Question Solved

How do I get IRB/ethics approval for human subjects research in India?

Back to Forum
Active 390 pts 0 followers
Bearys Institute of Technology · Posted
Nanotechnology

Background

I am a second-year PhD student working on multilingual NLP at NITK. My research involves building named entity recognition systems for code-mixed Telugu-English text, but I am struggling with the fine-tuning process for large language models.

The problem

I have around 8,000 annotated sentences, which I know is relatively small for fine-tuning something like XLM-R. When I fine-tune with default settings, I get reasonable results on validation but the model overfits badly by epoch 5.

What I have tried

  • Reduced learning rate to 1e-5
  • Added dropout at 0.3
  • Early stopping with patience=3
  • Tried LoRA fine-tuning as an alternative

Has anyone dealt with similar low-resource scenarios? Is LoRA actually recommended for NER tasks, or is full fine-tuning with heavy regularization the better path?

Any references to papers or GitHub repos with similar setups would be very helpful.

Sign in to interact

Sign in to join the discussion.

16 Replies

Oldest Top
0
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 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 Sanjay Kumar
Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

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

0
Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Ekta Choudhary Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

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

0
Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 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.

0
Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

0
Replying to Manish Tiwari
Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 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?

0
Jagdish Rawat · 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.

0
Replying to Jagdish Rawat
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 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.

0
Replying to Jagdish Rawat
Shiva Prasad Active 480 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?

0
Hemant Patwa · 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
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

Flower (flwr) is the most actively maintained and research-friendly federated learning framework right now. My group has been using it for 18 months on a healthcare project with 4 hospital sites.

Strengths:

  • Clean simulation API that lets you test on a single machine before deploying
  • Good support for custom aggregation strategies (FedProx, FedNova)
  • Active Discord community with quick responses from the maintainers

For non-IID data specifically, look at the FedProx strategy.it handles heterogeneous data distributions much better than FedAvg.

0
Replying to Admin NITK
Ashwin Murthy Distinguished 560 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

0
Preethi Anand Distinguished 690 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.

0
Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

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

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Quamar Ahmed Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

Marking this as the accepted answer. Incredibly helpful and specific. Really appreciate you taking the time.

0
Replying to Deepa Krishnamurthy
Preethi Anand Distinguished 690 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.