arXiv subjects

Shashwat Kumar

Publications and source records attributed to Shashwat Kumar.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Smooth Reparameterizations of Functions on Simplicial Product Spaces: Applications to Probabilistic Tensor Decomposition and Functional Data Registration

We consider optimization problems defined on product spaces of simplices. Examples of this class of problems include learning low-rank discrete multivariate probability distributions via simplex constrained tensor decomposition and performing functional data registration under the Square Root Velocity Function (SRVF) representation. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of replacing the product simplex with a smooth, elementwise strictly convex reparameterization, resulting in an unconstrained optimization problem on a manifold. We show that performing such a reparameterization results in the second order Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points on the smooth manifold being mapped to the weak second order KKT points on the product simplex. This leads to a Riemannian Gradient Descent (RGD) algorithm for solving the reparameterized problem, which outperforms Projected Gradient Descent (PGD), and provides a more faithful representation of the original function shapes while performing curve registration.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Bayesian In Vivo Tracking of Synapses using Joint Poisson Deconvolution and Diffeomorphic Registration

Synapses are densely packed submicron structures that dynamically reorganize during learning and memory formation. Longitudinal \textit{in vivo} imaging of fluorescently tagged synaptic receptors offers a promising opportunity to study large-scale synaptic dynamics and how these processes are disrupted in neurological disease. However, in vivo imaging with 2-photon microscopy uses low laser power and therefore suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high shot noise, nonlinear tissue motion between days, nonstationary fluctuations in synaptic fluorescence, and significant blur induced by the microscope point spread function (PSF). Together, these factors make it challenging to detect and track synapses, especially in regions with high synaptic density. This paper presents a novel template-based framework for modeling synapses as varying luminance point sources that move under a nonlinear tissue deformation. Taking a unified Bayesian approach, we apply this model to microscopy data by deriving a posterior that incorporates a diffeomorphic mapping for domain warping, a Gaussian point spread function for the imaging process, and a Poisson observation model for raw photon counts. The Bayesian solution simultaneously: (1) Constructs a probabilistic template of synapse locations, (2) denoises and deconvolves the image data, (3) infers fluorescence intensities, (4) performs diffeomorphic image registration to correct for tissue motion, and (5) provides confidence regions for these parameter estimates. We demonstrate the framework on both a 2D+t simulated dataset and a 3D+t longitudinal \textit{in vivo} microscopy dataset of fluorescent synapses imaged in a mouse over two weeks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

An Elastic Shape Variational Autoencoder for Skeleton Pose Trajectories

Deep generative models provide flexible frameworks for modeling complex, structured data such as images, videos, 3D objects, and texts. However, when applied to sequences of human skeletons, standard variational autoencoders (VAEs) often allocate substantial capacity to nuisance factors-such as camera orientation, subject scale, viewpoint, and execution speed-rather than the intrinsic geometry of shapes and their motion. We propose the Elastic Shape - Variational Autoencoder (ES-VAE), a geometry-aware generative model for skeletal trajectories that leverages the transported square-root velocity field (TSRVF) representation on Kendall's shape manifold. This representation inherently removes rigid translations, rotations, and global scaling of shapes, and temporal rate variability of sequences, isolating the underlying shape dynamics. The ES-VAE encoder maps skeletal sequences to a low-dimensional latent space incorporating the Riemannian logarithm map, while the decoder reconstructs sequences using the corresponding exponential map. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ES-VAE on two datasets. First, we analyze skeletal gait cycles to predict clinical mobility scores and classify subjects into healthy and post-stroke groups. Second, we evaluate action recognition on the NTU RGB+D dataset. Across both settings, ES-VAE consistently outperforms standard VAEs and a range of sequence modeling baselines, including temporal convolutional networks, transformers, and graph convolutional networks. More broadly, ES-VAE provides a principled framework for learning generative models of longitudinal data on pose shape manifolds, offering improved latent representation and downstream performance compared to existing deep learning approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Hilbert space signatures of non-ergodic glassy dynamics

Disorder in quantum many-body systems can drive transitions between ergodic and non-ergodic phases, yet the nature--and even the existence--of these transitions remains intensely debated. Using a two-dimensional array of superconducting qubits, we study an interacting spin model at finite temperature in a disordered landscape, tracking dynamics both in real space and in Hilbert space. Over a broad disorder range, we observe an intermediate non-ergodic regime with glass-like characteristics: physical observables become broadly distributed and some, but not all, degrees of freedom are effectively frozen. The Hilbert-space return probability shows slow power-law decay, consistent with finite-temperature quantum glassiness. In the same regime, we detect the onset of a finite Edwards-Anderson order parameter and the disappearance of spin diffusion. By contrast, at lower disorder, spin transport persists with a nonzero diffusion coefficient. Our results show that there is a transition out of the ergodic phase in two-dimensional systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Observation of disorder-induced superfluidity

The emergence of states with long-range correlations in a disordered landscape is rare, as disorder typically suppresses the particle mobility required for long-range coherence. But when more than two energy levels are available per site, disorder can induce resonances that locally enhance mobility. Here we explore phases arising from the interplay between disorder, kinetic energy, and interactions on a superconducting processor with qutrit readout and control. Compressibility measurements distinguish an incompressible Mott insulator from surrounding compressible phases and reveal signatures of glassiness, reflected in non-ergodic behavior. Spatially-resolved two-point correlator measurements identify regions of the phase diagram with a non-vanishing condensate fraction. We also visualize the spectrum by measuring the dynamical structure factor. A linearly-dispersing phonon mode materializes in the superfluid, appearing even when disorder is introduced to the clean Mott insulator. Our results provide strong experimental evidence for disorder-induced superfluidity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Quantum-Classical Separation in Bounded-Resource Tasks Arising from Measurement Contextuality

The prevailing view is that quantum phenomena can be harnessed to tackle certain problems beyond the reach of classical approaches. Quantifying this capability as a quantum-classical separation and demonstrating it on current quantum processors has remained elusive. Using a superconducting qubit processor, we show that quantum contextuality enables certain tasks to be performed with success probabilities beyond classical limits. With a few qubits, we illustrate quantum contextuality with the magic square game, as well as quantify it through a Kochen--Specker--Bell inequality violation. To examine many-body contextuality, we implement the N-player GHZ game and separately solve a 2D hidden linear function problem, exceeding classical success rate in both. Our work proposes novel ways to benchmark quantum processors using contextuality-based algorithms.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Fair Distribution of Digital Payments: Balancing Transaction Flows for Regulatory Compliance

The concentration of digital payment transactions in just two UPI apps like PhonePe and Google Pay has raised concerns of duopoly in India s digital financial ecosystem. To address this, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has mandated that no single UPI app should exceed 30 percent of total transaction volume. Enforcing this cap, however, poses a significant computational challenge: how to redistribute user transactions across apps without causing widespread user inconvenience while maintaining capacity limits? In this paper, we formalize this problem as the Minimum Edge Activation Flow (MEAF) problem on a bipartite network of users and apps, where activating an edge corresponds to a new app installation. The objective is to ensure a feasible flow respecting app capacities while minimizing additional activations. We further prove that Minimum Edge Activation Flow is NP-Complete. To address the computational challenge, we propose scalable heuristics, named Decoupled Two-Stage Allocation Strategy (DTAS), that exploit flow structure and capacity reuse. Experiments on large semi-synthetic transaction network data show that DTAS finds solutions close to the optimal ILP within seconds, offering a fast and practical way to enforce transaction caps fairly and efficiently.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

2D transmons with lifetimes and coherence times exceeding 1 millisecond

Materials improvements are a powerful approach to reducing loss and decoherence in superconducting qubits because such improvements can be readily translated to large scale processors. Recent work improved transmon coherence by utilizing tantalum (Ta) as a base layer and sapphire as a substrate. The losses in these devices are dominated by two-level systems (TLSs) with comparable contributions from both the surface and bulk dielectrics, indicating that both must be tackled to achieve major improvements in the state of the art. Here we show that replacing the substrate with high-resistivity silicon (Si) dramatically decreases the bulk substrate loss, enabling 2D transmons with time-averaged quality factors (Q) exceeding 1.5 x 10^7, reaching a maximum Q of 2.5 x 10^7, corresponding to a lifetime (T_1) of up to 1.68 ms. This low loss allows us to observe decoherence effects related to the Josephson junction, and we use improved, low-contamination junction deposition to achieve Hahn echo coherence times (T_2E) exceeding T_1. We achieve these material improvements without any modifications to the qubit architecture, allowing us to readily incorporate standard quantum control gates. We demonstrate single qubit gates with 99.994% fidelity. The Ta-on-Si platform comprises a simple material stack that can potentially be fabricated at wafer scale, and therefore can be readily translated to large-scale quantum processors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

A Shape-Based Functional Index for Objective Assessment of Pediatric Motor Function

Clinical assessments for neuromuscular disorders, such as Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), continue to rely on subjective measures to monitor treatment response and disease progression. We introduce a novel method using wearable sensors to objectively assess motor function during daily activities in 19 patients with DMD, 9 with SMA, and 13 age-matched controls. Pediatric movement data is complex due to confounding factors such as limb length variations in growing children and variability in movement speed. Our approach uses Shape-based Principal Component Analysis to align movement trajectories and identify distinct kinematic patterns, including variations in motion speed and asymmetry. Both DMD and SMA cohorts have individuals with motor function on par with healthy controls. Notably, patients with SMA showed greater activation of the motion asymmetry pattern. We further combined projections on these principal components with partial least squares (PLS) to identify a covariation mode with a canonical correlation of r = 0.78 (95% CI: [0.34, 0.94]) with muscle fat infiltration, the Brooke score (a motor function score), and age-related degenerative changes, proposing a novel motor function index. This data-driven method can be deployed in home settings, enabling better longitudinal tracking of treatment efficacy for children with neuromuscular disorders.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

Protomon: A Multimode Qubit in the Fluxonium Molecule

Qubits that are intrinsically insensitive to depolarization and dephasing errors promise to significantly reduce the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing. At their optimal operating points, the logical states of these qubits exhibit both exponentially suppressed matrix elements and sweet spots in energy dispersion, rendering the qubits immune to depolarization and dephasing, respectively. We introduce a multimode qubit, the protomon, encoded in a fluxonium molecule circuit. Compared to the closely related $0$-$\pi$ qubit, the protomon offers several advantages in theory: resilience to circuit parameter disorder, minimal dephasing from intrinsic harmonic modes, and no dependence on static offset charge. As a proof of concept, we realize four protomon qubits. By tuning the qubits to various operating points identified with calibrated two-tone spectroscopy, we measure depolarization times ranging from 64 to 73 $\mu$s and dephasing times between 0.2 to 0.5 $\mu$s for one selected qubit. The discrepancy between the relatively short measured coherence times and theoretical predictions is not fully understood. This calls for future studies investigating the limiting noise factors, informing the direction for improving coherence times of the protomon qubit.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Observation of disorder-free localization using a (2+1)D lattice gauge theory on a quantum processor

Disorder-induced phenomena in quantum many-body systems pose significant challenges for analytical methods and numerical simulations at relevant time and system scales. To reduce the cost of disorder-sampling, we investigate quantum circuits initialized in states tunable to superpositions over all disorder configurations. In a translationally-invariant lattice gauge theory (LGT), these states can be interpreted as a superposition over gauge sectors. We observe localization in this LGT in the absence of disorder in one and two dimensions: perturbations fail to diffuse despite fully disorder-free evolution and initial states. However, R\'enyi entropy measurements reveal that superposition-prepared states fundamentally differ from those obtained by direct disorder sampling. Leveraging superposition, we propose an algorithm with a polynomial speedup in sampling disorder configurations, a longstanding challenge in many-body localization studies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Dynamical nuclear polarization for dissipation-induced entanglement in NV centers

We propose a practical implementation of a two-qubit entanglement engine which denotes a scheme to generate quantum correlations through purely dissipative processes. On a diamond platform, the electron spin transitions of two Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers play the role of artificial atoms (qubits), interacting through a dipole-dipole Hamiltonian. The surrounding Carbon-13 nuclear spins act as spin baths playing the role of thermal reservoirs at well-defined temperatures and exchanging heat through the NV center qubits. In our scheme, a key challenge is therefore to create a temperature gradient between two spin baths surrounding each NV center, for which we propose the exploit the recent progresses in dynamical nuclear polarization, combined with microscopy superresolution methods. We discuss how these techniques should allow us to initialize such a long lasting out-of-equilibrium polarization situation between them, effectively leading to suitable conditions to run the entanglement engine successfully. Within a quantum master equation approach, we make theoretical predictions using state-of-the-art values for experimental parameters. We obtain promising values for the concurrence, reaching theoretical maxima.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Shape Analysis for Pediatric Upper Body Motor Function Assessment

Neuromuscular disorders, such as Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), cause progressive muscular degeneration and loss of motor function for 1 in 6,000 children. Traditional upper limb motor function assessments do not quantitatively measure patient-performed motions, which makes it difficult to track progress for incremental changes. Assessing motor function in children with neuromuscular disorders is particularly challenging because they can be nervous or excited during experiments, or simply be too young to follow precise instructions. These challenges translate to confounding factors such as performing different parts of the arm curl slower or faster (phase variability) which affects the assessed motion quality. This paper uses curve registration and shape analysis to temporally align trajectories while simultaneously extracting a mean reference shape. Distances from this mean shape are used to assess the quality of motion. The proposed metric is invariant to confounding factors, such as phase variability, while suggesting several clinically relevant insights. First, there are statistically significant differences between functional scores for the control and patient populations (p$=$0.0213$\le$0.05). Next, several patients in the patient cohort are able to perform motion on par with the healthy cohort and vice versa. Our metric, which is computed based on wearables, is related to the Brooke's score ((p$=$0.00063$\le$0.05)), as well as motor function assessments based on dynamometry ((p$=$0.0006$\le$0.05)). These results show promise towards ubiquitous motion quality assessment in daily life.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Driver State and Behavior Detection Through Smart Wearables

Integrating driver, in-cabin, and outside environment's contextual cues into the vehicle's decision making is the centerpiece of semi-automated vehicle safety. Multiple systems have been developed for providing context to the vehicle, which often rely on video streams capturing drivers' physical and environmental states. While video streams are a rich source of information, their ability in providing context can be challenging in certain situations, such as low illuminance environments (e.g., night driving), and they are highly privacy-intrusive. In this study, we leverage passive sensing through smartwatches for classifying elements of driving context. Specifically, through using the data collected from 15 participants in a naturalistic driving study, and by using multiple machine learning algorithms such as random forest, we classify driver's activities (e.g., using phone and eating), outside events (e.g., passing intersection and changing lane), and outside road attributes (e.g., driving in a city versus a highway) with an average F1 score of 94.55, 98.27, and 97.86 % respectively, through 10-fold cross-validation. Our results show the applicability of multimodal data retrieved through smart wearable devices in providing context in real-world driving scenarios and pave the way for a better shared autonomy and privacy-aware driving data-collection, analysis, and feedback for future autonomous vehicles.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Geometry matters: Exploring language examples at the decision boundary

A growing body of recent evidence has highlighted the limitations of natural language processing (NLP) datasets and classifiers. These include the presence of annotation artifacts in datasets, classifiers relying on shallow features like a single word (e.g., if a movie review has the word "romantic", the review tends to be positive), or unnecessary words (e.g., learning a proper noun to classify a movie as positive or negative). The presence of such artifacts has subsequently led to the development of challenging datasets to force the model to generalize better. While a variety of heuristic strategies, such as counterfactual examples and contrast sets, have been proposed, the theoretical justification about what makes these examples difficult for the classifier is often lacking or unclear. In this paper, using tools from information geometry, we propose a theoretical way to quantify the difficulty of an example in NLP. Using our approach, we explore difficult examples for several deep learning architectures. We discover that both BERT, CNN and fasttext are susceptible to word substitutions in high difficulty examples. These classifiers tend to perform poorly on the FIM test set. (generated by sampling and perturbing difficult examples, with accuracy dropping below 50%). We replicate our experiments on 5 NLP datasets (YelpReviewPolarity, AGNEWS, SogouNews, YelpReviewFull and Yahoo Answers). On YelpReviewPolarity we observe a correlation coefficient of -0.4 between resilience to perturbations and the difficulty score. Similarly we observe a correlation of 0.35 between the difficulty score and the empirical success probability of random substitutions. Our approach is simple, architecture agnostic and can be used to study the fragilities of text classification models. All the code used will be made publicly available, including a tool to explore the difficult examples for other datasets.

cs.CL↗