Raghav Sharma

Huaide Jiang, Yash Chaudhary, Yuping Wang et al.

There are two major categories of embodied navigation: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), where agents navigate by following natural language instructions; and Object-Goal Navigation (OGN), where agents navigate to a specified target object. However, existing work primarily evaluates model performance under nominal conditions, overlooking the potential corruptions that arise in real-world settings. To address this gap, we present NavTrust, a unified benchmark that systematically corrupts input modalities, including RGB, depth, and instructions, in realistic scenarios and evaluates their impact on navigation performance. To our best knowledge, NavTrust is the first benchmark that exposes embodied navigation agents to diverse RGB-Depth corruptions and instruction variations in a unified framework. Our extensive evaluation of seven state-of-the-art approaches reveals substantial performance degradation under realistic corruptions, which highlights critical robustness gaps and provides a roadmap toward more trustworthy embodied navigation systems. Furthermore, we systematically evaluate four distinct mitigation strategies to enhance robustness against RGB-Depth and instructions corruptions. Our base models include Uni-NaVid and ETPNav. We deployed them on a real mobile robot and observed improved robustness to corruptions. The project website is: https://navtrust.github.io.

Raghav Sharma, Manan Mehta, Sai Tiger Raina

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet recent progress has moved beyond canonical text-based methods. This survey synthesizes the new frontier of alignment research by addressing critical gaps in multi-modal alignment, cultural fairness, and low-latency optimization. To systematically explore these domains, we first review foundational algo- rithms, including PPO, DPO, and GRPO, before presenting a detailed analysis of the latest innovations. By providing a comparative synthesis of these techniques and outlining open challenges, this work serves as an essential roadmap for researchers building more robust, efficient, and equitable AI systems.

Anthony DiMaggio, Raghav Sharma, Gururaj Saileshwar

Secure federated learning (FL) preserves data privacy during distributed model training. However, deploying such frameworks across heterogeneous devices results in performance bottlenecks, due to straggler clients with limited computational or network capabilities, slowing training for all participating clients. This paper introduces the first straggler mitigation technique for secure aggregation with deep neural networks. We propose CLIP, a client-side invariant neuron pruning technique coupled with network-aware pruning, that addresses compute and network bottlenecks due to stragglers during training with minimal accuracy loss. Our technique accelerates secure FL training by 13% to 34% across multiple datasets (CIFAR10, Shakespeare, FEMNIST) with an accuracy impact of between 1.3% improvement to 2.6% reduction.

Raghav Sharma, Manan Mehta

Small language models (SLMs; 1-12B params, sometimes up to 20B) are sufficient and often superior for agentic workloads where the objective is schema- and API-constrained accuracy rather than open-ended generation. We synthesize recent evidence across open and proprietary SLMs (Phi-4-Mini, Qwen-2.5-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Llama-3.2-1B/3B, Ministral-3B/8B, Apple on-device 3B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill) and connect it to modern evaluations (BFCL v3/v4, StableToolBench) and serving stacks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) paired with guided decoding libraries (XGrammar, Outlines). We formalize SLM-default, LLM-fallback systems with uncertainty-aware routing and verifier cascades, and propose engineering metrics that reflect real production goals: cost per successful task (CPS), schema validity rate, executable call rate, p50/p95 latency, and energy per request. Guided decoding, strict JSON Schema outputs, and validator-first tool execution close much of the capability gap with larger models and often let SLMs match or surpass LLMs on tool use, function calling, and RAG at 10x-100x lower token cost with materially better latency and energy. We provide design patterns for agent stacks that prioritize SLMs: schema-first prompting, type-safe function registries, confidence scoring with verifier rollups, and lightweight adaptation via LoRA/QLoRA. We also delineate limits where fallback remains valuable (open-domain reasoning and some long-horizon planning). The result is a practical blueprint for building fast, inexpensive, and reliable agents that default to SLMs while preserving headroom with targeted LLM assistance. Keywords: small language models, agents, function calling, structured outputs, JSON Schema, guided decoding, LoRA/QLoRA, routing, energy efficiency, edge inference

Raghav Sharma, Manan Mehta

Ensuring that critical IoT systems function safely and smoothly depends a lot on finding anomalies quickly. As more complex systems, like smart healthcare, energy grids and industrial automation, appear, it is easier to see the shortcomings of older methods of detection. Monitoring failures usually happen in dynamic, high dimensional situations, especially when data is incomplete, messy or always evolving. Such limits point out the requirement for adaptive, intelligent systems that always improve and think. LLMs are now capable of significantly changing how context is understood and semantic inference is done across all types of data. This proposal suggests using an LLM supported contextual reasoning method along with XAI agents to improve how anomalies are found in significant IoT environments. To discover hidden patterns and notice inconsistencies in data streams, it uses attention methods, avoids dealing with details from every time step and uses memory buffers with meaning. Because no code AI stresses transparency and interpretability, people can check and accept the AI's decisions, helping ensure AI follows company policies. The two architectures are put together in a test that compares the results of the traditional model with those of the suggested LLM enhanced model. Important measures to check are the accuracy of detection, how much inaccurate information is included in the results, how clearly the findings can be read and how fast the system responds under different test situations. The metaheuristic is tested in simulations of real world smart grid and healthcare contexts to check its adaptability and reliability. From the study, we see that the new approach performs much better than most existing models in both accuracy and interpretation, so it could be a good fit for future anomaly detection tasks in IoT

Sophia J. Wagner, Nadieh Khalili, Raghav Sharma et al.

In digital pathology, different staining procedures and scanners cause substantial color variations in whole-slide images (WSIs), especially across different laboratories. These color shifts result in a poor generalization of deep learning-based methods from the training domain to external pathology data. To increase test performance, stain normalization techniques are used to reduce the variance between training and test domain. Alternatively, color augmentation can be applied during training leading to a more robust model without the extra step of color normalization at test time. We propose a novel color augmentation technique, HistAuGAN, that can simulate a wide variety of realistic histology stain colors, thus making neural networks stain-invariant when applied during training. Based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image-to-image translation, our model disentangles the content of the image, i.e., the morphological tissue structure, from the stain color attributes. It can be trained on multiple domains and, therefore, learns to cover different stain colors as well as other domain-specific variations introduced in the slide preparation and imaging process. We demonstrate that HistAuGAN outperforms conventional color augmentation techniques on a classification task on the publicly available dataset Camelyon17 and show that it is able to mitigate present batch effects.