained show that the proposed framework performs well in the case of domain shift and can learn domain-invariant features while explaining the target labels with LIME implementation enabling trustworthy information processing and extraction to combat misinformation effectively.

Aboli Marathe, Pushkar Jain, Rahee Walambe et al.

Modern applications such as self-driving cars and drones rely heavily upon robust object detection techniques. However, weather corruptions can hinder the object detectability and pose a serious threat to their navigation and reliability. Thus, there is a need for efficient denoising, deraining, and restoration techniques. Generative adversarial networks and transformers have been widely adopted for image restoration. However, the training of these methods is often unstable and time-consuming. Furthermore, when used for object detection (OD), the output images generated by these methods may provide unsatisfactory results despite image clarity. In this work, we propose a contrastive approach towards mitigating this problem, by evaluating images generated by restoration models during and post training. This approach leverages OD scores combined with attention maps for predicting the usefulness of restored images for the OD task. We conduct experiments using two novel use-cases of conditional GANs and two transformer methods that probe the robustness of the proposed approach on multi-weather corruptions in the OD task. Our approach achieves an averaged 178 percent increase in mAP between the input and restored images under adverse weather conditions like dust tornadoes and snowfall. We report unique cases where greater denoising does not improve OD performance and conversely where noisy generated images demonstrate good results. We conclude the need for explainability frameworks to bridge the gap between human and machine perception, especially in the context of robust object detection for autonomous vehicles.

Aboli Marathe, Rahee Walambe, Ketan Kotecha

Several popular computer vision (CV) datasets, specifically employed for Object Detection (OD) in autonomous driving tasks exhibit biases due to a range of factors including weather and lighting conditions. These biases may impair a model's generalizability, rendering it ineffective for OD in novel and unseen datasets. Especially, in autonomous driving, it may prove extremely high risk and unsafe for the vehicle and its surroundings. This work focuses on understanding these datasets better by identifying such "good-weather" bias. Methods to mitigate such bias which allows the OD models to perform better and improve the robustness are also demonstrated. A simple yet effective OD framework for studying bias mitigation is proposed. Using this framework, the performance on popular datasets is analyzed and a significant difference in model performance is observed. Additionally, a knowledge transfer technique and a synthetic image corruption technique are proposed to mitigate the identified bias. Finally, using the DAWN dataset, the findings are validated on the OD task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our techniques in mitigating real-world "good-weather" bias. The experiments show that the proposed techniques outperform baseline methods by averaged fourfold improvement.

Rajanikant Ghate, Nayan Kalnad, Rahee Walambe et al.

Automated depression screening and diagnosis is a highly relevant problem today. There are a number of limitations of the traditional depression detection methods, namely, high dependence on clinicians and biased self-reporting. In recent years, research has suggested strong potential in machine learning (ML) based methods that make use of the user's passive data collected via wearable devices. However, ML is data hungry. Especially in the healthcare domain primary data collection is challenging. In this work, we present an approach based on transfer learning, from a model trained on a secondary dataset, for the real time deployment of the depression screening tool based on the actigraphy data of users. This approach enables machine learning modelling even with limited primary data samples. A modified version of leave one out cross validation approach performed on the primary set resulted in mean accuracy of 0.96, where in each iteration one subject's data from the primary set was set aside for testing.

Aboli Marathe, Deva Ramanan, Rahee Walambe et al.

The open road poses many challenges to autonomous perception, including poor visibility from extreme weather conditions. Models trained on good-weather datasets frequently fail at detection in these out-of-distribution settings. To aid adversarial robustness in perception, we introduce WEDGE (WEather images by DALL-E GEneration): a synthetic dataset generated with a vision-language generative model via prompting. WEDGE consists of 3360 images in 16 extreme weather conditions manually annotated with 16513 bounding boxes, supporting research in the tasks of weather classification and 2D object detection. We have analyzed WEDGE from research standpoints, verifying its effectiveness for extreme-weather autonomous perception. We establish baseline performance for classification and detection with 53.87% test accuracy and 45.41 mAP. Most importantly, WEDGE can be used to fine-tune state-of-the-art detectors, improving SOTA performance on real-world weather benchmarks (such as DAWN) by 4.48 AP for well-generated classes like trucks. WEDGE has been collected under OpenAI's terms of use and is released for public use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The repository for this work and dataset is available at https://infernolia.github.io/WEDGE.

Nikita Bhandari, Rahee Walambe, Ketan Kotecha et al.

Computational analysis methods including machine learning have a significant impact in the fields of genomics and medicine. High-throughput gene expression analysis methods such as microarray technology and RNA sequencing produce enormous amounts of data. Traditionally, statistical methods are used for comparative analysis of gene expression data. However, more complex analysis for classification of sample observations, or discovery of feature genes requires sophisticated computational approaches. In this review, we compile various statistical and computational tools used in analysis of expression microarray data. Even though the methods are discussed in the context of expression microarrays, they can also be applied for the analysis of RNA sequencing and quantitative proteomics datasets. We discuss the types of missing values, and the methods and approaches usually employed in their imputation. We also discuss methods of data normalization, feature selection, and feature extraction. Lastly, methods of classification and class discovery along with their evaluation parameters are described in detail. We believe that this detailed review will help the users to select appropriate methods for preprocessing and analysis of their data based on the expected outcome.

Parag Narkhede, Rahee Walambe, Shashi Poddar et al.

This paper presents a novel method for attitude estimation of an object in 3D space by incremental learning of the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. Gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer are few widely used sensors in attitude estimation applications. Traditionally, multi-sensor fusion methods such as the Extended Kalman Filter and Complementary Filter are employed to fuse the measurements from these sensors. However, these methods exhibit limitations in accounting for the uncertainty, unpredictability, and dynamic nature of the motion in real-world situations. In this paper, the inertial sensors data are fed to the LSTM network which are then updated incrementally to incorporate the dynamic changes in motion occurring in the run time. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the dataset collected from a commercially available inertial measurement unit. The proposed framework offers a significant improvement in the results compared to the traditional method, even in the case of a highly dynamic environment. The LSTM framework-based attitude estimation approach can be deployed on a standard AI-supported processing module for real-time applications.

Anil Rahate, Rahee Walambe, Sheela Ramanna et al.

Multimodal deep learning systems which employ multiple modalities like text, image, audio, video, etc., are showing better performance in comparison with individual modalities (i.e., unimodal) systems. Multimodal machine learning involves multiple aspects: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. In the current state of multimodal machine learning, the assumptions are that all modalities are present, aligned, and noiseless during training and testing time. However, in real-world tasks, typically, it is observed that one or more modalities are missing, noisy, lacking annotated data, have unreliable labels, and are scarce in training or testing and or both. This challenge is addressed by a learning paradigm called multimodal co-learning. The modeling of a (resource-poor) modality is aided by exploiting knowledge from another (resource-rich) modality using transfer of knowledge between modalities, including their representations and predictive models. Co-learning being an emerging area, there are no dedicated reviews explicitly focusing on all challenges addressed by co-learning. To that end, in this work, we provide a comprehensive survey on the emerging area of multimodal co-learning that has not been explored in its entirety yet. We review implementations that overcome one or more co-learning challenges without explicitly considering them as co-learning challenges. We present the comprehensive taxonomy of multimodal co-learning based on the challenges addressed by co-learning and associated implementations. The various techniques employed to include the latest ones are reviewed along with some of the applications and datasets. Our final goal is to discuss challenges and perspectives along with the important ideas and directions for future work that we hope to be beneficial for the entire research community focusing on this exciting domain.

Hema Karande, Rahee Walambe, Victor Benjamin et al.

The evolution of electronic media is a mixed blessing. Due to the easy access, low cost, and faster reach of the information, people search out and devour news from online social networks. In contrast, the increasing acceptance of social media reporting leads to the spread of fake news. This is a minacious problem that causes disputes and endangers societal stability and harmony. Fake news spread has gained attention from researchers due to its vicious nature. proliferation of misinformation in all media, from the internet to cable news, paid advertising and local news outlets, has made it essential for people to identify the misinformation and sort through the facts. Researchers are trying to analyze the credibility of information and curtail false information on such platforms. Credibility is the believability of the piece of information at hand. Analyzing the credibility of fake news is challenging due to the intent of its creation and the polychromatic nature of the news. In this work, we propose a model for detecting fake news. Our method investigates the content of the news at the early stage i.e. when the news is published but is yet to be disseminated through social media. Our work interprets the content with automatic feature extraction and the relevance of the text pieces. In summary, we introduce stance as one of the features along with the content of the article and employ the pre-trained contextualized word embeddings BERT to obtain the state-of-art results for fake news detection. The experiment conducted on the real-world dataset indicates that our model outperforms the previous work and enables fake news detection with an accuracy of 95.32%.

Gargi Joshi, Rahee Walambe, Ketan Kotecha

Artificial Intelligence techniques powered by deep neural nets have achieved much success in several application domains, most significantly and notably in the Computer Vision applications and Natural Language Processing tasks. Surpassing human-level performance propelled the research in the applications where different modalities amongst language, vision, sensory, text play an important role in accurate predictions and identification. Several multimodal fusion methods employing deep learning models are proposed in the literature. Despite their outstanding performance, the complex, opaque and black-box nature of the deep neural nets limits their social acceptance and usability. This has given rise to the quest for model interpretability and explainability, more so in the complex tasks involving multimodal AI methods. This paper extensively reviews the present literature to present a comprehensive survey and commentary on the explainability in multimodal deep neural nets, especially for the vision and language tasks. Several topics on multimodal AI and its applications for generic domains have been covered in this paper, including the significance, datasets, fundamental building blocks of the methods and techniques, challenges, applications, and future trends in this domain

Nikita Bhandari, Satyajeet Khare, Rahee Walambe et al.

Gene promoters are the key DNA regulatory elements positioned around the transcription start sites and are responsible for regulating gene transcription process. Various alignment-based, signal-based and content-based approaches are reported for the prediction of promoters. However, since all promoter sequences do not show explicit features, the prediction performance of these techniques is poor. Therefore, many machine learning and deep learning models have been proposed for promoter prediction. In this work, we studied methods for vector encoding and promoter classification using genome sequences of three distinct higher eukaryotes viz. yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), A. thaliana (plant) and human (Homo sapiens). We compared one-hot vector encoding method with frequency-based tokenization (FBT) for data pre-processing on 1-D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. We found that FBT gives a shorter input dimension reducing the training time without affecting the sensitivity and specificity of classification. We employed the deep learning techniques, mainly CNN and recurrent neural network with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and random forest (RF) classifier for promoter classification at k-mer sizes of 2, 4 and 8. We found CNN to be superior in classification of promoters from non-promoter sequences (binary classification) as well as species-specific classification of promoter sequences (multiclass classification). In summary, the contribution of this work lies in the use of synthetic shuffled negative dataset and frequency-based tokenization for pre-processing. This study provides a comprehensive and generic framework for classification tasks in genomic applications and can be extended to various classification problems.

Ananya Srivastava, Mohammed Hasan, Bhargav Yagnik et al.

Social networking platforms provide a conduit to disseminate our ideas, views and thoughts and proliferate information. This has led to the amalgamation of English with natively spoken languages. Prevalence of Hindi-English code-mixed data (Hinglish) is on the rise with most of the urban population all over the world. Hate speech detection algorithms deployed by most social networking platforms are unable to filter out offensive and abusive content posted in these code-mixed languages. Thus, the worldwide hate speech detection rate of around 44% drops even more considering the content in Indian colloquial languages and slangs. In this paper, we propose a methodology for efficient detection of unstructured code-mix Hinglish language. Fine-tuning based approaches for Hindi-English code-mixed language are employed by utilizing contextual based embeddings such as ELMo (Embeddings for Language Models), FLAIR, and transformer-based BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). Our proposed approach is compared against the pre-existing methods and results are compared for various datasets. Our model outperforms the other methods and frameworks.

Narendra Patwardhan, Madhura Ingalhalikar, Rahee Walambe

This work introduces a novel activation unit that can be efficiently employed in deep neural nets (DNNs) and performs significantly better than the traditional Rectified Linear Units (ReLU). The function developed is a two parameter version of the specialized Richard's Curve and we call it Adaptive Richard's Curve weighted Activation (ARiA). This function is non-monotonous, analogous to the newly introduced Swish, however allows a precise control over its non-monotonous convexity by varying the hyper-parameters. We first demonstrate the mathematical significance of the two parameter ARiA followed by its application to benchmark problems such as MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, where we compare the performance with ReLU and Swish units. Our results illustrate a significantly superior performance on all these datasets, making ARiA a potential replacement for ReLU and other activations in DNNs.