Nilesh Ahuja

Parual Datta, Nilesh Ahuja, V. Srinivasa Somayazulu et al.

Split computing has emerged as a recent paradigm for implementation of DNN-based AI workloads, wherein a DNN model is split into two parts, one of which is executed on a mobile/client device and the other on an edge-server (or cloud). Data compression is applied to the intermediate tensor from the DNN that needs to be transmitted, addressing the challenge of optimizing the rate-accuracy-complexity trade-off. Existing split-computing approaches adopt ML-based data compression, but require that the parameters of either the entire DNN model, or a significant portion of it, be retrained for different compression levels. This incurs a high computational and storage burden: training a full DNN model from scratch is computationally demanding, maintaining multiple copies of the DNN parameters increases storage requirements, and switching the full set of weights during inference increases memory bandwidth. In this paper, we present an approach that addresses all these challenges. It involves the systematic design and training of bottleneck units - simple, low-cost neural networks - that can be inserted at the point of split. Our approach is remarkably lightweight, both during training and inference, highly effective and achieves excellent rate-distortion performance at a small fraction of the compute and storage overhead compared to existing methods.

Ibrahima J. Ndiour, Nilesh A. Ahuja, Omesh Tickoo

This paper presents a fast, principled approach for detecting anomalous and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in deep neural networks (DNN). We propose the application of linear statistical dimensionality reduction techniques on the semantic features produced by a DNN, in order to capture the low-dimensional subspace truly spanned by said features. We show that the "feature reconstruction error" (FRE), which is the $\ell_2$-norm of the difference between the original feature in the high-dimensional space and the pre-image of its low-dimensional reduced embedding, is highly effective for OOD and anomaly detection. To generalize to intermediate features produced at any given layer, we extend the methodology by applying nonlinear kernel-based methods. Experiments using standard image datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that our method meets or exceeds best-in-class quality performance, but at a fraction of the computational and memory cost required by the state of the art. It can be trained and run very efficiently, even on a traditional CPU.

Ibrahima Ndiour, Nilesh Ahuja, Utku Genc et al.

This paper presents a fast and principled approach for solving the visual anomaly detection and segmentation problem. In this setup, we have access to only anomaly-free training data and want to detect and identify anomalies of an arbitrary nature on test data. We propose the application of linear statistical dimensionality reduction techniques on the intermediate features produced by a pretrained DNN on the training data, in order to capture the low-dimensional subspace truly spanned by said features. We show that the \emph{feature reconstruction error} (FRE), which is the $\ell_2$-norm of the difference between the original feature in the high-dimensional space and the pre-image of its low-dimensional reduced embedding, is extremely effective for anomaly detection. Further, using the same feature reconstruction error concept on intermediate convolutional layers, we derive FRE maps that provide pixel-level spatial localization of the anomalies in the image (i.e. segmentation). Experiments using standard anomaly detection datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that our method matches or exceeds best-in-class quality performance, but at a fraction of the computational and memory cost required by the state of the art. It can be trained and run very efficiently, even on a traditional CPU.

Shu Zhao, Nilesh Ahuja, Tan Yu et al.

Pre-trained vision language models have shown remarkable performance on visual recognition tasks, but they typically assume the availability of complete multimodal inputs during both training and inference. In real-world scenarios, however, modalities may be missing due to privacy constraints, collection difficulties, or resource limitations. While previous approaches have addressed this challenge using prompt learning techniques, they fail to capture the cross-modal relationships necessary for effective multimodal visual recognition and suffer from inevitable computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce MoRA, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that explicitly models cross-modal interactions while maintaining modality-specific adaptations. MoRA introduces modality-common parameters between text and vision encoders, enabling bidirectional knowledge transfer. Additionally, combined with the modality-specific parameters, MoRA allows the backbone model to maintain inter-modality interaction and enable intra-modality flexibility. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MoRA achieves an average performance improvement in missing-modality scenarios by 5.24% and uses only 25.90% of the inference time compared to the SOTA method while requiring only 0.11% of trainable parameters compared to full fine-tuning.

Divake Kumar, Patrick Poggi, Sina Tayebati et al.

Most estimators collapse all uncertainty modes into a single confidence score, preventing reliable reasoning about when to allocate more compute or adjust inference. We introduce Uncertainty-Guided Inference-Time Selection, a lightweight inference time framework that disentangles aleatoric (data-driven) and epistemic (model-driven) uncertainty directly in deep feature space. Aleatoric uncertainty is estimated using a regularized global density model, while epistemic uncertainty is formed from three complementary components that capture local support deficiency, manifold spectral collapse, and cross-layer feature inconsistency. These components are empirically orthogonal and require no sampling, no ensembling, and no additional forward passes. We integrate the decomposed uncertainty into a distribution free conformal calibration procedure that yields significantly tighter prediction intervals at matched coverage. Using these components for uncertainty guided adaptive model selection reduces compute by approximately 60 percent on MOT17 with negligible accuracy loss, enabling practical self regulating visual inference. Additionally, our ablation results show that the proposed orthogonal uncertainty decomposition consistently yields higher computational savings across all MOT17 sequences, improving margins by 13.6 percentage points over the total-uncertainty baseline.

Amanda Rios, Ibrahima Ndiour, Parual Datta et al.

In the field of continual learning, relying on so-called oracles for novelty detection is commonplace albeit unrealistic. This paper introduces CONCLAD ("COntinuous Novel CLAss Detector"), a comprehensive solution to the under-explored problem of continual novel class detection in post-deployment data. At each new task, our approach employs an iterative uncertainty estimation algorithm to differentiate between known and novel class(es) samples, and to further discriminate between the different novel classes themselves. Samples predicted to be from a novel class with high-confidence are automatically pseudo-labeled and used to update our model. Simultaneously, a tiny supervision budget is used to iteratively query ambiguous novel class predictions, which are also used during update. Evaluation across multiple datasets, ablations and experimental settings demonstrate our method's effectiveness at separating novel and old class samples continuously. We will release our code upon acceptance.

Amanda Rios, Ibrahima Ndiour, Parual Datta et al.

AI deployed in many real-world use cases should be capable of adapting to novelties encountered after deployment. Here, we consider a challenging, under-explored and realistic continual adaptation problem: a deployed AI agent is continuously provided with unlabeled data that may contain not only unseen samples of known classes but also samples from novel (unknown) classes. In such a challenging setting, it has only a tiny labeling budget to query the most informative samples to help it continuously learn. We present a comprehensive solution to this complex problem with our model "CUAL" (Continual Uncertainty-aware Active Learner). CUAL leverages an uncertainty estimation algorithm to prioritize active labeling of ambiguous (uncertain) predicted novel class samples while also simultaneously pseudo-labeling the most certain predictions of each class. Evaluations across multiple datasets, ablations, settings and backbones (e.g. ViT foundation model) demonstrate our method's effectiveness. We will release our code upon acceptance.

Samet Akcay, Dick Ameln, Ashwin Vaidya et al.

This paper introduces anomalib, a novel library for unsupervised anomaly detection and localization. With reproducibility and modularity in mind, this open-source library provides algorithms from the literature and a set of tools to design custom anomaly detection algorithms via a plug-and-play approach. Anomalib comprises state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms that achieve top performance on the benchmarks and that can be used off-the-shelf. In addition, the library provides components to design custom algorithms that could be tailored towards specific needs. Additional tools, including experiment trackers, visualizers, and hyper-parameter optimizers, make it simple to design and implement anomaly detection models. The library also supports OpenVINO model optimization and quantization for real-time deployment. Overall, anomalib is an extensive library for the design, implementation, and deployment of unsupervised anomaly detection models from data to the edge.

Onat Gungor, Amanda Sofie Rios, Nilesh Ahuja et al.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a fundamental challenge in the deployment of machine learning models. From a security standpoint, this is particularly important because OOD test data can result in misleadingly confident yet erroneous predictions, which undermine the reliability of the deployed model. Although numerous models for OOD detection have been developed in computer vision and language, their adaptability to the time-series data domain remains limited and under-explored. Yet, time-series data is ubiquitous across manufacturing and security applications for which OOD is essential. This paper seeks to address this research gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of modality-agnostic OOD detection algorithms. We evaluate over several multivariate time-series datasets, deep learning architectures, time-series specific data augmentations, and loss functions. Our results demonstrate that: 1) the majority of state-of-the-art OOD methods exhibit limited performance on time-series data, and 2) OOD methods based on deep feature modeling may offer greater advantages for time-series OOD detection, highlighting a promising direction for future time-series OOD detection algorithm development.

Amanda S. Rios, Ibrahima J. Ndiour, Parual Datta et al.

AI deployed in the real-world should be capable of autonomously adapting to novelties encountered after deployment. Yet, in the field of continual learning, the reliance on novelty and labeling oracles is commonplace albeit unrealistic. This paper addresses a challenging and under-explored problem: a deployed AI agent that continuously encounters unlabeled data - which may include both unseen samples of known classes and samples from novel (unknown) classes - and must adapt to it continuously. To tackle this challenge, we propose our method COUQ "Continual Open-world Uncertainty Quantification", an iterative uncertainty estimation algorithm tailored for learning in generalized continual open-world multi-class settings. We rigorously apply and evaluate COUQ on key sub-tasks in the Continual Open-World: continual novelty detection, uncertainty guided active learning, and uncertainty guided pseudo-labeling for semi-supervised CL. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across multiple datasets, ablations, backbones and performance superior to state-of-the-art.

Divake Kumar, Sina Tayebati, Devashri Naik et al.

Most uncertainty-aware robotic systems collapse prediction uncertainty into a single scalar score and use it to trigger uniform corrective responses. This aggregation obscures whether uncertainty arises from corrupted observations or from mismatch between the learned model and the true system dynamics. As a result, corrective actions may be applied to the wrong component of the closed loop, degrading performance relative to leaving the policy unchanged. We introduce a lightweight post hoc framework that decomposes uncertainty into aleatoric and epistemic components and uses these signals to regulate system responses at inference time. Aleatoric uncertainty is estimated from deviations in the observation distribution using a Mahalanobis density model, while epistemic uncertainty is detected using a noise robust forward dynamics ensemble that isolates model mismatch from measurement corruption. The two signals remain empirically near orthogonal during closed loop execution and enable type specific responses. High aleatoric uncertainty triggers observation recovery, while high epistemic uncertainty moderates control actions. The same signals also regulate adaptive perception by guiding model capacity selection during tracking inference. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across both control and perception tasks. In robotic manipulation, the decomposed controller improves task success from 59.4% to 80.4% under compound perturbations and outperforms a combined uncertainty baseline by up to 21.0%. In adaptive tracking inference on MOT17, uncertainty-guided model selection reduces average compute by 58.2% relative to a fixed high capacity detector while preserving detection quality within 0.4%. Code and demo videos are available at https://divake.github.io/uncertainty-decomposition/.

Tianyi Shen, Huijuan Xu, Nilesh Ahuja et al.

Skeleton action recognition involves recognizing human action from human skeletons. The use of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) has driven major advances in this recognition task. In real-world scenarios, the captured skeletons are not always perfect or complete because of occlusions of parts of the human body or poor communication quality, leading to missing parts in skeletons or videos with missing frames. In the presence of such non-idealities, existing GCN models perform poorly due to missing local context. To address this limitation, we propose Parts-Mamba, a hybrid GCN-Mamba model designed to enhance the ability to capture and maintain contextual information from distant joints. The proposed Parts-Mamba model effectively captures part-specific information through its parts-specific scanning feature and preserves non-neighboring joint context via a parts-body fusion module. Our proposed model is evaluated on the NTU RGB+D 60 and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets under different occlusion settings, achieving up to 12.9% improvement in accuracy.

Ranganath Krishnan, Nilesh Ahuja, Alok Sinha et al.

We introduce supervised contrastive active learning (SCAL) and propose efficient query strategies in active learning based on the feature similarity (featuresim) and principal component analysis based feature-reconstruction error (fre) to select informative data samples with diverse feature representations. We demonstrate our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, model calibration and reduces sampling bias in an active learning setup for balanced and imbalanced datasets on image classification tasks. We also evaluate robustness of model to distributional shift derived from different query strategies in active learning setting. Using extensive experiments, we show that our proposed approach outperforms high performing compute-intensive methods by a big margin resulting in 9.9% lower mean corruption error, 7.2% lower expected calibration error under dataset shift and 8.9% higher AUROC for out-of-distribution detection.

Ranganath Krishnan, Alok Sinha, Nilesh Ahuja et al.

This paper presents simple and efficient methods to mitigate sampling bias in active learning while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and model robustness. We introduce supervised contrastive active learning by leveraging the contrastive loss for active learning under a supervised setting. We propose an unbiased query strategy that selects informative data samples of diverse feature representations with our methods: supervised contrastive active learning (SCAL) and deep feature modeling (DFM). We empirically demonstrate our proposed methods reduce sampling bias, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and model calibration in an active learning setup with the query computation 26x faster than Bayesian active learning by disagreement and 11x faster than CoreSet. The proposed SCAL method outperforms by a big margin in robustness to dataset shift and out-of-distribution.

Ergin Utku Genc, Nilesh Ahuja, Ibrahima J Ndiour et al.

This brief sketches initial progress towards a unified energy-based solution for the semi-supervised visual anomaly detection and localization problem. In this setup, we have access to only anomaly-free training data and want to detect and identify anomalies of an arbitrary nature on test data. We employ the density estimates from the energy-based model (EBM) as normalcy scores that can be used to discriminate normal images from anomalous ones. Further, we back-propagate the gradients of the energy score with respect to the image in order to generate a gradient map that provides pixel-level spatial localization of the anomalies in the image. In addition to the spatial localization, we show that simple processing of the gradient map can also provide alternative normalcy scores that either match or surpass the detection performance obtained with the energy value. To quantitatively validate the performance of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on the MVTec industrial dataset. Though still preliminary, our results are very promising and reveal the potential of EBMs for simultaneously detecting and localizing unforeseen anomalies in images.

Ibrahima Ndiour, Nilesh Ahuja, Omesh Tickoo

This paper presents a principled approach for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in deep neural networks (DNN). Modeling probability distributions on deep features has recently emerged as an effective, yet computationally cheap method to detect OOD samples in DNN. However, the features produced by a DNN at any given layer do not fully occupy the corresponding high-dimensional feature space. We apply linear statistical dimensionality reduction techniques and nonlinear manifold-learning techniques on the high-dimensional features in order to capture the true subspace spanned by the features. We hypothesize that such lower-dimensional feature embeddings can mitigate the curse of dimensionality, and enhance any feature-based method for more efficient and effective performance. In the context of uncertainty estimation and OOD, we show that the log-likelihood score obtained from the distributions learnt on this lower-dimensional subspace is more discriminative for OOD detection. We also show that the feature reconstruction error, which is the $L_2$-norm of the difference between the original feature and the pre-image of its embedding, is highly effective for OOD detection and in some cases superior to the log-likelihood scores. The benefits of our approach are demonstrated on image features by detecting OOD images, using popular DNN architectures on commonly used image datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and SVHN.

Javier Felip, Nilesh Ahuja, Omesh Tickoo

This paper introduces Tree-Pyramidal Adaptive Importance Sampling (TP-AIS), a novel iterated sampling method that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches like deterministic mixture population Monte Carlo (DM-PMC), mixture population Monte Carlo (M-PMC) and layered adaptive importance sampling (LAIS). TP-AIS iteratively builds a proposal distribution parameterized by a tree pyramid, where each tree leaf spans a subspace that represents its importance density. After each new sample operation, a set of tree leaves are subdivided for improving the approximation of the proposal distribution to the target density. Unlike the rest of the methods in the literature, TP-AIS is parameter free and requires no tuning to achieve its best performance. We evaluate TP-AIS with different complexity randomized target probability density functions (PDF) and also analyze its application to different dimensions. The results are compared to state-of-the-art iterative importance sampling approaches and other baseline MCMC approaches using Normalized Effective Sample Size (N-ESS), Jensen-Shannon Divergence, and time complexity.

Mahesh Subedar, Nilesh Ahuja, Ranganath Krishnan et al.

Data poisoning attacks compromise the integrity of machine-learning models by introducing malicious training samples to influence the results during test time. In this work, we investigate backdoor data poisoning attack on deep neural networks (DNNs) by inserting a backdoor pattern in the training images. The resulting attack will misclassify poisoned test samples while maintaining high accuracies for the clean test-set. We present two approaches for detection of such poisoned samples by quantifying the uncertainty estimates associated with the trained models. In the first approach, we model the outputs of the various layers (deep features) with parametric probability distributions learnt from the clean held-out dataset. At inference, the likelihoods of deep features w.r.t these distributions are calculated to derive uncertainty estimates. In the second approach, we use Bayesian deep neural networks trained with mean-field variational inference to estimate model uncertainty associated with the predictions. The uncertainty estimates from these methods are used to discriminate clean from the poisoned samples.

Nilesh A. Ahuja, Ibrahima Ndiour, Trushant Kalyanpur et al.

We present a principled approach for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) and adversarial samples in deep neural networks. Our approach consists in modeling the outputs of the various layers (deep features) with parametric probability distributions once training is completed. At inference, the likelihoods of the deep features w.r.t the previously learnt distributions are calculated and used to derive uncertainty estimates that can discriminate in-distribution samples from OOD samples. We explore the use of two classes of multivariate distributions for modeling the deep features - Gaussian and Gaussian mixture - and study the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity. We demonstrate benefits of our approach on image features by detecting OOD images and adversarially-generated images, using popular DNN architectures on MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets. We show that more precise modeling of the feature distributions result in significantly improved detection of OOD and adversarial samples; up to 12 percentage points in AUPR and AUROC metrics. We further show that our approach remains extremely effective when applied to video data and associated spatio-temporal features by detecting adversarial samples on activity classification tasks using UCF101 dataset, and the C3D network. To our knowledge, our methodology is the first one reported for reliably detecting white-box adversarial framing, a state-of-the-art adversarial attack for video classifiers.

Javier Felip, Nilesh Ahuja, David Gómez-Gutiérrez et al.

Consider scene understanding problems such as predicting where a person is probably reaching, or inferring the pose of 3D objects from depth images, or inferring the probable street crossings of pedestrians at a busy intersection. This paper shows how to solve these problems using Approximate Bayesian Computation. The underlying generative models are built from realistic simulation software, wrapped in a Bayesian error model for the gap between simulation outputs and real data. The simulators are drawn from off-the-shelf computer graphics, video game, and traffic simulation code. The paper introduces two techniques for speeding up inference that can be used separately or in combination. The first is to train neural surrogates of the simulators, using a simple form of domain randomization to make the surrogates more robust to the gap between the simulation and reality. The second is to adaptively discretize the latent variables using a Tree-pyramid approach adapted from computer graphics. This paper also shows performance and accuracy measurements on real-world problems, establishing that it is feasible to solve these problems in real-time.