This research aims to optimize intricate learning models by implementing quantization and bit-depth optimization techniques. The objective is to significantly cut time complexity while preserving model efficiency, thus addressing the challenge of extended execution times in intricate models. Two medical datasets were utilized as case studies to apply a Logistic Regression (LR) machine learning model. Using efficient quantization and bit depth optimization strategies the input data is downscaled from float64 to float32 and int32. The results demonstrated a significant reduction in time complexity, with only a minimal decrease in model accuracy post-optimization, showcasing the state-of-the-art optimization approach. This comprehensive study concludes that the impact of these optimization techniques varies depending on a set of parameters.

In regions like Punjab, India, where groundwater levels are plummeting at 41.6 cm/year, adopting water-saving rice farming practices is critical. Direct-Seeded Rice (DSR) and Alternate Wetting and Drying (A WD) can cut irrigation water use by 20-40% without hurting yields, yet lack of spatial data on adoption impedes effective adaptation policy and climate action. We present a machine learning framework to bridge this data gap by monitoring sustainable rice farming at scale. In collaboration with agronomy experts and a large-scale farmer training program, we obtained ground-truth data from 1,400 fields across Punjab. Leveraging this partnership, we developed a novel dimensional classification approach that decouples sowing and irrigation practices, achieving F1 scores of 0.8 and 0.74 respectively, solely employing Sentinel-1 satellite imagery. Explainability analysis reveals that DSR classification is robust while A WD classification depends primarily on planting schedule differences, as Sentinel-1's 12-day revisit frequency cannot capture the higher frequency irrigation cycles characteristic of A WD practices. Applying this model across 3 million fields reveals spatial heterogeneity in adoption at the state level, highlighting gaps and opportunities for policy targeting. Our district-level adoption rates correlate well with government estimates (Spearman's ρ=0.69 and Rank Biased Overlap=0.77). This study provides policymakers and sustainability programs a powerful tool to track practice adoption, inform targeted interventions, and drive data-driven policies for water conservation and climate mitigation at regional scale.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization across multimodal tasks, yet most evaluation benchmarks remain Western-centric, leaving open questions about their performance in culturally diverse and multilingual settings. To address this gap, we introduce IndicVisionBench, the first large-scale benchmark centered on the Indian subcontinent. Our final benchmark consists of a total of 5K images and 37K+ QA pairs across 13 culturally grounded topics. In addition, we release a paired parallel corpus of annotations across 10 Indic languages, creating a unique resource for analyzing cultural and linguistic biases in VLMs. We evaluate a broad spectrum of 8 models, from proprietary closed-source systems to open-weights medium and large-scale models. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gaps, underscoring the limitations of current VLMs in culturally diverse contexts. By centering cultural diversity and multilinguality, IndicVisionBench establishes a reproducible evaluation framework that paves the way for more inclusive multimodal research. Vision-language models (VLMs) (Bai et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2024; Lu et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2024b; Laurenc on et al., 2024; Tong et al., 2024; Xue et al., 2024) have demonstrated strong performance across a variety of multimodal tasks. However, existing benchmarks (Antol et al., 2015; Fu et al., 2023; Goyal et al., 2017) remain heavily Western-centric, limiting our understanding of how these models generalize to culturally diverse and multilingual settings. While some recent efforts partially cover this diversity (Romero et al., 2024; Nayak et al., 2024; V ayani et al., 2025), a systematic, large-scale benchmark capturing India-specific cultural concepts across multiple languages is still lacking. To address this gap, we introduce IndicVisionBench, a culturally grounded evaluation benchmark tailored for the Indian subcontinent. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale benchmark explicitly designed to assess VLMs in the context of Indian culture and languages. We use states as a proxy for cultural groups following prior works (Adilazuarda et al., 2024; Nayak et al., 2024).

The rapid advancement of large language models(LLMs) has intensified the need for domain and culture specific evaluation. Existing benchmarks are largely Anglocentric and domain-agnostic, limiting their applicability to India-centric contexts. To address this gap, we introduce BhashaBench V1, the first domain-specific, multi-task, bilingual benchmark focusing on critical Indic knowledge systems. BhashaBench V1 contains 74,166 meticulously curated question-answer pairs, with 52,494 in English and 21,672 in Hindi, sourced from authentic government and domain-specific exams. It spans four major domains: Agriculture, Legal, Finance, and Ayurveda, comprising 90+ subdomains and covering 500+ topics, enabling fine-grained evaluation. Evaluation of 29+ LLMs reveals significant domain and language specific performance gaps, with especially large disparities in low-resource domains. For instance, GPT-4o achieves 76.49% overall accuracy in Legal but only 59.74% in Ayurveda. Models consistently perform better on English content compared to Hindi across all domains. Subdomain-level analysis shows that areas such as Cyber Law, International Finance perform relatively well, while Panchakarma, Seed Science, and Human Rights remain notably weak. BhashaBench V1 provides a comprehensive dataset for evaluating large language models across India's diverse knowledge domains. It enables assessment of models' ability to integrate domain-specific knowledge with bilingual understanding. All code, benchmarks, and resources are publicly available to support open research.

Governance of data, compliance, and business privacy matters, particularly for healthcare and finance businesses. Since the recent emergence of AI enterprise AI assistants enhancing business productivity, safeguarding private data and compliance is now a priority. With the implementation of AI assistants across the enterprise, the zero data retention can be achieved by implementing zero data retention policies by Large Language Model businesses like Open AI and Anthropic and Meta. In this work, we explore zero data retention policies for the Enterprise apps of large language models (LLMs). Our key contribution is defining the architectural, compliance, and usability trade-offs of such systems in parallel. In this research work, we examine the development of commercial AI assistants with two industry leaders and market titans in this arena - Salesforce and Microsoft. Both of these companies used distinct technical architecture to support zero data retention policies. Salesforce AgentForce and Microsoft Copilot are among the leading AI assistants providing much-needed push to business productivity in customer care. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the technical architecture and deployment of zero data retention policy by consuming applications as well as big language models service providers like Open Ai, Anthropic, and Meta.

The Mar Menor, Europe's largest coastal lagoon, located in Spain, has undergone severe eutrophication crises. Monitoring chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) is essential to anticipate harmful algal blooms and guide mitigation. Traditional in situ measurements are spatially and temporally limited. Satellite-based approaches provide a more comprehensive view, enabling scalable, long-term, and transferable monitoring. This study aims to overcome limitations of chlorophyll monitoring, often restricted to surface estimates or limited temporal coverage, by developing a reliable methodology to predict and map Chl-a across the water column of the Mar Menor. The work integrates Sentinel 2 imagery with buoy-based ground truth to create models capable of high-resolution, depth-specific monitoring, enhancing early-warning capabilities for eutrophication. Nearly a decade of Sentinel 2 images was atmospherically corrected using C2RCC processors. Buoy data were aggregated by depth (0-1 m, 1-2 m, 2-3 m, 3-4 m). Multiple ML and DL algorithms-including RF, XGBoost, CatBoost, Multilater Perceptron Networks, and ensembles-were trained and validated using cross-validation. Systematic band-combination experiments and spatial aggregation strategies were tested to optimize prediction. Results show depth-dependent performance. At the surface, C2X-Complex with XGBoost and ensemble models achieved R2 = 0.89; at 1-2 m, CatBoost and ensemble models reached R2 = 0.87; at 2-3 m, TOA reflectances with KNN performed best (R2 = 0.81); while at 3-4 m, RF achieved R2 = 0.66. Generated maps successfully reproduced known eutrophication events (e.g., 2016 crisis, 2025 surge), confirming robustness. The study delivers an end-to-end, validated methodology for depth-specific Chl-amapping. Its integration of multispectral band combinations, buoy calibration, and ML/DL modeling offers a transferable framework for other turbid coastal systems.

This paper contains examples of stereotypes that may be offensive.

The growth of highly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) constitutes a huge dual-use problem, making it necessary to create dependable AI-generated text detection systems. Modern detectors are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks, with paraphrasing standing out as an effective evasion technique that foils statistical detection. This paper presents a comparative study of adversarial robustness, first by quantifying the limitations of standard adversarial training and then by introducing a novel, significantly more resilient detection framework: Perturbation-Invariant Feature Engineering (PIFE), a framework that enhances detection by first transforming input text into a standardized form using a multi-stage normalization pipeline, it then quantifies the transformation's magnitude using metrics like Levenshtein distance and semantic similarity, feeding these signals directly to the classifier. We evaluate both a conventionally hardened Transformer and our PIFE-augmented model against a hierarchical taxonomy of character-, word-, and sentence-level attacks. Our findings first confirm that conventional adversarial training, while resilient to syntactic noise, fails against semantic attacks, an effect we term "semantic evasion threshold", where its True Positive Rate at a strict 1% False Positive Rate plummets to 48.8%. In stark contrast, our PIFE model, which explicitly engineers features from the discrepancy between a text and its canonical form, overcomes this limitation. It maintains a remarkable 82.6% TPR under the same conditions, effectively neutralizing the most sophisticated semantic attacks. This superior performance demonstrates that explicitly modeling perturbation artifacts, rather than merely training on them, is a more promising path toward achieving genuine robustness in the adversarial arms race.

We introduce DRISHTIKON, a first-of-its-kind multimodal and multilingual benchmark centered exclusively on Indian culture, designed to evaluate the cultural understanding of generative AI systems. Unlike existing benchmarks with a generic or global scope, DRISHTIKON offers deep, fine-grained coverage across India's diverse regions, spanning 15 languages, covering all states and union territories, and incorporating over 64,000 aligned text-image pairs. The dataset captures rich cultural themes including festivals, attire, cuisines, art forms, and historical heritage amongst many more. We evaluate a wide range of vision-language models (VLMs), including open-source small and large models, proprietary systems, reasoning-specialized VLMs, and Indic-focused models, across zero-shot and chain-of-thought settings. Our results expose key limitations in current models' ability to reason over culturally grounded, multimodal inputs, particularly for low-resource languages and less-documented traditions. DRISHTIKON fills a vital gap in inclusive AI research, offering a robust testbed to advance culturally aware, multimodally competent language technologies.