Jianping Mei

Jianping Mei, Michael Moses, Jan Waelty et al.

We study how deep learning can improve valuation in the art market by incorporating the visual content of artworks into predictive models. Using a large repeated-sales dataset from major auction houses, we benchmark classical hedonic regressions and tree-based methods against modern deep architectures, including multi-modal models that fuse tabular and image data. We find that while artist identity and prior transaction history dominate overall predictive power, visual embeddings provide a distinct and economically meaningful contribution for fresh-to-market works where historical anchors are absent. Interpretability analyses using Grad-CAM and embedding visualizations show that models attend to compositional and stylistic cues. Our findings demonstrate that multi-modal deep learning delivers significant value precisely when valuation is hardest, namely first-time sales, and thus offers new insights for both academic research and practice in art market valuation.

Jianping Mei, Siqi Ai, Ye Yuan

Spatial transcriptomics enables genome-wide expression analysis within native tissue context, yet identifying spatial domains remains challenging due to complex gene-spatial interactions. Existing methods typically process spatial and feature views separately, fusing only at output level - an "encode-separately, fuse-late" paradigm that limits multi-scale semantic capture and cross-view interaction. Accordingly, stMFG is proposed, a multi-scale interactive fusion graph network that introduces layer-wise cross-view attention to dynamically integrate spatial and gene features after each convolution. The model combines cross-view contrastive learning with spatial constraints to enhance discriminability while maintaining spatial continuity. On DLPFC and breast cancer datasets, stMFG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 14% ARI improvement on certain slices.

Jianping Mei, Yilun Zheng, Qianwei Zhou et al.

In this paper, we study the multi-task sentiment classification problem in the continual learning setting, i.e., a model is sequentially trained to classifier the sentiment of reviews of products in a particular category. The use of common sentiment words in reviews of different product categories leads to large cross-task similarity, which differentiates it from continual learning in other domains. This knowledge sharing nature renders forgetting reduction focused approaches less effective for the problem under consideration. Unlike existing approaches, where task-specific masks are learned with specifically presumed training objectives, we propose an approach called Task-aware Dropout (TaskDrop) to generate masks in a random way. While the standard dropout generates and applies random masks for each training instance per epoch for effective regularization, TaskDrop applies random masking for task-wise capacity allocation and reuse. We conducted experimental studies on three multi-task review datasets and made comparison to various baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Our empirical results show that regardless of simplicity, TaskDrop overall achieved competitive performances for all the three datasets, especially after relative long term learning. This demonstrates that the proposed random capacity allocation mechanism works well for continual sentiment classification.