Divya Kothandaraman
Author directory2026
SVD-Attention: Efficiently Analyzing Attention Blocks in Transformers
Debopam Sanyal | Hongjie Chen | Riya Elizabeth Kuriyan | Arth Tak | Divya Kothandaraman | Akshay Mehra | Joshua Kimball | Alexey Tumanov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Debopam Sanyal | Hongjie Chen | Riya Elizabeth Kuriyan | Arth Tak | Divya Kothandaraman | Akshay Mehra | Joshua Kimball | Alexey Tumanov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Pretrained transformers spend a large share of their inference compute inside self-attention, yet the per-head query-key interaction is structurally low-rank by construction. We ask a diagnostic question: across layers and architectures, which heads actually use the full rank budget on real data, and which do not? We propose SVD-Attention, a post-hoc method that decomposes the per-head interaction matrix Mh and scores every singular mode by both its spectral magnitude and its activation variance across tokens on a small calibration set. The score keeps the modes the head can amplify and that real data actually activates, and discards the rest; the resulting factorization is exact for the retained modes and needs no finetuning. Across seven pretrained models and five task types, the diagnostic finds a task-dependent pattern: redundancy sits in the early to middle layers for sentiment and image classification and for generation, and in the late layers for dense prediction and extractive question answering. It is also predictive: truncating the layers it flags costs at most 1.75 F1, while truncating the same number of layers elsewhere in the same model costs up to 50 F1. SVD-Attention is an analysis tool rather than a compression method: acting on it reduces inference FLOPs by 0.8-1.5% on its own and by 8-11% when composed with weight pruning, with 0-4% change in task quality. We release the code at https://github.com/riksanyal/SVD-Attention.
2025
Imposter: Text and Frequency Guidance for Subject Driven Action Personalization using Diffusion Models
Divya Kothandaraman | Kuldeep Kulkarni | Sumit Shekhar | Balaji Vasan Srinivasan | Dinesh Manocha
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Divya Kothandaraman | Kuldeep Kulkarni | Sumit Shekhar | Balaji Vasan Srinivasan | Dinesh Manocha
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
We present ImPoster, a novel algorithm for generating a target image of a ‘source’ subject performing a ‘driving’ action. The inputs to our algorithm are a single pair of a source image with the subject that we wish to edit and a driving image with a subject of an arbitrary class performing the driving action, along with the text descriptions of the two images. Our approach is completely unsupervised and does not require any access to additional annotations like keypoints or pose. Our approach builds on a pretrained text-to-image latent diffusion model and learns the characteristics of the source and the driving image by finetuning the diffusion model for a small number of iterations. At inference time, ImPoster performs step-wise text prompting i.e. it denoises by first moving in the direction of the image manifold corresponding to the driving image followed by the direction of the image manifold corresponding to the text description of the desired target image. We propose a novel diffusion guidance formulation, image frequency guidance, to steer the generation towards the manifold of the source subject and the driving action at every step of the inference denoising. Our frequency guidance formulations are derived from the frequency domain properties of images. We extensively evaluate ImPoster on a diverse set of source-driving image pairs to demonstrate improvements over baselines. To the best of our knowledge, ImPoster is the first approach towards achieving both subject-driven as well as action-driven image personalization.