Ayush Singh

BigScience Workshop, Teven Le Scao, Angela Fan et al. · allen-ai, berkeley

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Jason Alan Fries, Leon Weber, Natasha Seelam et al. · stanford, utoronto

Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets --diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a diversity of novel pretraining tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBIO a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 12 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBIO facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBIO is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical

Shivank Garg, Ayush Singh, Gaurav Kumar Nayak

Text-to-image diffusion models have revolutionized generative AI, enabling high-quality and photorealistic image synthesis. However, their practical deployment remains hindered by several limitations: sensitivity to prompt phrasing, ambiguity in semantic interpretation (e.g., ``mouse" as animal vs. a computer peripheral), artifacts such as distorted anatomy, and the need for carefully engineered input prompts. Existing methods often require additional training and offer limited controllability, restricting their adaptability in real-world applications. We introduce Self-Improving Diffusion Agent (SIDiffAgent), a training-free agentic framework that leverages the Qwen family of models (Qwen-VL, Qwen-Image, Qwen-Edit, Qwen-Embedding) to address these challenges. SIDiffAgent autonomously manages prompt engineering, detects and corrects poor generations, and performs fine-grained artifact removal, yielding more reliable and consistent outputs. It further incorporates iterative self-improvement by storing a memory of previous experiences in a database. This database of past experiences is then used to inject prompt-based guidance at each stage of the agentic pipeline. \modelour achieved an average VQA score of 0.884 on GenAIBench, significantly outperforming open-source, proprietary models and agentic methods. We will publicly release our code upon acceptance.

Ayush Singh, John E. Ortega

State-of-the-art pre-trained language models (PLMs) outperform other models when applied to the majority of language processing tasks. However, PLMs have been found to degrade in performance under distribution shift, a phenomenon that occurs when data at test-time does not come from the same distribution as the source training set. Equally as challenging is the task of obtaining labels in real-time due to issues like long-labeling feedback loops. The lack of adequate methods that address the aforementioned challenges constitutes the need for approaches that continuously adapt the PLM to a distinct distribution. Unsupervised domain adaptation adapts a source model to an unseen as well as unlabeled target domain. While some techniques such as data augmentation can adapt models in several scenarios, they have only been sparsely studied for addressing the distribution shift problem. In this work, we present an approach (MEMO-CL) that improves the performance of PLMs at test-time under distribution shift. Our approach takes advantage of the latest unsupervised techniques in data augmentation and adaptation to minimize the entropy of the PLM's output distribution. MEMO-CL operates on a batch of augmented samples from a single observation in the test set. The technique introduced is unsupervised, domain-agnostic, easy to implement, and requires no additional data. Our experiments result in a 3% improvement over current test-time adaptation baselines.

Ayush Singh, Yash Bhambhu, Himanshu Buckchash et al.

Global contexts in images are quite valuable in image-to-image translation problems. Conventional attention-based and graph-based models capture the global context to a large extent, however, these are computationally expensive. Moreover, the existing approaches are limited to only learning the pairwise semantic relation between any two points on the image. In this paper, we present Latent Graph Attention (LGA) a computationally inexpensive (linear to the number of nodes) and stable, modular framework for incorporating the global context in the existing architectures, especially empowering small-scale architectures to give performance closer to large size architectures, thus making the light-weight architectures more useful for edge devices with lower compute power and lower energy needs. LGA propagates information spatially using a network of locally connected graphs, thereby facilitating to construct a semantically coherent relation between any two spatially distant points that also takes into account the influence of the intermediate pixels. Moreover, the depth of the graph network can be used to adapt the extent of contextual spread to the target dataset, thereby being able to explicitly control the added computational cost. To enhance the learning mechanism of LGA, we also introduce a novel contrastive loss term that helps our LGA module to couple well with the original architecture at the expense of minimal additional computational load. We show that incorporating LGA improves the performance on three challenging applications, namely transparent object segmentation, image restoration for dehazing and optical flow estimation.

Ayush Singh, Aayush J Rana, Akash Kumar et al.

In this work, we focus on label efficient learning for video action detection. We develop a novel semi-supervised active learning approach which utilizes both labeled as well as unlabeled data along with informative sample selection for action detection. Video action detection requires spatio-temporal localization along with classification, which poses several challenges for both active learning informative sample selection as well as semi-supervised learning pseudo label generation. First, we propose NoiseAug, a simple augmentation strategy which effectively selects informative samples for video action detection. Next, we propose fft-attention, a novel technique based on high-pass filtering which enables effective utilization of pseudo label for SSL in video action detection by emphasizing on relevant activity region within a video. We evaluate the proposed approach on three different benchmark datasets, UCF-101-24, JHMDB-21, and Youtube-VOS. First, we demonstrate its effectiveness on video action detection where the proposed approach outperforms prior works in semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning along with several baseline approaches in both UCF101-24 and JHMDB-21. Next, we also show its effectiveness on Youtube-VOS for video object segmentation demonstrating its generalization capability for other dense prediction tasks in videos. The code and models is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/AKASH2907/semi-sup-active-learning}.

Ayush Singh, Navpreet Singh, Shubham Vatsal

Having a clean dataset has been the foundational assumption of most natural language processing (NLP) systems. However, properly written text is rarely found in real-world scenarios and hence, oftentimes invalidates the aforementioned foundational assumption. Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance, but can they handle the inevitable noise in real-world data? This work tackles this critical question by investigating LLMs' resilience against morphological variations in text. To that end, we artificially introduce varying levels of noise into a diverse set of datasets and systematically evaluate LLMs' robustness against the corrupt variations of the original text. Our findings show that contrary to popular beliefs, generative LLMs are quiet robust to noisy perturbations in text. This is a departure from pre-trained models like BERT or RoBERTa whose performance has been shown to be sensitive to deteriorating noisy text. Additionally, we test LLMs' resilience on multiple real-world benchmarks that closely mimic commonly found errors in the wild. With minimal prompting, LLMs achieve a new state-of-the-art on the benchmark tasks of Grammar Error Correction (GEC) and Lexical Semantic Change (LSC). To empower future research, we also release a dataset annotated by humans stating their preference for LLM vs. human-corrected outputs along with the code to reproduce our results.

Ayush Singh, Pisharody Harikrishnan Gopalkrishnan, Mahesh Raveendranatha Panicker

The creation of unique control methods for a hand prosthesis is still a problem that has to be addressed. The best choice of a human-machine interface (HMI) that should be used to enable natural control is still a challenge. Surface electromyography (sEMG), the most popular option, has a variety of difficult-to-fix issues (electrode displacement, sweat, fatigue). The ultrasound imaging-based methodology offers a means of recognising complex muscle activity and configuration with a greater SNR and less hardware requirements as compared to sEMG. In this study, a prototype system for high frame rate ultrasound imaging for prosthetic arm control is proposed. Using the proposed framework, a virtual robotic hand simulation is developed that can mimic a human hand as illustrated in the link [10]. The proposed classification model simulating four hand gestures has a classification accuracy of more than 90%.

Shivank Garg, Ayush Singh, Shweta Singh et al.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. While it enables LLMs to achieve human-level alignment, it often incurs significant computational and financial costs due to its reliance on training external reward models or human-labeled preferences. In this work, we propose Implicit Preference Optimization (IPO), an alternative approach that leverages generative LLMs as preference classifiers, thereby reducing the dependence on external human feedback or reward models to obtain preferences. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the preference classification ability of LLMs using RewardBench, assessing models across different sizes, architectures, and training levels to validate our hypothesis. Furthermore, we investigate the self-improvement capabilities of LLMs by generating multiple responses for a given instruction and employing the model itself as a preference classifier for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)-based training. Our findings demonstrate that models trained through IPO achieve performance comparable to those utilizing state-of-the-art reward models for obtaining preferences.

Pratham Singla, Ayush Singh, Adesh Gupta et al.

Urban planning faces a critical challenge in balancing city-wide infrastructure needs with localized demographic preferences, particularly in rapidly developing regions. Although existing approaches typically focus on top-down optimization or bottom-up community planning, only some frameworks successfully integrate both perspectives. Our methodology employs a two-tier approach: First, a deterministic solver optimizes basic infrastructure requirements in the city region. Second, four specialized planning agents, each representing distinct sub-regions, propose demographic-specific modifications to a master planner. The master planner then evaluates and integrates these suggestions to ensure cohesive urban development. We validate our framework using a newly created dataset comprising detailed region and sub-region maps from three developing cities in India, focusing on areas undergoing rapid urbanization. The results demonstrate that this hybrid approach enables more nuanced urban development while maintaining overall city functionality.

Shubham Vatsal, Ayush Singh, Shabnam Tafreshi

Health insurance companies have a defined process called prior authorization (PA) which is a health plan cost-control process that requires doctors and other healthcare professionals to get clearance in advance from a health plan before performing a particular procedure on a patient in order to be eligible for payment coverage. For health insurance companies, approving PA requests for patients in the medical domain is a time-consuming and challenging task. One of those key challenges is validating if a request matches up to certain criteria such as age, gender, etc. In this work, we evaluate whether GPT can validate numerous key factors, in turn helping health plans reach a decision drastically faster. We frame it as a question answering task, prompting GPT to answer a question from patient electronic health record. We experiment with different conventional prompting techniques as well as introduce our own novel prompting technique. Moreover, we report qualitative assessment by humans on the natural language generation outputs from our approach. Results show that our method achieves superior performance with the mean weighted F1 score of 0.61 as compared to its standard counterparts.

Sameer Malik, Moyuru Yamada, Ayush Singh et al.

Comprehending long videos remains a significant challenge for Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs). Current LMMs struggle to process even minutes to hours videos due to their lack of explicit memory and retrieval mechanisms. To address this limitation, we propose RAVU (Retrieval Augmented Video Understanding), a novel framework for video understanding enhanced by retrieval with compositional reasoning over a spatio-temporal graph. We construct a graph representation of the video, capturing both spatial and temporal relationships between entities. This graph serves as a long-term memory, allowing us to track objects and their actions across time. To answer complex queries, we decompose the queries into a sequence of reasoning steps and execute these steps on the graph, retrieving relevant key information. Our approach enables more accurate understanding of long videos, particularly for queries that require multi-hop reasoning and tracking objects across frames. Our approach demonstrate superior performances with limited retrieved frames (5-10) compared with other SOTA methods and baselines on two major video QA datasets, NExT-QA and EgoSchema.

Ayush Singh, Rajdeep Aher, Shivank Garg

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, creating an increased need for efficient, task-specific fine-tuning methods. Traditional fine-tuning of LLMs involves updating a large number of parameters, which is computationally expensive and memory-intensive. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning by reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, while LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters, LoRA modules still create significant storage challenges. We propose LoRA-Mini, an optimized adaptation of LoRA that improves parameter efficiency by splitting low-rank matrices into four parts, with only the two inner matrices being trainable. This approach achieves upto a 20x reduction compared to standard LoRA in the number of trainable parameters while preserving performance levels comparable to standard LoRA, addressing both computational and storage efficiency in LLM fine-tuning.

Pratham Singla, Shivank Garg, Ayush Singh et al.

Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a fundamental question: Are these models aware of what they "learn" and "think"? To address this, we define three core competencies: (1) awareness of learned latent policies, (2) generalization of these policies across domains, and (3) alignment between internal reasoning traces and final outputs. We empirically evaluate these abilities on several tasks, each designed to require learning a distinct policy. Furthermore, we contrast the profiles of models post-trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our findings indicate that RL-trained models not only demonstrate greater awareness of their learned behaviors and stronger generalizability to novel, structurally similar tasks than SFT models but also often exhibit weak alignment between their reasoning traces and final outputs, an effect most pronounced in GRPO-trained models.

Ayush Singh, Mansi Gupta, Shivank Garg

Vision Language Models excel in handling a wide range of complex tasks, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Visual Question Answering (VQA), and advanced geometric reasoning. However, these models fail to perform well on low-level basic visual tasks which are especially easy for humans. Our goal in this work was to determine if these models are truly "blind" to geometric reasoning or if there are ways to enhance their capabilities in this area. Our work presents a novel automatic pipeline designed to extract key information from images in response to specific questions. Instead of just relying on direct VQA, we use question-derived keywords to create a caption that highlights important details in the image related to the question. This caption is then used by a language model to provide a precise answer to the question without requiring external fine-tuning.

Saranya Krishnamoorthy, Ayush Singh, Shabnam Tafreshi

Electronic health records (EHR) even though a boon for healthcare practitioners, are growing convoluted and longer every day. Sifting around these lengthy EHRs is taxing and becomes a cumbersome part of physician-patient interaction. Several approaches have been proposed to help alleviate this prevalent issue either via summarization or sectioning, however, only a few approaches have truly been helpful in the past. With the rise of automated methods, machine learning (ML) has shown promise in solving the task of identifying relevant sections in EHR. However, most ML methods rely on labeled data which is difficult to get in healthcare. Large language models (LLMs) on the other hand, have performed impressive feats in natural language processing (NLP), that too in a zero-shot manner, i.e. without any labeled data. To that end, we propose using LLMs to identify relevant section headers. We find that GPT-4 can effectively solve the task on both zero and few-shot settings as well as segment dramatically better than state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we also annotate a much harder real world dataset and find that GPT-4 struggles to perform well, alluding to further research and harder benchmarks.

Ruiyang Xu, Ayush Singh

Natural interface to database (NLIDB) has been researched a lot during the past decades. In the core of NLIDB, is a semantic parser used to convert natural language into SQL. Solutions from traditional NLP methodology focuses on grammar rule pattern learning and pairing via intermediate logic forms. Although those methods give an acceptable performance on certain specific database and parsing tasks, they are hard to generalize and scale. On the other hand, recent progress in neural deep learning seems to provide a promising direction towards building a general NLIDB system. Unlike the traditional approach, those neural methodologies treat the parsing problem as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem. In this paper, we experimented on several sequence-to-sequence learning models and evaluate their performance on general database parsing task.

Ayush Singh, Ajay Bhave, Dilip K. Prasad

Learning to dehaze single hazy images, especially using a small training dataset is quite challenging. We propose a novel generative adversarial network architecture for this problem, namely back projected pyramid network (BPPNet), that gives good performance for a variety of challenging haze conditions, including dense haze and inhomogeneous haze. Our architecture incorporates learning of multiple levels of complexities while retaining spatial context through iterative blocks of UNets and structural information of multiple scales through a novel pyramidal convolution block. These blocks together for the generator and are amenable to learning through back projection. We have shown that our network can be trained without over-fitting using as few as 20 image pairs of hazy and non-hazy images. We report the state of the art performances on NTIRE 2018 homogeneous haze datasets for indoor and outdoor images, NTIRE 2019 denseHaze dataset, and NTIRE 2020 non-homogeneous haze dataset.

Ayush Singh, Seyed Sadegh Mohseni Salehi, Ali Gholipour

Fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is challenged by uncontrollable, large, and irregular fetal movements. It is, therefore, performed through visual monitoring of fetal motion and repeated acquisitions to ensure diagnostic-quality images are acquired. Nevertheless, visual monitoring of fetal motion based on displayed slices, and navigation at the level of stacks-of-slices is inefficient. The current process is highly operator-dependent, increases scanner usage and cost, and significantly increases the length of fetal MRI scans which makes them hard to tolerate for pregnant women. To help build automatic MRI motion tracking and navigation systems to overcome the limitations of the current process and improve fetal imaging, we have developed a new real time image-based motion tracking method based on deep learning that learns to predict fetal motion directly from acquired images. Our method is based on a recurrent neural network, composed of spatial and temporal encoder-decoders, that infers motion parameters from anatomical features extracted from sequences of acquired slices. We compared our trained network on held out test sets (including data with different characteristics, e.g. different fetuses scanned at different ages, and motion trajectories recorded from volunteer subjects) with networks designed for estimation as well as methods adopted to make predictions. The results show that our method outperformed alternative techniques, and achieved real-time performance with average errors of 3.5 and 8 degrees for the estimation and prediction tasks, respectively. Our real-time deep predictive motion tracking technique can be used to assess fetal movements, to guide slice acquisitions, and to build navigation systems for fetal MRI.

Ayush Singh, Ritu Palod

Expressing in language is subjective. Everyone has a different style of reading and writing, apparently it all boil downs to the way their mind understands things (in a specific format). Language style transfer is a way to preserve the meaning of a text and change the way it is expressed. Progress in language style transfer is lagged behind other domains, such as computer vision, mainly because of the lack of parallel data, use cases, and reliable evaluation metrics. In response to the challenge of lacking parallel data, we explore learning style transfer from non-parallel data. We propose a model combining seq2seq, autoencoders, and adversarial loss to achieve this goal. The key idea behind the proposed models is to learn separate content representations and style representations using adversarial networks. Considering the problem of evaluating style transfer tasks, we frame the problem as sentiment transfer and evaluation using a sentiment classifier to calculate how many sentiments was the model able to transfer. We report our results on several kinds of models.