Shuai Huang

Congjing Zhang, Ryan Feng Lin, Ruoxuan Bao et al.

While tabular data is fundamental to many real-world machine learning (ML) applications, acquiring high-quality tabular data is usually labor-intensive and expensive. Limited by the scarcity of observations, tabular datasets often exhibit critical deficiencies, such as class imbalance, selection bias, and low fidelity. To address these challenges, building on recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), this paper introduces Team-then-Trim (T$^2$), a framework that synthesizes high-quality tabular data through a collaborative team of LLMs, followed by a rigorous three-stage plug-in data quality control (QC) pipeline. In T$^2$, tabular data generation is conceptualized as a manufacturing process: specialized LLMs, guided by domain knowledge, are tasked with generating different data components sequentially, and the resulting products, i.e., the synthetic data, are systematically evaluated across multiple dimensions of QC. Empirical results on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that T$^2$ outperforms state-of-the-art methods in producing high-quality tabular data, highlighting its potential to support downstream models when direct data collection is practically infeasible.

Shuai Huang, Xuan Kan, James J. Lah et al.

Current atlas-based approaches to brain network analysis rely heavily on standardized anatomical or connectivity-driven brain atlases. However, these fixed atlases often introduce significant limitations, such as spatial misalignment across individuals, functional heterogeneity within predefined regions, and atlas-selection biases, collectively undermining the reliability and interpretability of the derived brain networks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel atlas-free brain network transformer (atlas-free BNT) that leverages individualized brain parcellations derived directly from subject-specific resting-state fMRI data. Our approach computes ROI-to-voxel connectivity features in a standardized voxel-based feature space, which are subsequently processed using the BNT architecture to produce comparable subject-level embeddings. Experimental evaluations on sex classification and brain-connectome age prediction tasks demonstrate that our atlas-free BNT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art atlas-based methods, including elastic net, BrainGNN, Graphormer and the original BNT. Our atlas-free approach significantly improves the precision, robustness, and generalizability of brain network analyses. This advancement holds great potential to enhance neuroimaging biomarkers and clinical diagnostic tools for personalized precision medicine.