Minghan Chen

Enze Xu, Jingwen Zhang, Jiadi Li et al.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a heterogeneous, multifactorial neurodegenerative disorder characterized by beta-amyloid, pathologic tau, and neurodegeneration. There are no effective treatments for Alzheimer's disease at a late stage, urging for early intervention. However, existing statistical inference approaches of AD subtype identification ignore the pathological domain knowledge, which could lead to ill-posed results that are sometimes inconsistent with the essential neurological principles. Integrating systems biology modeling with machine learning, we propose a novel pathology steered stratification network (PSSN) that incorporates established domain knowledge in AD pathology through a reaction-diffusion model, where we consider non-linear interactions between major biomarkers and diffusion along brain structural network. Trained on longitudinal multimodal neuroimaging data, the biological model predicts long-term trajectories that capture individual progression pattern, filling in the gaps between sparse imaging data available. A deep predictive neural network is then built to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics, link neurological examinations with clinical profiles, and generate subtype assignment probability on an individual basis. We further identify an evolutionary disease graph to quantify subtype transition probabilities through extensive simulations. Our stratification achieves superior performance in both inter-cluster heterogeneity and intra-cluster homogeneity of various clinical scores. Applying our approach to enriched samples of aging populations, we identify six subtypes spanning AD spectrum, where each subtype exhibits a distinctive biomarker pattern that is consistent with its clinical outcome. PSSN provides insights into pre-symptomatic diagnosis and practical guidance on clinical treatments, which may be further generalized to other neurodegenerative diseases.

Minghan Chen, Guikun Chen, Wenguan Wang et al.

DETR introduces a simplified one-stage framework for scene graph generation (SGG) but faces challenges of sparse supervision and false negative samples. The former occurs because each image typically contains fewer than 10 relation annotations, while DETR-based SGG models employ over 100 relation queries. Each ground truth relation is assigned to only one query during training. The latter arises when one ground truth relation may have multiple queries with similar matching scores, leading to suboptimally matched queries being treated as negative samples. To address these, we propose Hydra-SGG, a one-stage SGG method featuring a Hybrid Relation Assignment. This approach combines a One-to-One Relation Assignment with an IoU-based One-to-Many Relation Assignment, increasing positive training samples and mitigating sparse supervision. In addition, we empirically demonstrate that removing self-attention between relation queries leads to duplicate predictions, which actually benefits the proposed One-to-Many Relation Assignment. With this insight, we introduce Hydra Branch, an auxiliary decoder without self-attention layers, to further enhance One-to-Many Relation Assignment by promoting different queries to make the same relation prediction. Hydra-SGG achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, including VG150 (16.0 mR@50), Open Images V6 (50.1 weighted score), and GQA (12.7 mR@50).

Xieting Chu, Hongjue Zhao, Enze Xu et al.

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering the analytical mathematical expression from data, finding various applications in natural sciences due to its good interpretability of results. However, existing methods face scalability issues when dealing with complex equations involving multiple variables. To address this challenge, we propose ScaleSR, a scalable symbolic regression model that leverages control variables to enhance both accuracy and scalability. The core idea is to decompose multi-variable symbolic regression into a set of single-variable SR problems, which are then combined in a bottom-up manner. The proposed method involves a four-step process. First, we learn a data generator from observed data using deep neural networks (DNNs). Second, the data generator is used to generate samples for a certain variable by controlling the input variables. Thirdly, single-variable symbolic regression is applied to estimate the corresponding mathematical expression. Lastly, we repeat steps 2 and 3 by gradually adding variables one by one until completion. We evaluate the performance of our method on multiple benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ScaleSR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in discovering mathematical expressions with multiple variables. Moreover, it can substantially reduce the search space for symbolic regression. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Mu Chen, Minghan Chen, Yi Yang

This paper focuses on Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection, addressing the challenge of identifying and understanding the interactions between humans and objects within a given image or video frame. Spearheaded by Detection Transformer (DETR), recent developments lead to significant improvements by replacing traditional region proposals by a set of learnable queries. However, despite the powerful representation capabilities provided by Transformers, existing Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection methods still yield low confidence levels when dealing with complex interactions and are prone to overlooking interactive actions. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach \textsc{UAHOI}, Uncertainty-aware Robust Human-Object Interaction Learning that explicitly estimates prediction uncertainty during the training process to refine both detection and interaction predictions. Our model not only predicts the HOI triplets but also quantifies the uncertainty of these predictions. Specifically, we model this uncertainty through the variance of predictions and incorporate it into the optimization objective, allowing the model to adaptively adjust its confidence threshold based on prediction variance. This integration helps in mitigating the adverse effects of incorrect or ambiguous predictions that are common in traditional methods without any hand-designed components, serving as an automatic confidence threshold. Our method is flexible to existing HOI detection methods and demonstrates improved accuracy. We evaluate \textsc{UAHOI} on two standard benchmarks in the field: V-COCO and HICO-DET, which represent challenging scenarios for HOI detection. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that \textsc{UAHOI} achieves significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, enhancing both the accuracy and robustness of HOI detection.

Heng Rao, Yu Gu, Jason Zipeng Zhang et al.

Biological oscillations are periodic changes in various signaling processes crucial for the proper functioning of living organisms. These oscillations are modeled by ordinary differential equations, with coefficient variations leading to diverse periodic behaviors, typically measured by oscillatory frequencies. This paper explores sampling techniques for neural networks to model the relationship between system coefficients and oscillatory frequency. However, the scarcity of oscillations in the vast coefficient space results in many samples exhibiting non-periodic behaviors, and small coefficient changes near oscillation boundaries can significantly alter oscillatory properties. This leads to non-oscillatory bias and boundary sensitivity, making accurate predictions difficult. While existing importance and uncertainty sampling approaches partially mitigate these challenges, they either fail to resolve the sensitivity problem or result in redundant sampling. To address these limitations, we propose the Hierarchical Gradient-based Genetic Sampling (HGGS) framework, which improves the accuracy of neural network predictions for biological oscillations. The first layer, Gradient-based Filtering, extracts sensitive oscillation boundaries and removes redundant non-oscillatory samples, creating a balanced coarse dataset. The second layer, Multigrid Genetic Sampling, utilizes residual information to refine these boundaries and explore new high-residual regions, increasing data diversity for model training. Experimental results demonstrate that HGGS outperforms seven comparative sampling methods across four biological systems, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing sampling and prediction accuracy.

Minghan Chen, Guikun Chen, Wenguan Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit varying levels of confidence across input prompts (questions): some lead to consistent, semantically similar answers, while others yield diverse or contradictory outputs. This variation reflects LLM's uncertainty about the input prompt, a signal of how confidently the model understands a given problem. However, vanilla Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) treats all prompts equally during policy updates, ignoring this important information about the model's knowledge boundaries. To address this limitation, we propose SEED-GRPO (Semantic Entropy EnhanceD GRPO), which explicitly measures LLMs' uncertainty of the input prompts semantic entropy. Semantic entropy measures the diversity of meaning in multiple generated answers given a prompt and uses this to modulate the magnitude of policy updates. This uncertainty-aware training mechanism enables dynamic adjustment of policy update magnitudes based on question uncertainty. It allows more conservative updates on high-uncertainty questions while maintaining the original learning signal on confident ones. Experimental results on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks (AIME24 56.7, AMC 68.7, MATH 83.4, Minerva 34.2, and OlympiadBench 48.0) demonstrate that SEED-GRPO achieves new state-of-the-art performance in average accuracy, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware policy optimization.

Nuutti Barron, Heng Rao, Urmi Saha et al.

Mechanistic modeling provides a biophysically grounded framework for studying the spread of pathological tau protein in tauopathies like Alzheimer's disease. Existing approaches typically model tau propagation as a diffusive process on the brain's structural connectome, reproducing macroscopic patterns but neglecting microscale cellular transport and reaction mechanisms. The Network Transport Model (NTM) was introduced to fill this gap, explaining how region-level progression of tau emerges from microscale biophysical processes. However, the NTM faces a common challenge for complex models defined by large systems of partial differential equations: the inability to perform parameter inference and mechanistic discovery due to high computational burden and slow model simulations. To overcome this barrier, we propose Tau-BNO, a Brain Neural Operator surrogate framework for rapidly approximating NTM dynamics that captures both intra-regional reaction kinetics and inter-regional network transport. Tau-BNO combines a function operator that encodes kinetic parameters with a query operator that preserves initial state information, while approximating anisotropic transport through a spectral kernel that retains directionality. Empirical evaluations demonstrate high predictive accuracy ($R^2\approx$ 0.98) across diverse biophysical regimes and an 89\% performance improvement over state-of-the-art sequence models like Transformers and Mamba, which lack inherent structural priors. By reducing simulation time from hours to seconds, we show that the surrogate model is capable of producing new insights and generating new hypotheses. This framework is readily extensible to a broader class of connectome-based biophysical models, showcasing the transformative value of deep learning surrogates to accelerate analysis of large-scale, computationally intensive dynamical systems.

Mohammad Marufur Rahman, Guanchu Wang, Kaixiong Zhou et al.

Catastrophic forgetting is a longstanding challenge in continual learning, where models lose knowledge from earlier tasks when learning new ones. While various mitigation strategies have been proposed for Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), recent architectural advances like Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have been suggested to offer intrinsic resistance to forgetting by leveraging localized spline-based activations. However, the practical behavior of KANs under continual learning remains unclear, and their limitations are not well understood. To address this, we present a comprehensive study of catastrophic forgetting in KANs and develop a theoretical framework that links forgetting to activation support overlap and intrinsic data dimension. We validate these analyses through systematic experiments on synthetic and vision tasks, measuring forgetting dynamics under varying model configurations and data complexity. Further, we introduce KAN-LoRA, a novel adapter design for parameter-efficient continual fine-tuning of language models, and evaluate its effectiveness in knowledge editing tasks. Our findings reveal that while KANs exhibit promising retention in low-dimensional algorithmic settings, they remain vulnerable to forgetting in high-dimensional domains such as image classification and language modeling. These results advance the understanding of KANs' strengths and limitations, offering practical insights for continual learning system design.

Enze Xu, Minghan Chen

In the field of systems biology, differential equations are commonly used to model biological systems, but solving them for large-scale and complex systems can be computationally expensive. Recently, the integration of machine learning and mathematical modeling has offered new opportunities for scientific discoveries in biology and health. The emerging physics-informed neural network (PINN) has been proposed as a solution to this problem. However, PINN can be computationally expensive and unreliable for complex biological systems. To address these issues, we propose the Fourier-enhanced Neural Networks for systems biology (SB-FNN). SB-FNN uses an embedded Fourier neural network with an adaptive activation function and a cyclic penalty function to optimize the prediction of biological dynamics, particularly for biological systems that exhibit oscillatory patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that SB-FNN achieves better performance and is more efficient than PINN for handling complex biological models. Experimental results on cellular and population models demonstrate that SB-FNN outperforms PINN in both accuracy and efficiency, making it a promising alternative approach for handling complex biological models. The proposed method achieved better performance on six biological models and is expected to replace PINN as the most advanced method in systems biology.

Minghan Chen, Yilong Sun, Xueqing Cai et al.

The agricultural irrigation system is closely related to agricultural production. There are some problems in nowadays agricultural irrigation system, such as poor mobility, imprecision and high price. To address these issues, an intelligent irrigation robot is designed and implemented in this work. The robot achieves precise irrigation by the irrigation path planning algorithm which is improved by Bayesian theory. In the proposed algorithm, we utilize as much information as possible to achieve full coverage irrigation in the complex agricultural environment. Besides, we propose the maximum risk to avoid the problem of lack of inspection in certain areas. Finally, We carried out simulation experiments and field experiments to verify the robot and the algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the robot is capable of fulfilling the requirements of various agricultural irrigation tasks.

Minghan Chen, Fangyan Dai, Bingjie Yan et al.

Distributed network of the computer and the design defects of the TCP protocol are given to the network attack to be multiplicative. Based on the simple and open assumptions of the TCP protocol in academic and collaborative communication environments, the protocol lacks secure authentication. In this paper, by adding RSA-based cryptography technology, RSA-based signature technology, DH key exchange algorithm, and HAMC-SHA1 integrity verification technology to the TCP protocol, and propose a security strategy which can effectively defend against TCP session hijacking.