Akash Kumar

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Stable Mean Teacher for Semi-supervised Video Action Detection

• Akash Kumar
• Sirshapan Mitra
• Yogesh Singh Rawat

In this work, we focus on semi-supervised learning for video action detection. Video action detection requires spatio-temporal localization in addition to classification, and a limited amount of labels makes the model prone to unreliable predictions. We present Stable Mean Teacher, a simple end-to-end student-teacher-based framework that benefits from improved and temporally consistent pseudo labels. It relies on a novel ErrOr Recovery (EoR) module, which learns from students' mistakes on labeled samples and transfers this to the teacher to improve pseudo labels for unlabeled samples. Moreover, existing spatio-temporal losses do not take temporal coherency into account and are prone to temporal inconsistencies. To overcome this, we present Difference of Pixels (DoP), a simple and novel constraint focused on temporal consistency, which leads to coherent temporal detections. We evaluate our approach on four different spatio-temporal detection benchmarks: UCF101-24, JHMDB21, AVA, and Youtube-VOS. Our approach outperforms the supervised baselines for action detection by an average margin of 23.5% on UCF101-24, 16% on JHMDB21, and 3.3% on AVA. Using merely 10% and 20% of data, it provides a competitive performance compared to the supervised baseline trained on 100% annotations on UCF101-24 and JHMDB21 respectively. We further evaluate its effectiveness on AVA for scaling to large-scale datasets and Youtube-VOS for video object segmentation, demonstrating its generalization capability to other tasks in the video domain.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

The Complexity of Learning Sparse Superposed Features with Feedback

• Akash Kumar

The success of deep networks is crucially attributed to their ability to capture latent features within a representation space. In this work, we investigate whether the underlying learned features of a model can be efficiently retrieved through feedback from an agent, such as a large language model (LLM), in the form of relative triplet comparisons. These features may represent various constructs, including dictionaries in LLMs or components of a covariance matrix of Mahalanobis distances. We analyze the feedback complexity associated with learning a feature matrix in sparse settings. Our results establish tight bounds when the agent is permitted to construct activations and demonstrate strong upper bounds in sparse scenarios when the agent’s feedback is limited to distributional information. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on two distinct applications: feature recovery from Recursive Feature Machine-trained models and dictionary extraction from sparse autoencoders trained on Large Language Models.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Semi-supervised Active Learning for Video Action Detection

• Ayush Singh
• Aayush J Rana
• Akash Kumar
• Shruti Vyas
• Yogesh Singh Rawat

In this work, we focus on label efficient learning for video action detection. We develop a novel semi-supervised active learning approach which utilizes both labeled as well as un- labeled data along with informative sample selection for ac- tion detection. Video action detection requires spatio-temporal localization along with classification, which poses several challenges for both active learning (informative sample se- lection) as well as semi-supervised learning (pseudo label generation). First, we propose NoiseAug, a simple augmenta- tion strategy which effectively selects informative samples for video action detection. Next, we propose fft-attention, a novel technique based on high-pass filtering which enables effective utilization of pseudo label for SSL in video action detection by emphasizing on relevant activity region within a video. We evaluate the proposed approach on three different bench- mark datasets, UCF-101-24, JHMDB-21, and Youtube-VOS. First, we demonstrate its effectiveness on video action detec- tion where the proposed approach outperforms prior works in semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning along with several baseline approaches in both UCF101-24 and JHMDB- 21. Next, we also show its effectiveness on Youtube-VOS for video object segmentation demonstrating its generalization capability for other dense prediction tasks in videos.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Teaching via Best-Case Counterexamples in the Learning-with-Equivalence-Queries Paradigm

• Akash Kumar
• Yuxin Chen
• Adish Singla

We study the sample complexity of teaching, termed as "teaching dimension" (TD) in the literature, for the learning-with-equivalence-queries (LwEQ) paradigm. More concretely, we consider a learner who asks equivalence queries (i. e. , "is the queried hypothesis the target hypothesis? "), and a teacher responds either "yes" or "no" along with a counterexample to the queried hypothesis. This learning paradigm has been extensively studied when the learner receives worst-case or random counterexamples; in this paper, we consider the optimal teacher who picks best-case counterexamples to teach the target hypothesis within a hypothesis class. For this optimal teacher, we introduce LwEQ-TD, a notion of TD capturing the teaching complexity (i. e. , the number of queries made) in this paradigm. We show that a significant reduction in queries can be achieved with best-case counterexamples, in contrast to worst-case or random counterexamples, for different hypothesis classes. Furthermore, we establish new connections of LwEQ-TD to the well-studied notions of TD in the learning-from-samples paradigm.

TCS Journal 2015 Journal Article

Approximation algorithms for digraph width parameters

• Shiva Kintali
• Nishad Kothari
• Akash Kumar