Chandranath Adak

Baban Gain, Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay, Samrat Mukherjee et al.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has made remarkable progress using large-scale textual data, but the potential of incorporating multimodal inputs, especially visual information, remains underexplored in high-resource settings. While prior research has focused on using multimodal data in low-resource scenarios, this study examines how image features impact translation when added to a large-scale, pre-trained unimodal NMT system. Surprisingly, the study finds that images might be redundant in this context. Additionally, the research introduces synthetic noise to assess whether images help the model handle textual noise. Multimodal models slightly outperform text-only models in noisy settings, even when random images are used. The study's experiments translate from English to Hindi, Bengali, and Malayalam, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks. Interestingly, the effect of visual context varies with the level of source text noise: no visual context works best for non-noisy translations, cropped image features are optimal for low noise, and full image features perform better in high-noise scenarios. This sheds light on the role of visual context, especially in noisy settings, and opens up a new research direction for Noisy Neural Machine Translation in multimodal setups. The research emphasizes the importance of combining visual and textual information to improve translation across various environments. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/babangain/indicMMT.

Xian Tao, Xinyi Gong, Xin Zhang et al.

Currently, deep learning-based visual inspection has been highly successful with the help of supervised learning methods. However, in real industrial scenarios, the scarcity of defect samples, the cost of annotation, and the lack of a priori knowledge of defects may render supervised-based methods ineffective. In recent years, unsupervised anomaly localization algorithms have become more widely used in industrial inspection tasks. This paper aims to help researchers in this field by comprehensively surveying recent achievements in unsupervised anomaly localization in industrial images using deep learning. The survey reviews more than 120 significant publications covering different aspects of anomaly localization, mainly covering various concepts, challenges, taxonomies, benchmark datasets, and quantitative performance comparisons of the methods reviewed. In reviewing the achievements to date, this paper provides detailed predictions and analysis of several future research directions. This review provides detailed technical information for researchers interested in industrial anomaly localization and who wish to apply it to the localization of anomalies in other fields.

Tejas Karkera, Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay et al.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is considered one of the significant concerns worldwide, primarily due to its impact on causing vision loss among most people with diabetes. The severity of DR is typically comprehended manually by ophthalmologists from fundus photography-based retina images. This paper deals with an automated understanding of the severity stages of DR. In the literature, researchers have focused on this automation using traditional machine learning-based algorithms and convolutional architectures. However, the past works hardly focused on essential parts of the retinal image to improve the model performance. In this study, we adopt and fine-tune transformer-based learning models to capture the crucial features of retinal images for a more nuanced understanding of DR severity. Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of image transformers to infer the degree of DR severity from fundus photographs. For experiments, we utilized the publicly available APTOS-2019 blindness detection dataset, where the performances of the transformer-based models were quite encouraging.

Bibek Das, Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay et al.

Deepfakes generated by modern generative models pose a serious threat to information integrity, digital identity, and public trust. Existing detection methods are largely reactive, attempting to identify manipulations after they occur and often failing to generalize across evolving generation techniques. This motivates the need for proactive mechanisms that secure media authenticity at the time of creation. In this work, we introduce SAiW, a Source-Attributed Invisible watermarking Framework for proactive deepfake defense and media provenance verification. Unlike conventional watermarking methods that treat watermark payloads as generic signals, SAiW formulates watermark embedding as a source-conditioned representation learning problem, where watermark identity encodes the originating source and modulates the embedding process to produce discriminative and traceable signatures. The framework integrates feature-wise linear modulation to inject source identity into the embedding network, enabling scalable multi-source watermark generation. A perceptual guidance module derived from human visual system priors ensures that watermark perturbations remain visually imperceptible while maintaining robustness. In addition, a dual-purpose forensic decoder simultaneously reconstructs the embedded watermark and performs source attribution, providing both automated verification and interpretable forensic evidence. Extensive experiments across multiple deepfake datasets demonstrate that SAiW achieves high perceptual quality while maintaining strong robustness against compression, filtering, noise, geometric transformations, and adversarial perturbations. By binding digital media to its origin through invisible yet verifiable markers, SAiW enables reliable authentication and source attribution, providing a scalable foundation for proactive deepfake defense and trustworthy media provenance.

Suraj Kumar, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Chandranath Adak

Recently, with the rapid deployment of service APIs, personalized service recommendations have played a paramount role in the growth of the e-commerce industry. Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters determining the service performance, often used for recommendation, fluctuate over time. Thus, the QoS prediction is essential to identify a suitable service among functionally equivalent services over time. The contemporary temporal QoS prediction methods hardly achieved the desired accuracy due to various limitations, such as the inability to handle data sparsity and outliers and capture higher-order temporal relationships among user-service interactions. Even though some recent recurrent neural-network-based architectures can model temporal relationships among QoS data, prediction accuracy degrades due to the absence of other features (e.g., collaborative features) to comprehend the relationship among the user-service interactions. This paper addresses the above challenges and proposes a scalable strategy for Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-source Collaborative-Features (TPMCF), achieving high prediction accuracy and faster responsiveness. TPMCF combines the collaborative-features of users/services by exploiting user-service relationship with the spatio-temporal auto-extracted features by employing graph convolution and transformer encoder with multi-head self-attention. We validated our proposed method on WS-DREAM-2 datasets. Extensive experiments showed TPMCF outperformed major state-of-the-art approaches regarding prediction accuracy while ensuring high scalability and reasonably faster responsiveness.

Shivam Singh, Sajana S, Poornima et al.

Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from the breath is becoming a viable route for the early detection of diseases non-invasively. This paper presents a sensor array with three metal oxide electrodes that can use machine learning methods to identify four distinct VOCs in a mixture. The metal oxide sensor array was subjected to various VOC concentrations, including ethanol, acetone, toluene and chloroform. The dataset obtained from individual gases and their mixtures were analyzed using multiple machine learning algorithms, such as Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree, Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine. KNN and RF have shown more than 99% accuracy in classifying different varying chemicals in the gas mixtures. In regression analysis, KNN has delivered the best results with R2 value of more than 0.99 and LOD of 0.012, 0.015, 0.014 and 0.025 PPM for predicting the concentrations of varying chemicals Acetone, Toluene, Ethanol, and Chloroform, respectively in complex mixtures. Therefore, it is demonstrated that the array utilizing the provided algorithms can classify and predict the concentrations of the four gases simultaneously for disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring.

Utsav Kumar Nareti, Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay

In the film industry, movie posters have been an essential part of advertising and marketing for many decades, and continue to play a vital role even today in the form of digital posters through online, social media and OTT (over-the-top) platforms. Typically, movie posters can effectively promote and communicate the essence of a film, such as its genre, visual style/tone, vibe and storyline cue/theme, which are essential to attract potential viewers. Identifying the genres of a movie often has significant practical applications in recommending the film to target audiences. Previous studies on genre identification have primarily focused on sources such as plot synopses, subtitles, metadata, movie scenes, and trailer videos; however, posters precede the availability of these sources, and provide pre-release implicit information to generate mass interest. In this paper, we work for automated multi-label movie genre identification only from poster images, without any aid of additional textual/metadata/video information about movies, which is one of the earliest attempts of its kind. Here, we present a deep transformer network with a probabilistic module to identify the movie genres exclusively from the poster. For experiments, we procured 13882 number of posters of 13 genres from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), where our model performances were encouraging and even outperformed some major contemporary architectures.

Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Muhammad Saqib

With the proliferation of the e-commerce industry, analyzing customer feedback is becoming indispensable to a service provider. In recent days, it can be noticed that customers upload the purchased product images with their review scores. In this paper, we undertake the task of analyzing such visual reviews, which is very new of its kind. In the past, the researchers worked on analyzing language feedback, but here we do not take any assistance from linguistic reviews that may be absent, since a recent trend can be observed where customers prefer to quickly upload the visual feedback instead of typing language feedback. We propose a hierarchical architecture, where the higher-level model engages in product categorization, and the lower-level model pays attention to predicting the review score from a customer-provided product image. We generated a database by procuring real visual product reviews, which was quite challenging. Our architecture obtained some promising results by performing extensive experiments on the employed database. The proposed hierarchical architecture attained a 57.48% performance improvement over the single-level best comparable architecture.

Suraj Kumar, Utsav Kumar Nareti, Soumi Chattopadhyay et al.

Accurate book genre classification is fundamental to digital library organization, content discovery, and personalized recommendation. Existing approaches typically model genre prediction as a flat, single-label task, ignoring hierarchical genre structure and relying heavily on noisy, subjective user reviews, which often degrade classification reliability. We propose HiGeMine, a two-phase hierarchical genre mining framework that robustly integrates user reviews with authoritative book blurbs. In the first phase, HiGeMine employs a zero-shot semantic alignment strategy to filter reviews, retaining only those semantically consistent with the corresponding blurb, thereby mitigating noise, bias, and irrelevance. In the second phase, we introduce a dual-path, two-level graph-based classification architecture: a coarse-grained Level-1 binary classifier distinguishes fiction from non-fiction, followed by Level-2 multi-label classifiers for fine-grained genre prediction. Inter-genre dependencies are explicitly modeled using a label co-occurrence graph, while contextual representations are derived from pretrained language models applied to the filtered textual content. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we curate a new hierarchical book genre dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiGeMine consistently outperformed strong baselines across hierarchical genre classification tasks. The proposed framework offers a principled and effective solution for leveraging both structured and unstructured textual data in hierarchical book genre analysis.

Roopa Bukke, Soumya Pandey, Suraj Kumar et al.

The rapid proliferation of online misinformation threatens the stability of digital social systems and poses significant risks to public trust, policy, and safety, necessitating reliable automated fake news detection. Existing methods often struggle with multimodal content, domain generalization, and explainability. We propose AMPEND-LS, an agentic multi-persona evidence-grounded framework with LLM-SLM synergy for multimodal fake news detection. AMPEND-LS integrates textual, visual, and contextual signals through a structured reasoning pipeline powered by LLMs, augmented with reverse image search, knowledge graph paths, and persuasion strategy analysis. To improve reliability, we introduce a credibility fusion mechanism combining semantic similarity, domain trustworthiness, and temporal context, and a complementary SLM classifier to mitigate LLM uncertainty and hallucinations. Extensive experiments across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AMPEND-LS consistently outperformed state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy, F1 score, and robustness. Qualitative case studies further highlight its transparent reasoning and resilience against evolving misinformation. This work advances the development of adaptive, explainable, and evidence-aware systems for safeguarding online information integrity.

Utsav Kumar Nareti, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Prolay Mallick et al.

Identifying fine-grained book genres is essential for enhancing user experience through efficient discovery, personalized recommendations, and improved reader engagement. At the same time, it provides publishers and marketers with valuable insights into consumer preferences and emerging market trends. While traditional genre classification methods predominantly rely on textual reviews or content analysis, the integration of additional modalities, such as book covers, blurbs, and metadata, offers richer contextual cues. However, the effectiveness of such multi-modal systems is often hindered by incomplete, noisy, or missing data across modalities. To address this, we propose IMAGINE (Intelligent Multi-modal Adaptive Genre Identification NEtwork), a framework designed to leverage multi-modal data while remaining robust to missing or unreliable information. IMAGINE learns modality-specific feature representations and adaptively prioritizes the most informative sources available at inference time. It further employs a hierarchical classification strategy, grounded in a curated taxonomy of book genres, to capture inter-genre relationships and support multi-label assignments reflective of real-world literary diversity. A key strength of IMAGINE is its adaptability: it maintains high predictive performance even when one modality, such as text or image, is unavailable. We also curated a large-scale hierarchical dataset that structures book genres into multiple levels of granularity, allowing for a more comprehensive evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that IMAGINE outperformed strong baselines in various settings, with significant gains in scenarios involving incomplete modality-specific data.

Utsav Kumar Nareti, Suraj Kumar, Soumya Pandey et al.

The surge in user-generated reviews has amplified the need for interpretable models that can provide fine-grained insights. Existing prototype-based models offer intuitive explanations but typically operate at coarse granularity (sentence or document level) and fail to address the multi-label nature of real-world text classification. We propose ProtoSiTex, a semi-interpretable framework designed for fine-grained multi-label text classification. ProtoSiTex employs a dual-phase alternating training strategy: an unsupervised prototype discovery phase that learns semantically coherent and diverse prototypes, and a supervised classification phase that maps these prototypes to class labels. A hierarchical loss function enforces consistency across sub-sentence, sentence, and document levels, enhancing interpretability and alignment. Unlike prior approaches, ProtoSiTex captures overlapping and conflicting semantics using adaptive prototypes and multi-head attention. We also introduce a benchmark dataset of hotel reviews annotated at the sub-sentence level with multiple labels. Experiments on this dataset and two public benchmarks (binary and multi-class) show that ProtoSiTex achieves state-of-the-art performance while delivering faithful, human-aligned explanations, establishing it as a robust solution for semi-interpretable multi-label text classification.

Medant Sharan, Chandranath Adak

This paper investigates the strategy game So Long Sucker (SLS) as a novel benchmark for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Unlike traditional board or video game testbeds, SLS is distinguished by its coalition formation, strategic deception, and dynamic elimination rules, making it a uniquely challenging environment for autonomous agents. We introduce the first publicly available computational framework for SLS, complete with a graphical user interface and benchmarking support for reinforcement learning algorithms. Using classical deep reinforcement learning methods (e.g., DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN), we train self-playing agents to learn the rules and basic strategies of SLS. Experimental results demonstrate that, although these agents achieve roughly half of the maximum attainable reward and consistently outperform random baselines, they require long training horizons (~2000 games) and still commit occasional illegal moves, highlighting both the promise and limitations of classical reinforcement learning. Our findings establish SLS as a negotiation-aware benchmark for MARL, opening avenues for future research that integrates game-theoretic reasoning, coalition-aware strategies, and advanced reinforcement learning architectures to better capture the social and adversarial dynamics of complex multi-agent games.

Suraj Kumar, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Chandranath Adak

Quality-of-Service (QoS) prediction is a critical task in the service lifecycle, enabling precise and adaptive service recommendations by anticipating performance variations over time in response to evolving network uncertainties and user preferences. However, contemporary QoS prediction methods frequently encounter data sparsity and cold-start issues, which hinder accurate QoS predictions and limit the ability to capture diverse user preferences. Additionally, these methods often assume QoS data reliability, neglecting potential credibility issues such as outliers and the presence of greysheep users and services with atypical invocation patterns. Furthermore, traditional approaches fail to leverage diverse features, including domain-specific knowledge and complex higher-order patterns, essential for accurate QoS predictions. In this paper, we introduce a real-time, trust-aware framework for temporal QoS prediction to address the aforementioned challenges, featuring an end-to-end deep architecture called the Hypergraph Convoluted Transformer Network (HCTN). HCTN combines a hypergraph structure with graph convolution over hyper-edges to effectively address high-sparsity issues by capturing complex, high-order correlations. Complementing this, the transformer network utilizes multi-head attention along with parallel 1D convolutional layers and fully connected dense blocks to capture both fine-grained and coarse-grained dynamic patterns. Additionally, our approach includes a sparsity-resilient solution for detecting greysheep users and services, incorporating their unique characteristics to improve prediction accuracy. Trained with a robust loss function resistant to outliers, HCTN demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale WSDREAM-2 datasets for response time and throughput.

Utsav Kumar Nareti, Chandranath Adak, Soumi Chattopadhyay et al.

Movie posters are not just decorative; they are meticulously designed to capture the essence of a movie, such as its genre, storyline, and tone/vibe. For decades, movie posters have graced cinema walls, billboards, and now our digital screens as a form of digital posters. Movie genre classification plays a pivotal role in film marketing, audience engagement, and recommendation systems. Previous explorations into movie genre classification have been mostly examined in plot summaries, subtitles, trailers and movie scenes. Movie posters provide a pre-release tantalizing glimpse into a film's key aspects, which can ignite public interest. In this paper, we presented the framework that exploits movie posters from a visual and textual perspective to address the multilabel movie genre classification problem. Firstly, we extracted text from movie posters using an OCR and retrieved the relevant embedding. Next, we introduce a cross-attention-based fusion module to allocate attention weights to visual and textual embedding. In validating our framework, we utilized 13882 posters sourced from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The outcomes of the experiments indicate that our model exhibited promising performance and outperformed even some prominent contemporary architectures.

Soumi Chattopadhyay, Chandranath Adak, Ranjana Roy Chowdhury

Quality-of-Service prediction of web service is an integral part of services computing due to its diverse applications in the various facets of a service life cycle, such as service composition, service selection, service recommendation. One of the primary objectives of designing a QoS prediction algorithm is to achieve satisfactory prediction accuracy. However, accuracy is not the only criteria to meet while developing a QoS prediction algorithm. The algorithm has to be faster in terms of prediction time so that it can be integrated into a real-time recommendation or composition system. The other important factor to consider while designing the prediction algorithm is scalability to ensure that the prediction algorithm can tackle large-scale datasets. The existing algorithms on QoS prediction often compromise on one goal while ensuring the others. In this paper, we propose a semi-offline QoS prediction model to achieve three important goals simultaneously: higher accuracy, faster prediction time, scalability. Here, we aim to predict the QoS value of service that varies across users. Our framework consists of multi-phase prediction algorithms: preprocessing-phase prediction, online prediction, and prediction using the pre-trained model. In the preprocessing phase, we first apply multi-level clustering on the dataset to obtain correlated users and services. We then preprocess the clusters using collaborative filtering to remove the sparsity of the given QoS invocation log matrix. Finally, we create a two-staged, semi-offline regression model using neural networks to predict the QoS value of service to be invoked by a user in real-time. Our experimental results on four publicly available WS-DREAM datasets show the efficiency in terms of accuracy, scalability, fast responsiveness of our framework as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Ranjana Roy Chowdhury, Soumi Chattopadhyay, Chandranath Adak

With the proliferation of Internet-of-Things and continuous growth in the number of web services at the Internet-scale, the service recommendation is becoming a challenge nowadays. One of the prime aspects influencing the service recommendation is the Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameter, which depicts the performance of a web service. In general, the service provider furnishes the value of the QoS parameters during service deployment. However, in reality, the QoS values of service vary across different users, time, locations, etc. Therefore, estimating the QoS value of service before its execution is an important task, and thus the QoS prediction has gained significant research attention. Multiple approaches are available in the literature for predicting service QoS. However, these approaches are yet to reach the desired accuracy level. In this paper, we study the QoS prediction problem across different users, and propose a novel solution by taking into account the contextual information of both services and users. Our proposal includes two key steps: (a) hybrid filtering and (b) hierarchical prediction mechanism. On the one hand, the hybrid filtering method aims to obtain a set of similar users and services, given a target user and a service. On the other hand, the goal of the hierarchical prediction mechanism is to estimate the QoS value accurately by leveraging hierarchical neural-regression. We evaluate our framework on the publicly available WS-DREAM datasets. The experimental results show the outperformance of our framework over the major state-of-the-art approaches.

Chandranath Adak, Bidyut B. Chaudhuri, Chin-Teng Lin et al.

In this paper, we work on intra-variable handwriting, where the writing samples of an individual can vary significantly. Such within-writer variation throws a challenge for automatic writer inspection, where the state-of-the-art methods do not perform well. To deal with intra-variability, we analyze the idiosyncrasy in individual handwriting. We identify/verify the writer from highly idiosyncratic text-patches. Such patches are detected using a deep recurrent reinforcement learning-based architecture. An idiosyncratic score is assigned to every patch, which is predicted by employing deep regression analysis. For writer identification, we propose a deep neural architecture, which makes the final decision by the idiosyncratic score-induced weighted average of patch-based decisions. For writer verification, we propose two algorithms for patch-fed deep feature aggregation, which assist in authentication using a triplet network. The experiments were performed on two databases, where we obtained encouraging results.

Chandranath Adak, Bidyut B. Chaudhuri, Michael Blumenstein

The handwriting of an individual may vary substantially with factors such as mood, time, space, writing speed, writing medium and tool, writing topic, etc. It becomes challenging to perform automated writer verification/identification on a particular set of handwritten patterns (e.g., speedy handwriting) of a person, especially when the system is trained using a different set of writing patterns (e.g., normal speed) of that same person. However, it would be interesting to experimentally analyze if there exists any implicit characteristic of individuality which is insensitive to high intra-variable handwriting. In this paper, we study some handcrafted features and auto-derived features extracted from intra-variable writing. Here, we work on writer identification/verification from offline Bengali handwriting of high intra-variability. To this end, we use various models mainly based on handcrafted features with SVM (Support Vector Machine) and features auto-derived by the convolutional network. For experimentation, we have generated two handwritten databases from two different sets of 100 writers and enlarged the dataset by a data-augmentation technique. We have obtained some interesting results.

Chandranath Adak, Bidyut B. Chaudhuri

In this paper, a text line identification method is proposed. The text lines of printed document are easy to segment due to uniform straightness of the lines and sufficient gap between the lines. But in handwritten documents, the line is non-uniform and interline gaps are variable. We take Rabindranath Tagore's manuscript as it is one of the most difficult manuscripts that contain doodles. Our method consists of a pre-processing stage to clean the document image. Then we separate doodles from the manuscript to get the textual region. After that we identify the text lines on the manuscript. For text line identification, we use window examination, black run-length smearing, horizontal histogram and connected component analysis.

Chandranath Adak

This paper introduces an efficient edge detection method based on Gabor filter and rough clustering. The input image is smoothed by Gabor function, and the concept of rough clustering is used to focus on edge detection with soft computational approach. Hysteresis thresholding is used to get the actual output, i.e. edges of the input image. To show the effectiveness, the proposed technique is compared with some other edge detection methods.

Chandranath Adak

This paper represents an text extraction method from Google maps, GIS maps/images. Due to an unsupervised approach there is no requirement of any prior knowledge or training set about the textual and non-textual parts. Fuzzy CMeans clustering technique is used for image segmentation and Prewitt method is used to detect the edges. Connected component analysis and gridding technique enhance the correctness of the results. The proposed method reaches 98.5% accuracy level on the basis of experimental data sets.

Chandranath Adak

This paper introduces an unsupervised technique to detect the changed region of multitemporal images on a same reference plane with the help of rough clustering. The proposed technique is a soft-computing approach, based on the concept of rough set with rough clustering and Pawlak's accuracy. It is less noisy and avoids pre-deterministic knowledge about the distribution of the changed and unchanged regions. To show the effectiveness, the proposed technique is compared with some other approaches.

Chandranath Adak

This paper introduces a new concept of textual message encryption and decryption through a pool of randomized symmetric key and the dual layer cryptosystem with the concept of visual cryptography and steganography. A textual message is converted into two image slides, and the images are encrypted through two different randomized sequences of symmetric key. The decryption is done in the reverse way. The encrypted images are decrypted by those two symmetric keys. The decrypted image slides are merged together and converted into textual message. Here the image sharing is done through the concept of visual cryptography and the textual message to image conversion is done through the concept of steganography.

Chandranath Adak

Hiding and securing the secret digital information and data that are transmitted over the internet is of widespread and most challenging interest. This paper presents a new idea of robust steganography using bitwise-XOR operation between stego-key-image-pixel LSB (Least Significant Bit) value and secret message-character ASCII-binary value (or, secret image-pixel value). The stego-key-image is shared in dual-layer using odd-even position of each pixel to make the system robust. Due to image sharing, the detection can only be done with all the image shares.