Hong‐Bin Shen

Jiachen Li, Ye Yuan, Hong-Bin Shen

Symbolic Regression (SR) is a type of regression analysis to automatically find the mathematical expression that best fits the data. Currently, SR still basically relies on various searching strategies so that a sample-specific model is required to be optimized for every expression, which significantly limits the model's generalization and efficiency. Inspired by the fact that human beings can infer a mathematical expression based on the curve of it, we propose Symbolic Expression Transformer (SET), a sample-agnostic model from the perspective of computer vision for SR. Specifically, the collected data is represented as images and an image caption model is employed for translating images to symbolic expressions. A large-scale dataset without overlap between training and testing sets in the image domain is released. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SET and suggest the promising direction of image-based model for solving the challenging SR problem.

Yu-Xuan Chen, Dagan Feng, Hong-Bin Shen

Rigid image alignment is a fundamental task in computer vision, while the traditional algorithms are either too sensitive to noise or time-consuming. Recent unsupervised image alignment methods developed based on spatial transformer networks show an improved performance on clean images but will not achieve satisfactory performance on noisy images due to its heavy reliance on pixel value comparations. To handle such challenging applications, we report a new unsupervised difference learning (UDL) strategy and apply it to rigid image alignment. UDL exploits the quantitative properties of regression tasks and converts the original unsupervised problem to pseudo supervised problem. Under the new UDL-based image alignment pipeline, rotation can be accurately estimated on both clean and noisy images and translations can then be easily solved. Experimental results on both nature and cryo-EM images demonstrate the efficacy of our UDL-based unsupervised rigid image alignment method.

Chenghan Yang, Peng Zhou, Dong-Sheng Zhang et al.

Traditional marine biological image recognition faces challenges of incomplete datasets and unsatisfactory model accuracy, particularly for few-shot conditions of rare species where data scarcity significantly hampers the performance. To address these issues, this study proposes an intelligent marine fish recognition framework, FishAI 2.0, integrating multimodal few-shot deep learning techniques with image generation for data augmentation. First, a hierarchical marine fish benchmark dataset, which provides a comprehensive data foundation for subsequent model training, is utilized to train the FishAI 2.0 model. To address the data scarcity of rare classes, the large language model DeepSeek was employed to generate high-quality textual descriptions, which are input into Stable Diffusion 2 for image augmentation through a hierarchical diffusion strategy that extracts latent encoding to construct a multimodal feature space. The enhanced visual-textual datasets were then fed into a Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) based model, enabling robust few-shot image recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that FishAI 2.0 achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 91.67 percent and Top-5 accuracy of 97.97 percent at the family level, outperforming baseline CLIP and ViT models with a substantial margin for the minority classes with fewer than 10 training samples. To better apply FishAI 2.0 to real-world scenarios, at the genus and species level, FishAI 2.0 respectively achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 87.58 percent and 85.42 percent, demonstrating practical utility. In summary, FishAI 2.0 improves the efficiency and accuracy of marine fish identification and provides a scalable technical solution for marine ecological monitoring and conservation, highlighting its scientific value and practical applicability.