Donglin Xie

Donglin Xie, Ruonan Yu, Gongfan Fang et al.

In this paper, we explore a new knowledge-amalgamation problem, termed Federated Selective Aggregation (FedSA). The goal of FedSA is to train a student model for a new task with the help of several decentralized teachers, whose pre-training tasks and data are different and agnostic. Our motivation for investigating such a problem setup stems from a recent dilemma of model sharing. Many researchers or institutes have spent enormous resources on training large and competent networks. Due to the privacy, security, or intellectual property issues, they are, however, not able to share their own pre-trained models, even if they wish to contribute to the community. The proposed FedSA offers a solution to this dilemma and makes it one step further since, again, the learned student may specialize in a new task different from all of the teachers. To this end, we proposed a dedicated strategy for handling FedSA. Specifically, our student-training process is driven by a novel saliency-based approach that adaptively selects teachers as the participants and integrates their representative capabilities into the student. To evaluate the effectiveness of FedSA, we conduct experiments on both single-task and multi-task settings. Experimental results demonstrate that FedSA effectively amalgamates knowledge from decentralized models and achieves competitive performance to centralized baselines.

Zhongheng Jiang, Yuechao Zhao, Donglin Xie et al.

Medical time-series data captures the dynamic progression of patient conditions, playing a vital role in modern clinical decision support systems. However, real-world clinical data is highly heterogeneous and inconsistently formatted. Furthermore, existing machine learning tools often have steep learning curves and fragmented workflows. Consequently, a significant gap remains between cutting-edge AI technologies and clinical application. To address this, we introduce mtslearn, an end-to-end integrated toolkit specifically designed for medical time-series data. First, the framework provides a unified data interface that automates the parsing and alignment of wide, long, and flat data formats. This design significantly reduces data cleaning overhead. Building on this, mtslearn provides a complete pipeline from data reading and feature engineering to model training and result visualization. Furthermore, it offers flexible interfaces for custom algorithms. Through a modular design, mtslearn simplifies complex data engineering tasks into a few lines of code. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for clinicians with limited programming experience, empowering them to focus more on exploring medical hypotheses and accelerating the translation of advanced algorithms into real-world clinical practice. mtslearn is publicly available at https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/mtslearn.

Donglin Xie, Qingshuo Zhao, Jingyu Wang et al.

Sleep disturbances are tightly linked to cardiovascular risk, yet polysomnography (PSG)-the clinical reference standard-remains resource-intensive and poorly suited for multi-night, home-based, and large-scale screening. Single-lead electrocardiography (ECG), already ubiquitous in Holter and patch-based devices, enables comfortable long-term acquisition and encodes sleep-relevant physiology through autonomic modulation and cardiorespiratory coupling. Here, we present a proof-of-concept Holter-to-Sleep framework that, using single-lead ECG as the sole input, jointly supports overnight sleep phenotyping and Holter-grade cardiac phenotyping within the same recording, and further provides an explicit analytic pathway for scalable cardio-sleep association studies. The framework is developed and validated on a pooled multi-center PSG sample of 10,439 studies spanning four public cohorts, with independent external evaluation to assess cross-cohort generalizability, and additional real-world feasibility assessment using overnight patch-ECG recordings via objective-subjective consistency analysis. This integrated design enables robust extraction of clinically meaningful overnight sleep phenotypes under heterogeneous populations and acquisition conditions, and facilitates systematic linkage between ECG-derived sleep metrics and arrhythmia-related Holter phenotypes. Collectively, the Holter-to-Sleep paradigm offers a practical foundation for low-burden, home-deployable, and scalable cardio-sleep monitoring and research beyond traditional PSG-centric workflows.

Gongzheng Tang, Qinghao Zhao, Guangkun Nie et al.

Hyperkalemia is a life-threatening electrolyte disorder that is common in patients with chronic kidney disease and heart failure, yet frequent monitoring remains difficult outside hospital settings. We developed and validated Pocket-K, a single-lead AI-ECG system initialized from the ECGFounder foundation model for non-invasive hyperkalemia screening and handheld deployment. In this multicentre observational study using routinely collected clinical ECG and laboratory data, 34,439 patients contributed 62,290 ECG--potassium pairs. Lead I data were used to fine-tune the model. Data from Peking University People's Hospital were divided into development and temporal validation sets, and data from The Second Hospital of Tianjin Medical University served as an independent external validation set. Hyperkalemia was defined as venous serum potassium > 5.5 mmol/L. Pocket-K achieved AUROCs of 0.936 in internal testing, 0.858 in temporal validation, and 0.808 in external validation. For KDIGO-defined moderate-to-severe hyperkalemia (serum potassium >= 6.0 mmol/L), AUROCs increased to 0.940 and 0.861 in the temporal and external sets, respectively. External negative predictive value exceeded 99.3%. Model-predicted high risk below the hyperkalemia threshold was more common in patients with chronic kidney disease and heart failure. A handheld prototype enabled near-real-time inference, supporting future prospective evaluation in native handheld and wearable settings.

Jiarui Jin, Xiaocheng Fang, Haoyu Wang et al.

Myocardial infarction is a critical manifestation of coronary artery disease, yet detecting it from single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) remains challenging due to limited spatial information. An intuitive idea is to convert single-lead into multiple-lead ECG for classification by pre-trained models, but generative methods optimized at the signal level in most cases leave a large latent space gap, ultimately degrading diagnostic performance. This naturally raises the question of whether latent space alignment could help. However, most prior ECG alignment methods focus on learning transformation invariance, which mismatches the goal of single-lead detection. To address this issue, we propose SelfMIS, a simple yet effective alignment learning framework to improve myocardial infarction detection from single-lead ECG. Discarding manual data augmentations, SelfMIS employs a self-cutting strategy to pair multiple-lead ECG with their corresponding single-lead segments and directly align them in the latent space. This design shifts the learning objective from pursuing transformation invariance to enriching the single-lead representation, explicitly driving the single-lead ECG encoder to learn a representation capable of inferring global cardiac context from the local signal. Experimentally, SelfMIS achieves superior performance over baseline models across nine myocardial infarction types while maintaining a simpler architecture and lower computational overhead, thereby substantiating the efficacy of direct latent space alignment. Our code and checkpoint will be publicly available after acceptance.

Gongfan Fang, Yifan Bao, Jie Song et al.

Knowledge distillation~(KD) aims to craft a compact student model that imitates the behavior of a pre-trained teacher in a target domain. Prior KD approaches, despite their gratifying results, have largely relied on the premise that \emph{in-domain} data is available to carry out the knowledge transfer. Such an assumption, unfortunately, in many cases violates the practical setting, since the original training data or even the data domain is often unreachable due to privacy or copyright reasons. In this paper, we attempt to tackle an ambitious task, termed as \emph{out-of-domain} knowledge distillation~(OOD-KD), which allows us to conduct KD using only OOD data that can be readily obtained at a very low cost. Admittedly, OOD-KD is by nature a highly challenging task due to the agnostic domain gap. To this end, we introduce a handy yet surprisingly efficacious approach, dubbed as~\textit{MosaicKD}. The key insight behind MosaicKD lies in that, samples from various domains share common local patterns, even though their global semantic may vary significantly; these shared local patterns, in turn, can be re-assembled analogous to mosaic tiling, to approximate the in-domain data and to further alleviating the domain discrepancy. In MosaicKD, this is achieved through a four-player min-max game, in which a generator, a discriminator, a student network, are collectively trained in an adversarial manner, partially under the guidance of a pre-trained teacher. We validate MosaicKD over {classification and semantic segmentation tasks} across various benchmarks, and demonstrate that it yields results much superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts on OOD data. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/zju-vipa/MosaicKD}.

Shuo Yang, Xinran Zheng, Xinchen Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various fields with their exceptional capabilities in understanding, processing, and generating human-like text. This paper investigates the potential of LLMs in advancing Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS), analyzing current challenges, methodologies, and future opportunities. It begins by establishing a foundational understanding of NIDS and LLMs, exploring the enabling technologies that bridge the gap between intelligent and cognitive systems in AI-driven NIDS. While Intelligent NIDS leverage machine learning and deep learning to detect threats based on learned patterns, they often lack contextual awareness and explainability. In contrast, Cognitive NIDS integrate LLMs to process both structured and unstructured security data, enabling deeper contextual reasoning, explainable decision-making, and automated response for intrusion behaviors. Practical implementations are then detailed, highlighting LLMs as processors, detectors, and explainers within a comprehensive AI-driven NIDS pipeline. Furthermore, the concept of an LLM-centered Controller is proposed, emphasizing its potential to coordinate intrusion detection workflows, optimizing tool collaboration and system performance. Finally, this paper identifies critical challenges and opportunities, aiming to foster innovation in developing reliable, adaptive, and explainable NIDS. By presenting the transformative potential of LLMs, this paper seeks to inspire advancement in next-generation network security systems.

Weicai Long, Yusen Hou, Junning Feng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as conversational assistants in genomics, where they are mainly used to reason over biological knowledge, annotations, and analysis outputs through natural language interfaces. However, existing benchmarks either focus on specialized DNA models trained for sequence prediction or evaluate biological knowledge using text-only questions, leaving the behavior of general-purpose LLMs when directly exposed to raw genome sequences underexplored. We introduce GenomeQA, a benchmark designed to provide a controlled evaluation setting for general-purpose LLMs on sequence-based genome inference tasks. GenomeQA comprises 5,200 samples drawn from multiple biological databases, with sequence lengths ranging from 6 to 1,000 base pairs (bp), spanning six task families: Enhancer and Promoter Identification, Splice Site Identification, Taxonomic Classification, Histone Mark Prediction, Transcription Factor Binding Site Prediction, and TF Motif Prediction. Across six frontier LLMs, we find that models consistently outperform random baselines and can exploit local sequence signals such as GC content and short motifs, while performance degrades on tasks that require more indirect or multi-step inference over sequence patterns. GenomeQA establishes a diagnostic benchmark for studying and improving the use of general-purpose LLMs on raw genomic sequences.

Jinshuai Gu, Zenghui Lin, Jingying Ma et al.

Cardiotocography (CTG) is a low-cost, non-invasive fetal health assessment technique used globally, especially in underdeveloped countries. However, it is currently mainly used to identify the fetus's current status (e.g., fetal acidosis or hypoxia), and the potential of CTG in predicting future adverse pregnancy outcomes has not been fully explored. We aim to develop an AI-based model that predicts biological age from CTG time series (named CTGage), then calculate the age gap between CTGage and actual age (named CTGage-gap), and use this gap as a new digital biomarker for future adverse pregnancy outcomes. The CTGage model is developed using 61,140 records from 11,385 pregnant women, collected at Peking University People's Hospital between 2018 and 2022. For model training, a structurally designed 1D convolutional neural network is used, incorporating distribution-aligned augmented regression technology. The CTGage-gap is categorized into five groups: < -21 days (underestimation group), -21 to -7 days, -7 to 7 days (normal group), 7 to 21 days, and > 21 days (overestimation group). We further defined the underestimation group and overestimation group together as the high-risk group. We then compare the incidence of adverse outcomes and maternal diseases across these groups. The average absolute error of the CTGage model is 10.91 days. When comparing the overestimation group with the normal group, premature infants incidence is 5.33% vs. 1.42% (p < 0.05) and gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) incidence is 31.93% vs. 20.86% (p < 0.05). When comparing the underestimation group with the normal group, low birth weight incidence is 0.17% vs. 0.15% (p < 0.05) and anaemia incidence is 37.51% vs. 34.74% (p < 0.05). Artificial intelligence-derived CTGage can predict the future risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes and hold potential as a novel, non-invasive, and easily accessible digital biomarker.

Cheng Dai, Yingqiao Lin, Fan Li et al.

In Domain Generalization (DG) tasks, models are trained by using only training data from the source domains to achieve generalization on an unseen target domain, this will suffer from the distribution shift problem. So it's important to learn a classifier to focus on the common representation which can be used to classify on multi-domains, so that this classifier can achieve a high performance on an unseen target domain as well. With the success of cross attention in various cross-modal tasks, we find that cross attention is a powerful mechanism to align the features come from different distributions. So we design a model named CADG (cross attention for domain generalization), wherein cross attention plays a important role, to address distribution shift problem. Such design makes the classifier can be adopted on multi-domains, so the classifier will generalize well on an unseen domain. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of domain generalization benchmarks compared with other single model and can even achieve a better performance than some ensemble-based methods.