Liang Sun

Jiaming Liu, Dingwei Fan, Junyong Zhao et al.

The anatomical structure segmentation of the spine and adjacent structures from computed tomography (CT) images is a key step for spinal disease diagnosis and treatment. However, the segmentation of CT images is impeded by low contrast and complex vertebral boundaries. Although advanced models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown promise in various segmentation tasks, their performance in spinal CT imaging is limited by high annotation requirements and poor domain adaptability. To address these limitations, we propose SpinalSAM-R1, a multimodal vision-language interactive system that integrates a fine-tuned SAM with DeepSeek-R1, for spine CT image segmentation. Specifically, our SpinalSAM-R1 introduces an anatomy-guided attention mechanism to improve spine segmentation performance, and a semantics-driven interaction protocol powered by DeepSeek-R1, enabling natural language-guided refinement. The SpinalSAM-R1 is fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for efficient adaptation. We validate our SpinalSAM-R1 on the spine anatomical structure with CT images. Experimental results suggest that our method achieves superior segmentation performance. Meanwhile, we develop a PyQt5-based interactive software, which supports point, box, and text-based prompts. The system supports 11 clinical operations with 94.3\% parsing accuracy and sub-800 ms response times. The software is released on https://github.com/6jm233333/spinalsam-r1.

Kamal Acharya, Alvaro Velasquez, Yongxin Liu et al.

Weather disaster related emergency operations pose a great challenge to air mobility in both aircraft and airport operations, especially when the impact is gradually approaching. We propose an optimized framework for adjusting airport operational schedules for such pre-disaster scenarios. We first, aggregate operational data from multiple airports and then determine the optimal count of evacuation flights to maximize the impacted airport's outgoing capacity without impeding regular air traffic. We then propose a novel Neural Network (NN) accelerated Genetic Algorithm(GA) for evacuation planning. Our experiments show that integration yielded comparable results but with smaller computational overhead. We find that the utilization of a NN enhances the efficiency of a GA, facilitating more rapid convergence even when operating with a reduced population size. This effectiveness persists even when the model is trained on data from airports different from those under test.

Kamal Acharya, Iman Sharifi, Mehul Lad et al.

Neurosymbolic AI combines neural network adaptability with symbolic reasoning, promising an approach to address the complex regulatory, operational, and safety challenges in Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). This survey reviews its applications across key AAM domains such as demand forecasting, aircraft design, and real-time air traffic management. Our analysis reveals a fragmented research landscape where methodologies, including Neurosymbolic Reinforcement Learning, have shown potential for dynamic optimization but still face hurdles in scalability, robustness, and compliance with aviation standards. We classify current advancements, present relevant case studies, and outline future research directions aimed at integrating these approaches into reliable, transparent AAM systems. By linking advanced AI techniques with AAM's operational demands, this work provides a concise roadmap for researchers and practitioners developing next-generation air mobility solutions.

Kamal Acharya, Mehul Lad, Liang Sun et al.

Travel demand prediction is crucial for optimizing transportation planning, resource allocation, and infrastructure development, ensuring efficient mobility and economic sustainability. This study introduces a Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (Neurosymbolic AI) framework that integrates decision tree (DT)-based symbolic rules with neural networks (NNs) to predict travel demand, leveraging the interpretability of symbolic reasoning and the predictive power of neural learning. The framework utilizes data from diverse sources, including geospatial, economic, and mobility datasets, to build a comprehensive feature set. DTs are employed to extract interpretable if-then rules that capture key patterns, which are then incorporated as additional features into a NN to enhance its predictive capabilities. Experimental results show that the combined dataset, enriched with symbolic rules, consistently outperforms standalone datasets across multiple evaluation metrics, including Mean Absolute Error (MAE), \(R^2\), and Common Part of Commuters (CPC). Rules selected at finer variance thresholds (e.g., 0.0001) demonstrate superior effectiveness in capturing nuanced relationships, reducing prediction errors, and aligning with observed commuter patterns. By merging symbolic and neural learning paradigms, this Neurosymbolic approach achieves both interpretability and accuracy.

Kamal Acharya, Mehul Lad, Liang Sun et al.

Accurate prediction of trips between zones is critical for transportation planning, as it supports resource allocation and infrastructure development across various modes of transport. Although the gravity model has been widely used due to its simplicity, it often inadequately represents the complex factors influencing modern travel behavior. This study introduces a data-driven approach to enhance the gravity model by integrating geographical, economic, social, and travel data from the counties in Tennessee and New York state. Using machine learning techniques, we extend the capabilities of the traditional model to handle more complex interactions between variables. Our experiments demonstrate that machine learning-enhanced models significantly outperform the traditional model. Our results show a 51.48% improvement in R-squared, indicating a substantial enhancement in the model's explanatory power. Also, a 63.59% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) reflects a significant increase in prediction accuracy. Furthermore, a 44.32% increase in Common Part of Commuters (CPC) demonstrates improved prediction reliability. These findings highlight the substantial benefits of integrating diverse datasets and advanced algorithms into transportation models. They provide urban planners and policymakers with more reliable forecasting and decision-making tools.

Xin Zhang, Liangxiu Han, Wenyong Zhu et al.

Computer-aided early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal form mild cognitive impairment (MCI) based on structure Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has provided a cost-effective and objective way for early prevention and treatment of disease progression, leading to improved patient care. In this work, we have proposed a novel computer-aided approach for early diagnosis of AD by introducing an explainable 3D Residual Attention Deep Neural Network (3D ResAttNet) for end-to-end learning from sMRI scans. Different from the existing approaches, the novelty of our approach is three-fold: 1) A Residual Self-Attention Deep Neural Network has been proposed to capture local, global and spatial information of MR images to improve diagnostic performance; 2) An explanation method using Gradient-based Localization Class Activation mapping (Grad-CAM) has been introduced to improve the explainable of the proposed method; 3) This work has provided a full end-to-end learning solution for automated disease diagnosis. Our proposed 3D ResAttNet method has been evaluated on a large cohort of subjects from real datasets for two changeling classification tasks (i.e., Alzheimer's disease (AD) vs. Normal cohort (NC) and progressive MCI (pMCI) vs. stable MCI (sMCI)). The experimental results show that the proposed approach has a competitive advantage over the state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy performance and generalizability. The explainable mechanism in our approach is able to identify and highlight the contribution of the important brain parts (e.g., hippocampus, lateral ventricle and most parts of the cortex) for transparent decisions.

Liang Sun, Zhanhao Mo, Fuhua Yan et al.

Chest computed tomography (CT) becomes an effective tool to assist the diagnosis of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide, using the computed-aided diagnosis technique for COVID-19 classification based on CT images could largely alleviate the burden of clinicians. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Feature Selection guided Deep Forest (AFS-DF) for COVID-19 classification based on chest CT images. Specifically, we first extract location-specific features from CT images. Then, in order to capture the high-level representation of these features with the relatively small-scale data, we leverage a deep forest model to learn high-level representation of the features. Moreover, we propose a feature selection method based on the trained deep forest model to reduce the redundancy of features, where the feature selection could be adaptively incorporated with the COVID-19 classification model. We evaluated our proposed AFS-DF on COVID-19 dataset with 1495 patients of COVID-19 and 1027 patients of community acquired pneumonia (CAP). The accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE) and AUC achieved by our method are 91.79%, 93.05%, 89.95% and 96.35%, respectively. Experimental results on the COVID-19 dataset suggest that the proposed AFS-DF achieves superior performance in COVID-19 vs. CAP classification, compared with 4 widely used machine learning methods.

Hongwei Ge, Zehang Yan, Kai Zhang et al.

Image captioning is a research hotspot where encoder-decoder models combining convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) achieve promising results. Despite significant progress, these models generate sentences differently from human cognitive styles. Existing models often generate a complete sentence from the first word to the end, without considering the influence of the following words on the whole sentence generation. In this paper, we explore the utilization of a human-like cognitive style, i.e., building overall cognition for the image to be described and the sentence to be constructed, for enhancing computer image understanding. This paper first proposes a Mutual-aid network structure with Bidirectional LSTMs (MaBi-LSTMs) for acquiring overall contextual information. In the training process, the forward and backward LSTMs encode the succeeding and preceding words into their respective hidden states by simultaneously constructing the whole sentence in a complementary manner. In the captioning process, the LSTM implicitly utilizes the subsequent semantic information contained in its hidden states. In fact, MaBi-LSTMs can generate two sentences in forward and backward directions. To bridge the gap between cross-domain models and generate a sentence with higher quality, we further develop a cross-modal attention mechanism to retouch the two sentences by fusing their salient parts as well as the salient areas of the image. Experimental results on the Microsoft COCO dataset show that the proposed model improves the performance of encoder-decoder models and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Liang Sun, Jason Mielens, Jason Baldridge

Unsupervised models of dependency parsing typically require large amounts of clean, unlabeled data plus gold-standard part-of-speech tags. Adding indirect supervision (e.g. language universals and rules) can help, but we show that obtaining small amounts of direct supervision - here, partial dependency annotations - provides a strong balance between zero and full supervision. We adapt the unsupervised ConvexMST dependency parser to learn from partial dependencies expressed in the Graph Fragment Language. With less than 24 hours of total annotation, we obtain 7% and 17% absolute improvement in unlabeled dependency scores for English and Spanish, respectively, compared to the same parser using only universal grammar constraints.