Hongyan Li

Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Yaliang Li et al.

This work summarizes two ways to accomplish Time-Series (TS) tasks in today's Large Language Model (LLM) context: LLM-for-TS (model-centric) designs and trains a fundamental large model, or fine-tunes a pre-trained LLM for TS data; TS-for-LLM (data-centric) converts TS into a model-friendly representation to enable the pre-trained LLM to handle TS data. Given the lack of data, limited resources, semantic context requirements, and so on, this work focuses on TS-for-LLM, where we aim to activate LLM's ability for TS data by designing a TS embedding method suitable for LLM. The proposed method is named TEST. It first tokenizes TS, builds an encoder to embed TS via instance-wise, feature-wise, and text-prototype-aligned contrast, where the TS embedding space is aligned to LLM embedding layer space, then creates soft prompts to make LLM more open to that embeddings, and finally implements TS tasks using the frozen LLM. We also demonstrate the feasibility of TS-for-LLM through theory and experiments. Experiments are carried out on TS classification, forecasting, and representation tasks using eight frozen LLMs with various structures and sizes. The results show that the pre-trained LLM with TEST strategy can achieve better or comparable performance than today's SOTA TS models and offer benefits for few-shot and generalization. By treating LLM as the pattern machine, TEST can endow LLM's ability to process TS data without compromising language ability. We hope that this study will serve as a foundation for future work to support TS+LLM progress.

Hongyan Li, Song Jiang, Wenjun Sun et al.

We propose a model-data asymptotic-preserving neural network(MD-APNN) method to solve the nonlinear gray radiative transfer equations(GRTEs). The system is challenging to be simulated with both the traditional numerical schemes and the vanilla physics-informed neural networks(PINNs) due to the multiscale characteristics. Under the framework of PINNs, we employ a micro-macro decomposition technique to construct a new asymptotic-preserving(AP) loss function, which includes the residual of the governing equations in the micro-macro coupled form, the initial and boundary conditions with additional diffusion limit information, the conservation laws, and a few labeled data. A convergence analysis is performed for the proposed method, and a number of numerical examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of MD-APNNs, and particularly, the importance of the AP property in the neural networks for the diffusion dominating problems. The numerical results indicate that MD-APNNs lead to a better performance than APNNs or pure data-driven networks in the simulation of the nonlinear non-stationary GRTEs.

Yongfan Lai, Wen Qian, Bo Liu et al.

The scarcity of high-quality data remains a primary bottleneck in adapting multimodal generative models for medical image editing. Existing medical image editing datasets often suffer from limited diversity, neglect of medical image understanding and inability to balance quality with scalability. To address these gaps, we propose MieDB-100k, a large-scale, high-quality and diverse dataset for text-guided medical image editing. It categorizes editing tasks into perspectives of Perception, Modification and Transformation, considering both understanding and generation abilities. We construct MieDB-100k via a data curation pipeline leveraging both modality-specific expert models and rule-based data synthetic methods, followed by rigorous manual inspection to ensure clinical fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that model trained with MieDB-100k consistently outperform both open-source and proprietary models while exhibiting strong generalization ability. We anticipate that this dataset will serve as a cornerstone for future advancements in specialized medical image editing.

Zhihu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Yu Wang et al.

The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has become a pivotal method for solving complex problems with large language models (LLMs). However, its application to domain-specific tasks remains challenging, as LLMs often fail to decompose tasks accurately or execute subtasks effectively. This paper introduces the Re-TASK framework, a novel theoretical model that revisits LLM tasks from capability, skill, and knowledge perspectives, drawing on the principles of Bloom's Taxonomy and Knowledge Space Theory. While CoT provides a workflow-centric perspective on tasks, Re-TASK introduces a Chain-of-Learning (CoL) paradigm that highlights task dependencies on specific capability items, further broken down into their constituent knowledge and skill components. To address CoT failures, we propose a Re-TASK prompting strategy, which strengthens task-relevant capabilities through targeted knowledge injection and skill adaptation. Experiments across diverse domains demonstrate the effectiveness of Re-TASK. In particular, we achieve improvements of 45.00% on Yi-1.5-9B and 24.50% on Llama3-Chinese-8B for legal tasks. These results highlight the potential of Re-TASK to significantly enhance LLM performance and its applicability in specialized domains. We release our code and data at https://github.com/Uylee/Re-TASK.

Zhigang Tu, Hongyan Li, Wei Xie et al.

Video super-resolution is currently one of the most active research topics in computer vision as it plays an important role in many visual applications. Generally, video super-resolution contains a significant component, i.e., motion compensation, which is used to estimate the displacement between successive video frames for temporal alignment. Optical flow, which can supply dense and sub-pixel motion between consecutive frames, is among the most common ways for this task. To obtain a good understanding of the effect that optical flow acts in video super-resolution, in this work, we conduct a comprehensive review on this subject for the first time. This investigation covers the following major topics: the function of super-resolution (i.e., why we require super-resolution); the concept of video super-resolution (i.e., what is video super-resolution); the description of evaluation metrics (i.e., how (video) superresolution performs); the introduction of optical flow based video super-resolution; the investigation of using optical flow to capture temporal dependency for video super-resolution. Prominently, we give an in-depth study of the deep learning based video super-resolution method, where some representative algorithms are analyzed and compared. Additionally, we highlight some promising research directions and open issues that should be further addressed.

Jiarui Jin, Haoyu Wang, Xingliang Wu et al.

Electrocardiography (ECG) serves as an indispensable diagnostic tool in clinical practice, yet existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain unreliable for ECG interpretation, often producing plausible but clinically incorrect analyses. To address this, we propose ECG-R1, the first reasoning MLLM designed for reliable ECG interpretation via three innovations. First, we construct the interpretation corpus using \textit{Protocol-Guided Instruction Data Generation}, grounding interpretation in measurable ECG features and monograph-defined quantitative thresholds and diagnostic logic. Second, we present a modality-decoupled architecture with \textit{Interleaved Modality Dropout} to improve robustness and cross-modal consistency when either the ECG signal or ECG image is missing. Third, we present \textit{Reinforcement Learning with ECG Diagnostic Evidence Rewards} to strengthen evidence-grounded ECG interpretation. Additionally, we systematically evaluate the ECG interpretation capabilities of proprietary, open-source, and medical MLLMs, and provide the first quantitative evidence that severe hallucinations are widespread, suggesting that the public should not directly trust these outputs without independent verification. Code and data are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/ECG-R1}{here}, and an online platform can be accessed at \href{http://ai.heartvoice.com.cn/ECG-R1/}{here}.

Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Moxian Song et al.

Continuous diagnosis and prognosis are essential for intensive care patients. It can provide more opportunities for timely treatment and rational resource allocation, especially for sepsis, a main cause of death in ICU, and COVID-19, a new worldwide epidemic. Although deep learning methods have shown their great superiority in many medical tasks, they tend to catastrophically forget, over fit, and get results too late when performing diagnosis and prognosis in the continuous mode. In this work, we summarized the three requirements of this task, proposed a new concept, continuous classification of time series (CCTS), and designed a novel model training method, restricted update strategy of neural networks (RU). In the context of continuous prognosis, our method outperformed all baselines and achieved the average accuracy of 90%, 97%, and 85% on sepsis prognosis, COVID-19 mortality prediction, and eight diseases classification. Superiorly, our method can also endow deep learning with interpretability, having the potential to explore disease mechanisms and provide a new horizon for medical research. We have achieved disease staging for sepsis and COVID-19, discovering four stages and three stages with their typical biomarkers respectively. Further, our method is a data-agnostic and model-agnostic plug-in, it can be used to continuously prognose other diseases with staging and even implement CCTS in other fields.

Chenxi Sun, Moxian Song, Derun Can et al.

In the real world, the class of a time series is usually labeled at the final time, but many applications require to classify time series at every time point. e.g. the outcome of a critical patient is only determined at the end, but he should be diagnosed at all times for timely treatment. Thus, we propose a new concept: Continuous Classification of Time Series (CCTS). It requires the model to learn data in different time stages. But the time series evolves dynamically, leading to different data distributions. When a model learns multi-distribution, it always forgets or overfits. We suggest that meaningful learning scheduling is potential due to an interesting observation: Measured by confidence, the process of model learning multiple distributions is similar to the process of human learning multiple knowledge. Thus, we propose a novel Confidence-guided method for CCTS (C3TS). It can imitate the alternating human confidence described by the Dunning-Kruger Effect. We define the objective- confidence to arrange data, and the self-confidence to control the learning duration. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that C3TS is more accurate than all baselines for CCTS.

Luo Ji, Qi Qin, Ningyuan Xi et al.

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $β$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $β$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

Jiarui Jin, Haoyu Wang, Hongyan Li et al.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is essential for the clinical diagnosis of arrhythmias and other heart diseases, but deep learning methods based on ECG often face limitations due to the need for high-quality annotations. Although previous ECG self-supervised learning (eSSL) methods have made significant progress in representation learning from unannotated ECG data, they typically treat ECG signals as ordinary time-series data, segmenting the signals using fixed-size and fixed-step time windows, which often ignore the form and rhythm characteristics and latent semantic relationships in ECG signals. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective on ECG signals, treating heartbeats as words and rhythms as sentences. Based on this perspective, we first designed the QRS-Tokenizer, which generates semantically meaningful ECG sentences from the raw ECG signals. Building on these, we then propose HeartLang, a novel self-supervised learning framework for ECG language processing, learning general representations at form and rhythm levels. Additionally, we construct the largest heartbeat-based ECG vocabulary to date, which will further advance the development of ECG language processing. We evaluated HeartLang across six public ECG datasets, where it demonstrated robust competitiveness against other eSSL methods. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/HeartLang.

Mohamad Koohi-Moghadam, Hongzhe Sun, Hongyan Li et al.

The discovery of anticancer therapeutics has traditionally treated organic small molecules and metal-based coordination complexes as separate chemical domains, limiting knowledge transfer despite their shared biological objectives. This disparity is particularly pronounced in available data, with extensive screening databases for organic compounds compared to only a few thousand characterized metal complexes. Here, we introduce ChemCLIP, a dual-encoder contrastive learning framework that bridges this organic-inorganic divide by learning unified representations based on shared anticancer activities rather than structural similarity. We compiled complementary datasets comprising 44,854 unique organic compounds and 5,164 unique metal complexes, standardized across 60 cancer cell lines. By training parallel encoders with activity-aware hard negative mining, we mapped structurally distinct compounds into a shared 256-dimensional embedding space where biologically similar compounds cluster together regardless of chemical class. We systematically evaluated four molecular encoding strategies: Morgan fingerprints, ChemBERTa, MolFormer, and Chemprop, through quantitative alignment metrics, embedding visualizations, and downstream classification tasks. Morgan fingerprints achieved superior performance with an average alignment ratio of 0.899 and downstream classification AUCs of 0.859 (inorganic) and 0.817 (organic). This work establishes contrastive learning as an effective strategy for unifying disparate chemical domains and provides empirical guidance for encoder selection in multi-modal chemistry applications, with implications extending beyond anticancer drug discovery to any scenario requiring cross-domain chemical knowledge transfer.

Jingwei Liu, Ling Yang, Hao Luo et al.

The paper-to-video task converts a research paper into a structured video abstract, distilling key concepts, methods, and conclusions into an accessible, well-organized format. While state-of-the-art video generation models demonstrate potential, they are constrained by limited context windows, rigid video duration constraints, limited stylistic diversity, and an inability to represent domain-specific knowledge. To address these limitations, we introduce Preacher, the first paper-to-video agentic system. Preacher employs a topdown approach to decompose, summarize, and reformulate the paper, followed by bottom-up video generation, synthesizing diverse video segments into a coherent abstract. To align cross-modal representations, we define key scenes and introduce a Progressive Chain of Thought (P-CoT) for granular, iterative planning. Preacher successfully generates high-quality video abstracts across five research fields, demonstrating expertise beyond current video generation models. Code will be released at: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Paper2Video

Jiarui Jin, Haoyu Wang, Xiang Lan et al.

Recent unified models such as GPT-5 have achieved encouraging progress on vision-language tasks. However, these unified models typically fail to correctly understand ECG signals and provide accurate medical diagnoses, nor can they correctly generate ECG signals. To address these limitations, we propose UniECG, the first unified model for ECG capable of concurrently performing evidence-based ECG interpretation and text-conditioned ECG generation tasks. Through a decoupled two-stage training approach, the model first learns evidence-based interpretation skills (ECG-to-Text), and then injects ECG generation capabilities (Text-to-ECG) via latent space alignment. UniECG can autonomously choose to interpret or generate an ECG based on user input, significantly extending the capability boundaries of current ECG models. Our code and checkpoints will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/UniECG upon acceptance.

Jiarui Jin, Xiaocheng Fang, Haoyu Wang et al.

Myocardial infarction is a critical manifestation of coronary artery disease, yet detecting it from single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) remains challenging due to limited spatial information. An intuitive idea is to convert single-lead into multiple-lead ECG for classification by pre-trained models, but generative methods optimized at the signal level in most cases leave a large latent space gap, ultimately degrading diagnostic performance. This naturally raises the question of whether latent space alignment could help. However, most prior ECG alignment methods focus on learning transformation invariance, which mismatches the goal of single-lead detection. To address this issue, we propose SelfMIS, a simple yet effective alignment learning framework to improve myocardial infarction detection from single-lead ECG. Discarding manual data augmentations, SelfMIS employs a self-cutting strategy to pair multiple-lead ECG with their corresponding single-lead segments and directly align them in the latent space. This design shifts the learning objective from pursuing transformation invariance to enriching the single-lead representation, explicitly driving the single-lead ECG encoder to learn a representation capable of inferring global cardiac context from the local signal. Experimentally, SelfMIS achieves superior performance over baseline models across nine myocardial infarction types while maintaining a simpler architecture and lower computational overhead, thereby substantiating the efficacy of direct latent space alignment. Our code and checkpoint will be publicly available after acceptance.

Yi Sun, Xinhao Zhong, Hongyan Li et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generation capabilities, yet they raise significant concerns regarding safety, copyright, and ethical implications. Existing concept erasure methods address these risks by removing sensitive concepts from pre-trained models, but most of them rely on data-intensive and computationally expensive fine-tuning, which poses a critical limitation. To overcome these challenges, inspired by the observation that the model's activations are predominantly composed of generic concepts, with only a minimal component can represent the target concept, we propose a novel training-free method (ActErase) for efficient concept erasure. Specifically, the proposed method operates by identifying activation difference regions via prompt-pair analysis, extracting target activations and dynamically replacing input activations during forward passes. Comprehensive evaluations across three critical erasure tasks (nudity, artistic style, and object removal) demonstrates that our training-free method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) erasure performance, while effectively preserving the model's overall generative capability. Our approach also exhibits strong robustness against adversarial attacks, establishing a new plug-and-play paradigm for lightweight yet effective concept manipulation in diffusion models.

Jingwei Liu, Ling Yang, Hongyan Li et al.

While time series diffusion models have received considerable focus from many recent works, the performance of existing models remains highly unstable. Factors limiting time series diffusion models include insufficient time series datasets and the absence of guidance. To address these limitations, we propose a Retrieval- Augmented Time series Diffusion model (RATD). The framework of RATD consists of two parts: an embedding-based retrieval process and a reference-guided diffusion model. In the first part, RATD retrieves the time series that are most relevant to historical time series from the database as references. The references are utilized to guide the denoising process in the second part. Our approach allows leveraging meaningful samples within the database to aid in sampling, thus maximizing the utilization of datasets. Meanwhile, this reference-guided mechanism also compensates for the deficiencies of existing time series diffusion models in terms of guidance. Experiments and visualizations on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, particularly in complicated prediction tasks.

Teng Chen, Sheng Xu, Feixiang Guo et al.

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

Yongfan Lai, Jiabo Chen, Deyun Zhang et al.

Heart disease remains a significant threat to human health. As a non-invasive diagnostic tool, the electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most widely used methods for cardiac screening. However, the scarcity of high-quality ECG data, driven by privacy concerns and limited medical resources, creates a pressing need for effective ECG signal generation. Existing approaches for generating ECG signals typically rely on small training datasets, lack comprehensive evaluation frameworks, and overlook potential applications beyond data augmentation. To address these challenges, we propose DiffuSETS, a novel framework capable of generating ECG signals with high semantic alignment and fidelity. DiffuSETS accepts various modalities of clinical text reports and patient-specific information as inputs, enabling the creation of clinically meaningful ECG signals. Additionally, to address the lack of standardized evaluation in ECG generation, we introduce a comprehensive benchmarking methodology to assess the effectiveness of generative models in this domain. Our model achieve excellent results in tests, proving its superiority in the task of ECG generation. Furthermore, we showcase its potential to mitigate data scarcity while exploring novel applications in cardiology education and medical knowledge discovery, highlighting the broader impact of our work.

Hongyan Li, Song Jiang, Wenjun Sun et al.

We develop a Macroscopic Auxiliary Asymptotic-Preserving Neural Network (MA-APNN) method to solve the time-dependent linear radiative transfer equations (LRTEs), which have a multi-scale nature and high dimensionality. To achieve this, we utilize the Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) framework and design a new adaptive exponentially weighted Asymptotic-Preserving (AP) loss function, which incorporates the macroscopic auxiliary equation that is derived from the original transfer equation directly and explicitly contains the information of the diffusion limit equation. Thus, as the scale parameter tends to zero, the loss function gradually transitions from the transport state to the diffusion limit state. In addition, the initial data, boundary conditions, and conservation laws serve as the regularization terms for the loss. We present several numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of MA-APNNs.

Yunfeng Ge, Jiawei Li, Yiji Zhao et al.

Text-to-Time Series generation holds significant potential to address challenges such as data sparsity, imbalance, and limited availability of multimodal time series datasets across domains. While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in Text-to-X (e.g., vision and audio data) generation, their use in time series generation remains in its nascent stages. Existing approaches face two critical limitations: (1) the lack of systematic exploration of general-proposed time series captions, which are often domain-specific and struggle with generalization; and (2) the inability to generate time series of arbitrary lengths, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. In this work, we first categorize time series captions into three levels: point-level, fragment-level, and instance-level. Additionally, we introduce a new fragment-level dataset containing over 600,000 high-resolution time series-text pairs. Second, we propose Text-to-Series (T2S), a diffusion-based framework that bridges the gap between natural language and time series in a domain-agnostic manner. T2S employs a length-adaptive variational autoencoder to encode time series of varying lengths into consistent latent embeddings. On top of that, T2S effectively aligns textual representations with latent embeddings by utilizing Flow Matching and employing Diffusion Transformer as the denoiser. We train T2S in an interleaved paradigm across multiple lengths, allowing it to generate sequences of any desired length. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that T2S achieves state-of-the-art performance across 13 datasets spanning 12 domains.

Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Moxian Song et al.

Time series widely exists in real-world applications and many deep learning models have performed well on it. Current research has shown the importance of learning strategy for models, suggesting that the benefit is the order and size of learning samples. However, no effective strategy has been proposed for time series due to its abstract and dynamic construction. Meanwhile, the existing one-shot tasks and continuous tasks for time series necessitate distinct learning processes and mechanisms. No all-purpose approach has been suggested. In this work, we propose a novel Curricular and CyclicaL loss (CRUCIAL) to learn time series for the first time. It is model- and task-agnostic and can be plugged on top of the original loss with no extra procedure. CRUCIAL has two characteristics: It can arrange an easy-to-hard learning order by dynamically determining the sample contribution and modulating the loss amplitude; It can manage a cyclically changed dataset and achieve an adaptive cycle by correlating the loss distribution and the selection probability. We prove that compared with monotonous size, cyclical size can reduce expected error. Experiments on 3 kinds of tasks and 5 real-world datasets show the benefits of CRUCIAL for most deep learning models when learning time series.

Xiaocheng Fang, Zhengyao Ding, Jieyi Cai et al.

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) imaging provides a comprehensive assessment of cardiac structure and function but remains constrained by high acquisition costs and reliance on expert annotations, limiting the availability of large-scale labeled datasets. In contrast, electrocardiograms (ECGs) are inexpensive, widely accessible, and offer a promising modality for conditioning the generative synthesis of cine CMR. To this end, we propose ECGFlowCMR, a novel ECG-to-CMR generative framework that integrates a Phase-Aware Masked Autoencoder (PA-MAE) and an Anatomy-Motion Disentangled Flow (AMDF) to address two fundamental challenges: (1) the cross-modal temporal mismatch between multi-beat ECG recordings and single-cycle CMR sequences, and (2) the anatomical observability gap due to the limited structural information inherent in ECGs. Extensive experiments on the UK Biobank and a proprietary clinical dataset demonstrate that ECGFlowCMR can generate realistic cine CMR sequences from ECG inputs, enabling scalable pretraining and improving performance on downstream cardiac disease classification and phenotype prediction tasks.

Qingqing Gu, Dan Wang, Yue Zhao et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is widely applied to enhance the LLM capability in math, coding and reasoning tasks. However, its performance is limited for open-domain tasks, when there are no clearly defined reasoning steps or logical transitions. To mitigate such challenges, we propose a new prompt-based paradigm called Chain of Conceptual Thoughts (CoCT), which suggests the LLM first to produce the tag of concepts, then complete the detailed content following the concept. To encourage this hierarchical way of thinking, we implement the concepts with emotions, strategies and topics. We experiment with this paradigm in daily and emotional support conversations, covering tasks with both in-domain and out-of-domain concept settings. Automatic, human, and LLM-based evaluations reveal that CoCT surpasses several prompt-based baselines such as self-refine, ECoT, SoT and RAG, suggesting a potential solution of LLM prompting paradigm for a wider scope of tasks.

Xiaocheng Fang, Jiarui Jin, Haoyu Wang et al.

In clinical practice, electrocardiography (ECG) remains the gold standard for cardiac monitoring, providing crucial insights for diagnosing a wide range of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, its reliance on specialized equipment and trained personnel limits feasibility for continuous routine monitoring. Photoplethysmography (PPG) offers accessible, continuous monitoring but lacks definitive electrophysiological information, preventing conclusive diagnosis. Generative models present a promising approach to translate PPG into clinically valuable ECG signals, yet current methods face substantial challenges, including the misalignment of physiological semantics in generative models and the complexity of modeling in high-dimensional signals. To this end, we propose PPGFlowECG, a two-stage framework that aligns PPG and ECG in a shared latent space via the CardioAlign Encoder and employs latent rectified flow to generate ECGs with high fidelity and interpretability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to experiment on MCMED, a newly released clinical-grade dataset comprising over 10 million paired PPG-ECG samples from more than 118,000 emergency department visits with expert-labeled cardiovascular disease annotations. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for PPG-to-ECG translation and cardiovascular disease detection. Moreover, cardiologist-led evaluations confirm that the synthesized ECGs achieve high fidelity and improve diagnostic reliability, underscoring our method's potential for real-world cardiovascular screening.

Yunfeng Ge, Ming Jin, Yiji Zhao et al.

Time series forecasting plays a vital role in critical domains like energy and transportation, where non-stationary dynamics are deeply intertwined with events in other modalities such as texts. However, incorporating natural language-based external events to improve non-stationary forecasting remains largely unexplored, as most approaches still rely on a single modality, resulting in limited contextual knowledge and model underperformance. Enabling fine-grained multimodal interactions between temporal and textual data is challenged by three fundamental issues: (1) the difficulty of fine-grained synchronization between time-varying discrete textual events and continuous time series; (2) the inherent temporal uncertainty introduced by textual semantics; and (3) the misalignment between textual event embeddings and multi-resolution temporal patterns. In this work, we address these challenges by introducing event-aware non-stationary time series forecasting (EventTSF), an autoregressive generation framework that integrates historical time series with textual events to make subsequent forecasts. Specifically, EventTSF uses autoregressive diffusion with flow matching at each step to capture nuanced temporal-event interactions. To handle event-induced uncertainty, flow matching timesteps are adaptively controlled according to event semantic signals. The underlying denoiser employs a multimodal U-shaped diffusion transformer that efficiently fuses temporal and textual modalities across different resolutions. Extensive experiments on 8 synthetic and real-world datasets show that EventTSF outperforms 12 baselines across diverse event-aware non-stationary time series forecasting scenarios, achieving substantial improvements of 10.7% higher forecasting accuracy and $1.13\times$ faster training efficiency.

Yongfan Lai, Bo Liu, Xinyan Guan et al.

Personalized electrocardiogram (ECG) generation is to simulate a patient's ECG digital twins tailored to specific conditions. It has the potential to transform traditional healthcare into a more accurate individualized paradigm, while preserving the key benefits of conventional population-level ECG synthesis. However, this promising task presents two fundamental challenges: extracting individual features without ground truth and injecting various types of conditions without confusing generative model. In this paper, we present ECGTwin, a two-stage framework designed to address these challenges. In the first stage, an Individual Base Extractor trained via contrastive learning robustly captures personal features from a reference ECG. In the second stage, the extracted individual features, along with a target cardiac condition, are integrated into the diffusion-based generation process through our novel AdaX Condition Injector, which injects these signals via two dedicated and specialized pathways. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments have demonstrated that our model can not only generate ECG signals of high fidelity and diversity by offering a fine-grained generation controllability, but also preserving individual-specific features. Furthermore, ECGTwin shows the potential to enhance ECG auto-diagnosis in downstream application, confirming the possibility of precise personalized healthcare solutions.

Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Yaliang Li et al.

Data is essential to performing time series analysis utilizing machine learning approaches, whether for classic models or today's large language models. A good time-series dataset is advantageous for the model's accuracy, robustness, and convergence, as well as task outcomes and costs. The emergence of data-centric AI represents a shift in the landscape from model refinement to prioritizing data quality. Even though time-series data processing methods frequently come up in a wide range of research fields, it hasn't been well investigated as a specific topic. To fill the gap, in this paper, we systematically review different data-centric methods in time series analysis, covering a wide range of research topics. Based on the time-series data characteristics at sample, feature, and period, we propose a taxonomy for the reviewed data selection methods. In addition to discussing and summarizing their characteristics, benefits, and drawbacks targeting time-series data, we also introduce the challenges and opportunities by proposing recommendations, open problems, and possible research topics.

Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Moxian Song et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have a greater potential for modeling time series data than Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), due to their inherent neuron dynamics and low energy consumption. However, it is difficult to demonstrate their superiority in classification accuracy, because current efforts mainly focus on designing better network structures. In this work, enlighten by brain-inspired science, we find that, not only the structure but also the learning process should be human-like. To achieve this, we investigate the power of Curriculum Learning (CL) on SNNs by designing a novel method named CSNN with two theoretically guaranteed mechanisms: The active-to-dormant training order makes the curriculum similar to that of human learning and suitable for spiking neurons; The value-based regional encoding makes the neuron activity to mimic the brain memory when learning sequential data. Experiments on multiple time series sources including simulated, sensor, motion, and healthcare demonstrate that CL has a more positive effect on SNNs than ANNs with about twice the accuracy change, and CSNN can increase about 3% SNNs' accuracy by improving network sparsity, neuron firing status, anti-noise ability, and convergence speed.

Zhigang Tu, Jiaxu Zhang, Hongyan Li et al.

In recent years, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) play an increasingly critical role in skeleton-based human action recognition. However, most GCN-based methods still have two main limitations: 1) They only consider the motion information of the joints or process the joints and bones separately, which are unable to fully explore the latent functional correlation between joints and bones for action recognition. 2) Most of these works are performed in the supervised learning way, which heavily relies on massive labeled training data. To address these issues, we propose a semi-supervised skeleton-based action recognition method which has been rarely exploited before. We design a novel correlation-driven joint-bone fusion graph convolutional network (CD-JBF-GCN) as an encoder and use a pose prediction head as a decoder to achieve semi-supervised learning. Specifically, the CD-JBF-GC can explore the motion transmission between the joint stream and the bone stream, so that promoting both streams to learn more discriminative feature representations. The pose prediction based auto-encoder in the self-supervised training stage allows the network to learn motion representation from unlabeled data, which is essential for action recognition. Extensive experiments on two popular datasets, i.e. NTU-RGB+D and Kinetics-Skeleton, demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised skeleton-based action recognition and is also useful for fully-supervised methods.

Yen-Hsiu Chou, Shenda Hong, Chenxi Sun et al.

Since data is presented long-tailed in reality, it is challenging for Federated Learning (FL) to train across decentralized clients as practical applications. We present Global-Regularized Personalization (GRP-FED) to tackle the data imbalanced issue by considering a single global model and multiple local models for each client. With adaptive aggregation, the global model treats multiple clients fairly and mitigates the global long-tailed issue. Each local model is learned from the local data and aligns with its distribution for customization. To prevent the local model from just overfitting, GRP-FED applies an adversarial discriminator to regularize between the learned global-local features. Extensive results show that our GRP-FED improves under both global and local scenarios on real-world MIT-BIH and synthesis CIFAR-10 datasets, achieving comparable performance and addressing client imbalance.

Chenxi Sun, Shenda Hong, Moxian Song et al.

Prediction based on Irregularly Sampled Time Series (ISTS) is of wide concern in the real-world applications. For more accurate prediction, the methods had better grasp more data characteristics. Different from ordinary time series, ISTS is characterised with irregular time intervals of intra-series and different sampling rates of inter-series. However, existing methods have suboptimal predictions due to artificially introducing new dependencies in a time series and biasedly learning relations among time series when modeling these two characteristics. In this work, we propose a novel Time Encoding (TE) mechanism. TE can embed the time information as time vectors in the complex domain. It has the the properties of absolute distance and relative distance under different sampling rates, which helps to represent both two irregularities of ISTS. Meanwhile, we create a new model structure named Time Encoding Echo State Network (TE-ESN). It is the first ESNs-based model that can process ISTS data. Besides, TE-ESN can incorporate long short-term memories and series fusion to grasp horizontal and vertical relations. Experiments on one chaos system and three real-world datasets show that TE-ESN performs better than all baselines and has better reservoir property.

Chenxi Sun, Moxian Song, Shenda Hong et al.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have demonstrated their outstanding ability in sequence tasks and have achieved state-of-the-art in wide range of applications, such as industrial, medical, economic and linguistic. Echo State Network (ESN) is simple type of RNNs and has emerged in the last decade as an alternative to gradient descent training based RNNs. ESN, with a strong theoretical ground, is practical, conceptually simple, easy to implement. It avoids non-converging and computationally expensive in the gradient descent methods. Since ESN was put forward in 2002, abundant existing works have promoted the progress of ESN, and the recently introduced Deep ESN model opened the way to uniting the merits of deep learning and ESNs. Besides, the combinations of ESNs with other machine learning models have also overperformed baselines in some applications. However, the apparent simplicity of ESNs can sometimes be deceptive and successfully applying ESNs needs some experience. Thus, in this paper, we categorize the ESN-based methods to basic ESNs, DeepESNs and combinations, then analyze them from the perspective of theoretical studies, network designs and specific applications. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of ESNs by summarizing the open questions and proposing possible future works.

Chenxi Sun, Shenda Hong, Moxian Song et al.

Irregularly sampled time series (ISTS) data has irregular temporal intervals between observations and different sampling rates between sequences. ISTS commonly appears in healthcare, economics, and geoscience. Especially in the medical environment, the widely used Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have abundant typical irregularly sampled medical time series (ISMTS) data. Developing deep learning methods on EHRs data is critical for personalized treatment, precise diagnosis and medical management. However, it is challenging to directly use deep learning models for ISMTS data. On the one hand, ISMTS data has the intra-series and inter-series relations. Both the local and global structures should be considered. On the other hand, methods should consider the trade-off between task accuracy and model complexity and remain generality and interpretability. So far, many existing works have tried to solve the above problems and have achieved good results. In this paper, we review these deep learning methods from the perspectives of technology and task. Under the technology-driven perspective, we summarize them into two categories - missing data-based methods and raw data-based methods. Under the task-driven perspective, we also summarize them into two categories - data imputation-oriented and downstream task-oriented. For each of them, we point out their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, we implement some representative methods and compare them on four medical datasets with two tasks. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in this area.

Shenda Hong, Cao Xiao, Tengfei Ma et al.

Electrocardiography (ECG) signals are commonly used to diagnose various cardiac abnormalities. Recently, deep learning models showed initial success on modeling ECG data, however they are mostly black-box, thus lack interpretability needed for clinical usage. In this work, we propose MultIlevel kNowledge-guided Attention networks (MINA) that predict heart diseases from ECG signals with intuitive explanation aligned with medical knowledge. By extracting multilevel (beat-, rhythm- and frequency-level) domain knowledge features separately, MINA combines the medical knowledge and ECG data via a multilevel attention model, making the learned models highly interpretable. Our experiments showed MINA achieved PR-AUC 0.9436 (outperforming the best baseline by 5.51%) in real world ECG dataset. Finally, MINA also demonstrated robust performance and strong interpretability against signal distortion and noise contamination.

Shenda Hong, Cao Xiao, Trong Nghia Hoang et al.

In many situations, we need to build and deploy separate models in related environments with different data qualities. For example, an environment with strong observation equipments (e.g., intensive care units) often provides high-quality multi-modal data, which are acquired from multiple sensory devices and have rich-feature representations. On the other hand, an environment with poor observation equipment (e.g., at home) only provides low-quality, uni-modal data with poor-feature representations. To deploy a competitive model in a poor-data environment without requiring direct access to multi-modal data acquired from a rich-data environment, this paper develops and presents a knowledge distillation (KD) method (RDPD) to enhance a predictive model trained on poor data using knowledge distilled from a high-complexity model trained on rich, private data. We evaluated RDPD on three real-world datasets and shown that its distilled model consistently outperformed all baselines across all datasets, especially achieving the greatest performance improvement over a model trained only on low-quality data by 24.56% on PR-AUC and 12.21% on ROC-AUC, and over that of a state-of-the-art KD model by 5.91% on PR-AUC and 4.44% on ROC-AUC.

Junyuan Shang, Cao Xiao, Tengfei Ma et al.

Recent progress in deep learning is revolutionizing the healthcare domain including providing solutions to medication recommendations, especially recommending medication combination for patients with complex health conditions. Existing approaches either do not customize based on patient health history, or ignore existing knowledge on drug-drug interactions (DDI) that might lead to adverse outcomes. To fill this gap, we propose the Graph Augmented Memory Networks (GAMENet), which integrates the drug-drug interactions knowledge graph by a memory module implemented as a graph convolutional networks, and models longitudinal patient records as the query. It is trained end-to-end to provide safe and personalized recommendation of medication combination. We demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of GAMENet by comparing with several state-of-the-art methods on real EHR data. GAMENet outperformed all baselines in all effectiveness measures, and also achieved 3.60% DDI rate reduction from existing EHR data.

Linqing Liu, Yao Lu, Min Yang et al.

In this paper, we propose an adversarial process for abstractive text summarization, in which we simultaneously train a generative model G and a discriminative model D. In particular, we build the generator G as an agent of reinforcement learning, which takes the raw text as input and predicts the abstractive summarization. We also build a discriminator which attempts to distinguish the generated summary from the ground truth summary. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves competitive ROUGE scores with the state-of-the-art methods on CNN/Daily Mail dataset. Qualitatively, we show that our model is able to generate more abstractive, readable and diverse summaries.