Cheng Huang

Cheng Huang, Weizheng Xie, Fan Gao et al.

Structural changes in retinal blood vessels are critical biomarkers for the onset and progression of glaucoma and other ocular diseases. However, current vessel segmentation approaches largely rely on supervised learning and extensive manual annotations, which are costly, error-prone, and difficult to obtain in optical coherence tomography angiography. Here we present BioVessel-Net, an unsupervised generative framework that integrates vessel biostatistics with adversarial refinement and a radius-guided segmentation strategy. Unlike pixel-based methods, BioVessel-Net directly models vascular structures with biostatistical coherence, achieving accurate and explainable vessel extraction without labeled data or high-performance computing. To support training and evaluation, we introduce RetinaMix, a new benchmark dataset of 2D and 3D OCTA images with high-resolution vessel details from diverse populations. Experimental results demonstrate that BioVessel-Net achieves near-perfect segmentation accuracy across RetinaMix and existing datasets, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised methods. Together, BioVessel-Net and RetinaMix provide a label-free, computationally efficient, and clinically interpretable solution for retinal vessel analysis, with broad potential for glaucoma monitoring, blood flow modeling, and progression prediction. Code and dataset are available: https://github.com/VikiXie/SatMar8.

Cheng Huang, Shoudong Han, Mengyu He et al.

Accurate data association is crucial in reducing confusion, such as ID switches and assignment errors, in multi-object tracking (MOT). However, existing advanced methods often overlook the diversity among trajectories and the ambiguity and conflicts present in motion and appearance cues, leading to confusion among detections, trajectories, and associations when performing simple global data association. To address this issue, we propose a simple, versatile, and highly interpretable data association approach called Decomposed Data Association (DDA). DDA decomposes the traditional association problem into multiple sub-problems using a series of non-learning-based modules and selectively addresses the confusion in each sub-problem by incorporating targeted exploitation of new cues. Additionally, we introduce Occlusion-aware Non-Maximum Suppression (ONMS) to retain more occluded detections, thereby increasing opportunities for association with trajectories and indirectly reducing the confusion caused by missed detections. Finally, based on DDA and ONMS, we design a powerful multi-object tracker named DeconfuseTrack, specifically focused on resolving confusion in MOT. Extensive experiments conducted on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets demonstrate that our proposed DDA and ONMS significantly enhance the performance of several popular trackers. Moreover, DeconfuseTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MOT17 and MOT20 test sets, significantly outperforms the baseline tracker ByteTrack in metrics such as HOTA, IDF1, AssA. This validates that our tracking design effectively reduces confusion caused by simple global association.

Hai Lin, Cheng Huang, Zhihong Chen

Reinforcement learning tasks in real-world scenarios often involve large, high-dimensional action spaces, leading to challenges such as convergence difficulties, instability, and high computational complexity. It is widely acknowledged that traditional value-based reinforcement learning algorithms struggle to address these issues effectively. A prevalent approach involves generating independent sub-actions within each dimension of the action space. However, this method introduces bias, hindering the learning of optimal policies. In this paper, we propose an advantage-based optimization method and an algorithm named Advantage Branching Dueling Q-network (ABQ). ABQ incorporates a baseline mechanism to tune the action value of each dimension, leveraging the advantage relationship across different sub-actions. With this approach, the learned policy can be optimized for each dimension. Empirical results demonstrate that ABQ outperforms BDQ, achieving 3%, 171%, and 84% more cumulative rewards in HalfCheetah, Ant, and Humanoid environments, respectively. Furthermore, ABQ exhibits competitive performance when compared against two continuous action benchmark algorithms, DDPG and TD3.

Yunyou Huang, Nana Wang, Wanling Gao et al.

Accurate day-ahead individual residential load forecasting is of great importance to various applications of smart grid on day-ahead market. Deep learning, as a powerful machine learning technology, has shown great advantages and promising application in load forecasting tasks. However, deep learning is a computationally-hungry method, and requires high costs (e.g., time, energy and CO2 emission) to train a deep learning model, which aggravates the energy crisis and incurs a substantial burden to the environment. As a consequence, the deep learning methods are difficult to be popularized and applied in the real smart grid environment. In this paper, we propose a low training cost model based on convolutional neural network, namely LoadCNN, for next-day load forecasting of individual resident with reduced training cost. The experiments show that the training time of LoadCNN is only approximately 1/54 of the one of other state-of-the-art models, and energy consumption and CO2 emissions are only approximate 1/45 of those of other state-of-the-art models based on the same indicators. Meanwhile, the prediction accuracy of our model is equal to that of current state-of-the-art models, making LoadCNN the first load forecasting model simultaneously achieving high prediction accuracy and low training costs. LoadCNN is an efficient green model that is able to be quickly, cost-effectively and environmentally-friendly deployed in a realistic smart grid environment.