Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) based on Transformers have garnered significant attention due to their superior performance and high energy efficiency. However, the spiking attention modules of most existing Transformer-based SNNs are adapted from those of analog Transformers, failing to fully address the issue of over-allocating attention to irrelevant contexts. To fix this fundamental yet overlooked issue, we propose a Lateral Inhibition-inspired Spiking Transformer (SpiLiFormer). It emulates the brain's lateral inhibition mechanism, guiding the model to enhance attention to relevant tokens while suppressing attention to irrelevant ones. Our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple datasets, including CIFAR-10 (+0.45%), CIFAR-100 (+0.48%), CIFAR10-DVS (+2.70%), N-Caltech101 (+1.94%), and ImageNet-1K (+1.6%). Notably, on the ImageNet-1K dataset, SpiLiFormer (69.9M parameters, 4 time steps, 384 resolution) outperforms E-SpikeFormer (173.0M parameters, 8 time steps, 384 resolution), a SOTA spiking Transformer, by 0.46% using only 39% of the parameters and half the time steps. The code and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/KirinZheng/SpiLiFormer.

The grim situation of novel coronavirus pneumonia 2019 (COVID-19) and its terrible spreading speed have already constituted a severe risk to human life, so it is ultimately essential to rapidly and accurately diagnose for COVID-19 pneumonia. Based on this study’s 746 lung CT images, we propose Multi-MedVit, a novel auxiliary COVID-19 diagnosis framework based on the multi-input Transformer. We compare Multi-MedVit with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, such as CNN, VGG16, and ResNet50. Multi-MedVit outperformed the other methods on the benchmark dataset and proved that multiscale data input for data augmentation helped enhance model stability. Based on an interpretable analysis of the input and output of Multi-MedVit, we found that with the support of the training set data, the model has been possible to accurately focus on the lesion area for diagnosis of COVID-19 without expert annotations, which can provide initial references containing more potential information to doctors more precisely and fleetly.

The Sentential Decision Diagram (SDD) is a compact and canonical representation of Boolean functions that generalizes the Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs). A variant of SDDs, namely Zero-suppressed Sentential Decision Diagrams (ZSDDs), was proposed recently by using different trimming rules. SDDs are suitable for functions where adjacent input assignments have the same outcome, while ZSDDs are more compact for spare functions. In this paper, we introduce a novel canonical SDD variant, called the Tagged Sentential Decision Diagrams (TSDDs). The key insight of TSDDs is to combine both trimming rules of SDDs and ZSDDs. With both characteristics of SDDs and ZSDDs, the TSDD representation is at least as small as the SDD or ZSDD representation for any Boolean functions. This is also shown in our experimental evaluation.