Research

Learning Systems guided by Principled Ideas

My research explores machine learning approaches inspired by how intelligent systems learn continually, use similarity and predict future observations.

Research overview

Principled Learning

My doctoral research investigated four learning principles: continual learning, recency, similarity-based learning and predictive coding. The work studied how these principles can improve learning under delayed feedback, multi-task learning and anomaly detection in multivariate time-series data.

  • Continual LearningLearning from streams of data when feedback may be delayed or incomplete.
  • Multi-task LearningUsing task similarity and synthetic auxiliary tasks to improve performance.
  • Predictive CodingLearning useful representations by predicting future observations.
  • Computer VisionApplications in image understanding, medical imaging and adaptive models.

Publications

Selected and peer-reviewed work

Publications are listed in reverse chronological order. External links lead to publisher or open-access records.

2022

Virtual Tasks but Real Gains: Improving Multi-Task Learning

Theivendiram Pranavan, Terence Sim and Jianshu Li

26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 4829–4836.

2022

Contrastive Predictive Coding for Anomaly Detection in Multi-variate Time Series Data

Theivendiram Pranavan, Terence Sim, Arulmurugan Ambikapathi and Savitha Ramasamy

arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.03639.

2020

Learning with Delayed Feedback

Theivendiram Pranavan and Terence Sim

25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 4895–4902.

2018

Improving Domain-specific SMT for Low-resourced Languages Using Data from Different Domains

Fathima Farhath, Pranavan Theivendiram, Surangika Ranathunga, Sanath Jayasena and Gihan Dias

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018).

2016

Named-Entity-Recognition for Tamil Language Using Margin-Infused Relaxed Algorithm

Pranavan Theivendiram, Megala Uthayakumar, Nilusija Nadarasamoorthy, Mokanarangan Thayaparan, Sanath Jayasena, Gihan Dias and Surangika Ranathunga

Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing), pp. 465–476.

2016

Tamil Morphological Analyzer Using Support Vector Machines

Mokanarangan Thayaparan, Pranavan Theivendiram, Megala Uthayakumar, Nilusija Nadarasamoorthy, Gihan Dias, Sanath Jayasena and Surangika Ranathunga

Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB), pp. 15–23.

Research collaboration and student projects

I welcome conversations around Continual Learning, Representation Learning, Computer Vision, Educational Technology and Applied AI systems.