Sarthak Kumar Maharana

I'm a second-year CS PhD student at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), advised by Dr. Yunhui Guo. Before this, I obtained my MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) and a Bachelor's degree from IIIT Bhubaneswar (IIIT-Bh), India, with an honors degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

My research focuses on enhancing model robustness, adaptability, and generalization to rapid distributional shifts during deployment, with an emphasis on continual learning. Additionally, I am engaged in projects on active learning for 3D object detection/segmentation and machine unlearning in generative models.

During my Masters, I closely worked with Dr. Yonggang Shi. Previously, I had also worked with Dr. Shri Narayanan. As an undergraduate, I was fortunate enough to work with Dr. Ren Hongliang (NUS), Dr. Prasanta Kumar Ghosh (IISc), and Dr. Aurobinda Routray (IIT-Kharagpur).

I'm happy to chat and discuss potential collaborations. Feel free to contact me.

Email / CV / Google Scholar / Github / LinkedIn

Nov '24	Serving as a CVPR 2025 reviewer!
Oct '24	Variational Diffusion Unlearning (VDU) is accepted to the NeurIPS SafeGenAI workshop 2024!
Sep '24	Our paper on submodular optimization for active 3D object detection has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024!
Aug '24	Serving as a reviewer for ICLR 2025.
Jul '24	Our paper on DNN watermarking has been accepted to ECCV 2024!
May '24	Serving as a reviewer for BMVC 2024.
Mar '24	Serving as a reviewer for CVPR 2024 Workshop on Test-Time Adaptation: Model, Adapt Thyself! (MAT).
Feb '24	Serving as a reviewer for ECCV 2024.
Jan '24	Our paper on SSL features for dysarthric speech has been accepted to the SASB workshop @ ICASSP 2024!
Jan '24	I am glad to be selected to attend the MLx Representation Learning and Generative AI Oxford Summer School.

Continual/Lifelong learning.
Data and parameter-efficient deep learning, model robustness, and adaptation.
General ML and computer vision.
Human-centered AI, which includes multi-modal machine learning with applications to speech and medical images.

First author works are highlighted.

Variational Diffusion Unlearning: A Variational Inference Framework for Unlearning in Diffusion Models
Subhodip Panda, MS Varun, Shreyans Jain, Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Prathosh AP
NeurIPS Safe Generative AI Workshop 2024

[Paper]

Machine unlearning of user-specific classes/concepts in pre-trained diffusion models (DDPMs).

STONE: A Submodular Optimization Framework for Active 3D Object Detection
Ruiyu Mao, Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Rishabh K Iyer, Yunhui Guo
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024

[Paper] [Code]

Submodular optimization scheme to handle data imbalance and label distributional coverage for active 3D object detection.

PALM: Pushing Adaptive Learning Rate Mechanisms for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Baoming Zhang, Yunhui Guo

[arXiv]

Adaptive learning rate continual test-time adaptation method based on model prediction uncertainty and parameter sensitivity to rapid distributional shifts.

Not Just Change the Labels, Learn the Features: Watermarking Deep Neural Networks with Multi-View Data
Yuxuan Li, Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Yunhui Guo
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2024

[Paper] [Code]

Novel watermarking technique based on multi-view data for defending against model extraction attacks.

Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion for Dysarthric Speech: Are Pre-Trained Self-Supervised Representations Favorable?
Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Krishna Kamal Adidam, Shoumik Nandi, Ajitesh Srivastava
ICASSP 2024 Workshops - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) Workshop on Self-supervision in Audio, Speech and Beyond (SASB) 2024

[Paper] [Poster]

Effectiveness of pre-trained self-supervised learning representations for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion of dysarthric speech.

Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion for Dysarthric Speech by Using Cross-Corpus Acoustic-Articulatory Data
Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Aravind Illa, Renuka Mannem, Yamini Bellur, Veeramani Preethish Kumar, Seena Vengalil, Kiran Polavarapu, Nalini Atchayaram, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh
IEEE International Conference of Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2021

[BibTeX] [Paper] [Code] [Video]

Joint and multi-corpus training for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion of dysarthric speech, using x-vectors, at low-resource data conditions.

Harmonics analysis of a PV integrated hysteresis current control inverter connected with grid and without grid
Jayanta Kumar Sahu, Sudhakar Sahu, J.P Patra, Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Bhagabat Panda
IEEE International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT) 2019

[BibTeX] [Paper]

Harmonics analysis of a PV integrated hysteresis current control inverter connected with grid and without grid.

	The University of Texas at Dallas Research Assistant Richardson, TX Aug 2023 - Present Supervisor - Dr. Yunhui Guo Activities - Currently working on problems related to efficient model fine-tuning and continual test-time domain adaptation.
	University of Southern California Student Researcher Los Angeles, CA May 2022 - July 2023 Supervisor - Dr. Yonggang Shi Activities - Developed an end-to-end general software tool to automate the reconstruction of fiber bundles in the brainstem of the human brain, using diffusion MRI images, for the HCP Aging dataset (to be publicly released soon). Leveraged deep learning based registration and label fusion methods to automatically generate the anatomical ROIs that are critical for fiber bundle reconstruction.
	University of Southern California Student Researcher Los Angeles, CA Dec 2021 - Dec 2022 Supervisor - Dr. Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan Activities - Performed speaker recognition from rt-MRI videos, based on an unsupervised disentanglement representation learning scheme. Contributed to the development of generating embeddings from 2D sagittal-view rt-MRI videos to distinguish between speakers based on their articulatory representations from vocal tract landmarks.
	National University of Singapore Part-time Research Assistant Remote July 2020 - Apr 2021 Supervisor - Dr. Ren Hongliang Activities - Experimented with different encoder-decoder architectures (ex. LinkNet) by plugging in spatio-temporal modules (ex. convLSTM) to perform pixel-wise prediction of the needle trajectory in ultrasound images during a kidney biopsy. Proposed the integration of a DGMN (Dynamic Graph Message Passing) network in DGCN (Dual Graph Convolutional Network), for efficient semantic segmentation, to model long-range dependencies in an OCT image.
	Indian Institute of Science Bachelor's Thesis and Student Researcher Bangalore, India Dec 2019 - Sep 2020 Supervisor - Dr. Prasanta Ghosh Activities - Studied acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) model’s performance on the dysarthric speech when the model was trained in a corpus dependent manner using a matched low-resource dysarthric corpus or using a mismatched cross-corpus with rich acoustic-articulatory data. Investigated the benefit of utilizing cross-corpus acoustic-articulatory data using transfer learning and joint-training techniques for the articulatory predictions of dysarthric subjects.
	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur Summer Research Intern Kharagpur, India May 2019 - Jul 2019 Supervisor - Dr. Aurobinda Routray Activities - Developed an in-house template matching algorithm, of various phases, to detect breaths in speech recordings using end-to-end deep neural networks. Employed a heuristic technique to join close predicted breath segments, and segments below a certain threshold were removed, for postprocessing and to remove any misclassification errors.

Reviewer - CVPR 2025, ICLR 2025, NeurIPS Workshops 2024, BMVC 2024, ECCV 2024, CVPR Workshops 2024, AAAI 2024
Building CORD.ai, a deep learning research community, as a core member and volunteer researcher.

I'm a cis male.
I consider myself lucky to have grown up in two beautiful cities in India - Bangalore and Bhubaneswar, that have infused in me a lot of character and development. I've also spent two quality years in the vibrant, diverse, gently warm, and sprawling city of Los Angeles, California. Absolutely look forward to staying in new places and experiencing different cultures.
I'm a HUGE fan of the classical formats of cricket. You'd often find me watching old test match highlights or SRT straight drives. Nothing can get more sublime than that. I bet! I don't consider IPL/T20 cricket as a thing AT ALL.
I think mobile photography is like a side gig for me? My phone instantly comes out the moment my eyes catch sight of a beautiful view.
I also spend a lot of time in quality humor - dark humor per se. We could talk about that later.

Source code by Jon Barron.