Abstract

Background: Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS), a temperament trait reflecting deeper cognitive processing and heightened emotional/physiological reactivity, is often linked to emotional dysregulation and vulnerability to stress-related problems. SPS includes three subscales: Ease of Excitation (EOE) reflects emotional sensitivity to internal (e.g., thoughts, bodily states) and external (e.g., social demands) stimuli; Low Sensory Threshold (LST) reflects sensitivity to intense sensory input; and Aesthetic Sensitivity (AES) denotes appreciation for subtleties (Smolewska et al., 2006). Music can sometimes contribute to maladaptive outcomes like rumination, avoidance coping, and amplification of negative affect (Alluri et al., 2022). Highly sensitive persons, especially with elevated EOE, may be more prone to such patterns due to their emotional reactivity. However, SPS’s interactive role in maladaptive music use remains underexplored. Aim: This study investigates the relationship between SPS and maladaptive music use, hypothesizing that individuals with high EOE, particularly those sensitive to external demands (External EOE), are more prone to unhealthy music engagement. Network analysis was employed to reveal how sensitivity traits, distress, and empathy interact in shaping music use patterns. Methods: A total of 680 Indian participants(mean age=20.69, s.d.=1.9; 180 females) completed a battery of self-report measures including Highly Sensitive Persons Scale (HSPS) for SPS traits, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) (Andrews & Slade, 2001), Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) for empathy traits (Keaton, 2017), and Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale (Saarikallio et al., 2015) assessing adaptive and maladaptive music use. The IRI included four subscales: Empathic Concern (EC), Perspective Taking (PT), Personal Distress (PD), and Fantasy Scale (FS), capturing both cognitive and affective empathy. Using exploratory factor analysis we split EOE into Internal and External factors. Regularized Partial Correlation Networks (RPCNs) and Bayesian Networks were constructed to model interactions and infer relationships among variables. Results: Unhealthy music use correlated with External EOE(r=0.25) while Healthy music use correlated with AES(r=0.32) among SPS traits. RPCNs identified External EOE as a central node in the network(strength=0.69; betweenness=116), bridging SPS traits with distress-related personal feelings(PD from IRI), psychological symptoms (K10), and Unhealthy music use. Bayesian Networks confirmed K10 as a direct predictor of Unhealthy use(B=0.50), with PD predicting K10(B=0.31) and External EOE predicting PD(B=0.50). Mediation analysis revealed that K10 significantly mediated the pathway from External EOE to Unhealthy music use, accounting for 55% of the total effect (all p<0.01), suggesting distress amplifies the impact of emotional sensitivity on maladaptive behaviors. Discussion: While music can support emotion regulation, our results suggest that highly sensitive persons experiencing distress may turn to music as a maladaptive coping strategy to escape overwhelming external demands. In India, where population density and sensory overstimulation are high, such patterns may be intensified. These findings add to the emerging literature on trait-environment interactions in music behavior and suggest that understanding EOE may inform future interventions or wellness strategies tailored to individual sensitivity profiles.

Abstract

Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), a trait marked by heightened reactivity to stimuli, is linked to emotional dysregulation and stress-related problems. Its subscales include Ease of Excitation that reflects emotional sensitivity to internal and external demands, Low Sensory Threshold reflects sensory overload susceptibility, and Aesthetic Sensitivity denotes appreciation for subtleties. While music can sometimes amplify maladaptive outcomes (rumination, avoidance), SPS’s role in such behaviours, especially in non-Western contexts, remains underexplored. This study examines how SPS drives maladaptive music listening in 673 Indian adults. Network analysis and structural equation modelling revealed sensitivity to external demands elevated psychological distress which in turn predicted maladaptive music use. Reactivity to internal demands may reduce maladaptive music use but exacerbated it when mediated by external demands, reflecting preference for avoidant coping in Indian context. Findings emphasize SPS’s role in maladaptive behaviours, demonstrating how sensory reactivity interacts with traits to shape distress-driven music use as an emotional regulation mechanism.

Abstract

Machine Learning Enabled Systems (MLS) are becoming integral to real-world applications, but ensuring their sustainable performance over time remains a significant challenge. These systems operate in dynamic environments and face runtime uncertainties like data drift and model degradation, which affect the sustainability of MLS across multiple dimensions: technical, economical, environmental, and social. While Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) addresses the technical dimension by streamlining the ML model lifecycle, it overlooks other dimensions. Furthermore, some traditional practices, such as frequent retraining, incur substantial energy and computational overhead, thus amplifying sustainability concerns. To address them, we introduce HarmonE, an architectural approach that enables self-adaptive capabilities in MLOps pipelines using the MAPE-K loop. HarmonE allows system architects to define explicit sustainability goals and adaptation thresholds at design time, and performs runtime monitoring of key metrics, such as prediction accuracy, energy consumption, and data distribution shifts, to trigger appropriate adaptation strategies. We validate our approach using a Digital Twin (DT) of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), focusing on traffic flow prediction as our primary use case. The DT employs time series ML models to simulate real-time traffic and assess various flow scenarios. Our results show that HarmonE adapts effectively to evolving conditions while maintaining accuracy and meeting sustainability goals.

Abstract

The robustness of precast concrete structures is primarily governed by connections between the precast structural components. Joint connections deliver a vital role in load transfer, restraining movement, and providing stability at local and global level. This calls for appropriate connection mechanism for precast elements providing integrity under different loading conditions and ease of construction. The connection details in literature or available in practice have been rarely evaluated. This paper discusses the numerical modelling of precast reinforced concrete structural wall-column with different joint connection systems and evaluates various seismic design parameters, simulated through in-plane lateral loading in a finite element software. The connection systems evaluated are reinforcement bar connection, headed bar connections, U-bar connection and steel wire loop connection, which are subsequently compared with a cast-in-situ reinforced concrete wall-column model having similar material and geometrical properties. The seismic behaviour of connections have been studied with regards to the damage pattern, stresses, lateral load capacity, base shear coefficient, stiffness, deformation characteristics, strength factors, and damage index. Among all the connection systems, U-bar connection and loop connection using steel wire ropes showed stresses within the yield limit, while other connection systems reached their yield capacity, indicating damage. Apparently, steel wire loop connection is found to be effective in transfer of lateral load between the precast reinforced concrete elements, as observed from the numerical analysis; whereas other connection systems yielded prior to the design load. However, all connections except the reinforcement bar connection surpassed design load prior to the peak limit.

Abstract

Model Merging (MM) has emerged as a promising approach to combine multiple fine-tuned models into a single model that maintains performance across tasks. However, its impact on (transferable) adversarial examples remains unexplored. Specifically, we investigate the affect of MM on the transferability of adversarial examples---a black-box, adversarial attack where adversarial examples generated for surrogate model successfully mislead target model. Through experiments on image classification models, we discover that, similar to recent findings of MM on backdoor attacks, where MM tends to sanitize the backdoor present in individual fine-tuned models, MM does not boost adversarial transferability. Our analysis reveals MM has no affect, and under certain conditions, decreased vulnerability to transferable adversarial examples. Consequently, our finding also support the notion of MM giving a "free lunch'' of adversarial robustness and provides important insights for designing more secure systems that employ MM.

Abstract

According to the cooperative principle (Grice 1975), utterances in a conversation adhere to the four maxims of conversational implicature – quantity, relation, quality and manner. An implicature arises when a maxim is flouted or contradicted, and the speaker is forced to infer a meaning. Consider the example: Speaker A: का िदलीप को परीकाएं आसान लग रही है? Kya Dilip ko parikshayein aasan lag rahi hain? (Does Dilip find the exam easy?) Speaker B: आज-कल वो सो नही पा रहा | [Aaj-kal wo so nahi pa raha.] (He hasn’t been able to sleep lately.) Speaker B flouts the maxim of relevance by not answering the question with a yes or no. Instead, his reply that Dilip has trouble sleeping implies that he doesn’t find the exams to be easy. While computational approaches have made some progress in English implicature benchmarks - GRICE (Zheng, 2021), IMPRESS (Jeretic 2020) and Conversational Implicature benchmark (CIB) (George and Mamidi, 2020), there are no benchmarks for Hindi. Hence, we propose a Hindi implicature benchmark- Indirect Questions Hi Implicature Benchmark - Toledo-Ronen (2020) found that translation- based methods lose nuances in argument evaluation. XCOPA benchmark (Ponti 2020) & Huang (2024) demonstrated that translated data hurts model performance for structurally divergent non- English languages. Hindi is a free word order, morphologically rich language. It is structurally different from English hence, translating English implicature benchmarks may not be unsuitable. Wang (2024) present indirect answers to yes-no questions in dialogues benchmark. Similar to their approach, we plan to collect Hindi interviews and extract indirect questions along with their answers involving implicature. We will annotate 5000 such questions. We will maintain a constraint that previous dialogues will be added to the question as a background to simplify the inference over a single dialogue turn. Evaluation will rely on ROUGE scores to measure correctness, as we leave exploration of suitable metrics for future work. For model evaluation, we plan to leverage a) English LLMs (meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B (Grattafiori 2024) and the current state-of-the-art reported by Sravanthi (2024), FlanT5-XXL (Chung 2022) finetuned on Hindi translated GRICE (Zheng 2021), IMPRESS (Jeretic 2020) and CIB (George and Mamidi 2020) and b) Hindi LLMs (Llama-3-Nanda-10B-Chat (Choudhury 2024) and Airavata (Gala 2024)).

Abstract

In recent years, widespread internet adoption and the growth in user base of various social media platforms have led to an increase in the prolifera tion of extreme speech online. While traditional language models have demon strated proficiency in distinguishing between neutral text and non-neutral text (i.e. extreme speech), categorizing the diverse types of extreme speech presents significant challenges [1][2]. The task of extreme speech classification is par ticularly nuanced, as it requires a deep understanding of socio-cultural contexts to accurately interpret the intent of the language used by the speaker. Even hu man annotators often disagree on the appropriate classification of such content, emphasizing the complex and subjective nature of this task [3]. The use of hu man moderators also presents a scaling issue, necessitating the need for auto mated systems for extreme speech classification. The recent launch of ChatGPT has drawn global attention to the potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) across a diverse variety of tasks. Trained on vast and diverse corpora, and demonstrating the ability to effectively capture and encode contex tual information, LLMs emerge as highly promising tools for tackling this spe cific task of extreme speech classification. In this paper, we leverage the Indian subset of the extreme speech dataset from [3] to develop an effective classifica tion framework using LLMs. We evaluate open-source Llama models against closed-source OpenAI models, finding that while pre-trained LLMs show mod erate efficacy, fine-tuning with domain-specific data significantly enhances per formance, highlighting their adaptability to linguistic and contextual nuances. Although GPT-based models outperform Llama models in zero-shot settings, the performance gap disappears after fine-tuning.

Abstract

Modeling process, operating condition, reliability, and technological variation in transistor level design introduce significant variance in device and performance parameters. This paper presents a machine-learning-based architectural approach that enhances model performance, as a step towards developing Foundation Models tailored for circuit data, accurately capturing technology and process-induced variations in leakage power, voltage, and current. The architecture incorporates the impact of varying operating conditions, including temperatures from -55°C to 125°C and supply voltage fluctuations of ±10% on 16nm HP FinFET, and 16nm, 22nm, 32nm, and 45nm HPMGK CMOS technology nodes. By enhancing the performance of baseline machine-learning models using a chained architecture to cater to the high variance in target, our C-Arch serves as a versatile framework for circuit modeling when the data spread is high. Experimental results on current, voltage, and leakage power estimation, demonstrate average improvements of up to 93.76%, 96.17%, and 88.82% in Mean Absolute Percentage Error compared to baseline models, underscoring the computational savings and viability of Foundation Models in circuit design.

Abstract

We consider a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multi-user communication system. For such a system, we aim to optimally select the RIS phase shifts and precoding vectors for maximizing the effective rank of the weighted channel covariance matrix which essentially improves the channel capacity. For a low-complexity transmitter design, we employ maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and minimum-mean square error (MMSE) precoding schemes along with water-filling algorithm-based power allocation. Further, we show that MRT and MMSE exhibit equivalent performance and become optimal when the channel effective rank is maximized by optimally configuring the RIS consisting of a large number of elements

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly being used for a variety of ML applications on graph data. Because graph data does not follow the independently and identically distributed i.i.d. assumption, adversarial manipulations or incorrect data can propagate to other data points through message passing, which deteriorates the model's performance. To allow model developers to remove the adverse effects of manipulated entities from a trained GNN, we study the recently formulated problem of Corrective Unlearning. We find that current graph unlearning methods fail to unlearn the effect of manipulations even when the whole manipulated set is known. We introduce a new graph unlearning method,Cognac, which can unlearn the effect of the manipulation set even when only % of it is identified. It recovers most of the performance of a strong oracle with fully corrected training data, even beating retraining from scratch without the deletion set, and is 8x more efficient while also scaling to large datasets. We hope our work assists GNN developers in mitigating harmful effects caused by issues in real-world data, post-training.