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Saumik Bhattacharya

Publications and source records attributed to Saumik Bhattacharya.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Teacher Knows It Best: Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Tipping Points in Networked Langevin Dynamics AI Sycophancy

We formulate a statistical physics framework to model a networked stochastic dynamical system exhibiting bistability, driven by additive noise and social conformity. We apply this model to understand and mitigate AI-induced delusional spiraling-a phenomenon where algorithmic sycophancy from Large Language Models continuously reinforces inaccurate beliefs within a socially interacting society. By partitioning the network into a majority of regular agents and a minority of "aware" nodes (Teachers) placed at topological hubs, we use a degree-weighted mean-field approximation to reduce high-dimensional coupled Langevin equations into a single macroscopic drift equation. We provide a closed-form analytical derivation for the deterministic critical tipping time through a saddle-node bifurcation. We validate this analytical boundary using finite-size scaling and demonstrate a universal data collapse across diverse network topologies. Finally, we optimize an intervention strategy under a strict budget constraint that balances the topological footprint against driving velocity. We prove mathematically that under certain conditions, a highly concentrated, rapid intervention targeting massive hubs strictly outperforms a distributed, slow approach to rescue the network.

physics.soc-ph

VSANet: View-aware Sparse Attention Network for Light Field Image Denoising

Light field (LF) image denoising is challenging due to the high-dimensional structure of LF data. While noise is independent across sub-aperture images, scene content exhibits strong cross-view correlations. We introduce VSANet, a view-aware sparse attention network for LF denoising. Specifically, we propose a view-aware sparse attention (VSA) block that represents the 4D LF feature map as a unified spatial-angular token space and performs cross-view aggregation via locality-sensitive hashing-based sparse attention. This enables global feature interactions with linear complexity, effectively exploiting LF correlations across views and spatial locations. In addition, we design a feature refinement (FR) block to emphasize informative features in spatial, angular, and epipolar subspaces. The VSA and FR blocks are integrated within a sequential attention refinement module, forming the core of VSANet. Experiments demonstrate VSANet outperforms stateof-the-art LF denoising methods.

cs.CV

Escape from Delusional Echo Trap: Symmetry Breaking, Stochastic Dynamics and Mathematical Mitigation Strategies for Algorithmic Sycophancy

We propose a rigorous and systematic mathematical framework for tracking the cognitive trajectories of a user, in the context of algorithmic sycophancy and AI-driven delusional spiraling. Using tools from dynamical systems theory and stochastic differential equations, we explore how individuals perceive, interpret, and update their beliefs as they interact with AI chatbots that possess hidden traits of sycophancy. We treat the evolving conviction as a continuous log-odds state variable, coupled into a stochastic differential equation, navigating a multi-valley potential energy landscape. Our analysis reveals several critical observations governing the stability and rigidity of belief dynamics. We demonstrate that the baseline prior perception of the individual is systematically enhanced by sycophantic feedback beyond a critical threshold. Here, the perceptual potential landscape undergoes a structural phase transition that severely deepens any incremental initial tilt present in the baseline state, transforming the landscape and giving rise to deep, highly resilient attractor basins that trap the individual in unshakeable, self-reinforcing, delusional convictions. Finally, we demonstrate that genuine external information can successfully challenge these rigid states. If this incoming evidence is strong and authentic enough to overcome the internal feedback barrier, it can correct the structural asymmetry caused by sycophancy, inducing a perception reversal that successfully restores the objective belief state.

cs.AI

Exploring Mutual Cross-Modal Attention for Context-Aware Human Affordance Generation

Human affordance learning investigates contextually relevant novel pose prediction such that the estimated pose represents a valid human action within the scene. While the task is fundamental to machine perception and automated interactive navigation agents, the exponentially large number of probable pose and action variations make the problem challenging and non-trivial. However, the existing datasets and methods for human affordance prediction in 2D scenes are significantly limited in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-attention mechanism to encode the scene context for affordance prediction by mutually attending spatial feature maps from two different modalities. The proposed method is disentangled among individual subtasks to efficiently reduce the problem complexity. First, we sample a probable location for a person within the scene using a variational autoencoder (VAE) conditioned on the global scene context encoding. Next, we predict a potential pose template from a set of existing human pose candidates using a classifier on the local context encoding around the predicted location. In the subsequent steps, we use two VAEs to sample the scale and deformation parameters for the predicted pose template by conditioning on the local context and template class. Our experiments show significant improvements over the previous baseline of human affordance injection into complex 2D scenes.

cs.CV

DRG-Font: Dynamic Reference-Guided Few-shot Font Generation via Contrastive Style-Content Disentanglement

Few-shot Font Generation aims to generate stylistically consistent glyphs from a few reference glyphs. However, capturing complex font styles from a few exemplars remains challenging, and the existing methods often struggle to retain discernible local characteristics in generated samples. This paper introduces DRG-Font, a contrastive font generation strategy that learns complex glyph attributes by decomposing style and content embedding spaces. For optimal style supervision, the proposed architecture incorporates a Reference Selection (RS) Module to dynamically select the best style reference from an available pool of candidates. The network learns to decompose glyph attributes into style and shape priors through a Multi-scale Style Head Block (MSHB) and a Multi-scale Content Head Block (MCHB). For style adaptation, a Multi-Fusion Upsampling Block (MFUB) produces the target glyph by combining the reference style prior and target content prior. The proposed method demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches across multiple visual and analytical benchmarks.

cs.CV

SAGE-GAN: Towards Realistic and Robust Segmentation of Spatially Ordered Nanoparticles via Attention-Guided GANs

Precise analysis of nanoparticles for characterization in electron microscopy images is essential for advancing nanomaterial development. Yet it remains challenging due to the time-consuming nature of manual methods and the shortcomings of traditional automated segmentation techniques, especially when dealing with complex shapes and imaging artifacts. While conventional methods yield promising results, they depend on a large volume of labeled training data, which is both difficult to acquire and highly time-consuming to generate. In order to overcome these challenges, we have developed a two-step solution: Firstly, our system learns to segment the key features of nanoparticles from a dataset of real images using a self-attention driven U-Net architecture that focuses on important physical and morphological details while ignoring background features and noise. Secondly, this trained Attention U-Net is embedded in a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) framework, inspired by the cGAN-Seg model introduced by Abzargar et al. This integration allows for the creation of highly realistic synthetic electron microscopy image-mask pairs that naturally reflect the structural patterns learned by the Attention U-Net. Consequently, the model can accurately detect features in a diverse array of real-world nanoparticle images and autonomously augment the training dataset without requiring human input. Cycle consistency enforces a direct correspondence between synthetic images and ground-truth masks, ensuring realistic features, which is crucial for accurate segmentation training.

cs.CV

l0-Regularized Sparse Coding-based Interpretable Network for Multi-Modal Image Fusion

Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) enhances the information content of the fused image by combining the unique as well as common features obtained from different modality sensor images, improving visualization, object detection, and many more tasks. In this work, we introduce an interpretable network for the MMIF task, named FNet, based on an $\ell_0$-regularized multi-modal convolutional sparse coding (MCSC) model. Specifically, for solving the $\ell_0$-regularized CSC problem, we design a learnable $\ell_0$-regularized sparse coding (LZSC) block in a principled manner through deep unfolding. Given different modality source images, FNet first separates the unique and common features from them using the LZSC block and then these features are combined to generate the final fused image. Additionally, we propose an $\ell_0$-regularized MCSC model for the inverse fusion process. Based on this model, we introduce an interpretable inverse fusion network named IFNet, which is utilized during FNet's training. Extensive experiments show that FNet achieves high-quality fusion results across eight different MMIF datasets. Furthermore, we show that FNet enhances downstream object detection \textcolor[rgb]{ 0, 0, 0}{and semantic segmentation} in visible-thermal image pairs. We have also visualized the intermediate results of FNet, which demonstrates the good interpretability of our network. Link for code and models: https://github.com/gargi884/FNet-MMIF.

cs.CV

Hyperspectral Unmixing with 3D Convolutional Sparse Coding and Projected Simplex Volume Maximization

Hyperspectral unmixing (HSU) aims to separate each pixel into its constituent endmembers and estimate their corresponding abundance fractions. This work presents an algorithm-unrolling-based network for the HSU task, named the 3D Convolutional Sparse Coding Network (3D-CSCNet), built upon a 3D CSC model. Unlike existing unrolling-based networks, our 3D-CSCNet is designed within the powerful autoencoder (AE) framework. Specifically, to solve the 3D CSC problem, we propose a 3D CSC block (3D-CSCB) derived through deep algorithm unrolling. Given a hyperspectral image (HSI), 3D-CSCNet employs the 3D-CSCB to estimate the abundance matrix. The use of 3D CSC enables joint learning of spectral and spatial relationships in the 3D HSI data cube. The estimated abundance matrix is then passed to the AE decoder to reconstruct the HSI, and the decoder weights are extracted as the endmember matrix. Additionally, we propose a projected simplex volume maximization (PSVM) algorithm for endmember estimation, and the resulting endmembers are used to initialize the decoder weights of 3D-CSCNet. Extensive experiments on three real datasets and one simulated dataset with three different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels demonstrate that our 3D-CSCNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV

LifWavNet: Lifting Wavelet-based Network for Non-contact ECG Reconstruction from Radar

Non-contact electrocardiogram (ECG) reconstruction from radar signals offers a promising approach for unobtrusive cardiac monitoring. We present LifWavNet, a lifting wavelet network based on a multi-resolution analysis and synthesis (MRAS) model for radar-to-ECG reconstruction. Unlike prior models that use fixed wavelet approaches, LifWavNet employs learnable lifting wavelets with lifting and inverse lifting units to adaptively capture radar signal features and synthesize physiologically meaningful ECG waveforms. To improve reconstruction fidelity, we introduce a multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (STFT) loss, that enforces consistency with the ground-truth ECG in both temporal and spectral domains. Evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate that LifWavNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in ECG reconstruction and downstream vital sign estimation (heart rate and heart rate variability). Furthermore, intermediate feature visualization highlights the interpretability of multi-resolution decomposition and synthesis in radar-to-ECG reconstruction. These results establish LifWavNet as a robust framework for radar-based non-contact ECG measurement.

cs.CV

F-ANcGAN: An Attention-Enhanced Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Architecture for Synthetic Image Generation of Nanoparticles

Nanomaterial research is becoming a vital area for energy, medicine, and materials science, and accurate analysis of the nanoparticle topology is essential to determine their properties. Unfortunately, the lack of high-quality annotated datasets drastically hinders the creation of strong segmentation models for nanoscale imaging. To alleviate this problem, we introduce F-ANcGAN, an attention-enhanced cycle consistent generative adversarial system that can be trained using a limited number of data samples and generates realistic scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images directly from segmentation maps. Our model uses a Style U-Net generator and a U-Net segmentation network equipped with self-attention to capture structural relationships and applies augmentation methods to increase the variety of the dataset. The architecture reached a raw FID score of 17.65 for TiO$_2$ dataset generation, with a further reduction in FID score to nearly 10.39 by using efficient post-processing techniques. By facilitating scalable high-fidelity synthetic dataset generation, our approach can improve the effectiveness of downstream segmentation task training, overcoming severe data shortage issues in nanoparticle analysis, thus extending its applications to resource-limited fields.

cs.CV

MIO : Mutual Information Optimization using Self-Supervised Binary Contrastive Learning

Self-supervised contrastive learning frameworks have progressed rapidly over the last few years. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function for contrastive learning. We model our pre-training task as a binary classification problem to induce an implicit contrastive effect. We further improve the näive loss function after removing the effect of the positive-positive repulsion and incorporating the upper bound of the negative pair repulsion. Unlike existing methods, the proposed loss function optimizes the mutual information in positive and negative pairs. We also present a closed-form expression for the parameter gradient flow and compare the behaviour of self-supervised contrastive frameworks using Hessian eigenspectrum to analytically study their convergence. The proposed method outperforms SOTA self-supervised contrastive frameworks on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, and Tiny-ImageNet. After 200 pretraining epochs with ResNet-18 as the backbone, the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 86.36%, 58.18%, 80.50%, and 30.87% on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets, respectively, and surpasses the SOTA contrastive baseline by 1.93%, 3.57%, 4.85%, and 0.33%, respectively. The proposed framework also achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 78.4% (200 epochs) and 65.22% (100 epochs) Top-1 Linear Evaluation accuracy on ImageNet100 and ImageNet1K datasets, respectively.

cs.CV

Federated Self-Supervised Learning for One-Shot Cross-Modal and Cross-Imaging Technique Segmentation

Decentralized federated learning enables learning of data representations from multiple sources without compromising the privacy of the clients. In applications like medical image segmentation, where obtaining a large annotated dataset from a single source is a distressing problem, federated self-supervised learning can provide some solace. In this work, we push the limits further by exploring a federated self-supervised one-shot segmentation task representing a more data-scarce scenario. We adopt a pre-existing self-supervised few-shot segmentation framework CoWPro and adapt it to the federated learning scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to attempt a self-supervised few-shot segmentation task in the federated learning domain. Moreover, we consider the clients to be constituted of data from different modalities and imaging techniques like MR or CT, which makes the problem even harder. Additionally, we reinforce and improve the baseline CoWPro method using a fused dice loss which shows considerable improvement in performance over the baseline CoWPro. Finally, we evaluate this novel framework on a completely unseen held-out part of the local client dataset. We observe that the proposed framework can achieve performance at par or better than the FedAvg version of the CoWPro framework on the held-out validation dataset.

cs.CV

INN-PAR: Invertible Neural Network for PPG to ABP Reconstruction

Non-invasive and continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring is essential for the early prevention of many cardiovascular diseases. Estimating arterial blood pressure (ABP) from photoplethysmography (PPG) has emerged as a promising solution. However, existing deep learning approaches for PPG-to-ABP reconstruction (PAR) encounter certain information loss, impacting the precision of the reconstructed signal. To overcome this limitation, we introduce an invertible neural network for PPG to ABP reconstruction (INN-PAR), which employs a series of invertible blocks to jointly learn the mapping between PPG and its gradient with the ABP signal and its gradient. INN-PAR efficiently captures both forward and inverse mappings simultaneously, thereby preventing information loss. By integrating signal gradients into the learning process, INN-PAR enhances the network's ability to capture essential high-frequency details, leading to more accurate signal reconstruction. Moreover, we propose a multi-scale convolution module (MSCM) within the invertible block, enabling the model to learn features across multiple scales effectively. We have experimented on two benchmark datasets, which show that INN-PAR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both waveform reconstruction and BP measurement accuracy. Codes can be found at: https://github.com/soumitra1992/INNPAR-PPG2ABP.

cs.LG

SINET: Sparsity-driven Interpretable Neural Network for Underwater Image Enhancement

Improving the quality of underwater images is essential for advancing marine research and technology. This work introduces a sparsity-driven interpretable neural network (SINET) for the underwater image enhancement (UIE) task. Unlike pure deep learning methods, our network architecture is based on a novel channel-specific convolutional sparse coding (CCSC) model, ensuring good interpretability of the underlying image enhancement process. The key feature of SINET is that it estimates the salient features from the three color channels using three sparse feature estimation blocks (SFEBs). The architecture of SFEB is designed by unrolling an iterative algorithm for solving the $\ell_1$ regularized convolutional sparse coding (CSC) problem. Our experiments show that SINET surpasses state-of-the-art PSNR value by $1.05$ dB with $3873$ times lower computational complexity. Code can be found at: https://github.com/gargi884/SINET-UIE/tree/main.

cs.CV

FastTextSpotter: A High-Efficiency Transformer for Multilingual Scene Text Spotting

The proliferation of scene text in both structured and unstructured environments presents significant challenges in optical character recognition (OCR), necessitating more efficient and robust text spotting solutions. This paper presents FastTextSpotter, a framework that integrates a Swin Transformer visual backbone with a Transformer Encoder-Decoder architecture, enhanced by a novel, faster self-attention unit, SAC2, to improve processing speeds while maintaining accuracy. FastTextSpotter has been validated across multiple datasets, including ICDAR2015 for regular texts and CTW1500 and TotalText for arbitrary-shaped texts, benchmarking against current state-of-the-art models. Our results indicate that FastTextSpotter not only achieves superior accuracy in detecting and recognizing multilingual scene text (English and Vietnamese) but also improves model efficiency, thereby setting new benchmarks in the field. This study underscores the potential of advanced transformer architectures in improving the adaptability and speed of text spotting applications in diverse real-world settings. The dataset, code, and pre-trained models have been released in our Github.

cs.CV

SSNet: Saliency Prior and State Space Model-based Network for Salient Object Detection in RGB-D Images

Salient object detection (SOD) in RGB-D images is an essential task in computer vision, enabling applications in scene understanding, robotics, and augmented reality. However, existing methods struggle to capture global dependency across modalities, lack comprehensive saliency priors from both RGB and depth data, and are ineffective in handling low-quality depth maps. To address these challenges, we propose SSNet, a saliency-prior and state space model (SSM)-based network for the RGB-D SOD task. Unlike existing convolution- or transformer-based approaches, SSNet introduces an SSM-based multi-modal multi-scale decoder module to efficiently capture both intra- and inter-modal global dependency with linear complexity. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal selective scan SSM (CM-S6) mechanism, which effectively captures global dependency between different modalities. Furthermore, we introduce a saliency enhancement module (SEM) that integrates three saliency priors with deep features to refine feature representation and improve the localization of salient objects. To further address the issue of low-quality depth maps, we propose an adaptive contrast enhancement technique that dynamically refines depth maps, making them more suitable for the RGB-D SOD task. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that SSNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV

d-Sketch: Improving Visual Fidelity of Sketch-to-Image Translation with Pretrained Latent Diffusion Models without Retraining

Structural guidance in an image-to-image translation allows intricate control over the shapes of synthesized images. Generating high-quality realistic images from user-specified rough hand-drawn sketches is one such task that aims to impose a structural constraint on the conditional generation process. While the premise is intriguing for numerous use cases of content creation and academic research, the problem becomes fundamentally challenging due to substantial ambiguities in freehand sketches. Furthermore, balancing the trade-off between shape consistency and realistic generation contributes to additional complexity in the process. Existing approaches based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) generally utilize conditional GANs or GAN inversions, often requiring application-specific data and optimization objectives. The recent introduction of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) achieves a generational leap for low-level visual attributes in general image synthesis. However, directly retraining a large-scale diffusion model on a domain-specific subtask is often extremely difficult due to demanding computation costs and insufficient data. In this paper, we introduce a technique for sketch-to-image translation by exploiting the feature generalization capabilities of a large-scale diffusion model without retraining. In particular, we use a learnable lightweight mapping network to achieve latent feature translation from source to target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing techniques in qualitative and quantitative benchmarks, allowing high-resolution realistic image synthesis from rough hand-drawn sketches.

cs.GR

Effects of Degradations on Deep Neural Network Architectures

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have massively influenced recent advances in large-scale image classification. More recently, a dynamic routing algorithm with capsules (groups of neurons) has shown state-of-the-art recognition performance. However, the behavior of such networks in the presence of a degrading signal (noise) is mostly unexplored. An analytical study on different network architectures toward noise robustness is essential for selecting the appropriate model in a specific application scenario. This paper presents an extensive performance analysis of six deep architectures for image classification on six most common image degradation models. In this study, we have compared VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-50, Inception-v3, MobileNet and CapsuleNet architectures on Gaussian white, Gaussian color, salt-and-pepper, Gaussian blur, motion blur and JPEG compression noise models.

cs.CV