Yashaswi Verma

Asha Rani, Pankaj Yadav, Yashaswi Verma

Autism, also known as Autism Spectrum Disorder (or ASD), is a neurological disorder. Its main symptoms include difficulty in (verbal and/or non-verbal) communication, and rigid/repetitive behavior. These symptoms are often indistinguishable from a normal (control) individual, due to which this disorder remains undiagnosed in early childhood leading to delayed treatment. Since the learning curve is steep during the initial age, an early diagnosis of autism could allow to take adequate interventions at the right time, which might positively affect the growth of an autistic child. Further, the traditional methods of autism diagnosis require multiple visits to a specialized psychiatrist, however this process can be time-consuming. In this paper, we present a learning based approach to automate autism diagnosis using simple and small action video clips of subjects. This task is particularly challenging because the amount of annotated data available is small, and the variations among samples from the two categories (ASD and control) are generally indistinguishable. This is also evident from poor performance of a binary classifier learned using the cross-entropy loss on top of a baseline encoder. To address this, we adopt contrastive feature learning in both self supervised and supervised learning frameworks, and show that these can lead to a significant increase in the prediction accuracy of a binary classifier on this task. We further validate this by conducting thorough experimental analyses under different set-ups on two publicly available datasets.

Anurag Jain, Yashaswi Verma

Contrastive learning is a powerful technique to learn representations that are semantically distinctive and geometrically invariant. While most of the earlier approaches have demonstrated its effectiveness on single-modality learning tasks such as image classification, recently there have been a few attempts towards extending this idea to multi-modal data. In this paper, we propose two loss functions based on normalized cross-entropy to perform the task of learning joint visual-semantic embedding using batch contrastive training. In a batch, for a given anchor point from one modality, we consider its negatives only from another modality, and define our first contrastive loss based on expected violations incurred by all the negatives. Next, we update this loss and define the second contrastive loss based on the violation incurred only by the hardest negative. We compare our results with existing visual-semantic embedding methods on cross-modal image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval tasks using the MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets, where we outperform the state-of-the-art on the MS-COCO dataset and achieve comparable results on the Flickr30K dataset.

Yashaswi Verma

The goal of eXtreme Multi-label Learning (XML) is to automatically annotate a given data point with the most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large vocabulary of labels (e.g., a million labels). Lately, many attempts have been made to address this problem that achieve reasonable performance on benchmark datasets. In this paper, rather than coming-up with an altogether new method, our objective is to present and validate a simple baseline for this task. Precisely, we investigate an on-the-fly global and structure preserving feature embedding technique using random projections whose learning phase is independent of training samples and label vocabulary. Further, we show how an ensemble of multiple such learners can be used to achieve further boost in prediction accuracy with only linear increase in training and prediction time. Experiments on three public XML benchmarks show that the proposed approach obtains competitive accuracy compared with many existing methods. Additionally, it also provides around 6572x speed-up ratio in terms of training time and around 14.7x reduction in model-size compared to the closest competitors on the largest publicly available dataset.