Abhinav Jain

Dhruv Patel, Abhinav Jain, Simran Bawkar et al.

Many applications such as forensics, surveillance, satellite imaging, medical imaging, etc., demand High-Resolution (HR) images. However, obtaining an HR image is not always possible due to the limitations of optical sensors and their costs. An alternative solution called Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a software-driven approach that aims to take a Low-Resolution (LR) image and obtain the HR image. Most supervised SISR solutions use ground truth HR image as a target and do not include the information provided in the LR image, which could be valuable. In this work, we introduce Triplet Loss-based Generative Adversarial Network hereafter referred as SRTGAN for Image Super-Resolution problem on real-world degradation. We introduce a new triplet-based adversarial loss function that exploits the information provided in the LR image by using it as a negative sample. Allowing the patch-based discriminator with access to both HR and LR images optimizes to better differentiate between HR and LR images; hence, improving the adversary. Further, we propose to fuse the adversarial loss, content loss, perceptual loss, and quality loss to obtain Super-Resolution (SR) image with high perceptual fidelity. We validate the superior performance of the proposed method over the other existing methods on the RealSR dataset in terms of quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Abhinav Jain, Ehan Masud, Michelle Han et al.

Due to the modern relevance of blockchain technology, smart contracts present both substantial risks and benefits. Vulnerabilities within them can trigger a cascade of consequences, resulting in significant losses. Many current papers primarily focus on classifying smart contracts for malicious intent, often relying on limited contract characteristics, such as bytecode or opcode. This paper proposes a novel, two-layered framework: 1) classifying and 2) directly repairing malicious contracts. Slither's vulnerability report is combined with source code and passed through a pre-trained RandomForestClassifier (RFC) and Large Language Models (LLMs), classifying and repairing each suggested vulnerability. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-tuned and prompt-engineered LLMs. The smart contract repair models, built from pre-trained GPT-3.5-Turbo and fine-tuned Llama-2-7B models, reduced the overall vulnerability count by 97.5% and 96.7% respectively. A manual inspection of repaired contracts shows that all retain functionality, indicating that the proposed method is appropriate for automatic batch classification and repair of vulnerabilities in smart contracts.

Abhinav Jain, Chris Jermaine, Vaibhav Unhelkar

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for solving challenging robotic tasks, even in the presence of action and observation uncertainties. Recent LLM-based decision-making methods (also referred to as LLM-based agents), when paired with appropriate critics, have demonstrated potential in solving complex, long-horizon tasks with relatively few interactions. However, most existing LLM-based agents lack the ability to retain and learn from past interactions - an essential trait of learning-based robotic systems. We propose RAG-Modulo, a framework that enhances LLM-based agents with a memory of past interactions and incorporates critics to evaluate the agents' decisions. The memory component allows the agent to automatically retrieve and incorporate relevant past experiences as in-context examples, providing context-aware feedback for more informed decision-making. Further by updating its memory, the agent improves its performance over time, thereby exhibiting learning. Through experiments in the challenging BabyAI and AlfWorld domains, we demonstrate significant improvements in task success rates and efficiency, showing that the proposed RAG-Modulo framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Abhinav Jain, Vaibhav Unhelkar

Offline imitation learning (IL) refers to learning expert behavior solely from demonstrations, without any additional interaction with the environment. Despite significant advances in offline IL, existing techniques find it challenging to learn policies for long-horizon tasks and require significant re-training when task specifications change. Towards addressing these limitations, we present GO-DICE an offline IL technique for goal-conditioned long-horizon sequential tasks. GO-DICE discerns a hierarchy of sub-tasks from demonstrations and uses these to learn separate policies for sub-task transitions and action execution, respectively; this hierarchical policy learning facilitates long-horizon reasoning. Inspired by the expansive DICE-family of techniques, policy learning at both the levels transpires within the space of stationary distributions. Further, both policies are learnt with goal conditioning to minimize need for retraining when task goals change. Experimental results substantiate that GO-DICE outperforms recent baselines, as evidenced by a marked improvement in the completion rate of increasingly challenging pick-and-place Mujoco robotic tasks. GO-DICE is also capable of leveraging imperfect demonstration and partial task segmentation when available, both of which boost task performance relative to learning from expert demonstrations alone.

Abhinav Jain, Swarat Chaudhuri, Thomas Reps et al.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become the standard for customising Foundation Models (FMs) to user-specific downstream tasks. However, typical PEFT methods require storing multiple task-specific adapters, creating scalability issues as these adapters must be housed and run at the FM server. Traditional prompt tuning offers a potential solution by customising them through task-specific input prefixes, but it under-performs compared to other PEFT methods like LoRA. To address this gap, we propose Low-Rank Prompt Adaptation (LoPA), a prompt-tuning-based approach that performs on par with state-of-the-art PEFT methods and full fine-tuning while being more parameter-efficient and not requiring a server-based adapter. LoPA generates soft prompts by balancing between sharing task-specific information across instances and customization for each instance. It uses a low-rank decomposition of the soft-prompt component encoded for each instance to achieve parameter efficiency. We provide a comprehensive evaluation on multiple natural language understanding and code generation and understanding tasks across a wide range of foundation models with varying sizes.

Anurag Tripathi, Vaibhav Patle, Abhinav Jain et al.

Text-to-SQL bridges the gap between natural language and structured database language, thus allowing non-technical users to easily query databases. Traditional approaches model text-to-SQL as a direct translation task, where a given Natural Language Query (NLQ) is mapped to an SQL command. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved translation accuracy, however, these methods all require that the target database is pre-specified. This becomes problematic in scenarios with multiple extensive databases, where identifying the correct database becomes a crucial yet overlooked step. In this paper, we propose a three-stage end-to-end text-to-SQL framework to identify the user's intended database before generating SQL queries. Our approach leverages LLMs and prompt engineering to extract implicit information from natural language queries (NLQs) in the form of a ruleset. We then train a large db\_id prediction model, which includes a RoBERTa-based finetuned encoder, to predict the correct Database identifier (db\_id) based on both the NLQ and the LLM-generated rules. Finally, we refine the generated SQL by using critic agents to correct errors. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art models in both database intent prediction and SQL generation accuracy.

Sudha Krishnamurthy, Vimal Bhat, Abhinav Jain

The proliferation of several streaming services in recent years has now made it possible for a diverse audience across the world to view the same media content, such as movies or TV shows. While translation and dubbing services are being added to make content accessible to the local audience, the support for making content accessible to people with different abilities, such as the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community, is still lagging. Our goal is to make media content more accessible to the DHH community by generating sign language videos with synthetic signers that are realistic and expressive. Using the same signer for a given media content that is viewed globally may have limited appeal. Hence, our approach combines parametric modeling and generative modeling to generate realistic-looking synthetic signers and customize their appearance based on user preferences. We first retarget human sign language poses to 3D sign language avatars by optimizing a parametric model. The high-fidelity poses from the rendered avatars are then used to condition the poses of synthetic signers generated using a diffusion-based generative model. The appearance of the synthetic signer is controlled by an image prompt supplied through a visual adapter. Our results show that the sign language videos generated using our approach have better temporal consistency and realism than signing videos generated by a diffusion model conditioned only on text prompts. We also support multimodal prompts to allow users to further customize the appearance of the signer to accommodate diversity (e.g. skin tone, gender). Our approach is also useful for signer anonymization.

Zhisheng Zheng, Xiaohang Sun, Tuan Dinh et al.

End-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems typically struggle with a critical data bottleneck: the scarcity of parallel speech-to-speech corpora. To overcome this, we introduce RosettaSpeech, a novel zero-shot framework trained exclusively on monolingual speech-text data augmented by machine translation supervision. Unlike prior works that rely on complex cascaded pseudo-labeling, our approach strategically utilizes text as a semantic bridge during training to synthesize translation targets, thereby eliminating the need for parallel speech pairs while maintaining a direct, end-to-end inference pipeline. Empirical evaluations on the CVSS-C benchmark demonstrate that RosettaSpeech achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, surpassing leading baselines by significant margins - achieving ASR-BLEU scores of 25.17 for German-to-English (+27% relative gain) and 29.86 for Spanish-to-English (+14%). Crucially, our model effectively preserves the source speaker's voice without ever seeing paired speech data. We further analyze the impact of data scaling and demonstrate the model's capability in many-to-one translation, offering a scalable solution for extending high-quality S2ST to "text-rich, speech-poor" languages.

Abhinav Jain, Xinyu Yao, Thomas Reps et al.

Adapting Foundation Models to new domains with limited training data is challenging and computationally expensive. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of using domain-specific exemplars as in-context demonstrations, we investigate whether representing exemplars purely as text is the most efficient, effective, and stable approach. We explore an alternative: representing exemplars as soft prompts with an exemplar order invariant model architecture. To this end, we introduce Multi-Head Attention Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MHA-RAG), a framework with the number of attention heads serving as a simple hyperparameter to control soft prompt-generation across different tasks. Across multiple question-answering benchmarks and model scales, MHA-RAG achieves a 20-point performance gain over standard RAG, while cutting inference costs by a factor of 10X GFLOPs-delivering both higher accuracy and greater efficiency, invariant to exemplar order.

Abhinav Jain, Cindy Grimm, Stefan Lee

Dormant tree pruning is labor-intensive but essential to maintaining modern highly-productive fruit orchards. In this work we present a closed-loop visuomotor controller for robotic pruning. The controller guides the cutter through a cluttered tree environment to reach a specified cut point and ensures the cutters are perpendicular to the branch. We train the controller using a novel orchard simulation that captures the geometric distribution of branches in a target apple orchard configuration. Unlike traditional methods requiring full 3D reconstruction, our controller uses just optical flow images from a wrist-mounted camera. We deploy our learned policy in simulation and the real-world for an example V-Trellis envy tree with zero-shot transfer, achieving a 30% success rate -- approximately half the performance of an oracle planner.

Xinyu Yao, Daniel Bourgeois, Abhinav Jain et al.

We study the problem of assigning operations in a dataflow graph to devices to minimize execution time in a work-conserving system, with emphasis on complex machine learning workloads. Prior learning-based methods often struggle due to three key limitations: (1) reliance on bulk-synchronous systems like TensorFlow, which under-utilize devices due to barrier synchronization; (2) lack of awareness of the scheduling mechanism of underlying systems when designing learning-based methods; and (3) exclusive dependence on reinforcement learning, ignoring the structure of effective heuristics designed by experts. In this paper, we propose \textsc{Doppler}, a three-stage framework for training dual-policy networks consisting of 1) a $\mathsf{SEL}$ policy for selecting operations and 2) a $\mathsf{PLC}$ policy for placing chosen operations on devices. Our experiments show that \textsc{Doppler} outperforms all baseline methods across tasks by reducing system execution time and additionally demonstrates sampling efficiency by reducing per-episode training time.

Mingchao Jiang, Abhinav Jain, Sophia Zorek et al.

We introduce SIMCOPILOT, a benchmark that simulates the role of large language models (LLMs) as interactive, "copilot"-style coding assistants. Targeting both completion (finishing incomplete methods or code blocks) and infill tasks (filling missing segments within existing code), SIMCOPILOT provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating LLM coding capabilities. The benchmark comprises dedicated sub-benchmarks for Java (SIMCOPILOTJ) and Python (SIMCOPILOTP), covering diverse codebases varying in size and complexity. Our key contributions include: (a) establishing a realistic, detailed evaluation environment to assess LLM utility in practical coding scenarios, and (b) providing fine-grained analyses that address critical factors frequently overlooked by existing benchmarks, such as task-specific performance nuances, contextual understanding across code segments, and sensitivity to variable scope. Evaluations conducted across domains-including algorithms, databases, computer vision, and neural networks-offer insights into model strengths and highlight persistent challenges in maintaining logical consistency within complex dependency structures. Beyond benchmarking, our study sheds light on the current limitations of LLM-driven code generation and underscores the ongoing transition of LLMs from merely syntax-aware generators toward reliable, intelligent software development partners.

Abhinav Jain, Chima Adiole, Swarat Chaudhuri et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on code have recently emerged as the dominant approach to program synthesis. However, these models are trained using next-token prediction, which ignores the syntax and semantics of code. We propose RLCF, that further trains a pre-trained LLM via reinforcement learning, using feedback from a grounding function that scores the quality of the code. The grounding function uses (i) compiler-derived feedback on whether the code it generates passes a set of correctness checks; and (ii) feedback from a different LLM that compares the generated code to a reference code. RLCF is model- and language-agnostic. We empirically evaluate it on the MBJP and MathQA tasks for Java. Our experiments show that RLCF raises the odds that an LLM-generated program compiles, is executable, and produces the right output on tests, often allowing LLMs to match the performance of 2x-8x larger LLMs.

Nitin Gupta, Hima Patel, Shazia Afzal et al.

The quality of training data has a huge impact on the efficiency, accuracy and complexity of machine learning tasks. Various tools and techniques are available that assess data quality with respect to general cleaning and profiling checks. However these techniques are not applicable to detect data issues in the context of machine learning tasks, like noisy labels, existence of overlapping classes etc. We attempt to re-look at the data quality issues in the context of building a machine learning pipeline and build a tool that can detect, explain and remediate issues in the data, and systematically and automatically capture all the changes applied to the data. We introduce the Data Quality Toolkit for machine learning as a library of some key quality metrics and relevant remediation techniques to analyze and enhance the readiness of structured training datasets for machine learning projects. The toolkit can reduce the turn-around times of data preparation pipelines and streamline the data quality assessment process. Our toolkit is publicly available via IBM API Hub [1] platform, any developer can assess the data quality using the IBM's Data Quality for AI apis [2]. Detailed tutorials are also available on IBM Learning Path [3].

Prashant Kumar, Sabyasachi Sahoo, Vanshil Shah et al.

Accurate reconstruction of static environments from LiDAR scans of scenes containing dynamic objects, which we refer to as Dynamic to Static Translation (DST), is an important area of research in Autonomous Navigation. This problem has been recently explored for visual SLAM, but to the best of our knowledge no work has been attempted to address DST for LiDAR scans. The problem is of critical importance due to wide-spread adoption of LiDAR in Autonomous Vehicles. We show that state-of the art methods developed for the visual domain when adapted for LiDAR scans perform poorly. We develop DSLR, a deep generative model which learns a mapping between dynamic scan to its static counterpart through an adversarially trained autoencoder. Our model yields the first solution for DST on LiDAR that generates static scans without using explicit segmentation labels. DSLR cannot always be applied to real world data due to lack of paired dynamic-static scans. Using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, we propose DSLR-UDA for transfer to real world data and experimentally show that this performs well in real world settings. Additionally, if segmentation information is available, we extend DSLR to DSLR-Seg to further improve the reconstruction quality. DSLR gives the state of the art performance on simulated and real-world datasets and also shows at least 4x improvement. We show that DSLR, unlike the existing baselines, is a practically viable model with its reconstruction quality within the tolerable limits for tasks pertaining to autonomous navigation like SLAM in dynamic environments.

Abhinav Jain, Daphne Chen, Dhruva Bansal et al.

We address the problem of adapting robot trajectories to improve safety, comfort, and efficiency in human-robot collaborative tasks. To this end, we propose CoMOTO, a trajectory optimization framework that utilizes stochastic motion prediction models to anticipate the human's motion and adapt the robot's joint trajectory accordingly. We design a multi-objective cost function that simultaneously optimizes for i) separation distance, ii) visibility of the end-effector, iii) legibility, iv) efficiency, and v) smoothness. We evaluate CoMOTO against three existing methods for robot trajectory generation when in close proximity to humans. Our experimental results indicate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods over a combined set of safety, comfort, and efficiency metrics.

Siddhartha Banerjee, Angel Daruna, David Kent et al.

Robot task execution when situated in real-world environments is fragile. As such, robot architectures must rely on robust error recovery, adding non-trivial complexity to highly-complex robot systems. To handle this complexity in development, we introduce Recovery-Driven Development (RDD), an iterative task scripting process that facilitates rapid task and recovery development by leveraging hierarchical specification, separation of nominal task and recovery development, and situated testing. We validate our approach with our challenge-winning mobile manipulator software architecture developed using RDD for the FetchIt! Challenge at the IEEE 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. We attribute the success of our system to the level of robustness achieved using RDD, and conclude with lessons learned for developing such systems.

Abhinav Jain, Seth Hutchinson, Frank Dellaert

In this paper, we explore the task of robot sculpting. We propose a search based planning algorithm to solve the problem of sculpting by material removal with a multi-axis manipulator. We generate collision free trajectories for a manipulator using best-first search in voxel space. We also show significant speedup of our algorithm by using octrees to decompose the voxel space. We demonstrate our algorithm on a multi-axis manipulator in simulation by sculpting Michelangelo's Statue of David, evaluate certain metrics of our algorithm and discuss future goals for the project.

Abhinav Jain, Frank Dellaert

Pose estimation is a vital step in many robotics and perception tasks such as robotic manipulation, autonomous vehicle navigation, etc. Current state-of-the-art pose estimation methods rely on deep neural networks with complicated structures and long inference times. While highly robust, they require computing power often unavailable on mobile robots. We propose a CNN-based pose refinement system which takes a coarsely estimated 3D pose from a computationally cheaper algorithm along with a bounding box image of the object, and returns a highly refined pose. Our experiments on the YCB-Video dataset show that our system can refine 3D poses to an extremely high precision with minimal training data.