Existing studies on fairness are largely Western-focused, making them inadequate for culturally diverse countries such as India. To address this gap, we introduce INDIC-BIAS, a comprehensive India-centric benchmark designed to evaluate fairness of LLMs across 85 identity groups encompassing diverse castes, religions, regions, and tribes. We first consult domain experts to curate over 1,800 socio-cultural topics spanning behaviors and situations, where biases and stereotypes are likely to emerge. Grounded in these topics, we generate and manually validate 20,000 real-world scenario templates to probe LLMs for fairness. We structure these templates into three evaluation tasks: plausibility, judgment, and generation. Our evaluation of 14 popular LLMs on these tasks reveals strong negative biases against marginalized identities, with models frequently reinforcing common stereotypes. Additionally, we find that models struggle to mitigate bias even when explicitly asked to rationalize their decision. Our evaluation provides evidence of both allocative and representational harms that current LLMs could cause towards Indian identities, calling for a more cautious usage in practical applications. We release INDIC-BIAS as an open-source benchmark to advance research on benchmarking and mitigating biases and stereotypes in the Indian context.

Cotton crops, often called "white gold," face significant production challenges, primarily due to various leaf-affecting diseases. As a major global source of fiber, timely and accurate disease identification is crucial to ensure optimal yields and maintain crop health. While deep learning and machine learning techniques have been explored to address this challenge, there remains a gap in developing lightweight models with fewer parameters which could be computationally effective for agricultural practitioners. To address this, we propose an innovative deep learning framework integrating a subset of trainable layers from MobileNet, transfer learning, data augmentation, a learning rate decay schedule, model checkpoints, and early stopping mechanisms. Our model demonstrates exceptional performance, accurately classifying seven cotton disease types with an overall accuracy of 98.42% and class-wise precision ranging from 96% to 100%. This results in significantly enhanced efficiency, surpassing recent approaches in accuracy and model complexity. The existing models in the literature have yet to attain such high accuracy, even when tested on data sets with fewer disease types. The substantial performance improvement, combined with the lightweight nature of the model, makes it practically suitable for real-world applications in smart farming. By offering a high-performing and efficient solution, our framework can potentially address challenges in cotton cultivation, contributing to sustainable agricultural practices.

Fault diagnosis (FD) is essential for maintaining operational safety and minimizing economic losses by detecting system abnormalities. Recently, deep learning (DL)-driven FD methods have gained prominence, offering significant improvements in precision and adaptability through the utilization of extensive datasets and advanced DL models. Modern industrial environments, however, demand FD methods that can handle new fault types, dynamic conditions, large-scale data, and provide real-time responses with minimal prior information. Although online continual learning (OCL) demonstrates potential in addressing these requirements by enabling DL models to continuously learn from streaming data, it faces challenges such as data redundancy, imbalance, and limited labeled data. To overcome these limitations, we propose SRTFD, a scalable real-time fault diagnosis framework that enhances OCL with three critical methods: Retrospect Coreset Selection (RCS), which selects the most relevant data to reduce redundant training and improve efficiency; Global Balance Technique (GBT), which ensures balanced coreset selection and robust model performance; and Confidence and Uncertainty-driven Pseudo-label Learning (CUPL), which updates the model using unlabeled data for continuous adaptation. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset and two public simulated datasets demonstrate SRTFD's effectiveness and potential for providing advanced, scalable, and precise fault diagnosis in modern industrial systems.

Since the inception of the SARS - CoV - 2 (COVID - 19) novel coronavirus, a lot of time and effort is being allocated to estimate the trajectory and possibly, forecast with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the number of cases, recoveries, and deaths due to the same. The model proposed in this paper is a mindful step in the same direction. The primary model in question is a Hybrid Holt's Model embedded with a Wavelet-based ANN. To test its forecasting ability, we have compared three separate models, the first, being a simple ARIMA model, the second, also an ARIMA model with a wavelet-based function, and the third, being the proposed model. We have also compared the forecast accuracy of this model with that of a modern day Vanilla LSTM recurrent neural network model. We have tested the proposed model on the number of confirmed cases (daily) for the entire country as well as 6 hotspot states. We have also proposed a simple adjustment algorithm in addition to the hybrid model so that daily and/or weekly forecasts can be meted out, with respect to the entirety of the country, as well as a moving window performance metric based on out-of-sample forecasts. In order to have a more rounded approach to the analysis of COVID-19 dynamics, focus has also been given to the estimation of the Basic Reproduction Number, $R_0$ using a compartmental epidemiological model (SIR). Lastly, we have also given substantial attention to estimating the shelf-life of the proposed model. It is obvious yet noteworthy how an accurate model, in this regard, can ensure better allocation of healthcare resources, as well as, enable the government to take necessary measures ahead of time.

Indigenous languages are a fundamental legacy in the development of human communication, embodying the unique identity and culture of local communities of America. The Second AmericasNLP Competition Track 1 of NeurIPS 2022 proposed developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for five indigenous languages: Quechua, Guarani, Bribri, Kotiria, and Wa'ikhana. In this paper, we propose a reliable ASR model for each target language by crawling speech corpora spanning diverse sources and applying data augmentation methods that resulted in the winning approach in this competition. To achieve this, we systematically investigated the impact of different hyperparameters by a Bayesian search on the performance of the language models, specifically focusing on the variants of the Wav2vec2.0 XLS-R model: 300M and 1B parameters. Moreover, we performed a global sensitivity analysis to assess the contribution of various hyperparametric configurations to the performances of our best models. Importantly, our results show that freeze fine-tuning updates and dropout rate are more vital parameters than the total number of epochs of lr. Additionally, we liberate our best models -- with no other ASR model reported until now for two Wa'ikhana and Kotiria -- and the many experiments performed to pave the way to other researchers to continue improving ASR in minority languages. This insight opens up interesting avenues for future work, allowing for the advancement of ASR techniques in the preservation of minority indigenous and acknowledging the complexities involved in this important endeavour.

The growing popularity of neural machine translation (NMT) and LLMs represented by ChatGPT underscores the need for a deeper understanding of their distinct characteristics and relationships. Such understanding is crucial for language professionals and researchers to make informed decisions and tactful use of these cutting-edge translation technology, but remains underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating three key questions: (1) the distinguishability of ChatGPT-generated translations from NMT and human translation (HT), (2) the linguistic characteristics of each translation type, and (3) the degree of resemblance between ChatGPT-produced translations and HT or NMT. To achieve these objectives, we employ statistical testing, machine learning algorithms, and multidimensional analysis (MDA) to analyze Spokesperson's Remarks and their translations. After extracting a wide range of linguistic features, supervised classifiers demonstrate high accuracy in distinguishing the three translation types, whereas unsupervised clustering techniques do not yield satisfactory results. Another major finding is that ChatGPT-produced translations exhibit greater similarity with NMT than HT in most MDA dimensions, which is further corroborated by distance computing and visualization. These novel insights shed light on the interrelationships among the three translation types and have implications for the future advancements of NMT and generative AI.

A single language model (LM), despite aligning well with an average labeler through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), may not universally suit diverse human preferences. Recent approaches therefore opt for customization by collecting multi-dimensional feedback and creating distinct reward models (RMs) for each dimension (e.g., helpfulness, harmlessness, or honesty). Different LMs can then be optimized for different preferences using multi-objective RLHF (MORLHF) with different reward weightings. Yet, RL fine-tuning is unstable and resource-heavy, especially for MORLHF with diverse and usually conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO), an RL-free algorithm that extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for multiple alignment objectives with minimal overheads. Essentially, MODPO folds language modeling directly into reward modeling, training LMs as implicit collective reward models (cRMs) that combine all objectives with specific weightings. While theoretically guaranteed to produce the same optimal solutions as MORLHF, MODPO is practically more stable and computationally efficient. Empirical results from safety alignment and long-form question answering confirm that MODPO matches or outperforms existing methods, consistently producing a Pareto front of LMs that cater to diverse preferences with 3 times less computational resources compared to MORLHF.

This paper presents the creation of initial bilingual corpora for thirteen very low-resource languages of India, all from Northeast India. It also presents the results of initial translation efforts in these languages. It creates the first-ever parallel corpora for these languages and provides initial benchmark neural machine translation results for these languages. We intend to extend these corpora to include a large number of low-resource Indian languages and integrate the effort with our prior work with African and American-Indian languages to create corpora covering a large number of languages from across the world.

Machine translation (MT) is routinely evaluated using various segment-level similarity metrics against one or more reference translations. At the same time, reference translations acquired in the standard way are often criticized for their flaws of various types. For several high-resourced language pairs, MT quality reaches levels comparable to the quality of the reference translation (Freitag et al. 2022; Hassan et al. 2018) and sometimes MT even significantly surpasses humans in a particular evaluation setting (Popel et al. 2020). Given this, one could conclude that state-of-the-art MT has reached the point where reference-based evaluation is no longer reliable and we have to resort to other methods (such as targeted expert evaluation of particular outputs), even if they are costly, subjective and possibly impossible to automate. The narrow goal of the presented work is to allow for an "extension of the expiry date" for reference-based evaluation methods. In a broader perspective, we want to formulate a methodology for creating reference translations which avoid the often-observed deficiencies of "standard" or "professional" reference translations, be it multiple interfering phenomena, inappropriate expressions, ignorance of topic-focus articulation (information structure) or other abundant shortcomings in the translation, indicating their authors' insensitivity to the topic itself, but above all to the source and target language. To this end, we introduce so-called optimal reference translations (ORT), which are intended to represent optimal (ideal or excellent) human translations (should they be the subject of a translation quality evaluation).

Accurate rainfall forecasting is crucial for effective disaster preparedness and mitigation in the North-East region of India, which is prone to extreme weather events such as floods and landslides. In this study, we investigated the use of two data-driven methods, Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), for rainfall forecasting using daily rainfall data collected from India Meteorological Department in northeast region over a period of 118 years. We conducted a comparative analysis of these methods to determine their relative effectiveness in predicting rainfall patterns. Using historical rainfall data from multiple weather stations, we trained and validated our models to forecast future rainfall patterns. Our results indicate that both DMD and LSTM are effective in forecasting rainfall, with LSTM outperforming DMD in terms of accuracy, revealing that LSTM has the ability to capture complex nonlinear relationships in the data, making it a powerful tool for rainfall forecasting. Our findings suggest that data-driven methods such as DMD and deep learning approaches like LSTM can significantly improve rainfall forecasting accuracy in the North-East region of India, helping to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events and enhance the region's resilience to climate change.