Ziheng Duan

Zheng Dong, Ke Xu, Ziheng Duan et al.

Although PIFu-based 3D human reconstruction methods are popular, the quality of recovered details is still unsatisfactory. In a sparse (e.g., 3 RGBD sensors) capture setting, the depth noise is typically amplified in the PIFu representation, resulting in flat facial surfaces and geometry-fallible bodies. In this paper, we propose a novel geometry-aware two-scale PIFu for 3D human reconstruction from sparse, noisy inputs. Our key idea is to exploit the complementary properties of depth denoising and 3D reconstruction, for learning a two-scale PIFu representation to reconstruct high-frequency facial details and consistent bodies separately. To this end, we first formulate depth denoising and 3D reconstruction as a multi-task learning problem. The depth denoising process enriches the local geometry information of the reconstruction features, while the reconstruction process enhances depth denoising with global topology information. We then propose to learn the two-scale PIFu representation using two MLPs based on the denoised depth and geometry-aware features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reconstructing facial details and bodies of different poses and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Ziheng Duan, Haoyan Xu, Yueyang Wang et al.

With the advancement of sensing technology, multivariate time series classification (MTSC) has recently received considerable attention. Existing deep learning-based MTSC techniques, which mostly rely on convolutional or recurrent neural networks, are primarily concerned with the temporal dependency of single time series. As a result, they struggle to express pairwise dependencies among multivariate variables directly. Furthermore, current spatial-temporal modeling (e.g., graph classification) methodologies based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are inherently flat and cannot aggregate hub data in a hierarchical manner. To address these limitations, we propose a novel graph pooling-based framework MTPool to obtain the expressive global representation of MTS. We first convert MTS slices to graphs by utilizing interactions of variables via graph structure learning module and attain the spatial-temporal graph node features via temporal convolutional module. To get global graph-level representation, we design an "encoder-decoder" based variational graph pooling module for creating adaptive centroids for cluster assignments. Then we combine GNNs and our proposed variational graph pooling layers for joint graph representation learning and graph coarsening, after which the graph is progressively coarsened to one node. At last, a differentiable classifier takes this coarsened representation to get the final predicted class. Experiments on ten benchmark datasets exhibit MTPool outperforms state-of-the-art strategies in the MTSC task.

Yueyang Wang, Ziheng Duan, Yida Huang et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting, which analyzes historical time series to predict future trends, can effectively help decision-making. Complex relations among variables in MTS, including static, dynamic, predictable, and latent relations, have made it possible to mining more features of MTS. Modeling complex relations are not only essential in characterizing latent dependency as well as modeling temporal dependence but also brings great challenges in the MTS forecasting task. However, existing methods mainly focus on modeling certain relations among MTS variables. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning model, termed Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (MTHetGNN). To characterize complex relations among variables, a relation embedding module is designed in MTHetGNN, where each variable is regarded as a graph node, and each type of edge represents a specific static or dynamic relationship. Meanwhile, a temporal embedding module is introduced for time series features extraction, where involving convolutional neural network (CNN) filters with different perception scales. Finally, a heterogeneous graph embedding module is adopted to handle the complex structural information generated by the two modules. Three benchmark datasets from the real world are used to evaluate the proposed MTHetGNN. The comprehensive experiments show that MTHetGNN achieves state-of-the-art results in the MTS forecasting task.

Yifu Zhou, Ziheng Duan, Haoyan Xu et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting is widely used in various fields. Reasonable prediction results can assist people in planning and decision-making, generate benefits and avoid risks. Normally, there are two characteristics of time series, that is, long-term trend and short-term fluctuation. For example, stock prices will have a long-term upward trend with the market, but there may be a small decline in the short term. These two characteristics are often relatively independent of each other. However, the existing prediction methods often do not distinguish between them, which reduces the accuracy of the prediction model. In this paper, a MTS forecasting framework that can capture the long-term trends and short-term fluctuations of time series in parallel is proposed. This method uses the original time series and its first difference to characterize long-term trends and short-term fluctuations. Three prediction sub-networks are constructed to predict long-term trends, short-term fluctuations and the final value to be predicted. In the overall optimization goal, the idea of multi-task learning is used for reference, which is to make the prediction results of long-term trends and short-term fluctuations as close to the real values as possible while requiring to approximate the values to be predicted. In this way, the proposed method uses more supervision information and can more accurately capture the changing trend of the time series, thereby improving the forecasting performance.

Dufan Wu, Daniel Montes, Ziheng Duan et al.

Purpose: To develop CADIA, a supervised deep learning model based on a region proposal network coupled with a false-positive reduction module for the detection and localization of intracranial aneurysms (IA) from computed tomography angiography (CTA), and to assess our model's performance to a similar detection network. Methods: In this retrospective study, we evaluated 1,216 patients from two separate institutions who underwent CT for the presence of saccular IA>=2.5 mm. A two-step model was implemented: a 3D region proposal network for initial aneurysm detection and 3D DenseNetsfor false-positive reduction and further determination of suspicious IA. Free-response receiver operative characteristics (FROC) curve and lesion-/patient-level performance at established false positive per volume (FPPV) were also performed. Fisher's exact test was used to compare with a similar available model. Results: CADIA's sensitivities at 0.25 and 1 FPPV were 63.9% and 77.5%, respectively. Our model's performance varied with size and location, and the best performance was achieved in IA between 5-10 mm and in those at anterior communicating artery, with sensitivities at 1 FPPV of 95.8% and 94%, respectively. Our model showed statistically higher patient-level accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity when compared to the available model at 0.25 FPPV and the best F-1 score (P<=0.001). At 1 FPPV threshold, our model showed better accuracy and specificity (P<=0.001) and equivalent sensitivity. Conclusions: CADIA outperformed a comparable network in the detection task of IA. The addition of a false-positive reduction module is a feasible step to improve the IA detection models.

Haoyan Xu, Ziheng Duan, Jie Feng et al.

Graph similarity computation aims to predict a similarity score between one pair of graphs to facilitate downstream applications, such as finding the most similar chemical compounds similar to a query compound or Fewshot 3D Action Recognition. Recently, some graph similarity computation models based on neural networks have been proposed, which are either based on graph-level interaction or node-level comparison. However, when the number of nodes in the graph increases, it will inevitably bring about reduced representation ability or high computation cost. Motivated by this observation, we propose a graph partitioning and graph neural network-based model, called PSimGNN, to effectively resolve this issue. Specifically, each of the input graphs is partitioned into a set of subgraphs to extract the local structural features directly. Next, a novel graph neural network with an attention mechanism is designed to map each subgraph into an embedding vector. Some of these subgraph pairs are automatically selected for node-level comparison to supplement the subgraph-level embedding with fine-grained information. Finally, coarse-grained interaction information among subgraphs and fine-grained comparison information among nodes in different subgraphs are integrated to predict the final similarity score. Experimental results on graph datasets with different graph sizes demonstrate that PSimGNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in graph similarity computation tasks using approximate Graph Edit Distance (GED) as the graph similarity metric.

Haoyan Xu, Runjian Chen, Yueyang Wang et al.

The ability to compute similarity scores between graphs based on metrics such as Graph Edit Distance (GED) is important in many real-world applications. Computing exact GED values is typically an NP-hard problem and traditional algorithms usually achieve an unsatisfactory trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide a data-driven solution for this task, which is more efficient while maintaining prediction accuracy in small graph (around 10 nodes per graph) similarity computation. Existing GNN-based methods, which either respectively embeds two graphs (lack of low-level cross-graph interactions) or deploy cross-graph interactions for whole graph pairs (redundant and time-consuming), are still not able to achieve competitive results when the number of nodes in graphs increases. In this paper, we focus on similarity computation for large-scale graphs and propose the "embedding-coarsening-matching" framework CoSimGNN, which first embeds and coarsens large graphs with adaptive pooling operation and then deploys fine-grained interactions on the coarsened graphs for final similarity scores. Furthermore, we create several synthetic datasets which provide new benchmarks for graph similarity computation. Detailed experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets have been conducted and CoSimGNN achieves the best performance while the inference time is at most 1/3 of that of previous state-of-the-art.

Ziheng Duan, Haoyan Xu, Yida Huang et al.

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is an essential problem in many fields. Accurate forecasting results can effectively help decision-making. To date, many MTS forecasting methods have been proposed and widely applied. However, these methods assume that the predicted value of a single variable is affected by all other variables, which ignores the causal relationship among variables. To address the above issue, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning model, termed graph neural network with Neural Granger Causality (CauGNN) in this paper. To characterize the causal information among variables, we introduce the Neural Granger Causality graph in our model. Each variable is regarded as a graph node, and each edge represents the casual relationship between variables. In addition, convolutional neural network (CNN) filters with different perception scales are used for time series feature extraction, which is used to generate the feature of each node. Finally, Graph Neural Network (GNN) is adopted to tackle the forecasting problem of graph structure generated by MTS. Three benchmark datasets from the real world are used to evaluate the proposed CauGNN. The comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in the MTS forecasting task.