Shirish Karande

Ritam Majumdar, Vishal Jadhav, Anirudh Deodhar et al.

Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been widely used to obtain accurate neural surrogates for a system of Partial Differential Equations (PDE). One of the major limitations of PINNs is that the neural solutions are challenging to interpret, and are often treated as black-box solvers. While Symbolic Regression (SR) has been studied extensively, very few works exist which generate analytical expressions to directly perform SR for a system of PDEs. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end framework for obtaining mathematical expressions for solutions of PDEs. We use a trained PINN to generate a dataset, upon which we perform SR. We use a Differentiable Program Architecture (DPA) defined using context-free grammar to describe the space of symbolic expressions. We improve the interpretability by pruning the DPA in a depth-first manner using the magnitude of weights as our heuristic. On average, we observe a 95.3% reduction in parameters of DPA while maintaining accuracy at par with PINNs. Furthermore, on an average, pruning improves the accuracy of DPA by 7.81% . We demonstrate our framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art SR solvers on systems of complex PDEs like Navier-Stokes: Kovasznay flow and Taylor-Green Vortex flow. Furthermore, we produce analytical expressions for a complex industrial use-case of an Air-Preheater, without suffering from performance loss viz-a-viz PINNs.

Ritam Majumdar, Vishal Jadhav, Anirudh Deodhar et al.

We demonstrate a Physics-informed Neural Network (PINN) based model for real-time health monitoring of a heat exchanger, that plays a critical role in improving energy efficiency of thermal power plants. A hypernetwork based approach is used to enable the domain-decomposed PINN learn the thermal behavior of the heat exchanger in response to dynamic boundary conditions, eliminating the need to re-train. As a result, we achieve orders of magnitude reduction in inference time in comparison to existing PINNs, while maintaining the accuracy on par with the physics-based simulations. This makes the approach very attractive for predictive maintenance of the heat exchanger in digital twin environments.

Ritam Majumdar, Vishal Jadhav, Anirudh Deodhar et al.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have been widely used to develop neural surrogates for solutions of Partial Differential Equations. A drawback of PINNs is that they have to be retrained with every change in initial-boundary conditions and PDE coefficients. The Hypernetwork, a model-based meta learning technique, takes in a parameterized task embedding as input and predicts the weights of PINN as output. Predicting weights of a neural network however, is a high-dimensional regression problem, and hypernetworks perform sub-optimally while predicting parameters for large base networks. To circumvent this issue, we use a low ranked adaptation (LoRA) formulation to decompose every layer of the base network into low-ranked tensors and use hypernetworks to predict the low-ranked tensors. Despite the reduced dimensionality of the resulting weight-regression problem, LoRA-based Hypernetworks violate the underlying physics of the given task. We demonstrate that the generalization capabilities of LoRA-based hypernetworks drastically improve when trained with an additional physics-informed loss component (HyperPINN) to satisfy the governing differential equations. We observe that LoRA-based HyperPINN training allows us to learn fast solutions for parameterized PDEs like Burger's equation and Navier Stokes: Kovasznay flow, while having an 8x reduction in prediction parameters on average without compromising on accuracy when compared to all other baselines.

Ritam Majumdar, Shirish Karande, Lovekesh Vig

Simulating physical systems using Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) has become an indispensible part of modern industrial process optimization. Traditionally, numerical solvers have been used to solve the associated PDEs, however recently Transform-based Neural Operators such as the Fourier Neural Operator and Wavelet Neural Operator have received a lot of attention for their potential to provide fast solutions for systems of PDEs. In this work, we investigate the importance of the transform layers to the reported success of transform based neural operators. In particular, we record the cost in terms of performance, if all the transform layers are replaced by learnable linear layers. Surprisingly, we observe that linear layers suffice to provide performance comparable to the best-known transform-based layers and seem to do so with a compute time advantage as well. We believe that this observation can have significant implications for future work on Neural Operators, and might point to other sources of efficiencies for these architectures.

Ritam Majumdar, Vishal Jadhav, Anirudh Deodhar et al.

We introduce Physics Informed Symbolic Networks (PISN) which utilize physics-informed loss to obtain a symbolic solution for a system of Partial Differential Equations (PDE). Given a context-free grammar to describe the language of symbolic expressions, we propose to use weighted sum as continuous approximation for selection of a production rule. We use this approximation to define multilayer symbolic networks. We consider Kovasznay flow (Navier-Stokes) and two-dimensional viscous Burger's equations to illustrate that PISN are able to provide a performance comparable to PINNs across various start-of-the-art advances: multiple outputs and governing equations, domain-decomposition, hypernetworks. Furthermore, we propose Physics-informed Neurosymbolic Networks (PINSN) which employ a multilayer perceptron (MLP) operator to model the residue of symbolic networks. PINSNs are observed to give 2-3 orders of performance gain over standard PINN.

Ritam Majumdar, Amey Varhade, Shirish Karande et al.

Self-training techniques have shown remarkable value across many deep learning models and tasks. However, such techniques remain largely unexplored when considered in the context of learning fast solvers for systems of partial differential equations (Eg: Neural Operators). In this work, we explore the use of self-training for Fourier Neural Operators (FNO). Neural Operators emerged as a data driven technique, however, data from experiments or traditional solvers is not always readily available. Physics Informed Neural Operators (PINO) overcome this constraint by utilizing a physics loss for the training, however the accuracy of PINO trained without data does not match the performance obtained by training with data. In this work we show that self-training can be used to close this gap in performance. We examine canonical examples, namely the 1D-Burgers and 2D-Darcy PDEs, to showcase the efficacy of self-training. Specifically, FNOs, when trained exclusively with physics loss through self-training, approach 1.07x for Burgers and 1.02x for Darcy, compared to FNOs trained with both data and physics loss. Furthermore, we discover that pseudo-labels can be used for self-training without necessarily training to convergence in each iteration. A consequence of this is that we are able to discover self-training schedules that improve upon the baseline performance of PINO in terms of accuracy as well as time.

Ritam Majumdar, Shirish Karande, Lovekesh Vig

The spread of many infectious diseases is modeled using variants of the SIR compartmental model, which is a coupled differential equation. The coefficients of the SIR model determine the spread trajectories of disease, on whose basis proactive measures can be taken. Hence, the coefficient estimates must be both fast and accurate. Shaier et al. in the paper "Disease Informed Neural Networks" used Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to estimate the parameters of the SIR model. There are two drawbacks to this approach. First, the training time for PINNs is high, with certain diseases taking close to 90 hrs to train. Second, PINNs don't generalize for a new SIDR trajectory, and learning its corresponding SIR parameters requires retraining the PINN from scratch. In this work, we aim to eliminate both of these drawbacks. We generate a dataset between the parameters of ODE and the spread trajectories by solving the forward problem for a large distribution of parameters using the LSODA algorithm. We then use a neural network to learn the mapping between spread trajectories and coefficients of SIDR in an offline manner. This allows us to learn the parameters of a new spread trajectory without having to retrain, enabling generalization at test time. We observe a speed-up of 3-4 orders of magnitude with accuracy comparable to that of PINNs for 11 highly infectious diseases. Further finetuning of neural network inferred ODE coefficients using PINN further leads to 2-3 orders improvement of estimated coefficients.

Ganesh Prasath, Shirish Karande

Several decision problems that are encountered in various business domains can be modeled as mathematical programs, i.e. optimization problems. The process of conducting such modeling often requires the involvement of experts trained in operations research and advanced algorithms. Surprisingly, despite the significant advances in the methods for program and code synthesis, AutoML, learning to optimize etc., there has been little or no attention paid to automating the task of synthesizing mathematical programs. We imagine a scenario where the specifications for modeling, i.e. the objective and constraints are expressed in an unstructured form in natural language (NL) and the mathematical program has to be synthesized from such an NL specification. In this work we evaluate the efficacy of employing CodeT5 with data augmentation and post-processing of beams. We utilize GPT-3 with back translation for generation of synthetic examples. Further we apply rules of linear programming to score beams and correct beams based on common error patterns. We observe that with these enhancements CodeT5 base gives an execution accuracy of 0.73 which is significantly better than zero-shot execution accuracy of 0.41 by ChatGPT and 0.36 by Codex.

Neil Shah, Shirish Karande, Vineet Gandhi

We propose a novel approach to significantly improve the intelligibility in the Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)-to-speech conversion task, leveraging self-supervision and sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning techniques. Unlike conventional methods that explicitly record ground-truth speech, our methodology relies on self-supervision and speech-to-speech synthesis to simulate ground-truth speech. Despite utilizing simulated speech, our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 29.08% improvement in the Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD) metric. Additionally, we present error rates and demonstrate our model's proficiency to synthesize speech in novel voices of interest. Moreover, we present a methodology for augmenting the existing CSTR NAM TIMIT Plus corpus, setting a benchmark with a Word Error Rate (WER) of 42.57% to gauge the intelligibility of the synthesized speech. Speech samples can be found at https://nam2speech.github.io/NAM2Speech/

Shrikant Kapse, Priyankkumar Dhrangdhariya, Priya Kedia et al.

Image-based deep learning provides a non-invasive, scalable solution for monitoring potato quality during storage, addressing key challenges such as sprout detection, weight loss estimation, and shelf-life prediction. In this study, images and corresponding weight data were collected over a 200-day period under controlled temperature and humidity conditions. Leveraging powerful pre-trained architectures of ResNet, VGG, DenseNet, and Vision Transformer (ViT), we designed two specialized models: (1) a high-precision binary classifier for sprout detection, and (2) an advanced multi-class predictor to estimate weight loss and forecast remaining shelf-life with remarkable accuracy. DenseNet achieved exceptional performance, with 98.03% accuracy in sprout detection. Shelf-life prediction models performed best with coarse class divisions (2-5 classes), achieving over 89.83% accuracy, while accuracy declined for finer divisions (6-8 classes) due to subtle visual differences and limited data per class. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of integrating image-based models into automated sorting and inventory systems, enabling early identification of sprouted potatoes and dynamic categorization based on storage stage. Practical implications include improved inventory management, differential pricing strategies, and reduced food waste across supply chains. While predicting exact shelf-life intervals remains challenging, focusing on broader class divisions ensures robust performance. Future research should aim to develop generalized models trained on diverse potato varieties and storage conditions to enhance adaptability and scalability. Overall, this approach offers a cost-effective, non-destructive method for quality assessment, supporting efficiency and sustainability in potato storage and distribution.

Ganesh Prasath Ramani, Shirish Karande, Santhosh V et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as formidable instruments capable of comprehending and producing human-like text. This paper explores the potential of LLMs, to shape user perspectives and subsequently influence their decisions on particular tasks. This capability finds applications in diverse domains such as Investment, Credit cards and Insurance, wherein they assist users in selecting appropriate insurance policies, investment plans, Credit cards, Retail, as well as in Behavioral Change Support Systems (BCSS). We present a sophisticated multi-agent framework wherein a consortium of agents operate in collaborative manner. The primary agent engages directly with user agents through persuasive dialogue, while the auxiliary agents perform tasks such as information retrieval, response analysis, development of persuasion strategies, and validation of facts. Empirical evidence from our experiments demonstrates that this collaborative methodology significantly enhances the persuasive efficacy of the LLM. We continuously analyze the resistance of the user agent to persuasive efforts and counteract it by employing a combination of rule-based and LLM-based resistance-persuasion mapping techniques. We employ simulated personas and generate conversations in insurance, banking, and retail domains to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in recognizing, adjusting to, and influencing various personality types. Concurrently, we examine the resistance mechanisms employed by LLM simulated personas. Persuasion is quantified via measurable surveys before and after interaction, LLM-generated scores on conversation, and user decisions (purchase or non-purchase).

Ninad Joshi, Ashutosh Ranjan, Vivek Srivastava et al.

Generative text-to-image models are typically trained on large-scale web-scraped datasets that include diverse visual content such as copyrighted and stylistically distinctive artworks, raising concerns about ownership, attribution, and the unintended reuse of protected visual expressions. A key issue is that models can learn stylistic patterns from this data and reproduce them in generated outputs without any explicit reference in the prompt. We refer to this phenomenon as The Silent Brush, where such learned styles reappear even when they are not requested. Existing evaluation methods mainly focus on near-duplicate retrieval or membership inference and do not account for this form of unintended stylistic resurfacing across prompts. To address these gaps, we first formulate guiding principles for evaluation of The Silent Brush. We then introduce Art Arena, an evaluation protocol that measures how strongly artworks are encoded, how they interact, and how frequently their stylistic traits reappear in generated outputs without explicit mention in prompts. We evaluate Art Arena on widely used text-to-image diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion v1.5, Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), and SANA-1.5, and design it to generalize across text-to-image generative systems. Our results show that The Silent Brush arises from differences in representational strength and interaction dynamics between artworks, leading to asymmetric blending in model generations. Code and evaluation resources are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ArtArena-EBE4.

Aditya Kakade, Vivek Srivastava, Shirish Karande

Gödel agent realize recursive self-improvement: an agent inspects its own policy and traces and then modifies that policy in a tested loop. We introduce Polaris, a Gödel agent for compact models that performs policy repair via experience abstraction, turning failures into policy updates through a structured cycle of analysis, strategy formation, abstraction, and minimal code pat ch repair with conservative checks. Unlike response level self correction or parameter tuning, Polaris makes policy level changes with small, auditable patches that persist in the policy and are reused on unseen instances within each benchmark. As part of the loop, the agent engages in meta reasoning: it explains its errors, proposes concrete revisions to its own policy, and then updates the policy. To enable cumulative policy refinement, we introduce experience abstraction, which distills failures into compact, reusable strategies that transfer to unseen instances. On MGSM, DROP, GPQA, and LitBench (covering arithmetic reasoning, compositional inference, graduate-level problem solving, and creative writing evaluation), a 7-billion-parameter model equipped with Polaris achieves consistent gains over the base policy and competitive baselines.

Ashutosh Ranjan, Vivek Srivastava, Shirish Karande et al.

Unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models often leads to uneven concept removal and unintended forgetting of unrelated capabilities. This complicates tasks such as copyright compliance, protected data mitigation, artist opt-outs, and policy-driven content updates. As models grow larger and adopt more diverse architectures, achieving precise and selective unlearning while preserving generative quality becomes increasingly challenging. We introduce SurgUn (pronounced as Surgeon), a surgical unlearning method that applies targeted weight-space updates to remove specific visual concepts in text-conditioned diffusion models. Our approach is motivated by retroactive interference theory, which holds that newly acquired memories can overwrite, suppress, or impede access to prior ones by competing for shared representational pathways. We adapt this principle to diffusion models by inducing retroactive concept interference, enabling focused destabilization of only the target concept while preserving unrelated capabilities through a novel training paradigm. SurgUn achieves high-precision unlearning across diverse settings. It performs strongly on compact U-Net based models such as Stable Diffusion v1.5, scales effectively to the larger U-Net architecture SDXL, and extends to SANA, representing an underexplored Diffusion Transformer based architecture for unlearning.

Aakash Sen Sharma, Debdeep Sanyal, Vivek Srivastava et al.

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values is central to their safe deployment, yet current practice produces static, brittle, and costly-to-maintain models that fail to keep pace with evolving norms and policies. This misalignment, which we term the Alignment-Reality Gap, poses a growing challenge for reliable long-term use. Existing remedies are inadequate: large-scale re-annotation is economically prohibitive, and standard unlearning methods act as blunt instruments that erode utility rather than enable precise policy updates. We introduce TRACE (Triage and Re-align by Alignment Conflict Evaluation), a framework for principled unlearning that reconceives re-alignment as a programmatic policy application problem. TRACE programmatically triages existing preference data against a new policy, identifies high-impact conflicts via a alignment impact score, and applies a hybrid optimization that cleanly inverts, discards, or preserves preferences while safeguarding model performance. Empirical results show that TRACE achieves robust re-alignment across diverse model families (Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Llama-3.1-8B). On both synthetic benchmarks and the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset under complex policy shift, TRACE enforces new principles without degrading general capabilities. Our work establishes a scalable, dynamic, and cost-effective paradigm for maintaining LLM alignment, providing a foundation for sustainable and responsible AI deployment.

Ragja Palakkadavath, Sarath Sivaprasad, Shirish Karande et al.

Several real-life applications require crafting concise, quantitative scoring functions (also called rating systems) from measured observations. For example, an effectiveness score needs to be created for advertising campaigns using a number of engagement metrics. Experts often need to create such scoring functions in the absence of labelled data, where the scores need to reflect business insights and rules as understood by the domain experts. Without a way to capture these inputs systematically, this becomes a time-consuming process involving trial and error. In this paper, we introduce a label-free practical approach to learn a scoring function from multi-dimensional numerical data. The approach incorporates insights and business rules from domain experts in the form of easily observable and specifiable constraints, which are used as weak supervision by a machine learning model. We convert such constraints into loss functions that are optimized simultaneously while learning the scoring function. We examine the efficacy of the approach using a synthetic dataset as well as four real-life datasets, and also compare how it performs vis-a-vis supervised learning models.

Aakash Sen Sharma, Debdeep Sanyal, Priyansh Srivastava et al.

Large language models (LLMs) commonly risk copyright infringement by reproducing protected content verbatim or with insufficient transformative modifications, posing significant ethical, legal, and practical concerns. Current inference-time safeguards predominantly rely on restrictive refusal-based filters, often compromising the practical utility of these models. To address this, we collaborated closely with intellectual property experts to develop FUA-LLM (Fair Use Aligned Language Models), a legally-grounded framework explicitly designed to align LLM outputs with fair-use doctrine. Central to our method is FairUseDB, a carefully constructed dataset containing 18,000 expert-validated examples covering nine realistic infringement scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to fine-tune open-source LLMs, encouraging them to produce legally compliant and practically useful alternatives rather than resorting to blunt refusal. Recognizing the shortcomings of traditional evaluation metrics, we propose new measures: Weighted Penalty Utility and Compliance Aware Harmonic Mean (CAH) to balance infringement risk against response utility. Extensive quantitative experiments coupled with expert evaluations confirm that FUA-LLM substantially reduces problematic outputs (up to 20\%) compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while preserving real-world usability.

Soham Roy, Abhishek Mishra, Shirish Karande et al.

Modern text-to-image generative models can inadvertently reproduce copyrighted content memorized in their training data, raising serious concerns about potential copyright infringement. We introduce Guardians of Generation, a model agnostic inference time framework for dynamic copyright shielding in AI image generation. Our approach requires no retraining or modification of the generative model weights, instead integrating seamlessly with existing diffusion pipelines. It augments the generation process with an adaptive guidance mechanism comprising three components: a detection module, a prompt rewriting module, and a guidance adjustment module. The detection module monitors user prompts and intermediate generation steps to identify features indicative of copyrighted content before they manifest in the final output. If such content is detected, the prompt rewriting mechanism dynamically transforms the user's prompt by sanitizing or replacing references that could trigger copyrighted material while preserving the prompt's intended semantics. The adaptive guidance module adaptively steers the diffusion process away from flagged content by modulating the model's sampling trajectory. Together, these components form a robust shield that enables a tunable balance between preserving creative fidelity and ensuring copyright compliance. We validate our method on a variety of generative models such as Stable Diffusion, SDXL, and Flux, demonstrating substantial reductions in copyrighted content generation with negligible impact on output fidelity or alignment with user intent. This work provides a practical, plug-and-play safeguard for generative image models, enabling more responsible deployment under real-world copyright constraints. Source code is available at: https://respailab.github.io/gog

Neil Shah, Shirish Karande, Vineet Gandhi

Current Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)-to-speech techniques rely on voice cloning to simulate ground-truth speech from paired whispers. However, the simulated speech often lacks intelligibility and fails to generalize well across different speakers. To address this issue, we focus on learning phoneme-level alignments from paired whispers and text and employ a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system to simulate the ground-truth. To reduce dependence on whispers, we learn phoneme alignments directly from NAMs, though the quality is constrained by the available training data. To further mitigate reliance on NAM/whisper data for ground-truth simulation, we propose incorporating the lip modality to infer speech and introduce a novel diffusion-based method that leverages recent advancements in lip-to-speech technology. Additionally, we release the MultiNAM dataset with over 7.96 hours of paired NAM, whisper, video, and text data from two speakers and benchmark all methods on this dataset. Speech samples and the dataset are available at https://diff-nam.github.io/DiffNAM/

Debdeep Sanyal, Umakanta Maharana, Yash Sinha et al.

Role-based access control (RBAC) and hierarchical structures are foundational to how information flows and decisions are made within virtually all organizations. As the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as unified knowledge repositories and intelligent assistants in enterprise settings becomes increasingly apparent, a critical, yet under explored, challenge emerges: \textit{can these models reliably understand and operate within the complex, often nuanced, constraints imposed by organizational hierarchies and associated permissions?} Evaluating this crucial capability is inherently difficult due to the proprietary and sensitive nature of real-world corporate data and access control policies. We introduce a synthetic yet representative \textbf{OrgAccess} benchmark consisting of 40 distinct types of permissions commonly relevant across different organizational roles and levels. We further create three types of permissions: 40,000 easy (1 permission), 10,000 medium (3-permissions tuple), and 20,000 hard (5-permissions tuple) to test LLMs' ability to accurately assess these permissions and generate responses that strictly adhere to the specified hierarchical rules, particularly in scenarios involving users with overlapping or conflicting permissions. Our findings reveal that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle significantly to maintain compliance with role-based structures, even with explicit instructions, with their performance degrades further when navigating interactions involving two or more conflicting permissions. Specifically, even \textbf{GPT-4.1 only achieves an F1-Score of 0.27 on our hardest benchmark}. This demonstrates a critical limitation in LLMs' complex rule following and compositional reasoning capabilities beyond standard factual or STEM-based benchmarks, opening up a new paradigm for evaluating their fitness for practical, structured environments.

Neil Shah, Ayan Kashyap, Shirish Karande et al.

Previous real-time MRI (rtMRI)-based speech synthesis models depend heavily on noisy ground-truth speech. Applying loss directly over ground truth mel-spectrograms entangles speech content with MRI noise, resulting in poor intelligibility. We introduce a novel approach that adapts the multi-modal self-supervised AV-HuBERT model for text prediction from rtMRI and incorporates a new flow-based duration predictor for speaker-specific alignment. The predicted text and durations are then used by a speech decoder to synthesize aligned speech in any novel voice. We conduct thorough experiments on two datasets and demonstrate our method's generalization ability to unseen speakers. We assess our framework's performance by masking parts of the rtMRI video to evaluate the impact of different articulators on text prediction. Our method achieves a $15.18\%$ Word Error Rate (WER) on the USC-TIMIT MRI corpus, marking a huge improvement over the current state-of-the-art. Speech samples are available at https://mri2speech.github.io/MRI2Speech/

Mandar Kulkarni, Kalpesh Patil, Shirish Karande

Current approaches for Knowledge Distillation (KD) either directly use training data or sample from the training data distribution. In this paper, we demonstrate effectiveness of 'mismatched' unlabeled stimulus to perform KD for image classification networks. For illustration, we consider scenarios where this is a complete absence of training data, or mismatched stimulus has to be used for augmenting a small amount of training data. We demonstrate that stimulus complexity is a key factor for distillation's good performance. Our examples include use of various datasets for stimulating MNIST and CIFAR teachers.

Mandar Kulkarni, Shirish Karande

Deep learning has shown promising results in many machine learning applications. The hierarchical feature representation built by deep networks enable compact and precise encoding of the data. A kernel analysis of the trained deep networks demonstrated that with deeper layers, more simple and more accurate data representations are obtained. In this paper, we propose an approach for layer-wise training of a deep network for the supervised classification task. A transformation matrix of each layer is obtained by solving an optimization aimed at a better representation where a subsequent layer builds its representation on the top of the features produced by a previous layer. We compared the performance of our approach with a DNN trained using back-propagation which has same architecture as ours. Experimental results on the real image datasets demonstrate efficacy of our approach. We also performed kernel analysis of layer representations to validate the claim of better feature encoding.

Yash Bhalgat, Mandar Kulkarni, Shirish Karande et al.

Document digitization is becoming increasingly crucial. In this work, we propose a shape based approach for automatic stamp verification/detection in document images using an unsupervised feature learning. Given a small set of training images, our algorithm learns an appropriate shape representation using an unsupervised clustering. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in challenging scenarios.

Anand Sriraman, Mandar Kulkarni, Rahul Kumar et al.

We present an end-to-end machine-human image annotation system where each component can be attached in a plug-and-play fashion. These components include Feature Extraction, Machine Classifier, Task Sampling and Crowd Consensus.

Purushotam Radadia, Shirish Karande

Manual correction of speech transcription can involve a selection from plausible transcriptions. Recent work has shown the feasibility of employing a mismatched crowd for speech transcription. However, it is yet to be established whether a mismatched worker has sufficiently fine-granular speech perception to choose among the phonetically proximate options that are likely to be generated from the trellis of an ASRU. Hence, we consider five languages, Arabic, German, Hindi, Russian and Spanish. For each we generate synthetic, phonetically proximate, options which emulate post-editing scenarios of varying difficulty. We consistently observe non-trivial crowd ability to choose among fine-granular options.