Sheng Hu

Ziqi Ma, Mengyu Han, Anteng Cai et al.

Background: Respiratory sound classification plays a critical role in the clinical identification of pulmonary pathologies. However, its performance is often hindered by the limited size, severe noise, and class imbalance of real-world auscultation datasets. Although conventional audio augmentation techniques are easy to implement, they may inadvertently distort subtle pathological characteristics. Meanwhile, existing Variational Autoencoder (VAE)- or Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based generative approaches often suffer from limited sample fidelity and insufficient controllability over class semantics, particularly under conditions of scarce supervision. Methods: To overcome these limitations, we propose C2GA, a class-controllable generative augmentation framework. C2GA first constructs a semantically rich discrete latent space using a conditional Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE), in which local acoustic tokens are explicitly decoupled from global class prototypes. Subsequently, a Transformer-based autoregressive prior is trained to generate label-consistent token sequences. These generated tokens are then fused with the corresponding class prototypes and decoded into high-fidelity Mel-spectrograms for data augmentation. Conclusion: These results indicate that C2GA provides an effective and semantically reliable augmentation strategy for respiratory sound analysis. By enabling controllable and high-quality data generation, the proposed framework offers a promising solution for improving the robustness and generalization of respiratory sound classification in realistic clinical scenarios.

Zhoufan Jiang, Yanming Wang, ChenWei Shi et al.

Decoding brain cognitive states from neuroimaging signals is an important topic in neuroscience. In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been recruited for multiple brain state decoding and achieved good performance. However, the open question of how to interpret the DNN black box remains unanswered. Capitalizing on advances in machine learning, we integrated attention modules into brain decoders to facilitate an in-depth interpretation of DNN channels. A 4D convolution operation was also included to extract temporo-spatial interaction within the fMRI signal. The experiments showed that the proposed model obtains a very high accuracy (97.4%) and outperforms previous researches on the 7 different task benchmarks from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset. The visualization analysis further illustrated the hierarchical emergence of task-specific masks with depth. Finally, the model was retrained to regress individual traits within the HCP and to classify viewing images from the BOLD5000 dataset, respectively. Transfer learning also achieves good performance. A further visualization analysis shows that, after transfer learning, low-level attention masks remained similar to the source domain, whereas high-level attention masks changed adaptively. In conclusion, the proposed 4D model with attention module performed well and facilitated interpretation of DNNs, which is helpful for subsequent research.

Peisheng Qian, Ziyuan Zhao, Haobing Liu et al.

Water quality has a direct impact on industry, agriculture, and public health. Algae species are common indicators of water quality. It is because algal communities are sensitive to changes in their habitats, giving valuable knowledge on variations in water quality. However, water quality analysis requires professional inspection of algal detection and classification under microscopes, which is very time-consuming and tedious. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-target deep learning framework for algal detection and classification. Extensive experiments were carried out on a large-scale colored microscopic algal dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method leads to the promising performance on algal detection, class identification and genus identification.

Sheng Hu, Yuqing Ma, Xianglong Liu et al.

Abstract reasoning refers to the ability to analyze information, discover rules at an intangible level, and solve problems in innovative ways. Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) test is typically used to examine the capability of abstract reasoning. The subject is asked to identify the correct choice from the answer set to fill the missing panel at the bottom right of RPM (e.g., a 3$\times$3 matrix), following the underlying rules inside the matrix. Recent studies, taking advantage of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have achieved encouraging progress to accomplish the RPM test. However, they partly ignore necessary inductive biases of RPM solver, such as order sensitivity within each row/column and incremental rule induction. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a Stratified Rule-Aware Network (SRAN) to generate the rule embeddings for two input sequences. Our SRAN learns multiple granularity rule embeddings at different levels, and incrementally integrates the stratified embedding flows through a gated fusion module. With the help of embeddings, a rule similarity metric is applied to guarantee that SRAN can not only be trained using a tuplet loss but also infer the best answer efficiently. We further point out the severe defects existing in the popular RAVEN dataset for RPM test, which prevent from the fair evaluation of the abstract reasoning ability. To fix the defects, we propose an answer set generation algorithm called Attribute Bisection Tree (ABT), forming an improved dataset named Impartial-RAVEN (I-RAVEN for short). Extensive experiments are conducted on both PGM and I-RAVEN datasets, showing that our SRAN outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin.