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

This study investigates how cinematographic techniques influence viewer perception and contribute to the objectification of women, utilizing eye-tracking data from 91 participants. They watched a sexualized music video (SV) known for objectifying portrayals and a non-sexualized music video (TV). Using dynamic Areas of Interests (AOIs)—head, torso, and lower body—gaze metrics such as fixation duration, visit count, and scan paths were recorded to assess visual attention patterns. Participants were grouped according to their average fixations on sexualized AOIs. Statistical analyses revealed significant differences in gaze behavior between the videos and among the groups, with increased attention to sexualized AOIs in SV. Additionally, data-driven group differences in fixations identified specific segments with heightened objectification that are further analyzed using scan path visualization techniques. These findings provide strong empirical evidence of camera-driven gaze objectification, demonstrating how cinematic framing implicitly shapes objectifying gaze patterns, highlighting the critical need for mindful media representation.

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.

Abstract

Engaging in political discussions is crucial in democratic societies, yet many individuals remain politically disinclined due to various factors such as perceived knowledge gaps, conflict avoidance, or a sense of disconnection from the political system. In this paper, we explore the potential of personal narratives—short, first-person ac- counts emphasizing personal experiences—as a means to empower these individuals to participate in online political discussions. Using a text classifier that identifies personal narratives, we conducted a large-scale computational analysis to evaluate the relationship between the use of personal narratives and participation in po- litical discussions on Reddit. We find that politically disinclined individuals (PDIs) are more likely to use personal narratives than more politically active users. Personal narratives are more likely to attract and retain politically disinclined individuals in political discussions than other comments. Importantly, personal narratives posted by politically disinclined individuals are received more posi- tively than their other comments in political communities. These results emphasize the value of personal narratives in promoting inclusive political discourse.

Abstract

This study investigates the landscape of environmental litigation in India, analyzing how environmental disputes unfold within the judiciary. It aims to identify significant patterns in case subject matter, types of appellants, and regional distribution of such cases. By examining the broader socio-legal context, the research explores how various stakeholders interact with the legal system to address environmental issues. The methodology involves assembling a dataset of legal cases and applying computational techniques to extract metadata and detect trends across multiple dimensions. Statistical analysis was used to assess correlations between case topics and appellant categories, while spatial data provided insights into regional variations in environmental disputes. Additionally, a qualitative review of relevant legislation and policies cited in key rulings helped contextualize the legal reasoning behind environmental judgments. Through a computational lens, this study uncovers the institutional dynamics that shape environmental justice in India, emphasizing the value of data-driven approaches in understanding the interplay between law, governance, and civic engagement in environmental policymaking.