arXiv subjects

Pranav Gupta

Publications and source records attributed to Pranav Gupta.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Two-player Alternate Uses Test: A Controlled Testbed for Interactive Human-AI and Human-Human Co-Creation

Controlled research on AI ideation typically compares independent agents, while field studies of human-AI collaboration sacrifice experimental control. We introduce a controlled, two-player extension of the Alternate Uses Test (AUT) that enables comparison of human-human and human-AI co-creation under matched interactive conditions, alongside calibrated non-interactive baselines. The platform supports decomposition of performance into three typically confounded factors: participant traits, partner perceptions, and content dynamics. An in-person pilot (N = 62) demonstrates its utility. Under matched time limits, originality with a GPT-4 partner is statistically equivalent to that with a human partner. Approach motivation (BAS Drive) moderates whether interactive partnership benefits originality, and self-reported cognitive outsourcing predicts lower originality specifically in human-human dyads. Prior exposure to highly creative ideas improves later performance, suggesting a "seeding" intervention. We release the platform, code, and dataset as a shared testbed for controlled studies of human-AI co-creation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Fast determinantal sampling on general spaces and diffusion geometry

Determinantal point processes have recently emerged as a kernel-based alternative to standard independent sampling for constructing efficient minibatches, coresets, and other compact representations of large-scale datasets. In particular, sampling mechanisms based on DPPs are believed to demonstrate better approximation properties compared to classical i.i.d. samplers, even at the scale of the exponent. One of the key strengths of DPP based samplers is that they can be deployed over very general spaces, in contrast to more classical sampling methods beyond i.i.d. which tend to work in very well-structured settings, principally Euclidean spaces. In this work, we establish explicit rate guarantees for determinantal sampling in spaces that extend far beyond known Euclidean setups, focusing on spectral kernels obtained from eigenspaces of naturally associated Laplacian and other Markov diffusion operators. This includes, in particular, Riemannian manifolds and weighted networks. In determinantal sampling from compact Riemannian manifolds, we establish sampling rates that automatically pick up the intrinsic dimensionality $d_{\text{int}}$ of the underlying manifold. In the setting of networks, we investigate DPP-based samplers on the celebrated k-nearest neighbour graphs, as well as weighted random geometric graphs, and demonstrate a similar improved dependence on the intrinsic dimensionality of the data. Overall, our approach achieves guarantees of $\big(\text{sample size}\big)^{-\frac{1}{2}-\frac{1}{2d_{\text{int}}}}$ that match known rates on Euclidean spaces of comparable dimension. In terms of techniques, we connect to the celebrated Weyl's Law for manifold spectra, and leverage tools from the theory of Markov diffusions and Dirichlet forms as well as certain ingredients from the theory of pseudodifferential operators, which could be of independent interest in this area.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

State-of-art minibatches via novel DPP kernels: discretization, wavelets, and rough objectives

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have emerged as a kernelized alternative to vanilla independent sampling for generating efficient minibatches, coresets and other parsimonious representations of large-scale datasets. While theoretical foundations and promising empirical performance have been demonstrated, there are two challenges for current proposals for DPP-based coresets or minibatches. The first is the need for families of DPPs with certain key variance reduction properties, usually constructed in a continuous setting, of which there are few known examples. The second is the need for an ad-hoc construction of a discrete DPP defined on a given dataset, that inherits such variance reduction. In this work, we contribute to the programme of establishing DPPs as a subsampling toolbox for ML by advancing on these two fronts. First, we propose new DPPs on the Euclidean space based on wavelets, with provably better accuracy guarantees than the best known rates. Second, we introduce a general method to convert such continuous DPPs, which are more amenable to proving analytical statements, into discrete kernels, which are pertinent for subsampling tasks such as minibatch and coreset constructions. This conversion mechanism simultaneously preserves the desired variance decay and reveals a low-rank decomposition of the discrete kernel, which makes sampling the corresponding DPP computationally inexpensive. En route, we enlarge the class of ML tasks amenable to improvements via DPP-based minibatches and coresets to include objective functions with arbitrarily low regularity, and rate guarantees that explicitly adapt to this regularity.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Causal inference and model explainability tools for retail

Most major retailers today have multiple divisions focused on various aspects, such as marketing, supply chain, online customer experience, store customer experience, employee productivity, and vendor fulfillment. They also regularly collect data corresponding to all these aspects as dashboards and weekly/monthly/quarterly reports. Although several machine learning and statistical techniques have been in place to analyze and predict key metrics, such models typically lack interpretability. Moreover, such techniques also do not allow the validation or discovery of causal links. In this paper, we aim to provide a recipe for applying model interpretability and causal inference for deriving sales insights. In this paper, we review the existing literature on causal inference and interpretability in the context of problems in e-commerce and retail, and apply them to a real-world dataset. We find that an inherently explainable model has a lower variance of SHAP values, and show that including multiple confounders through a double machine learning approach allows us to get the correct sign of causal effect.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Bounds of Validity for Bifurcations of Equilibria in a Class of Networked Dynamical Systems

Local bifurcation analysis plays a central role in understanding qualitative transitions in networked nonlinear dynamical systems, including dynamic neural network and opinion dynamics models. In this article we establish explicit bounds of validity for the classification of bifurcation diagrams in two classes of continuous-time networked dynamical systems, analogous in structure to the Hopfield and the Firing Rate dynamic neural network models. Our approach leverages recent advances in computing the bounds for the validity of Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, a reduction method widely employed in nonlinear systems analysis. Using these bounds we rigorously characterize neighbourhoods around bifurcation points where predictions from reduced-order bifurcation equations remain reliable. We further demonstrate how these bounds can be applied to an illustrative family of nonlinear opinion dynamics on k-regular graphs, which emerges as a special case of the general framework. These results provide new analytical tools for quantifying the robustness of bifurcation phenomena in dynamics over networked systems and highlight the interplay between network structure and nonlinear dynamical behaviour.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

OpenStaxQA: A multilingual dataset based on open-source college textbooks

We present OpenStaxQA, an evaluation benchmark specific to college-level educational applications based on 43 open-source college textbooks in English, Spanish, and Polish, available under a permissive Creative Commons license. We finetune and evaluate large language models (LLMs) with approximately 7 billion parameters on this dataset using quantized low rank adapters (QLoRa). Additionally we also perform a zero-shot evaluation on the AI2 reasoning challenge dev dataset in order to check if OpenStaxQA can lead to an improved performance on other tasks. We also discuss broader impacts relevant to datasets such as OpenStaxQA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Pagoda: An Energy and Time Roofline Study for DNN Workloads on Edge Accelerators

Edge accelerators such as Nvidia Jetsons are becoming an integral part of the computing continuum, and are often used for DNN inferencing and training. Nvidia Jetson edge devices have $2000$+ CUDA cores within a $70$W power envelope and offer $1000$s of power modes to customize CPU, GPU and memory frequencies. Their widely varying power--performance trade-offs can be exploited for energy and power-constrained deployments. While data-driven methods to predict the power and latency of DNN workloads for edge devices exist, there is a lack of principled study to understand why edge accelerators and their power modes perform the way they do. We develop a time roofline and a novel energy roofline model for the Jetson Orin AGX for diverse power modes, and couple it with an analytical model of the compute (FLOP) and memory access (bytes) for DNN inference workloads to analyze them from first principles. These reveal unique, sometimes counter-intuitive, insights into the power and performance behavior of DNN workloads on edge accelerators, e.g., the default power mode MAXN is not the most energy efficient and time efficiency implies energy efficiency for all power modes. We also extend our analytical roofline models to DNN training. Finally, we apply these methods to tune the power mode (and hence the roofline) of the edge device to optimize the latency and energy for DNN inference, with up to $15\%$ lower energy and minimal degradation in inference time.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Fulcrum: Optimizing Concurrent DNN Training and Inferencing on Edge Accelerators

The proliferation of GPU accelerated edge devices like Nvidia Jetsons and the rise in privacy concerns are placing an emphasis on concurrent DNN training and inferencing on edge devices. Inference and training have different computing and QoS goals. But edge accelerators like Jetson do not support native GPU sharing and expose 1000s of power modes. This requires careful time-sharing of concurrent workloads to meet power--performance goals, while limiting costly profiling. In this paper, we design an intelligent time-slicing approach for concurrent DNN training and inferencing on Jetsons. We formulate an optimization problem to interleave training and inferencing minibatches, and decide the device power mode and inference minibatch size, while maximizing the training throughput and staying within latency and power budgets, with modest profiling costs. We propose GMD, an efficient multi-dimensional gradient descent search which profiles just $15$ power modes; and ALS, an Active Learning technique which identifies reusable Pareto-optimal power modes, but profiles $50$--$150$ power modes. We evaluate these within our Fulcrum scheduler for $273,000+$ configurations across $15$ DNN workloads. We also evaluate our strategies on dynamic arrival inference and concurrent inferences. ALS and GMD outperform simpler and more complex baselines with larger-scale profiling. Their solutions satisfy the latency and power budget for $>97\%$ of our runs, and on average are within $7\%$ of the optimal throughput.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

GCN-TULHOR: Trajectory-User Linking Leveraging GCNs and Higher-Order Spatial Representations

Trajectory-user linking (TUL) aims to associate anonymized trajectories with the users who generated them, which is crucial for personalized recommendations, privacy-preserving analytics, and secure location-based services. Existing methods struggle with sparse data, incomplete routes, and limited modeling of complex spatial dependencies, often relying on low-level check-in data or ignoring spatial patterns. In this paper, we introduced GCN-TULHOR, a method that transforms raw location data into higher-order mobility flow representations using hexagonal tessellation, reducing data sparsity and capturing richer spatial semantics, and integrating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). Our approach converts both sparse check-in and continuous GPS trajectory data into unified higher-order flow representations, mitigating sparsity while capturing deeper semantic information. The GCN layer explicitly models complex spatial relationships and non-local dependencies without requiring side information such as timestamps or points of interest. Experiments on six real-world datasets show consistent improvements over classical baselines, RNN- and Transformer-based models, and the TULHOR method in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. GCN-TULHOR achieves 1-8% relative gains in accuracy and F1. Sensitivity analysis identifies an optimal setup with a single GCN layer and 512-dimensional embeddings. The integration of GCNs enhances spatial learning and improves generalizability across mobility data. This work highlights the value of combining graph-based spatial learning with sequential modeling, offering a robust and scalable solution for TUL with applications in recommendations, urban planning, and security.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Discrete non-abelian X-ray transforms

We define a discrete version of the non-abelian X-ray transform, going back in particular to Manakov, Zakharov (1981) and Strichartz (1982). We extend to this transform non-overdetermined reconstruction results obtained for the abelian case in the recent article by Novikov, Sharma (2025). In addition, we establish relations with the continuous non-abelian X-ray transform. In this respect, our results include an explicit and exact non-overdetermined layer-stripping reconstruction procedure for piecewise constant matrix-valued functions from their continuous non-abelian X-ray transform. To our knowledge, this result is new even for the classical X-ray transform.

math.FA↗

arXiv2025

CueBuddy: helping non-native English speakers navigate English-centric STEM education

Students across the world in STEM classes, especially in the Global South, fall behind their peers who are more fluent in English, despite being at par with them in terms of scientific prerequisites. While many of them are able to follow everyday English at ease, key terms in English stay challenging. In most cases, such students have had most of their course prerequisites in a lower resource language. Live speech translation to lower resource languages is a promising area of research, however, models for speech translation can be too expensive on a large scale and often struggle with technical content. In this paper, we describe CueBuddy, which aims to remediate these issues by providing real-time "lexical cues" through technical keyword spotting along real-time multilingual glossary lookup to help students stay up to speed with complex English jargon without disrupting their concentration on the lecture. We also describe the limitations and future extensions of our approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

NLP for Social Good: A Survey and Outlook of Challenges, Opportunities, and Responsible Deployment

Natural language processing (NLP) now shapes many aspects of our world, yet its potential for positive social impact is underexplored. This paper surveys work in ``NLP for Social Good" (NLP4SG) across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas, summarizing principal tasks and challenges. We analyze ACL Anthology trends, finding that inclusion and AI harms attract the most research, while domains such as poverty, peacebuilding, and environmental protection remain underexplored. Guided by our review, we outline opportunities for responsible and equitable NLP and conclude with a call for cross-disciplinary partnerships and human-centered approaches to ensure that future NLP technologies advance the public good.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A Breadth-First Catalog of Text Processing, Speech Processing and Multimodal Research in South Asian Languages

We review the recent literature (January 2022- October 2024) in South Asian languages on text-based language processing, multimodal models, and speech processing, and provide a spotlight analysis focused on 21 low-resource South Asian languages, namely Saraiki, Assamese, Balochi, Bhojpuri, Bodo, Burmese, Chhattisgarhi, Dhivehi, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Khasi, Malayalam, Meitei, Nepali, Odia, Pashto, Rajasthani, Sindhi, and Telugu. We identify trends, challenges, and future research directions, using a step-wise approach that incorporates relevance classification and clustering based on large language models (LLMs). Our goal is to provide a breadth-first overview of the recent developments in South Asian language technologies to NLP researchers interested in working with South Asian languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

OLAF: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Enhanced Multi-object Multi-part Scene Parsing

Multi-object multi-part scene segmentation is a challenging task whose complexity scales exponentially with part granularity and number of scene objects. To address the task, we propose a plug-and-play approach termed OLAF. First, we augment the input (RGB) with channels containing object-based structural cues (fg/bg mask, boundary edge mask). We propose a weight adaptation technique which enables regular (RGB) pre-trained models to process the augmented (5-channel) input in a stable manner during optimization. In addition, we introduce an encoder module termed LDF to provide low-level dense feature guidance. This assists segmentation, particularly for smaller parts. OLAF enables significant mIoU gains of $\mathbf{3.3}$ (Pascal-Parts-58), $\mathbf{3.5}$ (Pascal-Parts-108) over the SOTA model. On the most challenging variant (Pascal-Parts-201), the gain is $\mathbf{4.0}$. Experimentally, we show that OLAF's broad applicability enables gains across multiple architectures (CNN, U-Net, Transformer) and datasets. The code is available at olafseg.github.io

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

VARS: Vision-based Assessment of Risk in Security Systems

The accurate prediction of danger levels in video content is critical for enhancing safety and security systems, particularly in environments where quick and reliable assessments are essential. In this study, we perform a comparative analysis of various machine learning and deep learning models to predict danger ratings in a custom dataset of 100 videos, each containing 50 frames, annotated with human-rated danger scores ranging from 0 to 10. The danger ratings are further classified into three categories: no alert (less than 7)and high alert (greater than equal to 7). Our evaluation covers classical machine learning models, such as Support Vector Machines, as well as Neural Networks, and transformer-based models. Model performance is assessed using standard metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, and mean absolute error (MAE), and the results are compared to identify the most robust approach. This research contributes to developing a more accurate and generalizable danger assessment framework for video-based risk detection.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

CVCP-Fusion: On Implicit Depth Estimation for 3D Bounding Box Prediction

Combining LiDAR and Camera-view data has become a common approach for 3D Object Detection. However, previous approaches combine the two input streams at a point-level, throwing away semantic information derived from camera features. In this paper we propose Cross-View Center Point-Fusion, a state-of-the-art model to perform 3D object detection by combining camera and LiDAR-derived features in the BEV space to preserve semantic density from the camera stream while incorporating spacial data from the LiDAR stream. Our architecture utilizes aspects from previously established algorithms, Cross-View Transformers and CenterPoint, and runs their backbones in parallel, allowing efficient computation for real-time processing and application. In this paper we find that while an implicitly calculated depth-estimate may be sufficiently accurate in a 2D map-view representation, explicitly calculated geometric and spacial information is needed for precise bounding box prediction in the 3D world-view space.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ViDAS: Vision-based Danger Assessment and Scoring

We present a novel dataset aimed at advancing danger analysis and assessment by addressing the challenge of quantifying danger in video content and identifying how human-like a Large Language Model (LLM) evaluator is for the same. This is achieved by compiling a collection of 100 YouTube videos featuring various events. Each video is annotated by human participants who provided danger ratings on a scale from 0 (no danger to humans) to 10 (life-threatening), with precise timestamps indicating moments of heightened danger. Additionally, we leverage LLMs to independently assess the danger levels in these videos using video summaries. We introduce Mean Squared Error (MSE) scores for multimodal meta-evaluation of the alignment between human and LLM danger assessments. Our dataset not only contributes a new resource for danger assessment in video content but also demonstrates the potential of LLMs in achieving human-like evaluations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ECHO: Environmental Sound Classification with Hierarchical Ontology-guided Semi-Supervised Learning

Environment Sound Classification has been a well-studied research problem in the field of signal processing and up till now more focus has been laid on fully supervised approaches. Over the last few years, focus has moved towards semi-supervised methods which concentrate on the utilization of unlabeled data, and self-supervised methods which learn the intermediate representation through pretext task or contrastive learning. However, both approaches require a vast amount of unlabelled data to improve performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Environmental Sound Classification with Hierarchical Ontology-guided semi-supervised Learning (ECHO) that utilizes label ontology-based hierarchy to learn semantic representation by defining a novel pretext task. In the pretext task, the model tries to predict coarse labels defined by the Large Language Model (LLM) based on ground truth label ontology. The trained model is further fine-tuned in a supervised way to predict the actual task. Our proposed novel semi-supervised framework achieves an accuracy improvement in the range of 1\% to 8\% over baseline systems across three datasets namely UrbanSound8K, ESC-10, and ESC-50.

cs.SD↗