Ashwin Balasubramanian

Eun Cheol Choi, Ashwin Balasubramanian, Jinhu Qi et al.

Misinformation surrounding emerging outbreaks poses a serious societal threat, making robust countermeasures essential. One promising approach is stance detection (SD), which identifies whether social media posts support or oppose misleading claims. In this work, we finetune classifiers on COVID-19 misinformation SD datasets consisting of claims and corresponding tweets. Specifically, we test controllable misinformation generation (CMG) using large language models (LLMs) as a method for data augmentation. While CMG demonstrates the potential for expanding training datasets, our experiments reveal that performance gains over traditional augmentation methods are often minimal and inconsistent, primarily due to built-in safeguards within LLMs. We release our code and datasets to facilitate further research on misinformation detection and generation.

Faiz Aladin, Ashwin Balasubramanian, Lars Lindemann et al.

Reachability analysis has become increasingly important in robotics to distinguish safe from unsafe states. Unfortunately, existing reachability and safety analysis methods often fall short, as they typically require known system dynamics or large datasets to estimate accurate system models, are computationally expensive, and assume full state information. A recent method, called MORALS, aims to address these shortcomings by using topological tools to estimate Regions of Attraction (ROA) in a low-dimensional latent space. However, MORALS still relies on full state knowledge and has not been studied when only sensor measurements are available. This paper presents Visual Morse Graph-Aided Estimation of Regions of Attraction in a Learned Latent Space (V-MORALS). V-MORALS takes in a dataset of image-based trajectories of a system under a given controller, and learns a latent space for reachability analysis. Using this learned latent space, our method is able to generate well-defined Morse Graphs, from which we can compute ROAs for various systems and controllers. V-MORALS provides capabilities similar to the original MORALS architecture without relying on state knowledge, and using only high-level sensor data. Our project website is at: https://v-morals.onrender.com.