Ahsan Habib Akash

Ahsan Habib Akash, Dipkamal Bhusal, Stacey Jones et al.

Deep neural networks are widely deployed in high-stakes visual applications where interpretability is critical, yet existing explanations face a trade-off: post-hoc concept methods recover factors that are faithful to a model's behavior but unnamed, while naming and by-design methods attach human-readable concepts only by retraining or altering the classifier. We propose Language-Anchored Decomposition (LAD), a post-hoc framework that delivers concepts which are simultaneously named, faithful, and obtained without modifying the model. For each class, a large language model proposes a concept vocabulary that CLIP-based similarity maps localize across image regions. Inverting standard non-negative matrix factorization, LAD fixes these language-grounded maps as the coefficient matrix and learns only a concept basis that reconstructs the frozen encoder's activations, so naming becomes a structural constraint and the model's own feature geometry determines which concepts are retained. Removing this anchor preserves accuracy but collapses attribution faithfulness. Across natural-image, scene, and medical-imaging benchmarks, LAD produces spatially precise explanations that are decision-relevant under both concept insertion and deletion, while uniquely providing stable, human-interpretable concept names.

Shourov Joarder, Diganta Sikdar, Ahsan Habib Akash et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning ability of LLMs, but often depends on external supervision from human annotations or gold-standard solutions. Reinforcement learning from internal feedback (RLIF) has recently emerged as a scalable unsupervised alternative, using signals extracted from the model itself. However, existing RLIF methods typically rely on a single internal reward, which can lead to reward hacking, entropy collapse, and degraded reasoning structure. We propose a multi-reward RLIF framework that decomposes the training signal into two complementary components: an answer-level reward based on cluster voting and a completion-level reward based on token-wise self-certainty. To combine these signals robustly, we apply GDPO-based normalization to reduce reward-scale imbalance. We further introduce KL-Cov regularization, which targets low-entropy token distributions responsible for disproportionate entropy reduction, preserving exploration and preventing late-stage collapse. Across mathematical reasoning and code-generation benchmarks, our method improves stability and robustness over prior unsupervised RL approaches, while achieving performance close to supervised RLVR methods. These results show that complementary internal rewards, combined with targeted regularization, can support stable long-horizon reasoning without relying on external ground-truth supervision. Code will be released soon.

Ahsan Habib Akash, Greg Murray, Annahita Amireskandari et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success on multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification, yet they can exhibit demographic biases even when explicit protected attributes are absent during training. In this work, we focus on automated glaucoma screening from retinal fundus images, a critical application given that glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness and disproportionately affects underserved populations. Building on a reweighting-based contrastive learning framework, we introduce an attribute-agnostic debiasing method that (i) infers proxy subgroups via unsupervised clustering of image-image embeddings, (ii) computes gradient-similarity weights between the CLIP-style multimodal loss and a SimCLR-style image-pair contrastive loss, and (iii) applies these weights in a joint, top-$k$ weighted objective to upweight underperforming clusters. This label-free approach adaptively targets the hardest examples, thereby reducing subgroup disparities. We evaluate our method on the Harvard FairVLMed glaucoma subset, reporting Equalized Odds Distance (EOD), Equalized Subgroup AUC (ES AUC), and Groupwise AUC to demonstrate equitable performance across inferred demographic subgroups.

Asif Shahriyar Sushmit, Partho Ghosh, Md. Abrar Istiak et al.

Activity detection from first-person videos (FPV) captured using a wearable camera is an active research field with potential applications in many sectors, including healthcare, law enforcement, and rehabilitation. State-of-the-art methods use optical flow-based hybrid techniques that rely on features derived from the motion of objects from consecutive frames. In this work, we developed a two-stream network, the \emph{SegCodeNet}, that uses a network branch containing video-streams with color-coded semantic segmentation masks of relevant objects in addition to the original RGB video-stream. We also include a stream-wise attention gating that prioritizes between the two streams and a frame-wise attention module that prioritizes the video frames that contain relevant features. Experiments are conducted on an FPV dataset containing $18$ activity classes in office environments. In comparison to a single-stream network, the proposed two-stream method achieves an absolute improvement of $14.366\%$ and $10.324\%$ for averaged F1 score and accuracy, respectively, when average results are compared for three different frame sizes $224\times224$, $112\times112$, and $64\times64$. The proposed method provides significant performance gains for lower-resolution images with absolute improvements of $17\%$ and $26\%$ in F1 score for input dimensions of $112\times112$ and $64\times64$, respectively. The best performance is achieved for a frame size of $224\times224$ yielding an F1 score and accuracy of $90.176\%$ and $90.799\%$ which outperforms the state-of-the-art Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) \cite{carreira2017quo} method by an absolute margin of $4.529\%$ and $2.419\%$, respectively.

Partho Ghosh, Md. Abrar Istiak, Nayeeb Rashid et al.

In the advent of wearable body-cameras, human activity classification from First-Person Videos (FPV) has become a topic of increasing importance for various applications, including in life-logging, law-enforcement, sports, workplace, and healthcare. One of the challenging aspects of FPV is its exposure to potentially sensitive objects within the user's field of view. In this work, we developed a privacy-aware activity classification system focusing on office videos. We utilized a Mask-RCNN with an Inception-ResNet hybrid as a feature extractor for detecting, and then blurring out sensitive objects (e.g., digital screens, human face, paper) from the videos. For activity classification, we incorporate an ensemble of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with ResNet, ResNext, and DenseNet based feature extractors. The proposed system was trained and evaluated on the FPV office video dataset that includes 18-classes made available through the IEEE Video and Image Processing (VIP) Cup 2019 competition. On the original unprotected FPVs, the proposed activity classifier ensemble reached an accuracy of 85.078% with precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.88, 0.85 & 0.86, respectively. On privacy protected videos, the performances were slightly degraded, with accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores at 73.68%, 0.79, 0.75, and 0.74, respectively. The presented system won the 3rd prize in the IEEE VIP Cup 2019 competition.