Aakash Aanegola

Sanket Kalwar, Dhruv Patel, Aakash Aanegola et al.

Detecting objects under adverse weather and lighting conditions is crucial for the safe and continuous operation of an autonomous vehicle, and remains an unsolved problem. We present a Gated Differentiable Image Processing (GDIP) block, a domain-agnostic network architecture, which can be plugged into existing object detection networks (e.g., Yolo) and trained end-to-end with adverse condition images such as those captured under fog and low lighting. Our proposed GDIP block learns to enhance images directly through the downstream object detection loss. This is achieved by learning parameters of multiple image pre-processing (IP) techniques that operate concurrently, with their outputs combined using weights learned through a novel gating mechanism. We further improve GDIP through a multi-stage guidance procedure for progressive image enhancement. Finally, trading off accuracy for speed, we propose a variant of GDIP that can be used as a regularizer for training Yolo, which eliminates the need for GDIP-based image enhancement during inference, resulting in higher throughput and plausible real-world deployment. We demonstrate significant improvement in detection performance over several state-of-the-art methods through quantitative and qualitative studies on synthetic datasets such as PascalVOC, and real-world foggy (RTTS) and low-lighting (ExDark) datasets.

Arvindh Arun, Aakash Aanegola, Amul Agrawal et al.

Unsupervised Representation Learning on graphs is gaining traction due to the increasing abundance of unlabelled network data and the compactness, richness, and usefulness of the representations generated. In this context, the need to consider fairness and bias constraints while generating the representations has been well-motivated and studied to some extent in prior works. One major limitation of most of the prior works in this setting is that they do not aim to address the bias generated due to connectivity patterns in the graphs, such as varied node centrality, which leads to a disproportionate performance across nodes. In our work, we aim to address this issue of mitigating bias due to inherent graph structure in an unsupervised setting. To this end, we propose CAFIN, a centrality-aware fairness-inducing framework that leverages the structural information of graphs to tune the representations generated by existing frameworks. We deploy it on GraphSAGE (a popular framework in this domain) and showcase its efficacy on two downstream tasks - Node Classification and Link Prediction. Empirically, CAFIN consistently reduces the performance disparity across popular datasets (varying from 18 to 80% reduction in performance disparity) from various domains while incurring only a minimal cost of fairness.