Cheng Xie

Ikboljon Sobirov, Cheng Xie, Muhammad Siddique et al.

Since the emergence of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and, later, vision transformers (ViTs), deep learning architectures have predominantly relied on identical block types with varying hyperparameters. We propose a novel block alternation strategy to leverage the complementary strengths of different architectural designs, assembling structurally distinct components similar to Lego blocks. We introduce LegoNet, a deep learning framework that alternates CNN-based and SwinViT-based blocks to enhance feature learning for medical image segmentation. We investigate three variations of LegoNet and apply this concept to a previously unexplored clinical problem: the segmentation of the internal mammary artery (IMA), aorta, and perivascular adipose tissue (PVAT) from computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans. These PVAT regions have been shown to possess prognostic value in assessing cardiovascular risk and primary clinical outcomes. We evaluate LegoNet on large datasets, achieving superior performance to other leading architectures. Furthermore, we assess the model's generalizability on external testing cohorts, where an expert clinician corrects the model's segmentations, achieving DSC > 0.90 across various external, international, and public cohorts. To further validate the model's clinical reliability, we perform intra- and inter-observer variability analysis, demonstrating strong agreement with human annotations. The proposed methodology has significant implications for diagnostic cardiovascular management and early prognosis, offering a robust, automated solution for vascular and perivascular segmentation and risk assessment in clinical practice, paving the way for personalised medicine.

Xiong Zhang, Cheng Xie, Haoran Duan et al.

Real-world graph data environments intrinsically exist noise (e.g., link and structure errors) that inevitably disturb the effectiveness of graph representation and downstream learning tasks. For homogeneous graphs, the latest works use original node features to synthesize a similarity graph that can correct the structure of the noised graph. This idea is based on the homogeneity assumption, which states that similar nodes in the homogeneous graph tend to have direct links in the original graph. However, similar nodes in heterogeneous graphs usually do not have direct links, which can not be used to correct the original noise graph. This causes a significant challenge in noised heterogeneous graph learning. To this end, this paper proposes a novel synthesized similarity-based graph neural network compatible with noised heterogeneous graph learning. First, we calculate the original feature similarities of all nodes to synthesize a similarity-based high-order graph. Second, we propose a similarity-aware encoder to embed original and synthesized graphs with shared parameters. Then, instead of graph-to-graph supervising, we synchronously supervise the original and synthesized graph embeddings to predict the same labels. Meanwhile, a target-based graph extracted from the synthesized graph contrasts the structure of the metapath-based graph extracted from the original graph to learn the mutual information. Extensive experiments in numerous real-world datasets show the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art records in the noised heterogeneous graph learning tasks. In highlights, +5$\sim$6\% improvements are observed in several noised datasets compared with previous SOTA methods. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/kg-cc/NoiseHGNN.

Sujun Sun, Haowen Gu, Cheng Xie et al.

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment novel classes from target domains that are not involved in training and have significantly different data distributions from the source domain, using only a few annotated samples, and recent years have witnessed significant progress on this task. However, existing CD-FSS methods primarily focus on style gaps between source and target domains while ignoring segmentation granularity gaps, resulting in insufficient semantic discriminability for novel classes in target domains. Therefore, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Learning (HSL) framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, we introduce a Dual Style Randomization (DSR) module and a Hierarchical Semantic Mining (HSM) module to learn hierarchical semantic features, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize semantics at varying granularities. DSR simulates target domain data with diverse foreground-background style differences and overall style variations through foreground and global style randomization respectively, while HSM leverages multi-scale superpixels to guide the model to mine intra-class consistency and inter-class distinction at different granularities. Additionally, we also propose a Prototype Confidence-modulated Thresholding (PCMT) module to mitigate segmentation ambiguity when foreground and background are excessively similar. Extensive experiments are conducted on four popular target domain datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Chao Shu, Zhuoran Xin, Cheng Xie

The microstructure is an essential part of materials, storing the genes of materials and having a decisive influence on materials' physical and chemical properties. The material genetic engineering program aims to establish the relationship between material composition/process, organization, and performance to realize the reverse design of materials, thereby accelerating the research and development of new materials. However, tissue analysis methods of materials science, such as metallographic analysis, XRD analysis, and EBSD analysis, cannot directly establish a complete quantitative relationship between tissue structure and performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel data-knowledge-driven organization representation and performance prediction method to obtain a quantitative structure-performance relationship. First, a knowledge graph based on EBSD is constructed to describe the material's mesoscopic microstructure. Then a graph representation learning network based on graph attention is constructed, and the EBSD organizational knowledge graph is input into the network to obtain graph-level feature embedding. Finally, the graph-level feature embedding is input to a graph feature mapping network to obtain the material's mechanical properties. The experimental results show that our method is superior to traditional machine learning and machine vision methods.

Cheng Xie, Ting Zeng, Hongxin Xiang et al.

New categories can be discovered by transforming semantic features into synthesized visual features without corresponding training samples in zero-shot image classification. Although significant progress has been made in generating high-quality synthesized visual features using generative adversarial networks, guaranteeing semantic consistency between the semantic features and visual features remains very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot learning approach, GAN-CST, based on class knowledge to visual feature learning to tackle the problem. The approach consists of three parts, class knowledge overlay, semi-supervised learning and triplet loss. It applies class knowledge overlay (CKO) to obtain knowledge not only from the corresponding class but also from other classes that have the knowledge overlay. It ensures that the knowledge-to-visual learning process has adequate information to generate synthesized visual features. The approach also applies a semi-supervised learning process to re-train knowledge-to-visual model. It contributes to reinforcing synthesized visual features generation as well as new category prediction. We tabulate results on a number of benchmark datasets demonstrating that the proposed model delivers superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches.

Hongxin Xiang, Cheng Xie, Ting Zeng et al.

Suffering from the semantic insufficiency and domain-shift problems, most of existing state-of-the-art methods fail to achieve satisfactory results for Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL). In order to alleviate these problems, we propose a novel generative ZSL method to learn more generalized features from multi-knowledge with continuously generated new semantics in semantic-to-visual embedding. In our approach, the proposed Multi-Knowledge Fusion Network (MKFNet) takes different semantic features from multi-knowledge as input, which enables more relevant semantic features to be trained for semantic-to-visual embedding, and finally generates more generalized visual features by adaptively fusing visual features from different knowledge domain. The proposed New Feature Generator (NFG) with adaptive genetic strategy is used to enrich semantic information on the one hand, and on the other hand it greatly improves the intersection of visual feature generated by MKFNet and unseen visual faetures. Empirically, we show that our approach can achieve significantly better performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on a large number of benchmarks for several ZSL tasks, including traditional ZSL, generalized ZSL and zero-shot retrieval.

Cheng Xie, Hongxin Xiang, Ting Zeng et al.

Although zero-shot learning (ZSL) has an inferential capability of recognizing new classes that have never been seen before, it always faces two fundamental challenges of the cross modality and crossdomain challenges. In order to alleviate these problems, we develop a generative network-based ZSL approach equipped with the proposed Cross Knowledge Learning (CKL) scheme and Taxonomy Regularization (TR). In our approach, the semantic features are taken as inputs, and the output is the synthesized visual features generated from the corresponding semantic features. CKL enables more relevant semantic features to be trained for semantic-to-visual feature embedding in ZSL, while Taxonomy Regularization (TR) significantly improves the intersections with unseen images with more generalized visual features generated from generative network. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets (i.e., AwA1, AwA2, CUB, NAB and aPY) show that our approach is superior to these state-of-the-art methods in terms of ZSL image classification and retrieval.