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Swagatam Das

Publications and source records attributed to Swagatam Das.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Hyperbolic Gaussian Blurring Mean Shift: A Statistical Mode-Seeking Framework for Clustering in Curved Spaces

Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning task for uncovering patterns in data. While Gaussian Blurring Mean Shift (GBMS) has proven effective for identifying arbitrarily shaped clusters in Euclidean space, it struggles with datasets exhibiting hierarchical or tree-like structures. In this work, we introduce HypeGBMS, a novel extension of GBMS to hyperbolic space. Our method replaces Euclidean computations with hyperbolic distances and employs Möbius-weighted means to ensure that all updates remain consistent with the geometry of the space. HypeGBMS effectively captures latent hierarchies while retaining the density-seeking behavior of GBMS. We provide theoretical insights into convergence and computational complexity, along with empirical results that demonstrate improved clustering quality in hierarchical datasets. This work bridges classical mean-shift clustering and hyperbolic representation learning, offering a principled approach to density-based clustering in curved spaces. Extensive experimental evaluations on $11$ real-world datasets demonstrate that HypeGBMS significantly outperforms conventional mean-shift clustering methods in non-Euclidean settings, underscoring its robustness and effectiveness.

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Grounding the Ungrounded: A Spectral-Graph Framework for Quantifying Hallucinations in Multimodal LLMs

Hallucinations in LLMs--especially in multimodal settings--undermine reliability. We present a rigorous information-geometric framework, grounded in diffusion dynamics, to quantify hallucinations in MLLMs where model outputs are embedded via spectral decompositions of multimodal graph Laplacians, and their gaps to a truth manifold define a semantic distortion metric. We derive Courant-Fischer bounds on a temperature-dependent hallucination profile and use RKHS eigenmodes to obtain modality-aware, interpretable measures that track evolution over prompts and time. This reframes hallucination as quantifiable and bounded, providing a principled basis for evaluation and mitigation.

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HalluShift++: Bridging Language and Vision through Internal Representation Shifts for Hierarchical Hallucinations in MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in vision-language understanding tasks. While these models often produce linguistically coherent output, they often suffer from hallucinations, generating descriptions that are factually inconsistent with the visual content, potentially leading to adverse consequences. Therefore, the assessment of hallucinations in MLLM has become increasingly crucial in the model development process. Contemporary methodologies predominantly depend on external LLM evaluators, which are themselves susceptible to hallucinations and may present challenges in terms of domain adaptation. In this study, we propose the hypothesis that hallucination manifests as measurable irregularities within the internal layer dynamics of MLLMs, not merely due to distributional shifts but also in the context of layer-wise analysis of specific assumptions. By incorporating such modifications, \textsc{\textsc{HalluShift++}} broadens the efficacy of hallucination detection from text-based large language models (LLMs) to encompass multimodal scenarios. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/C0mRD/HalluShift_Plus.

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Convex Clustering Redefined: Robust Learning with the Median of Means Estimator

Clustering approaches that utilize convex loss functions have recently attracted growing interest in the formation of compact data clusters. Although classical methods like k-means and its wide family of variants are still widely used, all of them require the number of clusters k to be supplied as input, and many are notably sensitive to initialization. Convex clustering provides a more stable alternative by formulating the clustering task as a convex optimization problem, ensuring a unique global solution. However, it faces challenges in handling high-dimensional data, especially in the presence of noise and outliers. Additionally, strong fusion regularization, controlled by the tuning parameter, can hinder effective cluster formation within a convex clustering framework. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a robust approach that integrates convex clustering with the Median of Means (MoM) estimator, thus developing an outlier-resistant and efficient clustering framework that does not necessitate prior knowledge of the number of clusters. By leveraging the robustness of MoM alongside the stability of convex clustering, our method enhances both performance and efficiency, especially on large-scale datasets. Theoretical analysis demonstrates weak consistency under specific conditions, while experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method's superior performance compared to existing approaches.

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Rebalancing with Calibrated Sub-classes (RCS): A Statistical Fusion-based Framework for Robust Imbalanced Classification across Modalities

Class imbalance, where certain classes have insufficient data, poses a critical challenge for robust classification, often biasing models toward majority classes. Distribution calibration offers a promising avenue to address this by estimating more accurate class distributions. In this work, we propose Rebalancing with Calibrated Sub-classes (RCS) - a novel distribution calibration framework for robust imbalanced classification. RCS aims to fuse statistical information from the majority and intermediate class distributions via a weighted mixture of Gaussian components to estimate minority class parameters more accurately. An encoder-decoder network is trained to preserve structural relationships in imbalanced datasets and prevent feature disentanglement. Post-training, encoder-extracted feature vectors are leveraged to generate synthetic samples guided by the calibrated distributions. This fusion-based calibration effectively mitigates overgeneralization by incorporating neighborhood distribution information rather than relying solely on majority-class statistics. Extensive experiments on diverse image, text, and tabular datasets demonstrate that RCS consistently outperforms several baseline and state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness and broad applicability in addressing real-world imbalanced classification challenges.

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APFEx: Adaptive Pareto Front Explorer for Intersectional Fairness

Ensuring fairness in machine learning models is critical, especially when biases compound across intersecting protected attributes like race, gender, and age. While existing methods address fairness for single attributes, they fail to capture the nuanced, multiplicative biases faced by intersectional subgroups. We introduce Adaptive Pareto Front Explorer (APFEx), the first framework to explicitly model intersectional fairness as a joint optimization problem over the Cartesian product of sensitive attributes. APFEx combines three key innovations- (1) an adaptive multi-objective optimizer that dynamically switches between Pareto cone projection, gradient weighting, and exploration strategies to navigate fairness-accuracy trade-offs, (2) differentiable intersectional fairness metrics enabling gradient-based optimization of non-smooth subgroup disparities, and (3) theoretical guarantees of convergence to Pareto-optimal solutions. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate APFEx's superiority, reducing fairness violations while maintaining competitive accuracy. Our work bridges a critical gap in fair ML, providing a scalable, model-agnostic solution for intersectional fairness.

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Learning from Heterophilic Graphs: A Spectral Theory Perspective on the Impact of Self-Loops and Parallel Edges

Graph heterophily poses a formidable challenge to the performance of Message-passing Graph Neural Networks (MP-GNNs). The familiar low-pass filters like Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) face performance degradation, which can be attributed to the blending of the messages from dissimilar neighboring nodes. The performance of the low-pass filters on heterophilic graphs still requires an in-depth analysis. In this context, we update the heterophilic graphs by adding a number of self-loops and parallel edges. We observe that eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian decrease and increase respectively by increasing the number of self-loops and parallel edges. We conduct several studies regarding the performance of GCN on various benchmark heterophilic networks by adding either self-loops or parallel edges. The studies reveal that the GCN exhibited either increasing or decreasing performance trends on adding self-loops and parallel edges. In light of the studies, we established connections between the graph spectra and the performance trends of the low-pass filters on the heterophilic graphs. The graph spectra characterize the essential intrinsic properties of the input graph like the presence of connected components, sparsity, average degree, cluster structures, etc. Our work is adept at seamlessly evaluating graph spectrum and properties by observing the performance trends of the low-pass filters without pursuing the costly eigenvalue decomposition. The theoretical foundations are also discussed to validate the impact of adding self-loops and parallel edges on the graph spectrum.

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A Free Probabilistic Framework for Analyzing the Transformer-based Language Models

We present a formal operator-theoretic framework for analyzing Transformer-based language models using free probability theory. By modeling token embeddings and attention mechanisms as self-adjoint operators in a tracial \( W^* \)-probability space, we reinterpret attention as non-commutative convolution and describe representation propagation via free additive convolution. This leads to a spectral dynamic system interpretation of deep Transformers. We derive entropy-based generalization bounds under freeness assumptions and provide insight into positional encoding, spectral evolution, and representational complexity. This work offers a principled, though theoretical, perspective on structural dynamics in large language models.

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Hyperbolic Fuzzy C-Means with Adaptive Weight-based Filtering for Efficient Clustering

Clustering algorithms play a pivotal role in unsupervised learning by identifying and grouping similar objects based on shared characteristics. Although traditional clustering techniques, such as hard and fuzzy center-based clustering, have been widely used, they struggle with complex, high-dimensional, and non-Euclidean datasets. In particular, the fuzzy $C$-Means (FCM) algorithm, despite its efficiency and popularity, exhibits notable limitations in non-Euclidean spaces. Euclidean spaces assume linear separability and uniform distance scaling, limiting their effectiveness in capturing complex, hierarchical, or non-Euclidean structures in fuzzy clustering. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Filtration-based Hyperbolic Fuzzy C-Means (HypeFCM), a novel clustering algorithm tailored for better representation of data relationships in non-Euclidean spaces. HypeFCM integrates the principles of fuzzy clustering with hyperbolic geometry and employs a weight-based filtering mechanism to improve performance. The algorithm initializes weights using a Dirichlet distribution and iteratively refines cluster centroids and membership assignments based on a hyperbolic metric in the Poincaré Disc model. Extensive experimental evaluations on $6$ synthetic and $12$ real-world datasets demonstrate that HypeFCM significantly outperforms conventional fuzzy clustering methods in non-Euclidean settings, underscoring its robustness and effectiveness.

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MHARFedLLM: Multimodal Human Activity Recognition Using Federated Large Language Model

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) plays a vital role in applications such as fitness tracking, smart homes, and healthcare monitoring. Traditional HAR systems often rely on single modalities, such as motion sensors or cameras, limiting robustness and accuracy in real-world environments. This work presents FedTime-MAGNET, a novel multimodal federated learning framework that advances HAR by combining heterogeneous data sources: depth cameras, pressure mats, and accelerometers. At its core is the Multimodal Adaptive Graph Neural Expert Transformer (MAGNET), a fusion architecture that uses graph attention and a Mixture of Experts to generate unified, discriminative embeddings across modalities. To capture complex temporal dependencies, a lightweight T5 encoder only architecture is customized and adapted within this framework. Extensive experiments show that FedTime-MAGNET significantly improves HAR performance, achieving a centralized F1 Score of 0.934 and a strong federated F1 Score of 0.881. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining multimodal fusion, time series LLMs, and federated learning for building accurate and robust HAR systems.

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Relation-Aware Slicing in Cross-Domain Alignment

The Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein (SGW) distance, aiming to relieve the computational cost of solving a non-convex quadratic program that is the Gromov-Wasserstein distance, utilizes projecting directions sampled uniformly from unit hyperspheres. This slicing mechanism incurs unnecessary computational costs due to uninformative directions, which also affects the representative power of the distance. However, finding a more appropriate distribution over the projecting directions (slicing distribution) is often an optimization problem in itself that comes with its own computational cost. In addition, with more intricate distributions, the sampling itself may be expensive. As a remedy, we propose an optimization-free slicing distribution that provides fast sampling for the Monte Carlo approximation. We do so by introducing the Relation-Aware Projecting Direction (RAPD), effectively capturing the pairwise association of each of two pairs of random vectors, each following their ambient law. This enables us to derive the Relation-Aware Slicing Distribution (RASD), a location-scale law corresponding to sampled RAPDs. Finally, we introduce the RASGW distance and its variants, e.g., IWRASGW (Importance Weighted RASGW), which overcome the shortcomings experienced by SGW. We theoretically analyze its properties and substantiate its empirical prowess using extensive experiments on various alignment tasks.

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Assessing the Limits of In-Context Learning beyond Functions using Partially Ordered Relation

Generating rational and generally accurate responses to tasks, often accompanied by example demonstrations, highlights Large Language Model's (LLM's) remarkable In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities without requiring updates to the model's parameter space. Despite having an ongoing exploration focused on the inference from a document-level concept, its behavior in learning well-defined functions or relations in context needs a careful investigation. In this article, we present the performance of ICL on partially ordered relation by introducing the notion of inductively increasing complexity in prompts. In most cases, the saturated performance of the chosen metric indicates that while ICL offers some benefits, its effectiveness remains constrained as we increase the complexity in the prompts even in presence of sufficient demonstrative examples. The behavior is evident from our empirical findings and has further been theoretically justified in term of its implicit optimization process. The code is available \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICLonPartiallyOrderSet}{here}.

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Self-Tuning Spectral Clustering for Speaker Diarization

Spectral clustering has proven effective in grouping speech representations for speaker diarization tasks, although post-processing the affinity matrix remains difficult due to the need for careful tuning before constructing the Laplacian. In this study, we present a novel pruning algorithm to create a sparse affinity matrix called spectral clustering on p-neighborhood retained affinity matrix (SC-pNA). Our method improves on node-specific fixed neighbor selection by allowing a variable number of neighbors, eliminating the need for external tuning data as the pruning parameters are derived directly from the affinity matrix. SC-pNA does so by identifying two clusters in every row of the initial affinity matrix, and retains only the top p % similarity scores from the cluster containing larger similarities. Spectral clustering is performed subsequently, with the number of clusters determined as the maximum eigengap. Experimental results on the challenging DIHARD-III dataset highlight the superiority of SC-pNA, which is also computationally more efficient than existing auto-tuning approaches. Our implementations are available at https://github.com/nikhilraghav29/SC-pNA.

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Transformers Are Universally Consistent

Despite their central role in the success of foundational models and large-scale language modeling, the theoretical foundations governing the operation of Transformers remain only partially understood. Contemporary research has largely focused on their representational capacity for language comprehension and their prowess in in-context learning, frequently under idealized assumptions such as linearized attention mechanisms. Initially conceived to model sequence-to-sequence transformations, a fundamental and unresolved question is whether Transformers can robustly perform functional regression over sequences of input tokens. This question assumes heightened importance given the inherently non-Euclidean geometry underlying real-world data distributions. In this work, we establish that Transformers equipped with softmax-based nonlinear attention are uniformly consistent when tasked with executing Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, provided both the inputs and outputs are embedded in hyperbolic space. We derive deterministic upper bounds on the empirical error which, in the asymptotic regime, decay at a provable rate of $\mathcal{O}(t^{-1/2d})$, where $t$ denotes the number of input tokens and $d$ the embedding dimensionality. Notably, our analysis subsumes the Euclidean setting as a special case, recovering analogous convergence guarantees parameterized by the intrinsic dimensionality of the data manifold. These theoretical insights are corroborated through empirical evaluations on real-world datasets involving both continuous and categorical response variables.

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Generative Adversarial Network based Voice Conversion: Techniques, Challenges, and Recent Advancements

Voice conversion (VC) stands as a crucial research area in speech synthesis, enabling the transformation of a speaker's vocal characteristics to resemble another while preserving the linguistic content. This technology has broad applications, including automated movie dubbing, speech-to-singing conversion, and assistive devices for pathological speech rehabilitation. With the increasing demand for high-quality and natural-sounding synthetic voices, researchers have developed a wide range of VC techniques. Among these, generative adversarial network (GAN)-based approaches have drawn considerable attention for their powerful feature-mapping capabilities and potential to produce highly realistic speech. Despite notable advancements, challenges such as ensuring training stability, maintaining linguistic consistency, and achieving perceptual naturalness continue to hinder progress in GAN-based VC systems. This systematic review presents a comprehensive analysis of the voice conversion landscape, highlighting key techniques, key challenges, and the transformative impact of GANs in the field. The survey categorizes existing methods, examines technical obstacles, and critically evaluates recent developments in GAN-based VC. By consolidating and synthesizing research findings scattered across the literature, this review provides a structured understanding of the strengths and limitations of different approaches. The significance of this survey lies in its ability to guide future research by identifying existing gaps, proposing potential directions, and offering insights for building more robust and efficient VC systems. Overall, this work serves as an essential resource for researchers, developers, and practitioners aiming to advance the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in voice conversion technology.

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Collective Learning Mechanism based Optimal Transport Generative Adversarial Network for Non-parallel Voice Conversion

After demonstrating significant success in image synthesis, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models have likewise made significant progress in the field of speech synthesis, leveraging their capacity to adapt the precise distribution of target data through adversarial learning processes. Notably, in the realm of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) GAN-based Voice Conversion (VC) models, there exists a substantial disparity in naturalness between real and GAN-generated speech samples. Furthermore, while many GAN models currently operate on a single generator discriminator learning approach, optimizing target data distribution is more effectively achievable through a single generator multi-discriminator learning scheme. Hence, this study introduces a novel GAN model named Collective Learning Mechanism-based Optimal Transport GAN (CLOT-GAN) model, incorporating multiple discriminators, including the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) model, Vision Transformer (ViT), and conformer. The objective of integrating various discriminators lies in their ability to comprehend the formant distribution of mel-spectrograms, facilitated by a collective learning mechanism. Simultaneously, the inclusion of Optimal Transport (OT) loss aims to precisely bridge the gap between the source and target data distribution, employing the principles of OT theory. The experimental validation on VCC 2018, VCTK, and CMU-Arctic datasets confirms that the CLOT-GAN-VC model outperforms existing VC models in objective and subjective assessments.

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HalluShift: Measuring Distribution Shifts towards Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered widespread attention due to their adeptness at generating innovative responses to the given prompts across a multitude of domains. However, LLMs often suffer from the inherent limitation of hallucinations and generate incorrect information while maintaining well-structured and coherent responses. In this work, we hypothesize that hallucinations stem from the internal dynamics of LLMs. Our observations indicate that, during passage generation, LLMs tend to deviate from factual accuracy in subtle parts of responses, eventually shifting toward misinformation. This phenomenon bears a resemblance to human cognition, where individuals may hallucinate while maintaining logical coherence, embedding uncertainty within minor segments of their speech. To investigate this further, we introduce an innovative approach, HalluShift, designed to analyze the distribution shifts in the internal state space and token probabilities of the LLM-generated responses. Our method attains superior performance compared to existing baselines across various benchmark datasets. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/sharanya-dasgupta001/hallushift.

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Dirichlet Process-based Robust Clustering using the Median-of-Means Estimator

Clustering stands as one of the most prominent challenges in unsupervised machine learning. Among centroid-based methods, the classic $k$-means algorithm, based on Lloyd's heuristic, is widely used. Nonetheless, it is a well-known fact that $k$-means and its variants face several challenges, including heavy reliance on initial cluster centroids, susceptibility to converging into local minima of the objective function, and sensitivity to outliers and noise in the data. When data contains noise or outliers, the Median-of-Means (MoM) estimator offers a robust alternative for stabilizing centroid-based methods. On a different note, another limitation in many commonly used clustering methods is the need to specify the number of clusters beforehand. Model-based approaches, such as Bayesian nonparametric models, address this issue by incorporating infinite mixture models, which eliminate the requirement for predefined cluster counts. Motivated by these facts, in this article, we propose an efficient and automatic clustering technique by integrating the strengths of model-based and centroid-based methodologies. Our method mitigates the effect of noise on the quality of clustering; while at the same time, estimates the number of clusters. Statistical guarantees on an upper bound of clustering error, and rigorous assessment through simulated and real datasets, suggest the advantages of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.

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