Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in diverse tasks. This success raises a fundamental question in machine composition: Can symbolic music be considered a special form of language that can be jointly modeled with natural language for composition tasks? Recent studies validate that symbolic music can be modeled as a human language, yet composing structured music from partial symbolic inputs through natural language interaction remains underexplored. Even LLMs struggle to generate structurally coherent compositions in such hybrid input-output scenarios, highlighting a fundamental gap that calls for a domain-specific learning paradigm. To this end, we propose Inspiration-to-Structure (IoS), a cognitively inspired framework that enables LLMs to generate structured musical sections from melodic ideas. IoS employs a three-phase process—semantic, structural, and collaborative cognition—and is supported by two key components: (1) a new dataset and construction protocol called Structured Triplet Data (STD), and (2) a training method, Dual-Instance Structural Contrastive Optimization (DiSCO), designed to enhance structural awareness. Experiments show that IoS improves structural coherence by 47.8% and artistic creativity by 21.8% compared to conventional language modeling paradigm, supervised fine-tuning, and even enables smaller LLMs to surpass larger LLMs. These results suggest that symbolic music, while language-like, demands specialized modeling beyond standard language modeling paradigms. IoS enables LLMs to transform music theory knowledge into structured composition, empowering users to compose music interactively via language and advancing toward general creative AI.

Prevalent pre-training strategies for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are often constrained by spatio-temporal entanglement. This critical issue arises from processing multi-channel Electroencephalography (EEG) signals as monolithic sequences, which intertwines the signal's temporal dynamics with its spatial topography and hinders the learning of robust and generalizable representations. To address this, we introduce BraSTORM, a framework that explicitly disentangles EEG data into separate temporal and spatial streams at the input level. Two streams are processed by parallel encoders trained with a composite dual-objective: a masked signal reconstruction loss captures fine-grained, intra-modal details, while a cross-modal contrastive loss enforces high-level semantic alignment. Extensive fine-tuning experiments on six benchmarks covering three major BCI downstream tasks—Emotion Recognition, Sleep Staging, and Motor Imagery—demonstrate that BraSTORM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our findings validate that resolving spatio-temporal entanglement at the input level can be a competitive pre-training framework for the BCI field.

Adolescence is marked by strong creative impulses but limited strategies for structured expression, often leading to frustration or disengagement. While generative AI lowers technical barriers and delivers efficient outputs, its role in fostering adolescents’ expressive growth has been overlooked. We propose MusicScaffold, an adolescent-centered framework that transforms classical AI roles from broad conceptualizations into stage-specific, actionable developmental scaffolds designed to make expressive strategies transparent and learnable and to support adolescents in mastering creative expression. In a four-week study with middle school students (ages 12–14), MusicScaffold enhanced cognitive specificity, behavioral regulation, and affective autonomy in music creation. By reframing generative AI as a scaffold rather than a generator, this work bridges the machine efficiency of generative systems with human growth in adolescent creativity education.

Restaurants, as small hospitality businesses, are inherently vulnerable, making accurate survival prediction crucial. Previous studies have demonstrated the significance of user reviews and incorporated diverse review?derived factors, yet they have largely overlooked the large?scale network formed by user–restaurant interactions. How restaurant survival is influenced by the review network remains insufficiently explored. To fill this gap, leveraging network embeddedness theory, we statistically analyze the impact of two dimensions of embeddedness, structural and positional, on each restaurant's survival. Utilizing two real-world review datasets, the newly curated OpenRice and the well-established Yelp, our results reveal that a restaurant's network embeddedness and its temporal evolution positively correlate with its survival. Building on this insight, we propose a Dynamic Embeddedness-aware Graph Neural Network, DyE-GNN, for restaurant survival prediction. DyE-GNN not only explicitly integrates network embeddedness theory to guide the model design but also leverages domain knowledge to enable robust adaptability. Extensive experiments on both datasets confirm the superiority of DyE-GNN, underscoring the importance of network embeddedness attention, temporal dynamics, and survival knowledge of peer restaurants. Visualizations further demonstrate that network embeddedness facilitates the identification of at-risk restaurants at the network margin.

The field of music generation has seen a surge of interest from both academia and industry, with innovative platforms such as Suno, Udio, and SkyMusic earning widespread recognition. However, the challenge of music infilling—modifying specific music segments without reconstructing the entire piece—remains a significant hurdle for both audio-based and symbolic-based models, limiting their adaptability and practicality. In this paper, we address symbolic music infilling by introducing the Collaborative Music Inpainter (CMI), an advanced human-in-the-loop (HITL) model for music infilling. The CMI features the Joint Embedding Predictive Autoregressive Generative Architecture (JEP-AGA), which learns the high-level predictive representations of the masked part that needs to be infilled during the autoregressive generative process, akin to how humans perceive and interpret music. The newly developed Dynamic Interaction Learner (DIL) achieves HITL by iteratively refining the infilled output based on user interactions alone, significantly reducing the interaction cost without requiring further input. Experimental results confirm CMI’s superior performance in music infilling, demonstrating its efficiency in producing high-quality music.

Generative artificial intelligence in music has made significant strides, yet it still falls short of the substantial achievements seen in natural language processing, primarily due to the limited availability of music data. Knowledge-informed approaches have been shown to enhance the performance of music generation models, even when only a few pieces of musical knowledge are integrated. This paper seeks to leverage comprehensive music theory in AI-driven music generation tasks, such as algorithmic composition and style transfer, which traditionally require significant manual effort with existing techniques. We introduce a novel automatic music lexicon construction model that generates a lexicon, named CompLex, comprising 37,432 items derived from just 9 manually input category keywords and 5 sentence prompt templates. A new multi-agent algorithm is proposed to automatically detect and mitigate hallucinations. CompLex demonstrates impressive performance improvements across three state-of-the-art text-to-music generation models, encompassing both symbolic and audio-based methods. Furthermore, we evaluate CompLex in terms of completeness, accuracy, non-redundancy, and executability, confirming that it possesses the key characteristics of an effective lexicon.

Skeleton-based exercise assessment focuses on evaluating the correctness or quality of an exercise performed by a subject. Skeleton data provide two groups of features (i.e., position and orientation), which existing methods have not fully harnessed. We previously proposed an ensemble-based graph convolutional network (EGCN) that considers both position and orientation features to construct a model-based approach. Integrating these types of features achieved better performance than available methods. However, EGCN lacked a fusion strategy across the data, feature, decision, and model levels. In this paper, we present an advanced framework, EGCN++, for rehabilitation exercise assessment. Based on EGCN, a new fusion strategy called MLE-PO is proposed for EGCN++; this technique considers fusion at the data and model levels. We conduct extensive cross-validation experiments and investigate the consistency between machine and human evaluations on three datasets: UI-PRMD, KIMORE, and EHE. Results demonstrate that MLE-PO outperforms other EGCN ensemble strategies and representative baselines. Furthermore, the MLE-PO's model evaluation scores are more quantitatively consistent with clinical evaluations than other ensemble strategies.

3D human pose estimation has been researched for decades with promising fruits. 3D human pose lifting is one of the promising research directions toward the task where both estimated pose and ground truth pose data are used for training. Existing pose lifting works mainly focus on improving the performance of estimated pose, but they usually underperform when testing on the ground truth pose data. We observe that the performance of the estimated pose can be easily improved by preparing good quality 2D pose, such as fine-tuning the 2D pose or using advanced 2D pose detectors. As such, we concentrate on improving the 3D human pose lifting via ground truth data for the future improvement of more quality estimated pose data. Towards this goal, a simple yet effective model called Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (GLA-GCN) is proposed in this work. Our GLA-GCN globally models the spatiotemporal structure via a graph representation and backtraces local joint features for 3D human pose estimation via individually connected layers. To validate our model design, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Experimental results show that our GLA-GCN1implemented with ground truth 2D poses significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., up to 3%, 17%, and 14% error reductions on Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP, respectively).

Human action recognition (HAR) in RGB-D videos has been widely investigated since the release of affordable depth sensors. Currently, unimodal approaches (e.g., skeleton-based and RGB video-based) have realized substantial improvements with increasingly larger datasets. However, multimodal methods specifically with model-level fusion have seldom been investigated. In this article, we propose a model-based multimodal network (MMNet) that fuses skeleton and RGB modalities via a model-based approach. The objective of our method is to improve ensemble recognition accuracy by effectively applying mutually complementary information from different data modalities. For the model-based fusion scheme, we use a spatiotemporal graph convolution network for the skeleton modality to learn attention weights that will be transferred to the network of the RGB modality. Extensive experiments are conducted on five benchmark datasets: NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, PKU-MMD, Northwestern-UCLA Multiview, and Toyota Smarthome. Upon aggregating the results of multiple modalities, our method is found to outperform state-of-the-art approaches on six evaluation protocols of the five datasets; thus, the proposed MMNet can effectively capture mutually complementary features in different RGB-D video modalities and provide more discriminative features for HAR. We also tested our MMNet on an RGB video dataset Kinetics 400 that contains more outdoor actions, which shows consistent results with those of RGB-D video datasets.

Recently, some skeleton-based physical therapy systems have been attempted to automatically evaluate the correctness or quality of an exercise performed by rehabilitation subjects. However, in terms of algorithms and evaluation criteria, the task remains not fully explored regarding making full use of different skeleton features. To advance the prior work, we propose a learning framework called Ensemble-based Graph Convolutional Network (EGCN) for skeleton-based rehabilitation exercise assessment. As far as we know, this is the first attempt that utilizes both two skeleton feature groups and investigates different ensemble strategies for the task. We also examine the properness of existing evaluation criteria and focus on evaluating the prediction ability of our proposed method. We then conduct extensive cross-validation experiments on two latest public datasets: UI-PRMD and KIMORE. Results indicate that the model-level ensemble scheme of our EGCN achieves better performance than existing methods. Code is available: https://github.com/bruceyo/EGCN.

Indoor action recognition plays an important role in modern society, such as intelligent healthcare in large mobile cabin hospitals. With the wide usage of depth sensors like Kinect, multimodal information including skeleton and RGB modalities brings a promising way to improve the performance. However, existing methods are either focusing on a single data modality or failed to take the advantage of multiple data modalities. In this paper, we propose a Teacher-Student Multimodal Fusion (TSMF) model that fuses the skeleton and RGB modalities at the model level for indoor action recognition. In our TSMF, we utilize a teacher network to transfer the structural knowledge of the skeleton modality to a student network for the RGB modality. With extensive experiments on two benchmarking datasets: NTU RGB+D and PKU-MMD, results show that the proposed TSMF consistently performs better than state-of-the-art single modal and multimodal methods. It also indicates that our TSMF could not only improve the accuracy of the student network but also significantly improve the ensemble accuracy.