Yue Shi

Yue Shi, Shuhao Ma, Yihui Zhao et al.

Muscle force and joint kinematics estimation from surface electromyography (sEMG) are essential for real-time biomechanical analysis of the dynamic interplay among neural muscle stimulation, muscle dynamics, and kinetics. Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown the potential to improve biomechanical analysis in a fully automated and reproducible manner. However, the small sample nature and physical interpretability of biomechanical analysis limit the applications of DNNs. This paper presents a novel physics-informed low-shot learning method for sEMG-based estimation of muscle force and joint kinematics. This method seamlessly integrates Lagrange's equation of motion and inverse dynamic muscle model into the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework for structured feature decoding and extrapolated estimation from the small sample data. Specifically, Lagrange's equation of motion is introduced into the generative model to restrain the structured decoding of the high-level features following the laws of physics. And a physics-informed policy gradient is designed to improve the adversarial learning efficiency by rewarding the consistent physical representation of the extrapolated estimations and the physical references. Experimental validations are conducted on two scenarios (i.e. the walking trials and wrist motion trials). Results indicate that the estimations of the muscle forces and joint kinematics are unbiased compared to the physics-based inverse dynamics, which outperforms the selected benchmark methods, including physics-informed convolution neural network (PI-CNN), vallina generative adversarial network (GAN), and multi-layer extreme learning machine (ML-ELM).

Yue Shi, Shuhao Ma, Yihui Zhao

Muscle forces and joint kinematics estimated with musculoskeletal (MSK) modeling techniques offer useful metrics describing movement quality. Model-based computational MSK models can interpret the dynamic interaction between the neural drive to muscles, muscle dynamics, body and joint kinematics, and kinetics. Still, such a set of solutions suffers from high computational time and muscle recruitment problems, especially in complex modeling. In recent years, data-driven methods have emerged as a promising alternative due to the benefits of flexibility and adaptability. However, a large amount of labeled training data is not easy to be acquired. This paper proposes a physics-informed deep learning method based on MSK modeling to predict joint motion and muscle forces. The MSK model is embedded into the neural network as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) loss function with physiological parameters of muscle activation dynamics and muscle contraction dynamics to be identified. These parameters are automatically estimated during the training process which guides the prediction of muscle forces combined with the MSK forward dynamics model. Experimental validations on two groups of data, including one benchmark dataset and one self-collected dataset from six healthy subjects, are performed. The results demonstrate that the proposed deep learning method can effectively identify subject-specific MSK physiological parameters and the trained physics-informed forward-dynamics surrogate yields accurate motion and muscle forces predictions.

Yue Shi, Liangxiu Han, Xin Zhang et al.

Process-based models (PBMs) and deep learning (DL) are two key approaches in agricultural modelling, each offering distinct advantages and limitations. PBMs provide mechanistic insights based on physical and biological principles, ensuring interpretability and scientific rigour. However, they often struggle with scalability, parameterisation, and adaptation to heterogeneous environments. In contrast, DL models excel at capturing complex, nonlinear patterns from large datasets but may suffer from limited interpretability, high computational demands, and overfitting in data-scarce scenarios. This study presents a systematic review of PBMs, DL models, and hybrid PBM-DL frameworks, highlighting their applications in agricultural and environmental modelling. We classify hybrid PBM-DL approaches into DL-informed PBMs, where neural networks refine process-based models, and PBM-informed DL, where physical constraints guide deep learning predictions. Additionally, we conduct a case study on crop dry biomass prediction, comparing hybrid models against standalone PBMs and DL models under varying data quality, sample sizes, and spatial conditions. The results demonstrate that hybrid models consistently outperform traditional PBMs and DL models, offering greater robustness to noisy data and improved generalisation across unseen locations. Finally, we discuss key challenges, including model interpretability, scalability, and data requirements, alongside actionable recommendations for advancing hybrid modelling in agriculture. By integrating domain knowledge with AI-driven approaches, this study contributes to the development of scalable, interpretable, and reproducible agricultural models that support data-driven decision-making for sustainable agriculture.

Yue Shi, Liangxiu Han, Lianghao Han et al.

Realistic hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution (SR) techniques aim to generate a high-resolution (HR) HSI with higher spectral and spatial fidelity from its low-resolution (LR) counterpart. The generative adversarial network (GAN) has proven to be an effective deep learning framework for image super-resolution. However, the optimisation process of existing GAN-based models frequently suffers from the problem of mode collapse, leading to the limited capacity of spectral-spatial invariant reconstruction. This may cause the spectral-spatial distortion on the generated HSI, especially with a large upscaling factor. To alleviate the problem of mode collapse, this work has proposed a novel GAN model coupled with a latent encoder (LE-GAN), which can map the generated spectral-spatial features from the image space to the latent space and produce a coupling component to regularise the generated samples. Essentially, we treat an HSI as a high-dimensional manifold embedded in a latent space. Thus, the optimisation of GAN models is converted to the problem of learning the distributions of high-resolution HSI samples in the latent space, making the distributions of the generated super-resolution HSIs closer to those of their original high-resolution counterparts. We have conducted experimental evaluations on the model performance of super-resolution and its capability in alleviating mode collapse. The proposed approach has been tested and validated based on two real HSI datasets with different sensors (i.e. AVIRIS and UHD-185) for various upscaling factors and added noise levels, and compared with the state-of-the-art super-resolution models (i.e. HyCoNet, LTTR, BAGAN, SR- GAN, WGAN).

Yue Shi, Liangxiu Han, Anthony Kleerekoper et al.

Late blight disease is one of the most destructive diseases in potato crop, leading to serious yield losses globally. Accurate diagnosis of the disease at early stage is critical for precision disease control and management. Current farm practices in crop disease diagnosis are based on manual visual inspection, which is costly, time consuming, subject to individual bias. Recent advances in imaging sensors (e.g. RGB, multiple spectral and hyperspectral cameras), remote sensing and machine learning offer the opportunity to address this challenge. Particularly, hyperspectral imagery (HSI) combining with machine learning/deep learning approaches is preferable for accurately identifying specific plant diseases because the HSI consists of a wide range of high-quality reflectance information beyond human vision, capable of capturing both spectral-spatial information. The proposed method considers the potential disease specific reflectance radiation variance caused by the canopy structural diversity, introduces the multiple capsule layers to model the hierarchical structure of the spectral-spatial disease attributes with the encapsulated features to represent the various classes and the rotation invariance of the disease attributes in the feature space. We have evaluated the proposed method with the real UAV-based HSI data under the controlled field conditions. The effectiveness of the hierarchical features has been quantitatively assessed and compared with the existing representative machine learning/deep learning methods. The experiment results show that the proposed model significantly improves the accuracy performance when considering hierarchical-structure of spectral-spatial features, comparing to the existing methods only using spectral, or spatial or spectral-spatial features without consider hierarchical-structure of spectral-spatial features.

Xinchao Li, Peng Xu, Yue Shi et al.

In this paper, we present a subclass-representation approach that predicts the probability of a social image belonging to one particular class. We explore the co-occurrence of user-contributed tags to find subclasses with a strong connection to the top level class. We then project each image on to the resulting subclass space to generate a subclass representation for the image. The novelty of the approach is that subclass representations make use of not only the content of the photos themselves, but also information on the co-occurrence of their tags, which determines membership in both subclasses and top-level classes. The novelty is also that the images are classified into smaller classes, which have a chance of being more visually stable and easier to model. These subclasses are used as a latent space and images are represented in this space by their probability of relatedness to all of the subclasses. In contrast to approaches directly modeling each top-level class based on the image content, the proposed method can exploit more information for visually diverse classes. The approach is evaluated on a set of $2$ million photos with 10 classes, released by the Multimedia 2013 Yahoo! Large-scale Flickr-tag Image Classification Grand Challenge. Experiments show that the proposed system delivers sound performance for visually diverse classes compared with methods that directly model top classes.

Yue Shi, Martha Larson, Alan Hanjalic

One of the most challenging problems in recommender systems based on the collaborative filtering (CF) concept is data sparseness, i.e., limited user preference data is available for making recommendations. Cross-domain collaborative filtering (CDCF) has been studied as an effective mechanism to alleviate data sparseness of one domain using the knowledge about user preferences from other domains. A key question to be answered in the context of CDCF is what common characteristics can be deployed to link different domains for effective knowledge transfer. In this paper, we assess the usefulness of user-contributed (social) tags in this respect. We do so by means of the Generalized Tag-induced Cross-domain Collaborative Filtering (GTagCDCF) approach that we propose in this paper and that we developed based on the general collective matrix factorization framework. Assessment is done by a series of experiments, using publicly available CF datasets that represent three cross-domain cases, i.e., two two-domain cases and one three-domain case. A comparative analysis on two-domain cases involving GTagCDCF and several state-of-the-art CDCF approaches indicates the increased benefit of using social tags as representatives of explicit links between domains for CDCF as compared to the implicit links deployed by the existing CDCF methods. In addition, we show that users from different domains can already benefit from GTagCDCF if they only share a few common tags. Finally, we use the three-domain case to validate the robustness of GTagCDCF with respect to the scale of datasets and the varying number of domains.