Mental health plays a crucial role in the overall well-being of an individual. In recent years, digital platforms have increasingly been used to expand mental health and emotional support. However, there are persistent challenges related to limited user accessibility, internet connectivity, and data privacy, which highlight the need for an offline, smartphone-based solutions. To address these challenges, we propose EmoSApp (Emotional Support App): an entirely offline, smartphone-based conversational app designed to provide mental health and emotional support. EmoSApp leverages a language model, specifically the LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct, which is fine-tuned and quantized on a custom-curated ``Knowledge Dataset'' comprising 14,582 mental health QA pairs along with multi-turn conversational data, enabling robust domain expertise and fully on-device inference on resource-constrained smartphones. Through qualitative evaluation with students and mental health professionals, we demonstrate that EmoSApp has the ability to respond coherently and empathetically, provide relevant suggestions to user's mental health problems, and maintain interactive dialogue. Additionally, quantitative evaluations on nine commonsense and reasoning benchmarks, along with two mental health specific datasets, demonstrate EmoSApp's effectiveness in low-resource settings. By prioritizing on-device deployment and specialized domain-specific adaptation, EmoSApp serves as a blueprint for future innovations in portable, secure, and highly tailored AI-driven mental health support.

Large language models and multilingual machine translation (MT) systems increasingly drive access to information, yet many languages of the tribal communities remain effectively invisible in these technologies. This invisibility exacerbates existing structural inequities in education, governance, and digital participation. We present AdiBhashaa, a community-driven initiative that constructs the first open parallel corpora and baseline MT systems for four major Indian tribal languages-Bhili, Mundari, Gondi, and Santali. This work combines participatory data creation with native speakers, human-in-the-loop validation, and systematic evaluation of both encoder-decoder MT models and large language models. In addition to reporting technical findings, we articulate how AdiBhashaa illustrates a possible model for more equitable AI research: it centers local expertise, builds capacity among early-career researchers from marginalized communities, and foregrounds human validation in the development of language technologies.

Accurately recognizing human context from smartphone sensor data remains a significant challenge, especially in sedentary settings where activities such as studying, attending lectures, relaxing, and eating exhibit highly similar inertial patterns. Furthermore, social context plays a critical role in understanding user behavior, yet is often overlooked in mobile sensing research. To address these gaps, we introduce LogMe, a mobile sensing application that passively collects smartphone sensor data (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and rotation vector) and prompts users for hourly self-reports capturing both sedentary activity and social context. Using this dual-label dataset, we propose DySTAN (Dynamic Cross-Stitch with Task Attention Network), a multi-task learning framework that jointly classifies both context dimensions from shared sensor inputs. It integrates task-specific layers with cross-task attention to model subtle distinctions effectively. DySTAN improves sedentary activity macro F1 scores by 21.8% over a single-task CNN-BiLSTM-GRU (CBG) model and by 8.2% over the strongest multi-task baseline, Sluice Network (SN). These results demonstrate the importance of modeling multiple, co-occurring context dimensions to improve the accuracy and robustness of mobile context recognition.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown their potential across both general and domain-specific tasks. However, there is a growing concern regarding their lack of sensitivity, factual incorrectness in responses, inconsistent expressions of empathy, bias, hallucinations, and overall inability to capture the depth and complexity of human understanding, especially in low-resource and sensitive domains such as psychology. To address these challenges, our study employs a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs in psychotherapy. We use LLMs to generate precise summaries of motivational interviewing (MI) dialogues and design a two-stage annotation scheme based on key components of the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) framework, namely evocation, collaboration, autonomy, direction, empathy, and a non-judgmental attitude. Using expert-annotated MI dialogues as ground truth, we formulate multi-class classification tasks to assess model performance under progressive prompting techniques, incorporating one-shot and few-shot prompting. Our results offer insights into LLMs' capacity for understanding complex psychological constructs and highlight best practices to mitigate ``semantic drift" in therapeutic settings. Our work contributes not only to the MI community by providing a high-quality annotated dataset to address data scarcity in low-resource domains but also critical insights for using LLMs for precise contextual interpretation in complex behavioral therapy.

Open-world machine learning is an emerging technique in artificial intelligence, where conventional machine learning models often follow closed-world assumptions, which can hinder their ability to retain previously learned knowledge for future tasks. However, automated intelligence systems must learn about novel classes and previously known tasks. The proposed model offers novel learning classes in an open and continuous learning environment. It consists of two different but connected tasks. First, it discovers unknown classes in the data and creates novel classes; next, it learns how to perform class incrementally for each new class. Together, they enable continual learning, allowing the system to expand its understanding of the data and improve over time. The proposed model also outperformed existing approaches in open-world learning. Furthermore, it demonstrated strong performance in continuous learning, achieving a highest average accuracy of 82.54% over four iterations and a minimum accuracy of 65.87%.

Mobile health (mHealth) programs utilize automated voice messages to deliver health information, particularly targeting underserved communities, demonstrating the effectiveness of using mobile technology to disseminate crucial health information to these populations, improving health outcomes through increased awareness and behavioral change. India's Kilkari program delivers vital maternal health information via weekly voice calls to millions of mothers. However, the current random call scheduling often results in missed calls and reduced message delivery. This study presents a field trial of a collaborative bandit algorithm designed to optimize call timing by learning individual mothers' preferred call times. We deployed the algorithm with around $6500$ Kilkari participants as a pilot study, comparing its performance to the baseline random calling approach. Our results demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in call pick-up rates with the bandit algorithm, indicating its potential to enhance message delivery and impact millions of mothers across India. This research highlights the efficacy of personalized scheduling in mobile health interventions and underscores the potential of machine learning to improve maternal health outreach at scale.

Training autonomous driving and navigation systems requires large and diverse point cloud datasets that capture complex edge case scenarios from various dynamic urban settings. Acquiring such diverse scenarios from real-world point cloud data, especially for critical edge cases, is challenging, which restricts system generalization and robustness. Current methods rely on simulating point cloud data within handcrafted 3D virtual environments, which is time-consuming, computationally expensive, and often fails to fully capture the complexity of real-world scenes. To address some of these issues, this research proposes a novel approach that addresses the problem discussed by editing real-world LiDAR scans using semantic mask-based guidance to generate novel synthetic LiDAR point clouds. We incorporate range image projection and semantic mask conditioning to achieve diffusion-based generation. Point clouds are transformed to 2D range view images, which are used as an intermediate representation to enable semantic editing using convex hull-based semantic masks. These masks guide the generation process by providing information on the dimensions, orientations, and locations of objects in the real environment, ensuring geometric consistency and realism. This approach demonstrates high-quality LiDAR point cloud generation, capable of producing complex edge cases and dynamic scenes, as validated on the KITTI-360 dataset. This offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for generating diverse LiDAR data, a step toward improving the robustness of autonomous driving systems.

In particular, LLMs are capable of "lying", knowingly outputting false statements.

Deep learning models for precipitation forecasting often function as black boxes, limiting their adoption in real-world weather prediction. To enhance transparency while maintaining accuracy, we developed an interpretable deep learning framework for short-term precipitation prediction in four major Indian cities: Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata, spanning diverse climate zones. We implemented a hybrid Time-Distributed CNN-ConvLSTM (Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory) architecture, trained on multi-decadal ERA5 reanalysis data. The architecture was optimized for each city with a different number of convolutional filters: Bengaluru (32), Mumbai and Delhi (64), and Kolkata (128). The models achieved root mean square error (RMSE) values of 0.21 mm/day (Bengaluru), 0.52 mm/day (Mumbai), 0.48 mm/day (Delhi), and 1.80 mm/day (Kolkata). Through interpretability analysis using permutation importance, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), temporal occlusion, and counterfactual perturbation, we identified distinct patterns in the model's behavior. The model relied on city-specific variables, with prediction horizons ranging from one day for Bengaluru to five days for Kolkata. This study demonstrates how explainable AI (xAI) can provide accurate forecasts and transparent insights into precipitation patterns in diverse urban environments.

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention for node classification tasks on graph-structured data. However, traditional GNNs primarily focus on adjacency relationships between nodes, often overlooking the role-based characteristics that can provide complementary insights for learning expressive node representations. Existing frameworks for extracting role-based features are largely unsupervised and often fail to translate effectively into downstream predictive tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a hypergraph neural network with a state space model (HGMN). The model integrates role-aware representations into GNNs by combining hypergraph construction with state-space modeling in a principled manner. HGMN employs hypergraph construction techniques to capture higher-order relationships and leverages a learnable mamba transformer mechanism to fuse role-based and adjacency-based embeddings. By exploring two distinct hypergraph construction strategies, degree-based and neighborhood-based, the framework reinforces connectivity among nodes with structural similarity, thereby enriching the learned representations. Furthermore, the inclusion of hypergraph convolution layers enables the model to account for complex dependencies within hypergraph structures. To alleviate the over-smoothing problem encountered in deeper networks, we incorporate residual connections, which improve stability and promote effective feature propagation across layers. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets including OGB, ACM, DBLP, IIP TerroristRel, Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed demonstrate that HGMN consistently outperforms strong baselines in node classification tasks. These results support the claim that explicitly incorporating role-based features within a hypergraph framework offers tangible benefits for node classification tasks.