Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on creating new samples by linear interpolation between two given data samples, to improve both the generalization and robustness of the trained model. Knowledge distillation (KD), on the other hand, is widely used for model compression and transfer learning, which involves using a larger network's implicit knowledge to guide the learning of a smaller network. At first glance, these two techniques seem very different, however, we found that ``smoothness" is the connecting link between the two and is also a crucial attribute in understanding KD's interplay with mixup. Although many mixup variants and distillation methods have been proposed, much remains to be understood regarding the role of a mixup in knowledge distillation. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study on various important dimensions of compatibility between mixup and knowledge distillation. We also scrutinize the behavior of the networks trained with a mixup in the light of knowledge distillation through extensive analysis, visualizations, and comprehensive experiments on image classification. Finally, based on our findings, we suggest improved strategies to guide the student network to enhance its effectiveness. Additionally, the findings of this study provide insightful suggestions to researchers and practitioners that commonly use techniques from KD. Our code is available at https://github.com/hchoi71/MIX-KD.

深度神经网络是参数化的数千或数百万个参数，并且在许多分类问题中表现出巨大的成功。然而，大量参数使得难以将这些模型集成到智能手机和可穿戴设备的边缘设备中。为了解决这个问题，知识蒸馏（KD）已被广泛采用，它使用预先训练的高容量网络来培训更小的网络，适用于边缘设备。本文首次研究了使用KD用于可穿戴设备的时间序列数据的适用性和挑战。 KD的成功应用需要在培训期间需要具体的数据增强方法。然而，如果在KD期间存在用于选择增强方法的相干策略，则尚不清楚。在本文中，我们报告了详细研究的结果，这些研究比较和对比基于KD的人类活动分析中的各种常见选择和一些混合数据增强策略。该领域的研究通常是有限的，因为公共领域没有可穿戴设备的全面数据库。我们的研究将数据库视为公共规模的数据库，以源于大规模介入研究的人类活动和久坐行为。我们发现，在KD期间的数据增强技术的选择具有对最终性能的可变影响程度，并发现最佳网络选择以及数据增强策略特定于手头的数据集。但是，我们还通过一系列关于数据库提供强大基线表现的一般建议。

在本文中，我们在应用惯性监禁融合中的多模式数据之前，使用高度球形的Wasserstein AutoEncoder（WAE）。与需要从von MIS FISHER这样的分布的计算上采样计算的典型超球的生成模型不同，我们从发电机前后的正态分布采样。最后，为了确定所生成的样本的有效性，我们利用数据集中的模式之间的已知关系作为科学约束，研究所提出的模型的不同特性。

由于能够提高几个诊断任务的性能，深度神经网络越来越多地被用作医疗保健应用中的辅助工具。然而，由于基于深度学习系统的可靠性，概括性和可解释性的实际限制，这些方法在临床环境中不被广泛采用。因此，已经开发了方法，这在网络培训期间强加了额外的限制，以获得更多的控制，并改善探讨他们在医疗界的接受。在这项工作中，我们调查使用正交球（OS）约束对胸部X射线图像进行Covid-19案例的分类的益处。 OS约束可以写成一个简单的正交性术语，其与分类网络训练期间的标准交叉熵损耗结合使用。以前的研究表明，在对深度学习模型上对这种限制应用于应用这些限制方面表现出显着的益处。我们的研究结果证实了这些观察结果，表明正常性损失函数有效地通过Gradcam可视化，增强的分类性能和减少的模型校准误差产生了改进的语义本地化。我们的方法分别实现了两性和三类分类的准确性提高1.6％和4.8％;找到了应用数据增强的模型的类似结果。除了这些发现之外，我们的工作还提出了OS规范器在医疗保健中的新应用，提高了CoVID-19分类深度学习模型的后HOC可解释性和性能，以便于在临床环境中采用这些方法。我们还确定了我们将来可以探索进一步研究的战略的局限性。

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies -- such as hedging, attributions, or denials -- to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political scientists have studied these epistemic phenomena through labor-intensive manual content analysis. We propose to help automate such work through epistemic stance prediction, drawn from research in computational semantics, to distinguish at the clausal level what is asserted, denied, or only ambivalently suggested by the author or other mentioned entities (belief holders). We first develop a simple RoBERTa-based model for multi-source stance predictions that outperforms more complex state-of-the-art modeling. Then we demonstrate its novel application to political science by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Mass Market Manifestos corpus of U.S. political opinion books, where we characterize trends in cited belief holders -- respected allies and opposed bogeymen -- across U.S. political ideologies.

With large-scale adaption to biometric based applications, security and privacy of biometrics is utmost important especially when operating in unsupervised online mode. This work proposes a novel approach for generating new artificial fingerprints also called proxy fingerprints that are natural looking, non-invertible, revocable and privacy preserving. These proxy biometrics can be generated from original ones only with the help of a user-specific key. Instead of using the original fingerprint, these proxy templates can be used anywhere with same convenience. The manuscripts walks through an interesting way in which proxy fingerprints of different types can be generated and how they can be combined with use-specific keys to provide revocability and cancelability in case of compromise. Using the proposed approach a proxy dataset is generated from samples belonging to Anguli fingerprint database. Matching experiments were performed on the new set which is 5 times larger than the original, and it was found that their performance is at par with 0 FAR and 0 FRR in the stolen key, safe key scenarios. Other parameters on revocability and diversity are also analyzed for protection performance.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In particular, there are not nearly as many SLU task benchmarks, and many of the existing ones use data that is not freely available to all researchers. Recent work has begun to introduce such benchmark datasets for several tasks. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. We follow the blueprint of the Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark suite. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will be publishing for each task (i) annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) annotated development and test sets, and (iii) baseline models for easy reproducibility and comparisons. In this work, we present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also perform sensitivity analysis of pipeline models' performance (speech recognizer + text model) to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 state-of-the-art speech recognition models.

6D object pose estimation has been a research topic in the field of computer vision and robotics. Many modern world applications like robot grasping, manipulation, autonomous navigation etc, require the correct pose of objects present in a scene to perform their specific task. It becomes even harder when the objects are placed in a cluttered scene and the level of occlusion is high. Prior works have tried to overcome this problem but could not achieve accuracy that can be considered reliable in real-world applications. In this paper, we present an architecture that, unlike prior work, is context-aware. It utilizes the context information available to us about the objects. Our proposed architecture treats the objects separately according to their types i.e; symmetric and non-symmetric. A deeper estimator and refiner network pair is used for non-symmetric objects as compared to symmetric due to their intrinsic differences. Our experiments show an enhancement in the accuracy of about 3.2% over the LineMOD dataset, which is considered a benchmark for pose estimation in the occluded and cluttered scenes, against the prior state-of-the-art DenseFusion. Our results also show that the inference time we got is sufficient for real-time usage.

Automation in farming processes is a growing field of research in both academia and industries. A considerable amount of work has been put into this field to develop systems robust enough for farming. Terrace farming, in particular, provides a varying set of challenges, including robust stair climbing methods and stable navigation in unstructured terrains. We propose the design of a novel autonomous terrace farming robot, Aarohi, that can effectively climb steep terraces of considerable heights and execute several farming operations. The design optimisation strategy for the overall mechanical structure is elucidated. Further, the embedded and software architecture along with fail-safe strategies are presented for a working prototype. Algorithms for autonomous traversal over the terrace steps using the scissor lift mechanism and performing various farming operations have also been discussed. The adaptability of the design to specific operational requirements and modular farm tools allow Aarohi to be customised for a wide variety of use cases.

With the increasing use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in critical real-world applications, several post hoc explanation methods have been proposed to understand their predictions. However, there has been no work in generating explanations on the fly during model training and utilizing them to improve the expressive power of the underlying GNN models. In this work, we introduce a novel explanation-directed neural message passing framework for GNNs, EXPASS (EXplainable message PASSing), which aggregates only embeddings from nodes and edges identified as important by a GNN explanation method. EXPASS can be used with any existing GNN architecture and subgraph-optimizing explainer to learn accurate graph embeddings. We theoretically show that EXPASS alleviates the oversmoothing problem in GNNs by slowing the layer wise loss of Dirichlet energy and that the embedding difference between the vanilla message passing and EXPASS framework can be upper bounded by the difference of their respective model weights. Our empirical results show that graph embeddings learned using EXPASS improve the predictive performance and alleviate the oversmoothing problems of GNNs, opening up new frontiers in graph machine learning to develop explanation-based training frameworks.