Yao Su

Rong Zhou, Houliang Zhou, Yao Su et al.

Multimodal neuroimaging provides complementary insights for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, yet clinical datasets frequently suffer from missing modalities. We propose ACADiff, a framework that synthesizes missing brain imaging modalities through adaptive clinical-aware diffusion. ACADiff learns mappings between incomplete multimodal observations and target modalities by progressively denoising latent representations while attending to available imaging data and clinical metadata. The framework employs adaptive fusion that dynamically reconfigures based on input availability, coupled with semantic clinical guidance via GPT-4o-encoded prompts. Three specialized generators enable bidirectional synthesis among sMRI, FDG-PET, and AV45-PET. Evaluated on ADNI subjects, ACADiff achieves superior generation quality and maintains robust diagnostic performance even under extreme 80\% missing scenarios, outperforming all existing baselines. To promote reproducibility, code is available at https://github.com/rongzhou7/ACADiff

Shibowen Zhang, Jiayang Wu, Guannan Liu et al.

This paper presents an integrated model-based framework for generating and executing dynamic whole-body dance motions on humanoid robots. The framework operates in two stages: offline motion generation and online motion execution, both leveraging future state prediction to enable robust and dynamic dance motions in real-world environments. In the offline motion generation stage, human dance demonstrations are captured via a motion capture (MoCap) system, retargeted to the robot by solving a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem, and further refined using Trajectory Optimization (TO) to ensure dynamic feasibility. In the online motion execution stage, a centroidal dynamics-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework tracks the planned motions in real time and proactively adjusts swing foot placement to adapt to real world disturbances. We validate our framework on the full-size humanoid robot Kuavo 4Pro, demonstrating the dynamic dance motions both in simulation and in a four-minute live public performance with a team of four robots. Experimental results show that longer prediction horizons improve both motion expressiveness in planning and stability in execution.

Keqi Han, Yao Su, Lifang He et al.

Functional brain connectome is crucial for deciphering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive functions and neurological disorders. Graph deep learning models have recently gained tremendous popularity in this field. However, their actual effectiveness in modeling the brain connectome remains unclear. In this study, we re-examine graph deep learning models based on four large-scale neuroimaging studies encompassing diverse cognitive and clinical outcomes. Surprisingly, we find that the message aggregation mechanism, a hallmark of graph deep learning models, does not help with predictive performance as typically assumed, but rather consistently degrades it. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid model combining a linear model with a graph attention network through dual pathways, achieving robust predictions and enhanced interpretability by revealing both localized and global neural connectivity patterns. Our findings urge caution in adopting complex deep learning models for functional brain connectome analysis, emphasizing the need for rigorous experimental designs to establish tangible performance gains and perhaps more importantly, to pursue improvements in model interpretability.

Yao Su, Yuhong Jiang, Yixin Zhu et al.

We devise a cooperative planning framework to generate optimal trajectories for a tethered robot duo, who is tasked to gather scattered objects spread in a large area using a flexible net. Specifically, the proposed planning framework first produces a set of dense waypoints for each robot, serving as the initialization for optimization. Next, we formulate an iterative optimization scheme to generate smooth and collision-free trajectories while ensuring cooperation within the robot duo to efficiently gather objects and properly avoid obstacles. We validate the generated trajectories in simulation and implement them in physical robots using Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) to handle unknown dynamics of carried payloads. In a series of studies, we find that: (i) a U-shape cost function is effective in planning cooperative robot duo, and (ii) the task efficiency is not always proportional to the tethered net's length. Given an environment configuration, our framework can gauge the optimal net length. To our best knowledge, ours is the first that provides such estimation for tethered robot duo.