Tuberculosis (TB), an infectious bacterial disease, is a significant cause of death, especially in low-income countries, with an estimated ten million new cases reported globally in $2020$. While TB is treatable, non-adherence to the medication regimen is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Thus, proactively identifying patients at risk of dropping off their medication regimen enables corrective measures to mitigate adverse outcomes. Using a proxy measure of extreme non-adherence and a dataset of nearly $700,000$ patients from four states in India, we formulate and solve the machine learning (ML) problem of early prediction of non-adherence based on a custom rank-based metric. We train ML models and evaluate against baselines, achieving a $\sim 100\%$ lift over rule-based baselines and $\sim 214\%$ over a random classifier, taking into account country-wide large-scale future deployment. We deal with various issues in the process, including data quality, high-cardinality categorical data, low target prevalence, distribution shift, variation across cohorts, algorithmic fairness, and the need for robustness and explainability. Our findings indicate that risk stratification of non-adherent patients is a viable, deployable-at-scale ML solution.

Our paper aims to analyze political polarization in US political system using Language Models, and thereby help candidates make an informed decision. The availability of this information will help voters understand their candidates views on the economy, healthcare, education and other social issues. Our main contributions are a dataset extracted from Wikipedia that spans the past 120 years and a Language model based method that helps analyze how polarized a candidate is. Our data is divided into 2 parts, background information and political information about a candidate, since our hypothesis is that the political views of a candidate should be based on reason and be independent of factors such as birthplace, alma mater, etc. We further split this data into 4 phases chronologically, to help understand if and how the polarization amongst candidates changes. This data has been cleaned to remove biases. To understand the polarization we begin by showing results from some classical language models in Word2Vec and Doc2Vec. And then use more powerful techniques like the Longformer, a transformer based encoder, to assimilate more information and find the nearest neighbors of each candidate based on their political view and their background.

Object movement identification is one of the most researched problems in the field of computer vision. In this task, we try to classify a pixel as foreground or background. Even though numerous traditional machine learning and deep learning methods already exist for this problem, the two major issues with most of them are the need for large amounts of ground truth data and their inferior performance on unseen videos. Since every pixel of every frame has to be labeled, acquiring large amounts of data for these techniques gets rather expensive. Recently, Zhao et al. [1] proposed one of a kind Arithmetic Distribution Neural Network (ADNN) for universal background subtraction which utilizes probability information from the histogram of temporal pixels and achieves promising results. Building onto this work, we developed an intelligent video surveillance system that uses ADNN architecture for motion detection, trims the video with parts only containing motion, and performs anomaly detection on the trimmed video.

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled us to address the curse of dimensionality (COD) by solving problems in higher dimensions. A subset of such approaches of addressing the COD has led us to solving high-dimensional PDEs. This has resulted in opening doors to solving a variety of real-world problems ranging from mathematical finance to stochastic control for industrial applications. Although feasible, these deep learning methods are still constrained by training time and memory. Tackling these shortcomings, Tensor Neural Networks (TNN) demonstrate that they can provide significant parameter savings while attaining the same accuracy as compared to the classical Dense Neural Network (DNN). In addition, we also show how TNN can be trained faster than DNN for the same accuracy. Besides TNN, we also introduce Tensor Network Initializer (TNN Init), a weight initialization scheme that leads to faster convergence with smaller variance for an equivalent parameter count as compared to a DNN. We benchmark TNN and TNN Init by applying them to solve the parabolic PDE associated with the Heston model, which is widely used in financial pricing theory.

As language models have grown in parameters and layers, it has become much harder to train and infer with them on single GPUs. This is severely restricting the availability of large language models such as GPT-3, BERT-Large, and many others. A common technique to solve this problem is pruning the network architecture by removing transformer heads, fully-connected weights, and other modules. The main challenge is to discern the important parameters from the less important ones. Our goal is to find strong metrics for identifying such parameters. We thus propose two strategies: Cam-Cut based on the GradCAM interpretations, and Smooth-Cut based on the SmoothGrad, for calculating the importance scores. Through this work, we show that our scoring functions are able to assign more relevant task-based scores to the network parameters, and thus both our pruning approaches significantly outperform the standard weight and gradient-based strategies, especially at higher compression ratios in BERT-based models. We also analyze our pruning masks and find them to be significantly different from the ones obtained using standard metrics.

How do we design measures of social bias that we trust? While prior work has introduced several measures, no measure has gained widespread trust: instead, mounting evidence argues we should distrust these measures. In this work, we design bias measures that warrant trust based on the cross-disciplinary theory of measurement modeling. To combat the frequently fuzzy treatment of social bias in NLP, we explicitly define social bias, grounded in principles drawn from social science research. We operationalize our definition by proposing a general bias measurement framework DivDist, which we use to instantiate 5 concrete bias measures. To validate our measures, we propose a rigorous testing protocol with 8 testing criteria (e.g. predictive validity: do measures predict biases in US employment?). Through our testing, we demonstrate considerable evidence to trust our measures, showing they overcome conceptual, technical, and empirical deficiencies present in prior measures.

Evaluation is the central means for assessing, understanding, and communicating about NLP models. In this position paper, we argue evaluation should be more than that: it is a force for driving change, carrying a sociological and political character beyond its technical dimensions. As a force, evaluation's power arises from its adoption: under our view, evaluation succeeds when it achieves the desired change in the field. Further, by framing evaluation as a force, we consider how it competes with other forces. Under our analysis, we conjecture that the current trajectory of NLP suggests evaluation's power is waning, in spite of its potential for realizing more pluralistic ambitions in the field. We conclude by discussing the legitimacy of this power, who acquires this power and how it distributes. Ultimately, we hope the research community will more aggressively harness evaluation for change.

The rapid growth of machine translation (MT) systems has necessitated comprehensive studies to meta-evaluate evaluation metrics being used, which enables a better selection of metrics that best reflect MT quality. Unfortunately, most of the research focuses on high-resource languages, mainly English, the observations for which may not always apply to other languages. Indian languages, having over a billion speakers, are linguistically different from English, and to date, there has not been a systematic study of evaluating MT systems from English into Indian languages. In this paper, we fill this gap by creating an MQM dataset consisting of 7000 fine-grained annotations, spanning 5 Indian languages and 7 MT systems, and use it to establish correlations between annotator scores and scores obtained using existing automatic metrics. Our results show that pre-trained metrics, such as COMET, have the highest correlations with annotator scores. Additionally, we find that the metrics do not adequately capture fluency-based errors in Indian languages, and there is a need to develop metrics focused on Indian languages. We hope that our dataset and analysis will help promote further research in this area.

Many real-world applications of language models (LMs), such as code autocomplete and writing assistance, involve human-LM interaction, but the main LM benchmarks are non-interactive, where a system produces output without human intervention. To evaluate human-LM interaction, we develop a framework, Human-AI Language-based Interaction Evaluation (H-LINE), that expands non-interactive evaluation along three dimensions, capturing (i) the interactive process, not only the final output; (ii) the first-person subjective experience, not just a third-party assessment; and (iii) notions of preference beyond quality. We then design five tasks ranging from goal-oriented to open-ended to capture different forms of interaction. On four state-of-the-art LMs (three variants of OpenAI's GPT-3 and AI21's J1-Jumbo), we find that non-interactive performance does not always result in better human-LM interaction and that first-person and third-party metrics can diverge, suggesting the importance of examining the nuances of human-LM interaction.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of an interpretable and semiautomatic approach to stage grading ocular pathologies such as Diabetic retinopathy, Hypertensive retinopathy, and other retinopathies on the backdrop of major systemic diseases. The experimental study aims to evaluate an explainable staged grading process without using deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) directly. Many current CNN-based deep neural networks used for diagnosing retinal disorders might have appreciable performance but fail to pinpoint the basis driving their decisions. To improve these decisions' transparency, we have proposed a clinician-in-the-loop assisted intelligent workflow that performs a retinal vascular assessment on the fundus images to derive quantifiable and descriptive parameters. The retinal vessel parameters meta-data serve as hyper-parameters for better interpretation and explainability of decisions. The semiautomatic methodology aims to have a federated approach to AI in healthcare applications with more inputs and interpretations from clinicians. The baseline process involved in the machine learning pipeline through image processing techniques for optic disc detection, vessel segmentation, and arteriole/venule identification.