Abstract

The constant shifts in social and political contexts, driven by emerging social movements and political events, lead to new forms of hate content and previously unrecognized hate patterns that machine learning models may not have captured. Some recent literature proposes data augmentation-based techniques to enrich existing hate datasets by incorporating samples that reveal new implicit hate patterns. This approach aims to improve the model's performance on out-of-domain implicit hate instances. It is observed, that further addition of more samples for augmentation results in the decrease of the performance of the model. In this work, we propose a Knowledge Transfer-driven Concept Refinement method that distills and refines the concepts related to implicit hate samples through novel prototype alignment and concept losses, alongside data augmentation based on concept activation vectors. Experiments with several publicly available datasets show that incorporating additional implicit samples reflecting new hate patterns through concept refinement enhances the model's performance, surpassing baseline results while maintaining cross-dataset generalization capabilities.

Abstract

In this work, we present IDD-CRS, a large-scale dataset focused on critical road scenarios, captured using Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and dash cameras. Unlike existing datasets that predominantly emphasize pedestrian safety and vehicle safety separately, IDD-CRS incorporates both vehicle and pedestrian behaviors, offering a more comprehensive view of road safety. The dataset includes diverse scenarios, such as high-speed lane changes, unsafe vehicle approaches to pedestrians and cyclists, and complex interactions between ego vehicles and other road agents. Leveraging ADAS technology allows us to accurately define the temporal boundaries of actions, resulting in precise annotations and more reliable safety analysis. With 90 hours of video footage, consisting of 5400 one-minute-long videos and 135,000 frames, IDD-CRS introduces new vehicle related classes and hard negative classes, establishing baselines for action recognition and long-tail action recognition tasks. Our benchmarks reveal the limitations of current models, pointing toward future advancements needed for improving road safety technology.

Abstract

This study uses a transcriptomic and machine learning-based approach to gain a comprehensive understanding of the genomic landscape of Plasmodium falciparum, a malaria-causing parasite. This enables us to understand this life-threatening disease better and thus identify new treatment targets and intervention methods. We used single-cell RNA sequencing data from the Malarial Cell Atlas with 5,177 genes across 37,624 cells. Our approach combined static analyses, including highly variable gene identification, differential expression analysis, and M3Drop (a feature selection method based on noise filtration), to obtain stage-specific markers along with trajectory analysis (Monocle3) to identify top genes active during stage progression. The feature selection analyses were done for each stage and lifecycle gene, which are genes that remain active throughout the lifecycle. These complementary approaches gave us distinct gene sets: static analysis revealed genes necessary for stage-specific functions, while dynamic trajectory analysis highlighted genes that play an important role in cellular development. A neural network classifier trained on these gene sets achieved high accuracy (Accuracy: 96%; F1-score: 0.96) using trajectory-derived genes, performing better than the model trained on the entire gene set, indicating that the gene set has captured stage-specific signatures. Further, to validate the biological significance of the shortlisted genes, we performed a Gene Ontology analysis. We found that our analysis revealed results that are in line with existing literature. The ring stage genes were linked to immune evasion, trophozoite genes to haemoglobin digestion, schizont genes to merozoite invasion, and gametocyte genes to sexual differentiation. We plan to build on this work by studying the behaviour of important genes using a Poisson-Beta model to infer the kinetics of key genes, which will help us better understand how they change throughout the parasite's life cycle.

Abstract

The rising cost of drug discovery, coupled with a stagnation in the approval of novel treatments, highlights the urgent need for innovative strategies such as drug re-purposing. Pharmaceutical companies invest roughly 10-15 years and $2.6 billion to get a single FDA-approved drug to market. The COVID-19 pandemic further underscored the necessity of quickly identifying existing drugs with potential efficacy against a fast-spreading virus to curtail the pandemic. In this study, we perform a comparative analysis of several Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and recommendation system models to address drug re-purposing. We construct an integrated graph that combines Protein-Protein Interaction networks, Drug-Target Protein graphs, Disease-Protein associations, and Drug-Disease links. We leverage a network learning paradigm implemented over this complex graph via both node-agnostic and heterogeneous graph techniques for link prediction in drug-disease pairs. We implement a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (HGT) model that processes three node types (drugs, diseases, proteins) and four edge types. The HGT achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.985 and an F1-score of 0.90, demonstrating its efficacy in predicting drug re-purposing candidates. Additionally, we compared several node-agnostic GNN architectures, including Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks, GraphSAGE, and Graph Isomorphism Networks. All architectures performed comparably, with an AUC-ROC of around 0.98. However, when framing the drug re-purposing task as a recommendation problem using Matrix Factorization with side information, we observed a significant drop in performance, with the AUC-ROC falling to 0.82. This performance degradation highlights the importance of incorporating Protein-Protein Interaction networks in the modelling process, as matrix factorization fails to capture these complex network effects critical for drug re-purposing. Our models ranked 6,158 drugs based on their predicted efficacy in treating COVID-19, providing a valuable tool for prioritizing clinical trials and further research. Beyond COVID-19, such an integrated framework can allow us to uncover drug re-purposing prospects for any other novel diseases in a significantly more efficient and cost-effective way.

Abstract

Gliomas, accounting for nearly one-third of all brain tumours, present themselves as significant medical challenges owing to their heterogeneous and aggressive nature. Given that traditional diagnostic techniques often fall short of capturing the entire genetic landscape, there are minimal options currently present in personalised medicine, thus adding to existing challenges. In order to aid precision oncology, we present a machine learning (ML) framework for glioma subtype classification and mutation prediction using RNA sequencing data. We used a two-step feature selection procedure that included XGBoost and LASSO, leveraging RNA sequencing and somatic mutation data of 667 glioma samples from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Pan-Cancer project to identify key genes that are associated with glioma subtypes and important mutations. Metrics such as AUROC, F1-Score, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) were used to train and evaluate the supervised machine learning models, including Random Forest and Stochastic Gradient Descent. Our framework performed robustly despite the class imbalance present in the dataset. We achieved a high classification accuracy for Diffuse Glioma (DG) subtypes (AUROC 0.90-1.00), distinguishing between low-grade gliomas (LGGs) and glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Mutation status predictions for the key prognostic genes, including IDH, TP53, and ATRX, achieved high AUROC scores of 0.89-0.98 and MCC values of 0.72-0.97. Further, we used feature sets from our top-performing models to perform gene set enrichment as part of our post-analysis. This confirmed the biological significance of identified genes related to established carcinogenic pathways and further validated the clinical applicability of our technique. Our ML-driven framework presented offers a scalable, data-driven solution in computational oncology with potential applications across cancer types.

Abstract

Leptoquarks (LQs) can contribute to the magnetic and electric dipole moments of charged leptons, which the current experiments have measured with good accuracy. We revisit the parameter spaces of TeV-scale vector LQs that contribute to these observables and study how these models fare against the LHC bounds. We show that significant portions of the parameter space are excluded when the current LHC data is utilized effectively. We find that only U1and V2 can explain the observed positive shift in (aμexp-aμSM) through a lepton chirality-flipping contribution with O(1) LQ-quark-lepton coupling. We also see how these two LQs can fit the electron dipole moment and atomic parity violation measurements. We find that the current electric dipole moment measurements of the muon cannot restrain the LQ-quark-lepton couplings within perturbative regions.

Abstract

Despite the progress seen in classification methods, current approaches for handling videos with distribution shifts in source and target domains remain source-dependent as they require access to the source data during the adaptation stage. In this paper, we present a self-training based source-free video domain adaptation approach to address this challenge by bridging the gap between the source and the target domains. We use the source pre-trained model to generate pseudo-labels for the target domain samples, which are inevitably noisy. Thus, we treat the problem of source-free video domain adaptation as learning from noisy labels and argue that the samples with correct pseudo-labels can help us in adaptation. To this end, we leverage the cross-entropy loss as an indicator of the correctness of the pseudo-labels and use the resulting small-loss samples from the target domain for fine-tuning the model. We further enhance the adaptation performance by implementing a teacher–student (TS) framework, in which the teacher, which is updated gradually, produces reliable pseudo-labels. Meanwhile, the student undergoes fine-tuning on the target domain videos using these generated pseudo-labels to improve its performance. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our methods, termed as CleanAdapt, CleanAdapt + TS, achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming the existing approaches on various open datasets.

Abstract

There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires significant researcher effort, reasoning, and ingenuity. Yet current benchmarks for LMs predominantly assess their ability to generate solutions rather than challenge them. We advocate for developing benchmarks that evaluate this inverse capability — creating counterexamples for subtly incorrect solutions. To demonstrate this approach, we start with the domain of algorithmic problem solving, where counterexamples can be evaluated automatically using code execution. Specifically, we introduce REFUTE, a dynamically updating benchmark that includes recent problems and incorrect submissions from programming competitions, where human experts successfully identified counterexamples. Our analysis finds that the best reasoning agents, even OpenAI o3-mini (high) with code execution feedback, can create counterexamples for only < 9% of incorrect solutions in REFUTE, even though ratings indicate its ability to solve up to 48% of these problems from scratch. We hope our work spurs progress in evaluating and enhancing LMs’ ability to falsify incorrect solutions — a capability that is crucial for both accelerating research and making models self-improve through reliable reflective reasoning.

Abstract

Understanding user emotions to identify user opinion, sentiment, stance, and preferences has become a hot topic of research in the last few years. Many studies and datasets are designed for user emotion analysis including news websites, blogs, and user tweets. However, there is little exploration of political emotions in the Indian context for multi-label emotion detection. This paper presents a PoliEMO dataset—a novel benchmark corpus of political tweets in a multi-label setup for Indian elections, consisting of over 3512 tweets manually annotated. In this work, 6792 labels were generated for six emotion categories: anger, insult, joy, neutral, sadness, and shameful. Next, PoliEMO dataset is used to understand emotions in a multi-label context using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms with multi-label classifier (binary relevance (BR), label powerset (LP), classifier chain (CC), and multi-label k-nearest neighbors (MkNN)) and deep learning models like convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM), and transfer learning model, i.e., bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). Experiments and results show Bi-LSTM performs better with micro-averaged F1 score of 0.81, macro-averaged F1 score of 0.78, and accuracy 0.68 as compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract

In covering elections, journalists often use conflict frames which depict events and issues as adversarial, often highlighting confronta- tions between opposing parties. Although conflict frames result in more citizen engagement, they may distract from substantive policy discussion. In this work, we analyze the use of conflict frames in online English-language news articles by seven major news outlets in the 2014 and 2019 Indian general elections. We find that the use of conflict frames is not linked to the news outlets’ ideological biases but is associated with TV-based (rather than print-based) media. Further, the majority of news outlets do not exhibit ideolog- ical biases in portraying parties as aggressors or targets in articles with conflict frames. Finally, comparing news articles reporting on political speeches to their original speech transcripts, we find that, on average, news outlets tend to consistently report on attacks on the opposition party in the speeches but under-report on more substantive electoral issues covered in the speeches such as farmers’ issues and infrastructure.