Abhishek Sharma

Xuan Gong, Abhishek Sharma, Srikrishna Karanam et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where local nodes collaboratively train a central model while the training data remains decentralized. Existing FL methods typically share model parameters or employ co-distillation to address the issue of unbalanced data distribution. However, they suffer from communication bottlenecks. More importantly, they risk privacy leakage. In this work, we develop a privacy preserving and communication efficient method in a FL framework with one-shot offline knowledge distillation using unlabeled, cross-domain public data. We propose a quantized and noisy ensemble of local predictions from completely trained local models for stronger privacy guarantees without sacrificing accuracy. Based on extensive experiments on image classification and text classification tasks, we show that our privacy-preserving method outperforms baseline FL algorithms with superior performance in both accuracy and communication efficiency.

Xuan Gong, Liangchen Song, Rishi Vedula et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where many local nodes collaboratively train a central model while keeping the training data decentralized. This is particularly relevant for clinical applications since patient data are usually not allowed to be transferred out of medical facilities, leading to the need for FL. Existing FL methods typically share model parameters or employ co-distillation to address the issue of unbalanced data distribution. However, they also require numerous rounds of synchronized communication and, more importantly, suffer from a privacy leakage risk. We propose a privacy-preserving FL framework leveraging unlabeled public data for one-way offline knowledge distillation in this work. The central model is learned from local knowledge via ensemble attention distillation. Our technique uses decentralized and heterogeneous local data like existing FL approaches, but more importantly, it significantly reduces the risk of privacy leakage. We demonstrate that our method achieves very competitive performance with more robust privacy preservation based on extensive experiments on image classification, segmentation, and reconstruction tasks.

Jeffrey Chiu, Rajat Mittal, Neehal Tumma et al.

Topic models are some of the most popular ways to represent textual data in an interpret-able manner. Recently, advances in deep generative models, specifically auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), have led to the introduction of unsupervised neural topic models, which leverage deep generative models as opposed to traditional statistics-based topic models. We extend upon these neural topic models by introducing the Label-Indexed Neural Topic Model (LI-NTM), which is, to the extent of our knowledge, the first effective upstream semi-supervised neural topic model. We find that LI-NTM outperforms existing neural topic models in document reconstruction benchmarks, with the most notable results in low labeled data regimes and for data-sets with informative labels; furthermore, our jointly learned classifier outperforms baseline classifiers in ablation studies.

Tianyu Luan, Zhongpai Gao, Luyuan Xie et al.

We introduce a novel bottom-up approach for human body mesh reconstruction, specifically designed to address the challenges posed by partial visibility and occlusion in input images. Traditional top-down methods, relying on whole-body parametric models like SMPL, falter when only a small part of the human is visible, as they require visibility of most of the human body for accurate mesh reconstruction. To overcome this limitation, our method employs a "Divide and Fuse (D&F)" strategy, reconstructing human body parts independently before fusing them, thereby ensuring robustness against occlusions. We design Human Part Parametric Models (HPPM) that independently reconstruct the mesh from a few shape and global-location parameters, without inter-part dependency. A specially designed fusion module then seamlessly integrates the reconstructed parts, even when only a few are visible. We harness a large volume of ground-truth SMPL data to train our parametric mesh models. To facilitate the training and evaluation of our method, we have established benchmark datasets featuring images of partially visible humans with HPPM annotations. Our experiments, conducted on these benchmark datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our D&F method, particularly in scenarios with substantial invisibility, where traditional approaches struggle to maintain reconstruction quality.

Zhongpai Gao, Abhishek Sharma, Meng Zheng et al.

Positioning patients for scanning and interventional procedures is a critical task that requires high precision and accuracy. The conventional workflow involves manually adjusting the patient support to align the center of the target body part with the laser projector or other guiding devices. This process is not only time-consuming but also prone to inaccuracies. In this work, we propose an automated patient positioning system that utilizes a camera to detect specific hand gestures from technicians, allowing users to indicate the target patient region to the system and initiate automated positioning. Our approach relies on a novel multi-stage pipeline to recognize and interpret the technicians' gestures, translating them into precise motions of medical devices. We evaluate our proposed pipeline during actual MRI scanning procedures, using RGB-Depth cameras to capture the process. Results show that our system achieves accurate and precise patient positioning with minimal technician intervention. Furthermore, we validate our method on HaGRID, a large-scale hand gesture dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in hand detection and gesture recognition.

Abhishek Sharma, Yash Shah, Yash Agrawal et al.

Nowadays, yoga has become a part of life for many people. Exercises and sports technological assistance is implemented in yoga pose identification. In this work, a self-assistance based yoga posture identification technique is developed, which helps users to perform Yoga with the correction feature in Real-time. The work also presents Yoga-hand mudra (hand gestures) identification. The YOGI dataset has been developed which include 10 Yoga postures with around 400-900 images of each pose and also contain 5 mudras for identification of mudras postures. It contains around 500 images of each mudra. The feature has been extracted by making a skeleton on the body for yoga poses and hand for mudra poses. Two different algorithms have been used for creating a skeleton one for yoga poses and the second for hand mudras. Angles of the joints have been extracted as a features for different machine learning and deep learning models. among all the models XGBoost with RandomSearch CV is most accurate and gives 99.2\% accuracy. The complete design framework is described in the present paper.

Abhishek Sharma, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Anamika Sawhney et al.

Software developers use a variety of social media channels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date, collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contribute to. Meetup is one of such social media used by software developers to organize community gatherings. Liu et al. characterized Meetup as an event-based social network (EBSN) which contains valuable offline social interactions in addition to online interactions. Recently, Storey et al. found out that Meetup was one of the social channels used by developers. We in this work investigate in detail the dynamics of Meetup groups and events related to software development, which has not been done in any of the previous works. First, we identified 6,317 Meetup groups related to software development and extracted 185,758 events organized by them. Then we took a statistically significant sample of 452 events on which we performed open coding, based on which we were able to develop 9 categories of events (8 main categories + Others). Next, we did a popularity analysis of the categories of events and found that Talks by Domain Experts, Hands-on Sessions, and Open Discussions are the most popular categories of events organized by Meetup groups related to software development. Our findings show that more popular categories are those where developers can learn and gain knowledge. On doing a diversity analysis of Meetup groups we found 19.82% of the members on an average are female, which is a larger proportion as compared to numbers reported in previous studies on other social media. From a broader software development community point of view information from this new forum can be valuable to identify and understand emerging topics and associations among them which can be helpful to identify future trends as well as current best practices.

Rahul Mitra, Nitesh B. Gundavarapu, Abhishek Sharma et al.

The best performing methods for 3D human pose estimation from monocular images require large amounts of in-the-wild 2D and controlled 3D pose annotated datasets which are costly and require sophisticated systems to acquire. To reduce this annotation dependency, we propose Multiview-Consistent Semi Supervised Learning (MCSS) framework that utilizes similarity in pose information from unannotated, uncalibrated but synchronized multi-view videos of human motions as additional weak supervision signal to guide 3D human pose regression. Our framework applies hard-negative mining based on temporal relations in multi-view videos to arrive at a multi-view consistent pose embedding. When jointly trained with limited 3D pose annotations, our approach improves the baseline by 25% and state-of-the-art by 8.7%, whilst using substantially smaller networks. Lastly, but importantly, we demonstrate the advantages of the learned embedding and establish view-invariant pose retrieval benchmarks on two popular, publicly available multi-view human pose datasets, Human 3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP, to facilitate future research.

Agus Sulistya, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Abhishek Sharma et al.

Software developers have benefited from various sources of knowledge such as forums, question-and-answer sites, and social media platforms to help them in various tasks. Extracting software-related knowledge from different platforms involves many challenges. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the effectiveness of knowledge extraction tasks by performing cross-platform analysis. Our approach is based on transfer representation learning and word embeddings, leveraging information extracted from a source platform which contains rich domain-related content. The information extracted is then used to solve tasks in another platform (considered as target platform) with less domain-related contents. We first build a word embeddings model as a representation learned from the source platform, and use the model to improve the performance of knowledge extraction tasks in the target platform. We experiment with Software Engineering Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow as source platforms, and two different target platforms, i.e., Twitter and YouTube. Our experiments show that our approach improves performance of existing work for the tasks of identifying software-related tweets and helpful YouTube comments.