Soudeep Ghoshal

Soudeep Ghoshal, Sandipan Chakraborty, Pradipto Chowdhury et al.

Machine learning techniques, such as Transformers and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, play a crucial role in Symbolic Music Generation (SMG). Existing literature indicates a difference between LSTMs and Transformers regarding their ability to model local melodic continuity versus maintaining global structural coherence. However, their specific properties within the context of SMG have not been systematically studied. This paper addresses this gap by providing a fine-grained comparative analysis of LSTMs versus Transformers for SMG, examining local and global properties in detail using 17 musical quality metrics on the Deutschl dataset. We find that LSTM networks excel at capturing local patterns but fail to preserve long-range dependencies, while Transformers model global structure effectively but tend to produce irregular phrasing. Based on this analysis and leveraging their respective strengths, we propose a Hybrid architecture combining a Transformer Encoder with an LSTM Decoder and evaluate it against both baselines. We evaluated 1,000 generated melodies from each of the three architectures on the Deutschl dataset. The results show that the hybrid method achieves better local and global continuity and coherence compared to the baselines. Our work highlights the key characteristics of these models and demonstrates how their properties can be leveraged to design superior models. We also supported the experiments with ablation studies and human perceptual evaluations, which statistically support the findings and provide robust validation for this work.

Soudeep Ghoshal, Himanshu Buckchash

Deep ConvNets suffer from gradient signal degradation as network depth increases, limiting effective feature learning in complex architectures. ResNet addressed this through residual connections, but these fixed short-circuits cannot adapt to varying input complexity or selectively emphasize task relevant features across network hierarchies. This study introduces GradAttn, a hybrid CNN-transformer framework that replaces fixed residual connections with attention-controlled gradient flow. By extracting multi-scale CNN features at different depths and regulating them through self-attention, GradAttn dynamically weights shallow texture features and deep semantic representations. For representational analysis, we evaluated three GradAttn variants across eight diverse datasets, from natural images, medical imaging, to fashion recognition. Results demonstrate that GradAttn outperforms ResNet-18 on five of eight datasets, achieving up to +11.07% accuracy improvement on FashionMNIST while maintaining comparable network size. Gradient flow analysis reveals that controlled instabilities, introduced by attention, often coincide with improved generalization, challenging the assumption that perfect stability is optimal. Furthermore, positional encoding effectiveness proves dataset dependent, with CNN hierarchies frequently encoding sufficient spatial structure. These findings allow attention mechanisms as enablers of learnable gradient control, offering a new paradigm for adaptive representation learning in deep neural architectures.

Soudeep Ghoshal, Himanshu Buckchash, Sarita Paudel et al.

From customer feedback to social media, understanding human sentiment in text is central to how machines can interact meaningfully with people. However, despite notable progress, accurately capturing sentiment remains a challenging task, which continues to motivate further research in this area. To this end, we introduce Non-Differential Transformer (NDT). It is inspired by (but in contrast to) the state-of-the-art Differential Transformer (DT) model. While standard Transformers can struggle with irrelevant context, the sota DT model uses attention map subtraction, potentially for noise cancellation. We explore an alternative motivation, hypothesizing that benefits may arise from enabling different attention components to specialize on distinct concepts within the text, similar to multiplexing information channels or mixture models, rather than primarily canceling noise via subtraction. Guided by this concept-multiplexing (ConPlex) view, the specific architecture presented in this paper employs a purely additive strategy. It uses only positive weights, learned during training, to ensure constructive combination of these specialized attention perspectives. This design choice explores positive only integration, though our broader framework also shows promise with less constrained linear combinations involving both positive and negative weights. Our model computes attention via this positively weighted sum of multiple distinct attention maps. This allows the model to constructively integrate diverse signals and potentially capture more complex contextual relationships. Competitive performance is achieved by the proposed model for Sentiment Analysis while tested on multiple datasets. We conclude by presenting our results, challenges and future research agenda in this important area of research.