Yamuna Prasad

Dildar Ali, Suman Banerjee, Yamuna Prasad

Creating and maximizing influence among the customers is one of the central goals of an advertiser, and hence, remains an active area of research in recent times. In this advertisement technique, the advertisers approach an influence provider for a specific number of views of their content on a payment basis. Now, if the influence provider can provide the required number of views or more, he will receive the full, else a partial payment. In the context of an influence provider, it is a loss for him if he offers more or less views. This is formalized as 'Regret', and naturally, in the context of the influence provider, the goal will be to minimize this quantity. In this paper, we solve this problem in the context of billboard advertisement and pose it as a discrete optimization problem. We propose four efficient solution approaches for this problem and analyze them to understand their time and space complexity. We implement all the solution methodologies with real-life datasets and compare the obtained results with the existing solution approaches from the literature. We observe that the proposed solutions lead to less regret while taking less computational time.

Rahul Ranjan, Mahendra Kumar Gurve, Anuj et al.

Developing benchmark datasets for low-resource languages poses significant challenges, primarily due to the limited availability of native linguistic experts and the substantial time and cost involved in annotation. Given these challenges, Maithili is still underrepresented in natural language processing research. It is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by more than 13 million people in the Purvanchal region of India, valued for its rich linguistic structure and cultural significance. While sentiment analysis has achieved remarkable progress in high-resource languages, resources for low-resource languages, such as Maithili, remain scarce, often restricted to coarse-grained annotations and lacking interpretability mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel dataset comprising 3,221 Maithili sentences annotated for sentiment polarity and accompanied by natural language justifications. Moreover, the dataset is carefully curated and validated by linguistic experts to ensure both label reliability and contextual fidelity. Notably, the justifications are written in Maithili, thereby promoting culturally grounded interpretation and enhancing the explainability of sentiment models. Furthermore, extensive experiments using both classical machine learning and state-of-the-art transformer architectures demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness for interpretable sentiment analysis. Ultimately, this work establishes the first benchmark for explainable affective computing in Maithili, thus contributing a valuable resource to the broader advancement of multilingual NLP and explainable AI.

Sankar Behera, Yamuna Prasad

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success but their large size poses deployment challenges. While various pruning techniques exist, many involve complex iterative processes, specialized criteria, or struggle to maintain sparsity effectively during training. We introduce ONG (One-shot NMF-based Gradient Masking), a novel sparsification strategy that identifies salient weight structures using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) for one-shot pruning at the outset of training. Subsequently, ONG employs a precise gradient masking mechanism to ensure that only unpruned weights are updated, strictly preserving the target sparsity throughout the training phase. We integrate ONG into the BIMP comparative framework and evaluate it on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with ResNet56, ResNet34, and ResNet18 against established stable sparsification methods. Our experiments demonstrate ONG's ability to achieve comparable or superior performance at various sparsity levels while maintaining structural integrity post-pruning and offering a clear mechanism for targeting desired sparsities.

Yamuna Prasad, Dinesh Khandelwal, K. K. Biswas

Many machine learning applications such as in vision, biology and social networking deal with data in high dimensions. Feature selection is typically employed to select a subset of features which im- proves generalization accuracy as well as reduces the computational cost of learning the model. One of the criteria used for feature selection is to jointly minimize the redundancy and maximize the rele- vance of the selected features. In this paper, we formulate the task of feature selection as a one class SVM problem in a space where features correspond to the data points and instances correspond to the dimensions. The goal is to look for a representative subset of the features (support vectors) which describes the boundary for the region where the set of the features (data points) exists. This leads to a joint optimization of relevance and redundancy in a principled max-margin framework. Additionally, our formulation enables us to leverage existing techniques for optimizing the SVM objective resulting in highly computationally efficient solutions for the task of feature selection. Specifically, we employ the dual coordinate descent algorithm (Hsieh et al., 2008), originally proposed for SVMs, for our formulation. We use a sparse representation to deal with data in very high dimensions. Experiments on seven publicly available benchmark datasets from a variety of domains show that our approach results in orders of magnitude faster solutions even while retaining the same level of accuracy compared to the state of the art feature selection techniques.

Yamuna Prasad, K. K. Biswas

Several data mining problems are characterized by data in high dimensions. One of the popular ways to reduce the dimensionality of the data is to perform feature selection, i.e, select a subset of relevant and non-redundant features. Recently, Quadratic Programming Feature Selection (QPFS) has been proposed which formulates the feature selection problem as a quadratic program. It has been shown to outperform many of the existing feature selection methods for a variety of applications. Though, better than many existing approaches, the running time complexity of QPFS is cubic in the number of features, which can be quite computationally expensive even for moderately sized datasets. In this paper we propose a novel method for feature selection by integrating k-means clustering with QPFS. The basic variant of our approach runs k-means to bring down the number of features which need to be passed on to QPFS. We then enhance this idea, wherein we gradually refine the feature space from a very coarse clustering to a fine-grained one, by interleaving steps of QPFS with k-means clustering. Every step of QPFS helps in identifying the clusters of irrelevant features (which can then be thrown away), whereas every step of k-means further refines the clusters which are potentially relevant. We show that our iterative refinement of clusters is guaranteed to converge. We provide bounds on the number of distance computations involved in the k-means algorithm. Further, each QPFS run is now cubic in number of clusters, which can be much smaller than actual number of features. Experiments on eight publicly available datasets show that our approach gives significant computational gains (both in time and memory), over standard QPFS as well as other state of the art feature selection methods, even while improving the overall accuracy.