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Somak Aditya

Assistant Professor

Department of CSE, IIT KGP

Biography

Latest News
  • I am looking for motivated full-time Ph.D students who are interested in pursuing their thesis in the exciting juncture of classical and statistical AI (often dubbed as neuro-symbolic methods).

I am an Assistant Professor (Grade I) at IIT Kharagpur Department of CSE. I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research India advised by Dr. Monojit Choudhury. Prior to joining MSR India, I spent 1.5 years in Adobe Research as a full-time Researcher. I completed by Ph.D from CIDSE, Arizona State University in June 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Chitta Baral and Prof. Yezhou Yang.

Deployable AI systems should be able to reason with knowledge that is commonplace to humans. Thus, my research aims to enhance, evaluate, and explain different types of complex reasoning abilities of AI systems. At MSRI, I explored evaluation and enhancement of reasoning capabilities of Transformers-based language models. Apart from end-to-end reasoning, I am paralley exploring multi-hop reasoning capabilities of neural methods in both symbolic and natural language domains. During my Ph.D, I have explored enhancement of reasoning capabilities of image understanding systems. Through a combination of Deep Learning, Knowledge Representation, and Probabilistic Logical Reasoning, I demonstrated the benefits of using reasoning and knowledge in Visual Question-Answering, Captioning, image puzzle solving and visual reasoning.

News

[Nov 2023] Tr$^2$AIL Lab: Tr$^2$AILer Sachin Vashishtha won the PMRF scholarship for 2023! Congratulations Sachin!
[Nov 2023] Tr$^2$AIL Lab: Tr$^2$AILer and MTech student Debrup Das's internship with Rakuten India got extended for the second time. He is working now for 8 months funded by Rakuten! Congratulations Debrup!!
[Sep 2023] AACL-IJCNLP 2023: Two Long papers accepted in Main Conference: 1) SYNC: A Structurally guided Hard Negative Curricula for Efficient Neural Code Search (with Atharva Naik, Soumitra Das, Jyothi Vedurada), 2) Prover: Generating Intermediate Steps for NLI with Commonsense Knowledge Retrieval and Next-Step Prediction (with Deepanway Ghosal, Monojit Choudhury). Stay tuned for code and preprints!
[Aug 2023] LREV 2023: LREV Journal on Logical NLI dataset accepted with Ishan Tarunesh and Monojit Choudhury (Updated preprint soon).
[Jul 2023] CS60050: NO DIRECT EMAILS FOR COURSE REGISTRATION WILL BE ENTERTAINED. They may be spammed or even reported.
[Jun 2023] EMNLP 2023: Invited as an Area Chair.
[Jun 2023] AAAI 2024: Invited as a Senior PC member for the second time.
[May 2023] Microsoft: Received the "Accelerate Foundation Models Academic Research" 2023 by Microsoft jointly with Prof. Animesh Mukherjee. This comes with large Azure credits and OpenAI API access.
[May 2023] ACL 2023: Our work on "A Robust Information-Masking Approach for Domain Counterfactual Generation" with Prof. Soujanya Poria, Pengfei Hong, Rishabh Bhardwaj, and Navonil Majumdar. Full credit goes to my co-authors!!!
[Apr 2023] Ashoka: I was invited to give a talk at Ashoka University for the AI@Ashoka Workshop. The talk slides are available here: AI Progress & Hype under the lens of Reasoning (PDF 14.0 MB size).
[Mar 2023] CS60092 COURSE UPDATE: Recording of GUEST LECTURE BY Dr. Anirudh Kembhavi, Director of Computer Vision at Allen Institute for AI (AI2) is available here.
[Jan 2023] Toloka AI Grant: Received the Toloka AI Annotation Grant of USD 300 for data creation in the Toloka AI platform. Thanks Toloka AI!
[Jan 2023] IIT KGP FSRG: Received the FSRG Grant aproval from IIT Kharagpur on "The Role of Feedback in Vision-Language enabled Embodied Agents towards Application to Disaster Management"!
[Jan 2023] USPTO: Second patent granted (filed during Adobe Research) on Marketing Knowledge Graph Creation! Congratulations to my co-author (/co-inventor) Dr. Atanu Sinha!
[Jan 2023] CS60092 COURSE UPDATE: INVITED GUEST LECTURE BY Dr. Anirudh Kembhavi, Director of Computer Vision at Allen Institute for AI (AI2) on MARCH 13, MONDAY confirmed!!
[Dec 2022] IndoML 2022: My invited talk on "The Relevance of Representation and Reasoning in the era of (Large) Language Models" is available here.
[Sep 2022] AACL-IJCNLP 2022: Two papers accepted. "Multilingual CheckList: Generation and Evaluation" in AACL Findings and "Vector Space Interpolation for Query Expansion" as a short paper. Kudos to the all my co-authors! Stay tuned for preprints.
[Sep 2022] SERB DST: Startup Research Grant on "Learning from Rules and Data for Image Analytics" got Approved!
[Aug 2022] New Prerpint: Generating Intermediate Steps for NLI with Next-Step Supervision. We show how intermediate steps/proof tree can help. The work is under review. Code and website to be public soon.
[Jul 2022] AAAI 2023: Honored to be serving as a Senior PC member for AAAI 2023!
[Apr 2022] I was promoted to Assistant Professor Grade-I (effective from Nov 29, 2021).
[Feb 2022] Rakuten Institute of Technology: Invited Talk on "Evolution of Representation and Reasoning in the era of Deep Learning".
[Jan 2022] Google India: USD 5K Google Cloud Credits Award.
[Dec 2021] MSR India SNLP Group: Invited End-of-Postdoc Talk..
[Nov 2021] IIT KGP: Joined IIT KGP as Assistant Professor.
[Oct 2021] AAAI 2022 (Demo): LITMUS Predictor: An AI Assistant for Building Reliable, High-performing and Fair Multilingual NLP Systems accepted in AAAI 2022 Demonstrations track (joint work with the Speech and NLP group at MSR India).
[Oct 2021] IndoML 2021: IndoML Datathon registration is open for students. Lucrative cash prize, and a series of exciting talks by thought leaders in ML/NLP awaits you! So go forth and register.
[Oct 2021] EMNLP 2021 (MRL Workshop): TaxiXNLI dataset released publicly!
[Sep 2021] EMNLP 2021 (MRL workshop): Work on "Analyzing the Effects of Reasoning Types on Cross-Lingual Transfer Performance" accepted, with co-authors Karthikeyan K, Aalok Sathe and Monojit Choudhury.
[Aug 2021] MILA Philosophy of NLP Reading Group: Invited as a speaker.
[Aug 2021] IndoML 2021: Invited to be a part of the organizing committee (specifically datathon@IndoML). See IndoML 2020 for reference.
[Aug 2021] NeurIPS-2021 MathAI4ED: Invited as a PC member.
[Aug 2021] Invited Lecture at IEEE SPS Deep Learning Summer School on "The Interplay between Deep Learning, Logic, and Reasoning"
[Jun 2021] CIKM 2021: Workshop CfP for "Knowledge Injection in Neural Networks" is now public! Please consider submitting!!
[Jun 2021] Seminar at IIT-Hyderabad CSE on "Explicit Knowledge and Reasoning in the era of Deep Learning"
[May 2021] Seminar at IIT-Kharagpur CSE on "Explicit Knowledge and Reasoning in the era of Deep Learning".
[May 2021] Seminar at IIT-Kharagpur Center for AI on "Explicit Knowledge and Reasoning in the era of Deep Learning".
[Mar 2021] ICLR 2021 (MathAI workshop): Work on "Analyzing The Nuances of Transformers' Polynomial Simplification Abilities" accepted, with co-authors Vishesh Agarwal, and Navin Goyal.
[Mar 2021] IJCAI 2021: Workshop CfP for "Is Neuro-symbolic SOTA still a myth for NLI" is now public! Please consider submitting!!
[Mar 2021] IJCAI 2021: Workshop proposoal on "Is Neuro-symbolic SOTA still a myth for NLI" accepted with co-organizers Maria Chang, Swarat Chaudhuri, Monojit Choudhury, and Sebastijan Dumancic.
[Mar 2021] ICLR 2021 (MathAI workshop): Invited as PC member.
[Dec 2020] ACL-IJCNLP-2021: Invited as PC member.
[Nov 2020] CoNLL 2020: Our pre-recorded talk on TaxiNLI is online. Hope you enjoy (modulo my lack of expressions :))!
[Oct 2020] NAACL-2021: Invited as PC Member.
[Oct 2020] CoNLL-2020: TaxiNLI dataset released publicly!
[Sep 2020] CoNLL-2020: TaxiNLI: Taking a ride up the NLU Hill accepted at CoNLL.
[Aug 2020] EACL-2021: Invited as PC Member.
[Mar 2020] EMNLP-20: Invited as PC Member.
[Mar 2020] LANTERN@COLING-20: Invited as PC Member.
[Feb 2020] Joined MSR India as a Postdoc Researcher.
[Jan 2020] ACL-20: Invited as PC Member.
[Dec 2019] USPTO: "Knowledge-sharing between cross-domain Agents" work approved internally to be filed..
[Dec 2019] AAAI-20: "Uncovering Relations for Marketing Knowledge Representation" accepted in StarAI workshop full paper.
[Dec 2019] IJCAI-20: Invited as PC Member.
[Oct 2019] AAAI-20: Exploratory Navigation and Selective Readoing got accepted as AAAI demo.
[Sep 2019] Adobe News: Knowledge Graph Research appears in Adobe News !
[Aug 2019] AAAI-20: Invited as an AAAI 2020 PC Member!
[Aug 2019] IJCAI-19: Invited as an IJCAI DC Career Panelist!
[Aug 2019] IJCAI-19: Our work on Integrating Knowledge and Reasoning in Image Understanding" got accepted in IJCAI 2019 Survey!
[May 2019] USPTO: First patent on Marketing Knowledge Graph Creation approved!
[Nov 2018] WACV-19: Our work on "Spatial Knowledge Distillation on Visual Reasoning" got accepted in WACV 2019!
[Oct 2018] KR-19: We had a successful workshop filled with intersting talks from researchers from University of Leeds, IBM Research US, University of Adelaide and Army Research Lab. Their talks are avaibale at: .
[Aug 2018] My doctoral dissertation is now publicly available for download in the ASU Digital Repostory.
[Aug 2018] UAI-18: We presented this poster for "Combining Knowledge and Reasoning through Probabilistic Soft Logic for Image Puzzle Solving" in UAI 2018.
[June 2018] Successfully defended my thesis. My slides are available on dropbox.
[June 2018] Published the Image Riddles code for public use that was used in UAI-18 work. Visit Github.
[June 2018] Published the PSL engine code for public use that was used in AAAI-18 work. Visit Github.
[May 2018] UAI-18: Our paper on Image Riddles is accepted in UAI 2018 (30% acceptance rate).
[May 2018] Invited as a reviewer in Robotics and Autonomus Systems journal.
[May 2018] Our Website for KR-2018 workshop is live! Please consider submitting to the workshop.
[Mar 2018] We are organizing the first workshop on "Induce and Deduce: Integrating learning of representations and models with deductive, explainable reasoning that leverages knowledge" in KR 2018 (Phoenix, 27-29 Oct). Website coming soon!
[Mar 2018] I am awarded the University Graduate Fellowship for Spring 2018 for the third time. Thank you ASU, CIDSE!
[Feb 2018] AAAI-18: Presented our work on "Explicit Reasoning over End-to-End Neural Architectures" in AAAI 2018.
[Jan 2018] ASU SW Robotics Symposium-18: Presented our work on "Explicit Reasoning over End-to-End Neural Architectures" in ASU SouthWest Robotics Symposium. The work was nominated for Best Abstract award.
[Dec 2017] CVIU-17: Our accepted manuscript in CVIU is now available online: "Image Understanding using Vision and Reasoning through Scene Description Graph"
[Dec 2017] CVIU-17: Our work "Image Understanding using Vision and Reasoning through Scene Description Graph" has been accepted in the reputed Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU) journal.
[Nov 2017] Our Work on Explicit Reasoning over End-To-End Neural Architectures has been accepted in AAAI 2018 (Acceptance Rate: 24.5%, 933 accepted out of 3.8k).
[Nov 2017] Vision and Reasoning Website is live.
[Oct 2017] Invited as a reviewer for The Visual Computer journal.
[July 2017] Work on Image Riddles accepted as Extended Abstract on Vision Meets Cognition Workshop, CVPR 2017.
[May 2017] Thesis proposal accepted, and officially advanced to candidacy.
[May 2017] Joined JDE, Verisk Analytics as Cognitive Analytics and Machine Learning Research Intern, under Dr. Maneesh Singh, Director, JDE, Cognitive Analytics.
[May 2017] Unofficially a Ph.D. Candidate, after successfully defending my proposal on "Knowledge and Reasoning in Image Understanding".
[May 2017] Invited as a review-assistant for IJCAI 2017.
[March 2017] Awarded University Graduate Fellowship for Spring 2017 from ASU, for the third time.
[Feb 2017] Attended AAAI-2017 (DC and the main Conference). Great to know that people are interested in Vision and Reasoning approaches. Here is the poster I presented at the main conference.

Projects

NeuroSymbolic Reasoning

We investigate how to combine neural networks, logical systems to perform complex reasoning (agnostic of modalities)

Symbolic Mathematics

We explore multi-hop reasoning capabilities of Transformer/GNN methods in purely symbolic domains.

Reasoning in NLP

We investigate how to evaluate, explain and enhance neural models under the lens of reasoning.

Vision and Reasoning

In this project, we explore how reasoning with knowledge enhance image understanding.

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