Shoji Nishimura

Ou Deng, Shoji Nishimura, Atsushi Ogihara et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for biomedical knowledge faces a hierarchy-aware ontology grounding challenge: resources like HPO, DO, and MeSH use deep ``is-a" taxonomies, yet production stacks rely on Euclidean embeddings and ANN indexes. While hyperbolic embeddings suit hierarchical representation, they face two barriers: (i) lack of native vector database support, and (ii) risk of underperforming on entity-centric queries where hierarchy is irrelevant. We present HyEm, a lightweight retrieval layer integrating hyperbolic ontology embeddings into existing Euclidean ANN infrastructure. HyEm learns radius-controlled hyperbolic embeddings, stores origin log-mapped vectors in standard Euclidean databases for candidate retrieval, then applies exact hyperbolic reranking. A query-adaptive gate outputs continuous mixing weights, combining Euclidean semantic similarity with hyperbolic hierarchy distance at reranking time. Our bi-Lipschitz analysis under radius constraints provides practical guidance for ANN oversampling and dimensionality.Experiments on biomedical ontology subsets demonstrate HyEm preserves 94-98% of Euclidean baseline performance on entity-centric queries while substantially improving hierarchy-navigation and mixed-intent queries, maintaining indexability at moderate oversampling.

Ou Deng, Shoji Nishimura, Atsushi Ogihara et al.

This study proposes Evolutionary Causal Discovery (ECD) for causal discovery that tailors response variables, predictor variables, and corresponding operators to research datasets. Utilizing genetic programming for variable relationship parsing, the method proceeds with the Relative Impact Stratification (RIS) algorithm to assess the relative impact of predictor variables on the response variable, facilitating expression simplification and enhancing the interpretability of variable relationships. ECD proposes an expression tree to visualize the RIS results, offering a differentiated depiction of unknown causal relationships compared to conventional causal discovery. The ECD method represents an evolution and augmentation of existing causal discovery methods, providing an interpretable approach for analyzing variable relationships in complex systems, particularly in healthcare settings with Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world EHR datasets demonstrate the efficacy of ECD in uncovering patterns and mechanisms among variables, maintaining high accuracy and stability across different noise levels. On the real-world EHR dataset, ECD reveals the intricate relationships between the response variable and other predictive variables, aligning with the results of structural equation modeling and shapley additive explanations analyses.

Ou Deng, Ruichen Cong, Jianting Xu et al.

Symbolic regression promises readable equations but struggles to encode unit-aware thresholds and conditional logic. We propose logistic-gated operators (LGO) -- differentiable gates with learnable location and steepness -- embedded as typed primitives and mapped back to physical units for audit. Across two primary health datasets (ICU, NHANES), the hard-gate variant recovers clinically plausible cut-points: 71% (5/7) of assessed thresholds fall within 10% of guideline anchors and 100% within 20%, while using far fewer gates than the soft variant (ICU median 4.0 vs 10.0; NHANES 5.0 vs 12.5), and remaining within the competitive accuracy envelope of strong SR baselines. On predominantly smooth tasks, gates are pruned, preserving parsimony. The result is compact symbolic equations with explicit, unit-aware thresholds that can be audited against clinical anchors -- turning interpretability from a post-hoc explanation into a modeling constraint and equipping symbolic regression with a practical calculus for regime switching and governance-ready deployment.

Junnan Li, Jianquan Liu, Yongkang Wong et al.

The recent development of commodity 360$^{\circ}$ cameras have enabled a single video to capture an entire scene, which endows promising potentials in surveillance scenarios. However, research in omnidirectional video analysis has lagged behind the hardware advances. In this work, we address the important problem of action recognition in top-view 360$^{\circ}$ videos. Due to the wide filed-of-view, 360$^{\circ}$ videos usually capture multiple people performing actions at the same time. Furthermore, the appearance of people are deformed. The proposed framework first transforms omnidirectional videos into panoramic videos, then it extracts spatial-temporal features using region-based 3D CNNs for action recognition. We propose a weakly-supervised method based on multi-instance multi-label learning, which trains the model to recognize and localize multiple actions in a video using only video-level action labels as supervision. We perform experiments to quantitatively validate the efficacy of the proposed method and qualitatively demonstrate action localization results. To enable research in this direction, we introduce 360Action, the first omnidirectional video dataset for multi-person action recognition.