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Abdul Monaf Chowdhury

Publications and source records attributed to Abdul Monaf Chowdhury.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Kernelized Parameter Sensitivity Atlases for Amortized Conditional Interpretability

Gradient-based attribution provides input-specific information about model parameters, but computing it via backpropagation for many samples is expensive, while static importance scores discard input dependence. We derive KPSA (Kernelized Parameter Sensitivity Atlas) from a block decomposition of the empirical neural tangent kernel. It measures normalized parameter-group sensitivity, embeds those sources in an explicit query space, and uses a lightweight kernel to estimate sensitivities for unseen inputs. We derive bounds that separate finite-source from irreducible representation error and give margin-based top-$k$ recovery. This paper studies two interpretability applications. Firstly, KPSA identifies parameter groups with high susceptibility to perturbations across vision, forecasting, and protein-modeling setups. Across a fivefold range of parameter budgets ($0.02$-$0.1\%$), its selected groups attain $39$-$85\%$ of the perturbation susceptibility of a first-order backpropagation oracle. In vision and forecasting, these parameter groups form sparse sensitivity circuits that extend across depth and vary systematically with the input. Secondly, we use KPSA on an activation-attribution problem for MLP features in transformers. It retains $81\%$ of the gap between a backpropagation oracle and a constant-sensitivity baseline on vision while increasing batched query-time throughput from 551 to 2,041 images/s and reducing peak GPU memory from 4.55 to 0.44GB. On the protein-modeling task, it recovers $68\%$ of this gap. An ablation of KPSA's kernel aggregation shows that nearest-neighbor retrieval in KPSA space can remain competitive. The empirics show that compact kernel atlases can store useful input-dependent parameter sensitivity while amortizing repeated gradient attribution, a step toward scalable conditional interpretability. Code can be found at https://github.com/Axym-Labs/kpsa .

cs.LG↗

Do Better Goal Representations Improve Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning?

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) relies heavily on how target goals are represented to the policy. While recent methods encode goals via temporal distance, occupancy, or controllability, it remains unclear how much downstream performance actually depends on representation quality. We study this in offline GCRL by constructing an exact temporal-distance goal representation in deterministic mazes. We then systematically corrupt its geometric quality while keeping the downstream learner fixed. Across OGBench navigation tasks and two algorithms, large changes in goal-representation quality produce almost no change in performance. However, applying the same interventions to the agent's current state more than doubles success, revealing the state pathway as the true bottleneck. Building on this insight, we show that simple random Fourier positional encodings substantially improve performance on the hardest navigation tasks without map information or objective modifications. Overall, our findings suggest that in state-based offline navigation, improving how the agent's current state is represented matters far more than refining the goal representation. Code will be released soon.

cs.LG↗

GTRL: Grounding Divide-and-Conquer Value Learning with Temporal Differences

In offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), divide-and-conquer scales to long horizons by joining two shorter segments at a subgoal. However, under stochastic dynamics, the base case of this rule values the luckiest trajectories through the data. The subgoal must also lie on a shared trajectory, so a state-goal pair that no trajectory connects gets no value update at all. To address both, we present Grounded Transitive RL (GTRL), an offline GCRL value learning algorithm that grounds the divide-and-conquer update with a one-step TD target. Over a single step, TD is correct, as its target averages over the successors and needs no subgoal. GTRL adds this target to the composition rather than replacing it, so every pair receives an update, and the composition still carries the long horizon. GTRL also corrects the bias from hindsight relabeling by reweighting each goal against how reachable it was from other successors. We evaluate our algorithm on nineteen OGBench tasks spanning stochastic, deterministic, and stitching environments, where it achieves the highest average success rate. Code will be released soon.

cs.LG↗

LaGEA: Language Guided Embodied Agents for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation benefits from foundation models that describe goals, but today's agents still lack a principled way to learn from their own mistakes. We ask whether natural language can serve as feedback, an error-reasoning signal that helps embodied agents diagnose what went wrong and correct course. We introduce LaGEA (Language Guided Embodied Agents), a framework that turns episodic, schema-constrained reflections from a vision language model (VLM) into temporally grounded guidance for reinforcement learning. LaGEA summarizes each attempt in concise language, localizes the decisive moments in the trajectory, aligns feedback with visual state in a shared representation, and converts goal progress and feedback agreement into bounded, step-wise shaping rewards whose influence is modulated by an adaptive, failure-aware coefficient. This design yields dense signals early when exploration needs direction and gracefully recedes as competence grows. On the Meta-World MT10 and Robotic Fetch embodied manipulation benchmark, LaGEA improves average success over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by 9.0% on random goals, 5.3% on fixed goals, and 17% on fetch tasks, while converging faster. These results support our hypothesis: language, when structured and grounded in time, is an effective mechanism for teaching robots to self-reflect on mistakes and make better choices.

cs.RO↗

Counting Through Occlusion: Framework for Open World Amodal Counting

Object counting has achieved remarkable success on visible instances, yet state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods fail under occlusion. This failure stems from a fundamental architectural limitation where backbone networks encode occluding surfaces rather than target objects, thereby corrupting the feature representations required for accurate enumeration. To address this, we present CountOCC, an amodal counting framework that explicitly reconstructs occluded object features through hierarchical multimodal guidance. Rather than accepting degraded encodings, we synthesize complete representations by integrating spatial context from visible fragments with semantic priors from text and visual embeddings, generating features at occluded locations across multiple pyramid levels. We further introduce a visual equivalence objective that enforces consistency in attention space, ensuring that both occluded and unoccluded views of the same scene produce spatially aligned gradient-based attention maps. Together, these complementary mechanisms preserve discriminative properties essential for accurate counting under occlusion. For rigorous evaluation, we establish occlusion-augmented versions of FSC-147 and CARPK (FSC-147-OCC and CARPK-OCC). CountOCC achieves SOTA performance on FSC-147-OCC with 26.72% and 20.80% MAE reduction over prior baselines under occlusion in validation and test, respectively. CountOCC also demonstrates exceptional generalization by setting new SOTA results on CARPK-OCC with 49.89% MAE reduction and on CAPTURe-Real with 28.79% MAE reduction, validating robust amodal counting.

cs.CV↗

T3Time: Tri-Modal Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Multi-Head Alignment and Residual Fusion

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code - https://github.com/monaf-chowdhury/T3Time/

cs.LG↗