V. L. Lajish

Anoop K., Manjary P. Gangan, Deepak P. et al.

The remarkable progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) brought about by deep learning, particularly with the recent advent of large pre-trained neural language models, is brought into scrutiny as several studies began to discuss and report potential biases in NLP applications. Bias in NLP is found to originate from latent historical biases encoded by humans into textual data which gets perpetuated or even amplified by NLP algorithm. We present a survey to comprehend bias in large pre-trained language models, analyze the stages at which they occur in these models, and various ways in which these biases could be quantified and mitigated. Considering wide applicability of textual affective computing based downstream tasks in real-world systems such as business, healthcare, education, etc., we give a special emphasis on investigating bias in the context of affect (emotion) i.e., Affective Bias, in large pre-trained language models. We present a summary of various bias evaluation corpora that help to aid future research and discuss challenges in the research on bias in pre-trained language models. We believe that our attempt to draw a comprehensive view of bias in pre-trained language models, and especially the exploration of affective bias will be highly beneficial to researchers interested in this evolving field.

Anoop Kadan, Deepak P., Sahely Bhadra et al.

Groundbreaking inventions and highly significant performance improvements in deep learning based Natural Language Processing are witnessed through the development of transformer based large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The wide availability of unlabeled data within human generated data deluge along with self-supervised learning strategy helps to accelerate the success of large PLMs in language generation, language understanding, etc. But at the same time, latent historical bias/unfairness in human minds towards a particular gender, race, etc., encoded unintentionally/intentionally into the corpora harms and questions the utility and efficacy of large PLMs in many real-world applications, particularly for the protected groups. In this paper, we present an extensive investigation towards understanding the existence of "Affective Bias" in large PLMs to unveil any biased association of emotions such as anger, fear, joy, etc., towards a particular gender, race or religion with respect to the downstream task of textual emotion detection. We conduct our exploration of affective bias from the very initial stage of corpus level affective bias analysis by searching for imbalanced distribution of affective words within a domain, in large scale corpora that are used to pre-train and fine-tune PLMs. Later, to quantify affective bias in model predictions, we perform an extensive set of class-based and intensity-based evaluations using various bias evaluation corpora. Our results show the existence of statistically significant affective bias in the PLM based emotion detection systems, indicating biased association of certain emotions towards a particular gender, race, and religion.

Manjary P. Gangan, Anoop Kadan, Lajish V L

Image forensics research has recently witnessed a lot of advancements towards developing computational models capable of accurately detecting natural images captured by cameras and GAN generated images. However, it is also important to ensure whether these computational models are fair enough and do not produce biased outcomes that could eventually harm certain societal groups or cause serious security threats. Exploring fairness in image forensic algorithms is an initial step towards mitigating these biases. This study explores bias in visual transformer based image forensic algorithms that classify natural and GAN images, since visual transformers are recently being widely used in image classification based tasks, including in the area of image forensics. The proposed study procures bias evaluation corpora to analyze bias in gender, racial, affective, and intersectional domains using a wide set of individual and pairwise bias evaluation measures. Since the robustness of the algorithms against image compression is an important factor to be considered in forensic tasks, this study also analyzes the impact of image compression on model bias. Hence to study the impact of image compression on model bias, a two-phase evaluation setting is followed, where the experiments are carried out in uncompressed and compressed evaluation settings. The study could identify bias existences in the visual transformer based models distinguishing natural and GAN images, and also observes that image compression impacts model biases, predominantly amplifying the presence of biases in class GAN predictions.

Manjary P. Gangan, Anoop Kadan, Lajish V L

The digital image forensics based research works in literature classifying natural and computer generated images primarily focuses on binary tasks. These tasks typically involve the classification of natural images versus computer graphics images only or natural images versus GAN generated images only, but not natural images versus both types of generated images simultaneously. Furthermore, despite the support of advanced convolutional neural networks and transformer based architectures that can achieve impressive classification accuracies for this forensic classification task of distinguishing natural and computer generated images, these models are seen to fail over the images that have undergone post-processing operations intended to deceive forensic algorithms, such as JPEG compression, Gaussian noise addition, etc. In this digital image forensic based work to distinguish between natural and computer-generated images encompassing both computer graphics and GAN generated images, we propose a robust forensic classifier framework leveraging enriched vision transformers. By employing a fusion approach for the networks operating in RGB and YCbCr color spaces, we achieve higher classification accuracy and robustness against the post-processing operations of JPEG compression and addition of Gaussian noise. Our approach outperforms baselines, demonstrating 94.25% test accuracy with significant performance gains in individual class accuracies. Visualizations of feature representations and attention maps reveal improved separability as well as improved information capture relevant to the forensic task. This work advances the state-of-the-art in image forensics by providing a generalized and resilient solution to distinguish between natural and generated images.

Sunil Kumar Kopparapu, Lajish VL

This paper describes a new feature set for use in the recognition of on-line handwritten Devanagari script based on Fuzzy Directional Features. Experiments are conducted for the automatic recognition of isolated handwritten character primitives (sub-character units). Initially we describe the proposed feature set, called the Fuzzy Directional Features (FDF) and then show how these features can be effectively utilized for writer independent character recognition. Experimental results show that FDF set perform well for writer independent data set at stroke level recognition. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a novel feature set and establish experimentally its ability in recognition of handwritten Devanagari script.

Lajish V. L., Sunil Kumar Kopparapu

Identity of a vehicle is done through the vehicle license plate by traffic police in general. Au- tomatic vehicle license plate recognition has several applications in intelligent traffic management systems. The security situation across the globe and particularly in India demands a need to equip the traffic police with a system that enables them to get instant details of a vehicle. The system should be easy to use, should be mobile, and work 24 x 7. In this paper, we describe a mobile phone based, client-server architected, license plate recognition system. While we use the state of the art image processing and pattern recognition algorithms tuned for Indian conditions to automatically recognize non-uniform license plates, the main contribution is in creating an end to end usable solution. The client application runs on a mobile device and a server application, with access to vehicle information database, is hosted centrally. The solution enables capture of license plate image captured by the phone camera and passes to the server; on the server the license plate number is recognized; the data associated with the number plate is then sent back to the mobile device, instantaneously. We describe the end to end system architecture in detail. A working prototype of the proposed system has been implemented in the lab environment.

Sunil Kumar Kopparapu, Lajish V. L

The main challenge in on-line handwritten character recognition in Indian lan- guage is the large size of the character set, larger similarity between different characters in the script and the huge variation in writing style. In this paper we propose a framework for on-line handwitten script recognition taking cues from speech signal processing literature. The framework is based on identify- ing strokes, which in turn lead to recognition of handwritten on-line characters rather that the conventional character identification. Though the framework is described for Devanagari script, the framework is general and can be applied to any language. The proposed platform consists of pre-processing, feature extraction, recog- nition and post processing like the conventional character recognition but ap- plied to strokes. The on-line Devanagari character recognition reduces to one of recognizing one of 69 primitives and recognition of a character is performed by recognizing a sequence of such primitives. We further show the impact of noise removal on on-line raw data which is usually noisy. The use of Fuzzy Direc- tional Features to enhance the accuracy of stroke recognition is also described. The recognition results are compared with commonly used directional features in literature using several classifiers.