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Vineeth N. Balasubramanian

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Nash Equilibrium Framework For Training-Free Multimodal Step Verification

Multimodal large language models often generate reasoning chains containing subtle errors that lead to incorrect answers. Current verification approaches have notable limitations. Learned critics need extensive labeled data and show inconsistent performance across different tasks. Meanwhile, existing training-free methods simply average scores from different sources, missing a key insight: when these scores disagree, that disagreement itself carries important information about whether a reasoning step is truly valid or not. We propose a training-free verification approach that treats step-wise verification as a coordination problem among specialized judges. We formalize these judges' interaction as a Nash equilibrium game where agreement signals valid steps while disagreement reveals instability. Our method computes equilibrium scores through a closed-form solution, enabling both disagreement-aware filtering and stability-conscious ranking of reasoning steps. Evaluated across six benchmarks, our approach achieves consistent improvements of 2.4% to 5.2% over baseline models and shows competitive performance against learned critics, demonstrating that cross-modal agreement (not just average confidence) provides robust verification signals without task-specific adaptation.

preprint2026arXiv

Unifying Scientific Communication: Fine-Grained Correspondence Across Scientific Media

The communication of scientific knowledge has become increasingly multimodal, spanning text, visuals, and speech through materials such as research papers, slides, and recorded presentations. These different representations collectively convey a study's reasoning, results, and insights, offering complementary perspectives that enrich understanding. However, despite their shared purpose, such materials are rarely connected in a structured way. The absence of explicit links across formats makes it difficult to trace how concepts, visuals, and explanations correspond, limiting unified exploration and analysis of research content. To address this gap, we introduce the Multimodal Conference Dataset (MCD), the first benchmark that integrates research papers, presentation videos, explanatory videos, and slides from the same works. We evaluate a range of embedding-based and vision-language models to assess their ability to discover fine-grained cross-format correspondences, establishing the first systematic benchmark for this task. Our results show that vision-language models are robust but struggle with fine-grained alignment, while embedding-based models capture text-visual correspondences well but equations and symbolic content form distinct clusters in the embedding space. These findings highlight both the strengths and limitations of current approaches and point to key directions for future research in multimodal scientific understanding. To ensure reproducibility, we release the resources for MCD at https://github.com/meghamariamkm2002/MCD

preprint2024arXiv

Towards Learning and Explaining Indirect Causal Effects in Neural Networks

Recently, there has been a growing interest in learning and explaining causal effects within Neural Network (NN) models. By virtue of NN architectures, previous approaches consider only direct and total causal effects assuming independence among input variables. We view an NN as a structural causal model (SCM) and extend our focus to include indirect causal effects by introducing feedforward connections among input neurons. We propose an ante-hoc method that captures and maintains direct, indirect, and total causal effects during NN model training. We also propose an algorithm for quantifying learned causal effects in an NN model and efficient approximation strategies for quantifying causal effects in high-dimensional data. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the causal effects learned by our ante-hoc method better approximate the ground truth effects compared to existing methods.

preprint2023arXiv

Towards Estimating Transferability using Hard Subsets

As transfer learning techniques are increasingly used to transfer knowledge from the source model to the target task, it becomes important to quantify which source models are suitable for a given target task without performing computationally expensive fine tuning. In this work, we propose HASTE (HArd Subset TransfErability), a new strategy to estimate the transferability of a source model to a particular target task using only a harder subset of target data. By leveraging the internal and output representations of model, we introduce two techniques, one class agnostic and another class specific, to identify harder subsets and show that HASTE can be used with any existing transferability metric to improve their reliability. We further analyze the relation between HASTE and the optimal average log likelihood as well as negative conditional entropy and empirically validate our theoretical bounds. Our experimental results across multiple source model architectures, target datasets, and transfer learning tasks show that HASTE modified metrics are consistently better or on par with the state of the art transferability metrics.

preprint2022arXiv

On Conditioning the Input Noise for Controlled Image Generation with Diffusion Models

Conditional image generation has paved the way for several breakthroughs in image editing, generating stock photos and 3-D object generation. This continues to be a significant area of interest with the rise of new state-of-the-art methods that are based on diffusion models. However, diffusion models provide very little control over the generated image, which led to subsequent works exploring techniques like classifier guidance, that provides a way to trade off diversity with fidelity. In this work, we explore techniques to condition diffusion models with carefully crafted input noise artifacts. This allows generation of images conditioned on semantic attributes. This is different from existing approaches that input Gaussian noise and further introduce conditioning at the diffusion model's inference step. Our experiments over several examples and conditional settings show the potential of our approach.

preprint2016arXiv

Deep Model Compression: Distilling Knowledge from Noisy Teachers

The remarkable successes of deep learning models across various applications have resulted in the design of deeper networks that can solve complex problems. However, the increasing depth of such models also results in a higher storage and runtime complexity, which restricts the deployability of such very deep models on mobile and portable devices, which have limited storage and battery capacity. While many methods have been proposed for deep model compression in recent years, almost all of them have focused on reducing storage complexity. In this work, we extend the teacher-student framework for deep model compression, since it has the potential to address runtime and train time complexity too. We propose a simple methodology to include a noise-based regularizer while training the student from the teacher, which provides a healthy improvement in the performance of the student network. Our experiments on the CIFAR-10, SVHN and MNIST datasets show promising improvement, with the best performance on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We also conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the proposed method under related settings on the CIFAR-10 dataset to show the promise of the proposed approach.