Dual-Track CoT: Budget-Aware Stepwise Guidance for Small LMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) solve many reasoning tasks via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, but smaller models (about 7 to 8B parameters) still struggle with multi-step reasoning under tight compute and token budgets. Existing test time reasoning methods such as self consistency (sampling multiple rationales and voting), Tree-of-Thoughts (search over intermediate thoughts), and critique revise loops improve performance, but often at high token cost and without fine-grained step-level control. This project1 aims to address that gap: can Small Language Models (SLMs) reason reliably using the same or fewer tokens? This question is both scientific and practical. Scientifically, it probes whether process supervision and simple test-time controls (such as token budgets and rejection of redundant steps) can substitute for model scale or large sampling counts. Practically, many deployments (on-device, low-latency, or cost-constrained settings) cannot afford huge models or dozens of sampled rationales per query. A method that improves SLM reasoning at fixed cost would therefore be directly useful.

Astronomical Image Colorization and upscaling with Generative Adversarial Networks

Automatic colorization of images without human intervention has been a subject of interest in the machine learning community for a brief period of time. Assigning color to an image is a highly ill-posed problem because of its innate nature of possessing very high degrees of freedom; given an image, there is often no single color-combination that is correct. Besides colorization, another problem in reconstruction of images is Single Image Super Resolution, which aims at transforming low resolution images to a higher resolution. This research aims to provide an automated approach for the problem by focusing on a very specific domain of images, namely astronomical images, and process them using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We explore the usage of various models in two different color spaces, RGB and L*a*b. We use transferred learning owing to a small data set, using pre-trained ResNet-18 as a backbone, i.e. encoder for the U-net and fine-tune it further. The model produces visually appealing images which hallucinate high resolution, colorized data in these results which does not exist in the original image. We present our results by evaluating the GANs quantitatively using distance metrics such as L1 distance and L2 distance in each of the color spaces across all channels to provide a comparative analysis. We use Frechet inception distance (FID) to compare the distribution of the generated images with the distribution of the real image to assess the model's performance.