Nikhil Kumar

Nitin Choudhury, Nikhil Kumar, Aditya Kumar Sinha et al.

Wide exploration on robocall surveillance research is hindered due to limited access to public datasets, due to privacy concerns. In this work, we first curate Robo-SAr, a synthetic robocall dataset designed for robocall surveillance research. Robo-SAr comprises of ~200 unwanted and ~1200 legitimate synthetic robocall samples across three realistic adversarial axes: psycholinguistics-manipulated transcripts, emotion-eliciting speech, and cloned voices. We further propose RoboKA, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN)-based multimodal fusion framework designed to model structured nonlinear interactions between acoustic and linguistic cues that characterize diverse adversarial robocall strategies. RoboKA first leverages cross-modal contrastive learning to align latent modality representations and feeds the resulting embeddings to a KAN-projection head for final classification. We benchmark RoboKA against strong unimodal and multimodal baselines in both in-domain and out-of-domain setups, finding RoboKA to surpass all baselines in terms of recall and F1-score.

Nikhil Kumar, Pravendra Singh

While there has been significant progress in object detection using conventional image processing and machine learning algorithms, exploring small and dim target detection in the IR domain is a relatively new area of study. The majority of small and dim target detection methods are derived from conventional object detection algorithms, albeit with some alterations. The task of detecting small and dim targets in IR imagery is complex. This is because these targets often need distinct features, the background is cluttered with unclear details, and the IR signatures of the scene can change over time due to fluctuations in thermodynamics. The primary objective of this review is to highlight the progress made in this field. This is the first review in the field of small and dim target detection in infrared imagery, encompassing various methodologies ranging from conventional image processing to cutting-edge deep learning-based approaches. The authors have also introduced a taxonomy of such approaches. There are two main types of approaches: methodologies using several frames for detection, and single-frame-based detection techniques. Single frame-based detection techniques encompass a diverse range of methods, spanning from traditional image processing-based approaches to more advanced deep learning methodologies. Our findings indicate that deep learning approaches perform better than traditional image processing-based approaches. In addition, a comprehensive compilation of various available datasets has also been provided. Furthermore, this review identifies the gaps and limitations in existing techniques, paving the way for future research and development in this area.

Nikhil Kumar, Avinash Upadhyay, Shreya Sharma et al.

This paper presents a novel mid-wave infrared (MWIR) small target detection dataset (MWIRSTD) comprising 14 video sequences containing approximately 1053 images with annotated targets of three distinct classes of small objects. Captured using cooled MWIR imagers, the dataset offers a unique opportunity for researchers to develop and evaluate state-of-the-art methods for small object detection in realistic MWIR scenes. Unlike existing datasets, which primarily consist of uncooled thermal images or synthetic data with targets superimposed onto the background or vice versa, MWIRSTD provides authentic MWIR data with diverse targets and environments. Extensive experiments on various traditional methods and deep learning-based techniques for small target detection are performed on the proposed dataset, providing valuable insights into their efficacy. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/avinres/MWIRSTD.

Anamitra Maiti, Subham Laha, Rishav Upadhaya et al.

In today's digital age, the internet is essential for communication and the sharing of information, creating a critical need for sophisticated data security measures to prevent unauthorized access and exploitation. Cryptography encrypts messages into a cipher text that is incomprehensible to unauthorized readers, thus safeguarding data during its transmission. Steganography, on the other hand, originates from the Greek term for "covered writing" and involves the art of hiding data within another medium, thereby facilitating covert communication by making the message invisible. This proposed approach takes advantage of the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL), especially through the application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), to improve upon traditional steganographic methods. By embedding encrypted data within another medium, our method ensures that the communication remains hidden from prying eyes. The application of GANs enables a smart, secure system that utilizes the inherent sensitivity of neural networks to slight alterations in data, enhancing the protection against detection. By merging the encryption techniques of cryptography with the hiding capabilities of steganography, and augmenting these with the strengths of AI, we introduce a comprehensive security system designed to maintain both the privacy and integrity of information. This system is crafted not just to prevent unauthorized access or modification of data, but also to keep the existence of the data hidden. This fusion of technologies tackles the core challenges of data security in the current era of open digital communication, presenting an advanced solution with the potential to transform the landscape of information security.

Nikhil Kumar

This paper examines the market for AI models in which firms compete to provide accurate model predictions and consumers exhibit heterogeneous preferences for model accuracy. We develop a consumer-firm duopoly model to analyze how competition affects firms' incentives to improve model accuracy. Each firm aims to minimize its model's error, but this choice can often be suboptimal. Counterintuitively, we find that in a competitive market, firms that improve overall accuracy do not necessarily improve their profits. Rather, each firm's optimal decision is to invest further on the error dimension where it has a competitive advantage. By decomposing model errors into false positive and false negative rates, firms can reduce errors in each dimension through investments. Firms are strictly better off investing on their superior dimension and strictly worse off with investments on their inferior dimension. Profitable investments adversely affect consumers but increase overall welfare.

Kailas Dayanandan, Nikhil Kumar, Anand Sinha et al.

The dual thinking framework considers fast, intuitive, and slower logical processing. The perception of dual thinking in vision requires images where inferences from intuitive and logical processing differ, and the latter is under-explored in current studies. We introduce a novel adversarial dataset to provide evidence for the dual thinking framework in human vision, which also facilitates the study of the qualitative behavior of deep learning models. Our psychophysical studies show the presence of multiple inferences in rapid succession, and analysis of errors shows that the early stopping of visual processing can result in missing relevant information. MLLMs (Multi-modal Large Language Models) and VLMs (Vision Language Models) have made significant progress in correcting errors in intuitive processing in human vision and showed enhanced performance on images requiring logical processing. However, their improvements in logical processing have not kept pace with their advancements in intuitive processing. In contrast, segmentation models exhibit errors similar to those seen in intuitive human processing and lack understanding of sub-structures, as indicated by errors related to sub-components in identified instances. As AI (Artificial Intelligence)-based systems find increasing applications in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving, the integration of logical processing capabilities becomes essential. This not only enhances performance but also addresses the limitations of scaling-based approaches while ensuring robustness and reliability in real-world environments.