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How do I approach fine-tuning a transformer model for low-resource Indian languages? (54)

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Growing 85 pts 0 followers
St Aloysius (Deemed to be University) · Posted
Educational Assessment Finance & Banking

What I need help with

I am preparing my first SERB Core Research Grant proposal. My research area is structural health monitoring using IoT sensors.

Specific questions:

  1. What is the typical review timeline.how many months between submission and decision?
  2. Is the budget justification section as important as the technical merit section?
  3. Should I include international collaborators or is that a distraction for a first application?
  4. What is the realistic success rate for first-time applicants?

I am applying as an Assistant Professor with 2 years of post-PhD experience and 6 publications.

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23 Replies

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Lalitha Mohan Active 230 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

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Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

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Replying to Asha Pillai
Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for the honest take. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.not the sanitized version.

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Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Ekta Choudhary Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

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Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

I have a slightly different take from my experience in industry research. The reproducibility crisis is real but unevenly distributed. Fields with strong engineering culture (computational biology, ML with benchmarks) have actually improved significantly in the last 5 years. The bigger problem is in fields where data sharing is structurally difficult.clinical medicine, behavioral economics.

The ML community's move toward open code and reproducibility checklists has been genuinely effective.

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Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Uday Bose Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

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Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Ishaan Verma Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

This is very reassuring. I was worried the null result would kill the paper but your framing around transparency and effect sizes makes a lot of sense.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

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Jagdish Rawat · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

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Replying to Jagdish Rawat
Chetan Jain Growing 100 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Replying to Jagdish Rawat
Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Indira Balan · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Admin NITK · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

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Admin NITK · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

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Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

0
Replying to Harini Balakrishnan
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

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Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

As a senior faculty member (25 years in the system), I want to offer a different perspective. Yes, the pressures are real. But I have also seen the other side: students who produce excellent work, publish honestly, and build reputations over time. The system is imperfect but not entirely broken.

What has actually helped my students: choosing venues carefully (a few strong papers rather than many weak ones), developing genuine collaborations rather than transactional coauthorships.