Accurate segmentation of ultra-high-resolution (UHR) images, which often exceed tens of millions of pixels, is critically important in domains such as remote sensing and biomedical imaging. However, acquiring pixel-level annotations for such high-resolution images is prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive. While semi-supervised semantic segmentation can significantly reduce the annotation burden, its extension to UHR images holds great potential for addressing the unique challenges posed by sparse supervision. To this end, we propose SSR-SAM, a retrieval-style semi-supervised segmentation framework tailored for UHR images. Leveraging the promptable paradigm of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SSR-SAM treats locally annotated regions as prompts to retrieve semantically consistent pixels across the entire image. Building upon this retrieval-style segmentation paradigm, we further introduce prompt-level perturbation, a novel trail to deploy consistency regularization for semi-supervised segmentation. It encourages the model to learn consistency across predictions guided by diverse visual-semantic prompts, thereby enhancing generalization on unlabeled data. We evaluate SSR-SAM on three UHR datasets: Inria Aerial, BCSS, and URUR. Experimental results show that SSR-SAM achieves clear performance gains over the labeled-only supervision, with average mIoU improvements of 4.9%, 4.15%, and 2.5%, respectively. Additionally, SSR-SAM possesses zero-shot segmentation capability, exhibiting potential for general retrieval-style segmentation tasks.

The multimodal multi-objective optimization problem (MMOP) involves multiple distinct components of the Pareto set (PS), which correspond to the same Pareto front (PF). Most existing multimodal multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MMOEAs) face challenges in achieving both accuracy and timeliness in solving MMOPs. In this article, a two-stage clustering and independent competing based evolutionary algorithm (TSCICEA) is proposed for solving MMOPs. Firstly, in the early stage of population evolution, the K-means technique is used to coarsely cluster the population into multiple independent subpopulations, which aims to rapidly ascertain the approximate distribution structure of modalities and preliminarily locate their spatial positions. In the later stage, the DBSCAN technique is utilized to conduct fine clustering of the population, which aims to re-cluster misclustered individuals in the coarse clustering into new subpopulations, thus achieving a precise distinction between different modalities. Subsequently, to accurately identify the corresponding modality for each subpopulation, an independent competing strategy is proposed. This strategy can automatically assign different identification approaches for each modality based on their differences, and it simultaneously manages different modalities through parallel execution, thus significantly enhancing both the accuracy and timeliness of modality identification. To evaluate the effectiveness of TSCICEA, we compare it against state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark test problems with 2–15 objectives and 4–15 variables. Experimental results demonstrate that TSCICEA achieves superior performance in terms of the IEDRX, IMST, and HV indicators

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have garnered widespread recognition in the identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) owing to their remarkable adaptability to irregular patterns of Functional Brain Networks (FBNs). However, current methods for constructing FBNs generally employ a uniform modeling strategy to process neuroimaging data from different subjects, which fail to consider the heterogeneity of functional connectivity patterns among individuals adequately. In addition, existing methods tend to excessively focus on directly connected brain Regions of Interest (ROIs) when analyzing brain networks, underestimat\ing the importance of indirectly connected brain ROIs. At the same time, conventional approaches for identifying crucial brain regions may miss vital regions due to rigid threshold constraints. To address these issues, we propose Personalized Structure Preservation based GNN (PSP-GNN) for ASD diagnosis, which incorporates three aspects: 1) A personalized structure preservation strategy that constructs individualized brain networks by accounting for subject-specific variations; 2) A connection interaction-aware module designed to characterize interactions between directly and indirectly connected brain regions, providing comprehensive brain network representations; 3) A flexible brain region refinement technique based on Bernoulli sampling, which identifies salient brain regions without relying on pre-defined thresholds. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PSP-GNN in ASD diagnosis, highlighting its potential as a robust tool for future ASD diagnosis applications that combine FBNs and GNNs. Notably, the critical brain regions identified by PSP-GNN are consistent with established medical knowledge, suggesting their utility as potential biomarkers for clinical ASD diagnosis.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), due to their advanced capability in extracting high-order neighbor relationships, have become essential in multimodal recommendation tasks. However, augmenting the number of propagation layers in GNNs can result in feature redundancy, which may degrade the final recommendation performance. In addition, the existing recommendation task method directly maps the preprocessed multimodal features to the low-dimensional space, which will bring the noise unrelated to user preference, thus affecting the representation ability of the model. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose Multimodal Graph Neural Network (MGNM) for Recommendation with Dynamic De-Redundancy (DDR) and Modality-Guided Feature De-Noisy, which is divided into local and global interaction. Initially, in the local interaction process, we integrate a DDR loss function which is achieved by utilizing the product of the feature coefficient matrix and the feature matrix as a penalization factor. It reduces the feature redundancy effects of multimodal and behavioral features caused by the stacking of multiple GNN layers. Subsequently, in the global interaction process, we developed modality-guided global feature purifiers for each modality to alleviate the impact of modality noise. It is a two-fold guiding mechanism eliminating modality features that are irrelevant to user preferences and captures complex relationships within the modality. Experimental results demonstrate that MGNM achieves superior performance on multimodal information denoising and removal of redundant information compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted substantial attention due to their simple structure and strong adaptability, but enhancing robustness and adaptability for trajectory tracking under unbounded disturbances remains a key challenge. To address this, this article proposes a novel double integral fuzzy zeroing neural dynamics controller (DIFZNDC). The DIFZNDC integrates a double integral neural dynamics model with a novel dual-input single-output fuzzy logic system (DISOFLS), which can adaptively adjust the parameters, thereby enhancing the robustness and adaptability of the controller. In addition, the global convergence and robustness of the system under the DIFZNDC are theoretically verified. Moreover, two trajectory tracking examples demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the DIFZNDC for the quadrotor system. Quantitative analysis under Gaussian disturbance indicates that the DIFZNDC reduces the root-mean-square error (RMSE) by 84.61% and 48.35% compared to the modified super-twisting controller (MSTC) and the fixed-time zeroing neural dynamics controller (FTZNDC), respectively.

Scene Text Recognition (STR) methods have demonstrated robust performance in word-level text recognition. However, in real applications the text image is sometimes long due to detected with multiple horizontal words. It triggers the requirement to build long text recognition models from readily available short (i.e., word-level) text datasets, which has been less studied previously. In this paper, we term this task Out of Length (OOL) text recognition. We establish the first Long Text Benchmark (LTB) to facilitate the assessment of different methods in long text recognition. Meanwhile, we propose a novel method called OOL Text Recognition with sub-String Matching (SMTR). SMTR comprises two cross-attention-based modules: one encodes a sub-string containing multiple characters into next and previous queries, and the other employs the queries to attend to the image features, matching the sub-string and simultaneously recognizing its next and previous character. SMTR can recognize text of arbitrary length by iterating the process above. To avoid being trapped in recognizing highly similar sub-strings, we introduce a regularization training to compel SMTR to effectively discover subtle differences between similar sub-strings for precise matching. In addition, we propose an inference augmentation strategy to alleviate confusion caused by identical sub-strings in the same text and improve the overall recognition efficiency. Extensive experimental results reveal that SMTR, even when trained exclusively on short text, outperforms existing methods in public short text benchmarks and exhibits a clear advantage on LTB.

Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher's knowledge within homogeneous architectures. However, these methods overlook the diverse knowledge contained in architectures with different inductive biases, which is crucial for enabling the student to acquire a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the data during distillation. To this end, we propose for the first time a generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective, named HeteroAKD. Due to the substantial disparities between heterogeneous architectures, such as CNN and Transformer, directly transferring cross-architecture knowledge presents significant challenges. To eliminate the influence of architecture-specific information, the intermediate features of both the teacher and student are skillfully projected into an aligned logits space. Furthermore, to utilize diverse knowledge from heterogeneous architectures and deliver customized knowledge required by the student, a teacher-student knowledge mixing mechanism (KMM) and a teacher-student knowledge evaluation mechanism (KEM) are introduced. These mechanisms are performed by assessing the reliability and its discrepancy between heterogeneous teacher-student knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on three main-stream benchmarks using various teacher-student pairs demonstrate that our HeteroAKD framework outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.

Connected component (CC) is a proper text shape representation that aligns with human reading intuition. However, CC-based text detection methods have recently faced a developmental bottleneck that their time-consuming post-processing is difficult to eliminate. To address this issue, we introduce an explicit relational reasoning network (ERRNet) to elegantly model the component relationships without post-processing. Concretely, we first represent each text instance as multiple ordered text components, and then treat these components as objects in sequential movement. In this way, scene text detection can be innovatively viewed as a tracking problem. From this perspective, we design an end-to-end tracking decoder to achieve a CC-based method dispensing with post-processing entirely. Additionally, we observe that there is an inconsistency between classification confidence and localization quality, so we propose a Polygon Monte-Carlo method to quickly and accurately evaluate the localization quality. Based on this, we introduce a position-supervised classification loss to guide the task-aligned learning of ERRNet. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our ERRNet. It consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while holding highly competitive inference speed.

Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) segmentation is a critical step in the treatment of hemorrhagic stroke. Although many segmentation models have been developed for this task, their large parameter counts and high computational costs hinder deployment on mobile devices. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight multi-axis interactive and mask-guided network for ICH segmentation, named DualMNet. DualMNet integrates a Multi-Axis Interactive Attention (MIA) module, which utilizes three-axis interactions to generate an attention map, extracting the inherent characteristics of CT images and enhancing feature representation with minimal computational cost. Furthermore, to overcome the difficulties of missed and false detections caused by low contrast between hemorrhagic and normal tissues, as well as the excessively small area of some bleeding regions, we design a Mask-Guided Feature Fusion (MGFF) module. This module uses intermediate mask predictions to guide the adaptive fusion of low-level and high-level features, making the model more sensitive to hemorrhagic regions. Experimental results on two public datasets, PHY and BHSD, demonstrate that DualMNet outperforms existing lightweight models in segmentation accuracy, achieving higher Dice scores while significantly reducing model parameters.

Non-exemplar class incremental learning (NECIL) aims to continuously assimilate new knowledge while retaining previously acquired knowledge in scenarios where prior examples are unavailable. A prevalent strategy within NECIL mitigates knowledge forgetting by freezing the feature extractor after training on the initial task. However, this freezing mechanism does not provide explicit training to differentiate between new and old classes, resulting in overlapping feature representations. To address this challenge, we propose a **C**onfusion-driven se**L**f-supervised pr**O**gressi**V**ely weighted **E**nsemble lea**R**ning (*CLOVER*) framework for NECIL. Firstly, we introduce a confusion-driven self-supervised learning approach that enhances representation extraction by guiding the model to distinguish between highly confusable classes, thereby reducing class representation overlap. Secondly, we develop a progressively weighted ensemble learning method that gradually adjusts weights to integrate diverse knowledge more effectively, further minimizing representation overlap. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the CIFAR100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet-Subset NECIL benchmarks.

With the advancement of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery, visual servo control has become a crucial technique for improving surgical outcomes. However, traditional visual servo methods often rely on precise kinematic models and camera calibration, limiting their generalizability. Considering these, this article proposes a novel uncalibrated model-free visual servo control scheme. Specifically, we introduce a Jacobian matrix and interaction matrix estimation method based on a gradient neural network (GNN), which enables online estimation by utilizing control signals and sensor outputs. Then, the estimated results are incorporated into a visual servo control framework that considers remote center of motion (RCM) constraint, joint-drift problem, and physical constraint, formulated as a quadratic programming (QP) problem. Subsequently, focusing on the joint limits and endoscope insertion depth constraint, we develop a nonpiecewise differentiable multilevel constraint handling technique. For the formulated QP problem, a predefined-time convergent error-regulating zeroing neural network (PTCER-ZNN) solver is designed, and we can derive the optimal control signals. Detailed theoretical analyses of the developed GNN estimation method and the PTCER-ZNN solver are provided. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in image feature regulation and tracking tasks, exhibiting its advantages over existing approaches.

The goal of few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) is to learn new concepts from a limited number of novel samples while preserving the knowledge of previously learned classes. The mainstream FSCIL framework begins with training in the base session, after which the feature extractor is frozen to accommodate novel classes. We observed that traditional base-session training approaches often lead to overfitting on challenging samples, which can lead to reduced robustness in the decision boundaries and exacerbate the forgetting phenomenon when introducing incremental data. To address this issue, we proposed the progressive learning strategy (PGLS). First, inspired by curriculum learning, we developed a covariance noise perturbation approach based on the statistical information as a difficulty measure for assessing sample robustness. We then reweighted the samples based on their robustness, initially concentrating on enhancing model stability by prioritizing robust samples and subsequently leveraging weakly robust samples to improve generalization. Second, we predefined forward compatibility for various virtual class augmentation models. Within base class training, we employed a curriculum learning strategy that progressively introduced fewer to more virtual classes in order to mitigate any adverse effects on model performance. This strategy enhances the adaptability of base classes to novel ones and alleviates forgetting problems. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on the CUB200, CIFAR100, and miniImageNet datasets demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed method over state-of-the-art models.

Software-defined networking (SDN) enables network visibility and intelligence by providing a global topology view. The controller maintains and updates the real-time topology using the OpenFlow Discovery Protocol (OFDP). However, without robust security mechanisms, OFDP introduces new security threats to the network. This paper investigates the security threats of OFDP packets, focusing specifically on their header fields and data units. We propose novel methods to implement existing attacks and bypass current defenses. In addition, we identify two new vulnerabilities that allow for the manipulation of link information and the exhaustion of network resources. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the feasibility of these attacks. Our findings have been responsibly disclosed to Floodlight, and two CVEs ( CVE-2024-57672 and CVE-2024-57673) were assigned. To defend against such attacks, we designLOFDPto enhance the security of OFDP by thoroughly inspecting the header fields and encrypting the data units. As a lightweight extension of existing controllers,LOFDPcan filter malformed packets to prevent attacks, balancing scalability and security. We implement a prototype ofLOFDPand evaluate its effectiveness and performance in a simulated environment. The results show thatLOFDPcan effectively prevent attacks with negligible latency.

Individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) exhibit intricate structural and functional interconnectivity across multiple brain regions. These patients demonstrate abnormal alterations in both respective modal brain regions and co-occurrent brain regions. Furthermore, there exist multi-level relationships between these abnormal brain structures and functions, encompassing hierarchical interactions between function-structural alterations as well as hierarchical progression from local regions to broader brain networks. However, most existing multi-modal ADHD classification approaches independently embed functional and structural data into separate spaces for information integration, often predominately focusing on uni-modal features. This approaches lead to a significant loss of features related to functiona-structural interaction relationships. Additionally, it is crucial for ADHD classification to accurately identify both uni-modal and co-occurrent abnormal alterations in brain regions which have hierarchical progression relationships. This study proposes a function-structural interaction multi-modal network with progressive and multi-level feature fusion (FSIPM) for ADHD classification. The main contributions are threefold: 1) An innovative function-structural interaction method is proposed to facilitate the mutual regulation of information across modalities, thereby relieving modal feature bias caused by integrated fusion. 2) A multi-level refinement framework is designed to promote the identification of both individual and co-occurrent abnormal brain regions. This progressive approach models the function-structural alterations of abnormal brain regions and the hierarchical relationships from local to brain networks, ensuring a deeper understanding of brain abnormalities. 3) Multi-level feature fusion aims to minimize the loss of details caused by consecutive sampling operations during the progressive process of the network, contributing to a more accurate and nuanced representation of ADHD-related brain alterations. Experimental results on the ADHD-200 and ABIDE I datasets demonstrate that FSIPM achieves competitive performance in ADHD classification while revealing uni-modal and co-occurrent altered brain regions that are consistent with clinical findings.

Self-training has been shown to achieve remarkable gains in semi-supervised semantic segmentation by creating pseudo-labels using unlabeled data. This approach, however, suffers from the quality of the generated pseudo-labels, and generating higher quality pseudo-labels is the main challenge that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel method for semi-supervised semantic segmentation based on Multi-perspective pseudo-label Generation and Confidence-weighted Training (MGCT). First, we present a multi-perspective pseudo-label generation strategy that considers both global and local semantic perspectives. This strategy prioritizes pixels in all images by the global and local predictions, and subsequently generates pseudo-labels for different pixels in stages according to the ranking results. Our pseudo-label generation method shows superior suitability for semi-supervised semantic segmentation compared to other approaches. Second, we propose a confidence-weighted training method to alleviate performance degradation caused by unstable pixels. Our training method assigns confident weights to unstable pixels, which reduces the interference of unstable pixels during training and facilitates the efficient training of the model. Finally, we validate our approach on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets, and the results indicate that we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on both datasets in all settings.

Involving both position and orientation tracking, pose tracking control for the end-effector of a redundant manipulator is a critical problem in robotic motion control. However, existing methods often suffer from dependency on model parameters and lack joint constraints. To remedy these weaknesses, this article proposes a data-based predictive tracking control of position and orientation (DBPTCPO) for redundant manipulators with undetermined parameters. Specifically, in addition to minimizing tracking error, the DBPTCPO scheme can also minimize joint velocity and acceleration to optimize energy efficiency. Furthermore, it directly handles three-level joint constraints, effectively preventing a reduction in the feasible domain of decision variables. As for the uncertain parameters of redundant manipulators, a method based on zeroing neurodynamics (ZNs) is developed to estimate the Jacobian matrix, requiring only the sensory output and control signals. Ultimately, a ZN-based solver is designed to solve the quadratic programming (QP) problem with inequality constraints derived from the DBPTCPO scheme. Necessary theoretical analyses for the control process are provided, and the higher tracking accuracy of the proposed method is numerically validated when compared with other control schemes.

Multimodal recommendation systems integrate diverse multimodal information into the feature representations of both items and users, thereby enabling a more comprehensive modeling of user preferences. However, existing methods are hindered by data sparsity and the inherent noise within multimodal data, which impedes the accurate capture of users' interest preferences. Additionally, discrepancies in the semantic representations of items across different modalities can adversely impact the prediction accuracy of recommendation models. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel diffusion-based contrastive learning (DiffCL) framework for multimodal recommendation. DiffCL employs a diffusion model (DM) to generate contrastive views that effectively mitigate the impact of noise during the contrastive learning phase. Furthermore, it improves semantic consistency across modalities by aligning distinct visual and textual semantic information through stable ID embeddings. Finally, the introduction of the item-item graph (I-I graph) enhances multimodal feature representations, thereby alleviating the adverse effects of data sparsity on the overall system performance. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the DiffCL.

Multimodal recommendation systems improve the accuracy of recommendations by integrating information from different modalities to obtain potential representations of users and items. However, existing multimodal recommendation methods often use single user embedding to model users’ interests in different modalities, neglecting multimodal information. Furthermore, the semantics expressed by the same items in different modalities may be inconsistent, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. To alleviate the impact of these issues, we propose a new multimodal recommendation framework called Learnable Prompts and ID-guided Contrastive Learning (LPIC). Specifically, we introduce a continuously learnable prompt embedding method, incorporating multimodal features of items to model users’ interests in specific modalities. Then, we propose an ID-guided contrastive learning component to enhance historical interaction features in textual, visual, and fused modalities, while aligning text, image, and fused modality to enhance semantic consistency between modalities. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three publicly available Amazon datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the LPIC framework.

Images suffer from heavy spatial redundancy because pixels in neighboring regions are spatially correlated. Existing approaches strive to overcome this limitation by reducing less meaningful image regions. However, current leading methods rely on supervisory signals. They may compel models to preserve content that aligns with labeled categories and discard content belonging to unlabeled categories. This categorical inductive bias makes these methods less effective in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a self-supervised framework for image redundancy reduction called Learning to Rank Patches (LTRP). We observe that image reconstruction of masked image modeling models is sensitive to the removal of visible patches when the masking ratio is high (e.g., 90%). Building upon it, we implement LTRP via two steps: inferring the semantic density score of each patch by quantifying variation between reconstructions with and without this patch, and learning to rank the patches with the pseudo score. The entire process is self-supervised, thus getting out of the dilemma of categorical inductive bias. We design extensive experiments on different datasets and tasks. The results demonstrate that LTRP outperforms both supervised and other self-supervised methods due to the fair assessment of image content. Code is available at https://github.com/irsLu/1trp.

Pathological virtual re-staining is a valuable research topic in AI-aided diagnosis, as it reduces the need for costly and time-consuming physical staining. However, existing methods still suffer from the insufficient ability to preserve tissue microstructure and cellular details, making the generated images less convincing. In this paper, we propose a CycleGAN-based dual contrastive learning re-staining method called DCLRStain. DCLRStain establishes dual contrastive learning between the source and re-stained image domains, conducting negative sampling within each image pair from both domains. It guides the model’s attention to finer content such as cellular details. Meanwhile, DCLRStain introduces a structural similarity-based loss term that further forces the tissue microstructure to be consistent between the source and re-stained images. Experimental results demonstrate that DCLRStain yields competitive quantitative scores compared to state-of-the-art models and maintains superior qualitative performance. Moreover, DCLRStain achieves higher accuracy in the downstream classification task.

In multi-sequence Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), the accurate segmentation of the kidney and tumor based on traditional supervised methods typically necessitates detailed annotation for each sequence, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods can effectively mitigate inter-domain differences by aligning cross-modal features, thereby reducing the annotation burden. However, most existing UDA methods are limited to one-to-one domain adaptation, which tends to be inefficient and resource-intensive when faced with multi-target domain transfer tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel and efficient One-to-Multiple Progressive Style Transfer Unsupervised Domain-Adaptive (PSTUDA) framework for kidney and tumor segmentation in multi-sequence MRI. Specifically, we develop a multi-level style dictionary to explicitly store the style information of each target domain at various stages, which alleviates the burden of a single generator in a multi-target transfer task and enables effective decoupling of content and style. Concurrently, we employ multiple cascading style fusion modules that utilize point-wise instance normalization to progressively recombine content and style features, which enhances cross-modal alignment and structural consistency. Experiments conducted on the private MSKT and public KiTS19 datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PSTUDA over comparative methods in multi-sequence kidney and tumor segmentation. The average Dice Similarity Coefficients are increased by at least 1.8% and 3.9%, respectively. Impressively, our PSTUDA not only significantly reduces the floating-point computation by approximately 72% but also reduces the number of model parameters by about 50%, bringing higher efficiency and feasibility to practical clinical applications.

Endoscopic video analysis can effectively assist clinicians in disease diagnosis and treatment, and has played an indispensable role in clinical medicine. Unlike regular videos, endoscopic video analysis presents unique challenges, including complex camera movements, uneven distribution of lesions, and concealment, and it typically relies on contrastive learning in self-supervised pretraining as its mainstream technique. However, representations obtained from contrastive learning enhance the discriminability of the model but often lack fine-grained information, which is suboptimal in the pixel-level prediction tasks. In this paper, we develop a Multi-view Masked Contrastive Representation Learning (M$^2$CRL) framework for endoscopic video pre-training. Specifically, we propose a multi-view mask strategy for addressing the challenges of endoscopic videos. We utilize the frame-aggregated attention guided tube mask to capture global-level spatiotemporal sensitive representation from the global views, while the random tube mask is employed to focus on local variations from the local views. Subsequently, we combine multi-view mask modeling with contrastive learning to obtain endoscopic video representations that possess fine-grained perception and holistic discriminative capabilities simultaneously. The proposed M$^2$CRL is pre-trained on 7 publicly available endoscopic video datasets and fine-tuned on 3 endoscopic video datasets for 3 downstream tasks. Notably, our M$^2$CRL significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art self-supervised endoscopic pre-training methods, e.g., Endo-FM (3.5% F1 for classification, 7.5% Dice for segmentation, and 2.2% F1 for detection) and other self-supervised methods, e.g., VideoMAE V2 (4.6% F1 for classification, 0.4% Dice for segmentation, and 2.1% F1 for detection).

Software-defined networking (SDN) has significantly enriched network functions by separating the control plane from the data plane. Meanwhile, the unique architecture of SDN brings new security challenges. Recent studies show that attackers can fabricate inter-switch links to hijack the traffic or interfere with network services. In this paper, we uncover two new vulnerabilities that can tamper with the topology view of the SDN controller. Then, we present two novel attacks named Cluster Splitting and Cluster Amnesia according to such flaws. We split or forget partial network topology by establishing a broadcast domain port or external link. As a result, it affects the module responsible for computing topology instances and disrupts the routing calculations. To defend against such attacks, we design a two-stage algorithm to verify the switch port and link in real-time. With the principle of saving the limited control channel resources and not extending the LLDP protocol, we propose LldpChecker. As a lightweight extension for SDN controllers, it can filter malicious broadcast domain ports and external links. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of LldpChecker. The results show that LldpChecker can effectively mitigate these two novel attacks with negligible overhead.

Hyperspectral images (HSI) have spectral variability, which leads to spectral dependence in adjacent and non-adjacent regions, and this dependence is essential for the classification of regions with mixed pixels. Current neural architecture search (NAS) methods have achieved significant advantages in HSI classification, but these methods cannot capture spectral dependence in non-adjacent regions because only use feedforward connections. Meanwhile, the cost of the search process in NAS is proportional to the scale of the search space, which limits the expansion of the search space. To address these issues, we propose a sparse-coding-inspired feedback neural architecture search (SCIF-NAS) method for HSI classification. Firstly, we view HSI samples as sequences and introduce a feedback mechanism in NAS to model the spectral dependence of non-adjacent regions to mitigate the effects of spectral variation. Secondly, we design several feedforward operations according to the characteristics of HSI, to form the search space together with feedback operations. Meanwhile, a sparse-coding-inspired NAS accelerated strategy is introduced to alleviate the search time burden caused by the expansion of search space. Thirdly, we integrate center loss with cross-entropy loss to construct a hybrid loss function that helps to obtain a better classification boundary. Finally, we conduct experiments on three popular HSI benchmarks, which show that SCIF-NAS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in HSI classification.

Few-shot learning (FSL) has achieved promising performance in hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) with few labeled samples by designing a proper embedding feature extractor. However, the performance of embedding feature extractors relies on the design of efficient deep convolutional neural network architectures, which heavily depends on the expertise knowledge. Particularly, FSL requires extracting discriminative features effectively across different domains, which makes the construction even more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel neural architecture search-based FSL model for HSI classification, called HCFSL-NAS. Three novel strategies are proposed in this work. First, a neural architecture search-based embedding feature extractor is developed to the FSL in HSIC, whose search space includes a group of proposed multi-scale convolutions with channel attention. Second, a multi-source learning framework is employed to aggregate abundant heterogeneous and homogeneous source data, which enables the powerful generalization of network to the HSIC with only few labeled samples. Finally, the pointwise-based cross-entropy loss and the pairwise-based adaptive sparse loss are jointly optimized to maximize inter-class distance and minimize the distance within a class simultaneously. Experimental results on four publicly hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that HCFSL-NAS outperforms both the exiting FSL methods and supervised learning methods for HSI classification with only few labeled samples. Code is available at: https://github.com/xh-captain/HCFSL-NAS.

Modeling functional brain networks (FBNs) for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has sparked significant interest since the abnormal functional connectivity is discovered in certain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based brain regions compared to typical developmental control (TC) individuals. However, existing models for modeling FBNs generally use dimensionality reduction techniques to process the high dimensional input data, which results in confusion and an inaccurate representation of voxel interactions between spatially close brain regions, causing misdiagnosis of the disease. To address these issues, we propose a spatial preservation-based neural architecture search (SP-NAS) for FBNs modeling in ADHD. The main work includes three-fold: 1) A spatial preservation module is designed to embed original spatial information into dimensionality reduction data, addressing the challenge of a large number of parameters in the original data and mitigating disease misdiagnosis resulting from voxel confusion between different brain regions caused by dimensionality reduction. 2) A search space using more suitable search operations is constructed to efficiently extract spatial-temporal interaction characteristics of fMRI data in ADHD while narrowing the search space. 3) Cross-regional association differences between ADHD and TC groups are explored for ADHD auxiliary diagnosis since the abnormal activation regions of ADHD relative to TC on the brain regions and the abnormal connectivity between the lesion brain regions are identified. Model validation results on the ADHD-200 dataset show that the FBNs obtained from SP-NAS not only achieve competitive results in ADHD diagnosis but also reveal abnormal connections in the lesion regions of ADHD consistent with clinical diagnosis.

The development of the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) provides a promising solution to promoting road safety and driving experiences, but it also generates massive data, leading to network configuration and management issues. Fortunately, by integrating software-defined network (SDN) and VANET, a new network paradigm called software-defined vehicular network (SDVN) is proposed to tackle these problems via furnishing centralized control and programmability. With the help of SDN, the centralized controller provides global visibility about network devices and improves the efficiency of various applications. However, the building procedure of global topology also brings new security concerns to the SDVN. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the security of topology management under a standard SDVN scenario. By exploiting the high mobility of VANET and vulnerabilities in topology management inherited from SDN, we unveil five threats of topology poison in SDVN with lower attack bars. Based on such threats, we propose several attacks to poison the global topology of four mainstream controllers in emulated and real-world environments. Additionally, we present empirical studies to illustrate the impact of these attacks on network communication and topology-based applications. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of these attacks under existing state-of-the-art defense systems.

RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) focuses on utilizing the complementary cues of RGB and depth modalities to detect and segment salient regions. However, many proposed methods train their models in a simple multi-modal manner, ignoring the differences between these two modalities in the contribution of salient detection. Furthermore, the quality of depth datasets varies significantly between individuals and is another important factor affecting model performance. To address the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a novel depth-guided fusion network framework (DGFNet) for the RGB-D SOD task. To avoid the influence of low-quality depth maps on RGB-D SOD, we design a depth map enhanced algorithm which jointly models salient detection and depth estimation to improve the quality of depth. Also, we propose a depth attention mechanism to encode valuable spatial information for SOD, which is then used in depth-guided fusion (DGF) module to guide the fusion of cross-modality features at each level. Extensive experiments on seven commonly tested datasets demonstrate that our DGFNet outperforms the 23 state-of-the-art RGB-D-based SOD methods.

As a common and significant problem in the field of industrial information, the time-varying quaternion matrix equation (TV-QME) is considered in this article and addressed by an improved zeroing neural network (ZNN) method based on the real representation of the quaternion. In the light of an improved dynamic parameter (IDP) and an innovative activation function (IAF), a dynamic parameter noise-tolerant ZNN (DPNTZNN) model is put forward for solving the TV-QME. The presented IDP with the character of changing with the residual error and the proposed IAF with the remarkable performance can strongly enhance the convergence and robustness of the DPNTZNN model. Therefore, the DPNTZNN model possesses fast predefined-time convergence and superior robustness under different noise environments, which are theoretically analyzed in detail. Besides, the provided simulative experiments verify the advantages of the DPNTZNN model for solving the TV-QME, especially compared with other ZNN models. Finally, the DPNTZNN model is applied to image restoration, which further illustrates the practicality of the DPNTZNN model.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) significantly simplifies the management of networks by deploying various applications. However, the performance gap between the application and the forwarding device brings new security concerns for the network. In this paper, we systematically study the match field defined in the OpenFlow protocol and reveal the vulnerability in the match process of data streams. Then, we propose sensitive field manipulation attacks to saturate the network bottleneck. Furthermore, we investigate the threats to SDN architecture by exploiting such attacks. We demonstrate the feasibility of the attack and evaluate it in a physical environment. To defend against such attacks, we design SFieldDefender to detect malicious probing by training machine learning models. Moreover, we design a multi-policy coordination mechanism to deal with different types of abnormal traffic. Implementations and evaluations demonstrate that SFieldDefender can effectively detect the sensitive field manipulation attack and protect the network core services.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has drawn increasing attention in histopathological image analysis in recent years. Compared to contrastive learning which is troubled with the false negative problem, i.e., semantically similar images are selected as negative samples, masked autoencoders (MAE) build SSL from a generative paradigm which is probably a more appropriate pretraining. In this paper, we introduce MAE to histopathological image understanding, and moreover, verify the effect of visible patches in this task. Specifically, a novel SD-MAE model is proposed to enable a self-distillation augmented MAE. Besides the reconstruction loss on masked image patches, SD-MAE further imposes the self-distillation loss on visible patches to enhance the representational capacity of encoder located in the shallow layers. It generates a more effective feature pre-training and benefits downstream applications. We apply SD-MAE to histopathological image classification, cell segmentation and cell detection. Experiments demonstrate that SD-MAE shows highly competitive performance compared with other SSL methods in these tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/irsLu/SD-MAE/

In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (MDR-Net) for ultrasound image segmentation by exploiting multi-decision and deep refinement of the target. Our MDR-Net consists of two main parts, i.e., a multi-decision module (MDM) and a deep refinement module (DRM). Specifically, the MDM effectively addresses the issue of inconspicuous target regions in ultrasound images by combining multi-scale features and multi-receptive field self-attention to enhance the discriminative representation of features and diagnose feature points multiple times. In addition, to alleviate the problem of blurred boundaries and severe speckle noise, the DRM progressively fuses multi-scale features and makes the fused features interact with higher-level features to refine the target details step by step. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets, namely BUSI and UDIAT. We achieve a Dice of 0.8265 and 0.8827 on the two datasets, which are at least 2% and 1.24% higher than other state-of-the-art ultrasound image segmentation methods.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attracts extra attention in medical image processing because no additional labels are required when adapting to different distributions. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework named as Domain Expansion and PseudoLabeling (DEPL). We extend the domain of a labeled source domain data to four different distributed domains and use adversarial learning to align the image appearance level and feature level from the four different domains to the unlabeled target domain. In addition, we propose a selective pseudolabeling mechanism, namely using strong confidence pseudolabeling to boost model performance. We evaluate our model for the MR to CT adaptation segmentation task on the public dataset MMWHS. Compared to seven other state-of-the-art segmentation methods, our DEPL achieves the best Dice similarity coefficient by 82.4%, which is at least 3.9% higher than the other UDA segmentation methods.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables the deployment of diversified networking applications by providing global visibility and open programmability on a centralized controller. As SDN enters its second decade, several well-developed open source controllers have been widely adopted in industry, and various commercial SDN applications are built to meet the surging demand of network innovation. This complex ecosystem inevitably introduces new security threats, as malicious applications can significantly disrupt network operations. In this paper, we introduce a new vulnerability in existing SDN controllers that enable adversaries to create a backdoor and further deploy malicious applications to disrupt network service via a series of topology poisoning attacks. The root cause of this vulnerability is that SDN systems simply process received Packet-In messages without checking the integrity, and thus can be misguided by manipulated messages. We discover that five popular SDN controllers (i.e., Floodlight, ONOS, OpenDaylight, POX and Ryu) are potentially vulnerable to the disclosed attack, and further propose six new attacks exploiting this vulnerability to disrupt SDN services from different layers. We evaluate the effectiveness of these attacks with experiments in real SDN testbeds, and discuss feasible countermeasures.

Increasing attention has been paid to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-assisted diagnosis using functional brain networks (FBNs) since FBNs-based ADHD diagnosis can not only extract the functional connectivities from FBNs as potential biomarkers for brain disease classification, but also identify the focal regions of disease. Therefore, modeling FBNs has become a key topic for ADHD diagnosis via resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI). However, the dominant models either ignore the strong regional correlation between adjacent time series or fail to capture the long-distance dependency (LDD) in imaging series. To address the issues, we propose a multi-head attention-based region-enhancement model (MAREM) for ADHD classification. Firstly, a multi-head attention mechanism with region-enhancement is designed to represent the FBNs, where region-enhancement module are designed to process strong regional correlation between adjacent time series. Secondly, multi-head attention is used to map the region information of each time point into different subspaces for establishing global dependencies in imaging series. Thirdly, the proposed model is applied to the ADHD-200 dataset for classification. The results show the proposed model’s out-performance of the state-of-the-art in both classification accuracy and generalization ability. Furthermore, we identify several brain networks that have been considered to be associated with ADHD in clinical studies.

Spatio-temporal modelling based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) of ADHD has been a major concern in the neuroimaging community, given the differences in the role of brain regions between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) patients versus typical developmental control group (TC). Several spatio-temporal deep learning models are proposed for rsfMRI, however, due to the high dimensionality and few samples of brain data, most models use dimension-reduced data as input for modelling, which suffer from the loss of original spatial relationships in the brain data. Although Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Attention mechanism (Attention) proposed in recent years can extract local correlations and long-distance dependency (LDD), the spatio-temporal relationships they rely on have lost their original high-dimensional spatial relevance. Therefore, a spatial preservation-based autoencoder for modelling ADHD functional brain networks (FBNs) is proposed by embedding the spatial information and combining both RNN and Transformer to address the issue that the dimension-reduced data cannot preserve the original high-dimensional spatial correlations. Firstly, a spatial preservation module is designed to fill the gap between the original data and the dimension-reduced data. Secondly, the dimension reduction module and feature extraction module are designed to improve the representation of spatio-temporal correlations. Thirdly, the extracted FBNs are applied to the disease classification on the ADHD-200 dataset, which show the model’s effectiveness in classifying ADHD compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we investigate the differences in regional correlations between ADHD and TC.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification based on neural architecture search (NAS) is a currently attractive frontier as it not only automatically searches complex neural network architecture, but also avoids professional knowledge and experience design, and alleviates the lacking of generalization ability as well when dealing with a new classification task. However, the existing HSI classification based on NAS has some drawbacks: 1) A huge number of training parameters and high calculations are inductive to over-fitting and high complexity. 2) Efficient operators are lacking in the search space which can distinguish spatial locations and spectral features in different bands. Furthermore, as the category samples in HSI data show a serious long-tail distribution phenomenon, HSI classification remains challenging. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight HSI classification model LMSS-NAS integrating multi-scale spectral-spatial attention. The main work includes three-fold: 1) In order to reduce the number of model parameters and promote spectral-spatial feature fusion, a new lightweight efficient search space is designed, which consists of three equivalent lightweight convolution operators with multiple receptive fields. 2) To fully use the spectral-spatial correlation of HSI, a cube-to-pixel classification framework is designed to mine the local spatial and spectral context. 3) Focal loss and label smoothing loss in computer vision tasks are jointly migrated to LMSS-NAS to improve the unbalanced samples’ classification and model robustness. Experimental results on four public hyperspectral data sets show that the proposed method can achieve competitive classification performance as well as low computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/xh-captain/LMSS-NAS.

Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is a critical procedure in the diagnosis and quantitative analysis of breast cancer. Most existing methods for BUS image segmentation do not effectively utilize the prior information extracted from the images. In addition, breast tumors have very blurred boundaries, various sizes and irregular shapes, and the images have a lot of noise. Thus, tumor segmentation remains a challenge. In this article, we propose a BUS image segmentation method using a boundary-guided and region-aware network with global scale-adaptive (BGRA-GSA). Specifically, we first design a global scale-adaptive module (GSAM) to extract features of tumors of different sizes from multiple perspectives. GSAM encodes the features at the top of the network in both channel and spatial dimensions, which can effectively extract multi-scale context and provide global prior information. Moreover, we develop a boundary-guided module (BGM) for fully mining boundary information. BGM guides the decoder to learn the boundary context by explicitly enhancing the extracted boundary features. Simultaneously, we design a region-aware module (RAM) for realizing the cross-fusion of diverse layers of breast tumor diversity features, which can facilitate the network to improve the learning ability of contextual features of tumor regions. These modules enable our BGRA-GSA to capture and integrate rich global multi-scale context, multi-level fine-grained details, and semantic information to facilitate accurate breast tumor segmentation. Finally, the experimental results on three publicly available datasets show that our model achieves highly effective segmentation of breast tumors even with blurred boundaries, various sizes and shapes, and low contrast.

The spatiotemporal representation of task-based brain functional networks is a key topic in functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) research. At present, deep learning has been more powerful and flexible in brain functional network research than traditional methods. However, the dominant deep learning models failed in capturing the long-distance dependency (LDD) in task-based fMRI images (tfMRI) due to the time correlation among different task stimuli, the nature between temporal and spatial dimensions, which resulting in inaccurate brain pattern extraction. To address this issue, this paper proposes a spatiotemporal attention neural architecture search (NAS) model for task-based brain functional networks representation (SA-NAS-BFNR), where attention mechanism and gate recurrent unit (GRU) are integrated into a novel framework and GRU structure is searched by the differentiable neural architecture search. This model can not only achieve meaningful brain functional networks (BFNs) by addressing the LDD, but also simplify the existing recurrent structure models in tfMRI. Experiments show that the proposed model is capable of improving the fitting ability between time series and task stimulus sequence, and extracting the BFNs effectively as well.

Efficient and accurate abdominal multi-organ segmentation is the key to clinical applications such as computer-aided diagnosis and computer-aided surgery, but this task is extremely challenging due to blurred organ boundaries, complex backgrounds, and different organ sizes. Although existing segmentation methods have achieved good segmentation results, we found that the segmentation performance of abdominal small and medium organs is often unsatisfactory, but the accurate location and segmentation of abdominal small and medium organs plays an important role in the diagnosis and screening of clinical diseases. To address this problem, in this paper we propose an intra- and inter-scale collaborative learning network (I2-Net) for the abdominal multi-organ segmentation task. Firstly, we design a Feature Complementary Module (FCM) to adaptively complement the local and global features extracted by CNN and Transformer. Secondly, we propose a Feature Aggregation Module (FAM) to aggregate multi-scale semantic information. Finally, we employ a Focus Module (FM) for collaborative learning of intra- and inter-scale features. Extensive experiments on the Synapse dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and achieve accurate segmentation of abdominal multi-organs, especially for small and medium organs.

With the advent of the era of big data, it is troublesome to accurately predict the associations between lncRNAs and diseases based on traditional biological experiments due to its time-consuming and subjective. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning method for predicting lncRNA-disease associations using multi-feature coding and attention convolutional neural network (MCA-Net). We first calculate six similarity features to extract different types of lncRNA and disease feature information. Second, a multi-feature coding method is proposed to construct the feature vectors of lncRNA-disease association samples by integrating the six similarity features. Furthermore, an attention convolutional neural network is developed to identify lncRNA-disease associations under 10-fold cross-validation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of MCA-Net from different perspectives including the effects of the model parameters, distinct deep learning models, and the necessity of attention mechanism. We also compare MCA-Net with several state-of-the-art methods on three publicly available datasets, i.e., LncRNADisease, Lnc2Cancer, and LncRNADisease2.0. The results show that our MCA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all three dataset. Besides, case studies on breast cancer and lung cancer further verify that MCA-Net is effective and accurate for the lncRNA-disease association prediction.

In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network based on boundary-guided and region-aware (BGRA-Net) for breast tumor segmentation in ultrasound images. In particular, in the encoding stage, we propose a boundary-guided module (BGM) to guide the learning of boundary features in the decoding stage by explicitly strengthening the extracted boundary information. Meanwhile, in the decoding stage, we propose a region-aware module (RAM) to integrate different levels of detailed and semantic features to improve the comprehensive representation of tumor regional features. Besides, a scale-adaptive module (SAM) is further proposed to capture the characteristics of tumors with different sizes between the encoding and decoding stages. To evaluate the effectiveness of our BGRA-Net, we conduct extensive experiments on the UDIAT dataset and compare it with eight state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that our BGRA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and can achieve accurate segmentation of breast tumors with ambiguous boundaries.

Accurate and automatic gland segmentation can help pathologists diagnose the malignancy of colorectal cancers. However, it remains a challenging task because of the large morphological differences between the glands and the presence of sticky glands. In this paper, a hybrid feature enhancement network (HFE-Net) for glandular segmentation is proposed, which includes a multi-scale local feature extraction block (MSLFEB) and a global feature enhancement block (GFEB). Specifically, the MSLFEB is used to extract multiscale features through different sizes of the receptive field to reduce the loss of the local information and effectively alleviate glandular adhesion. The GFEB is used to transfer the underlying features to the decoder by considering the global semantic information. Furthermore, we design a focal and variance (FV) loss function to alleviate the class imbalance and constraint the pixels within the same instance. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on the 2015 MICCAI GlaS challenge dataset and the CRAG colorectal adenocarcinoma dataset. The results show that our HFE-Net can achieve competitive results with fewer computing resources when compared with the state-of-the-art gland segmentation methods.

Summary To meet the surging demand for artificial intelligence and cloud service, data centers have been expanding rapidly on recent years. Therefore, data center networks have received great attention recently and more challenges gradually emerged. The exiting technology of data center networks (DCNs) has presented two problems: high energy consumption and network load imbalance. Traditionally, the middle‐box hardware is dedicated and complexly merged, such as network load balancer and network energy optimizer. As an emerging architecture, software defined networks (SDNs) brings an opportunity to accomplish load balancing and energy optimization simultaneously with its characteristics. In this article, we propose a traffic flow management strategy which jointly considers energy optimization and load balancing. The strategy forwards traffic flows with maximum available bandwidth multipath routing to balance network load. We minimize activated links and switches to save energy by scheduling traffic flows. We jointly formulate these as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. We propose a heuristic algorithm to handle the problem. The full simulation results reveal the high efficiency of our algorithm and the coexistence of network energy optimization and load balancing.

The histopathological analysis is the gold standard for assessing the presence and many complex diseases, like tumors. As one of the essential part of tumors, the shape, staining, and tissue distribution of the nuclei plays an important role in tumor diagnosis. However, due to nuclei congestion and possible occlusion, nuclei segmentation remains challenging. In this paper, we propose an automatic and effective nuclei segmentation method in histopathology images based on rotation equivariant and multi-level feature aggregation neural network (REMFANet). First, considering the inherent rotation equivariant of digital pathological images, we introduce group equivariant convolutions to improve the performance of the automatic segmentation of pathological images. Second, to eliminate the semantic gap between shallow features and deep features in encoder-decoder structural models, we propose a multi-level feature aggregation strategy based on U-Net 3+. Specifically, (1) we design a new decoder module to restore pixel-level predictions more accurately; (2) we propose an improved long-skip connection mode to provide richer semantic information in the decoder; (3) we also construct a semantic enhancement block to enhance the robustness of lowlevel semantic information. Finally, we evaluate our REMFA-Net on the MoNuSeg dataset and compare the results with seven state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other models for the nuclei segmentation in histopathology images.

In this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid Multi-scale Object Equalization Network (HMOE-Net) to segment intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) regions. In particular, we design a shallow feature extraction network (SFENet) and a deep feature extraction network (DFENet) to solve the problem of equalization learning of hybrid multi-scale object features. The multi-level feature extraction (MLFE) blocks are presented in DFENet to explore multi-level semantic features more effectively. Furthermore, we adopt a progressive feature extraction strategy combining SFENet and DFENet to further consider the differences of various ICH regions and achieve the equalization feature learning of multi-scale objects. To verify the effectiveness of HMOE-Net, we collect a clinical ICH dataset with a total of 500 CT cases from three hospitals for the evaluation. The experimental results show that HMOE-Net is superior to six state-of-the-art methods and achieves accurate segmentation for multi-scale ICH regions.

Breast cancer diagnosis in multi-gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) is an important task that highly relevant to cancer grading and prognosis. In recent years, many computer-aided diagnosis methods were proposed and achieved promising performance. However, they mostly suffer from heavy computational burden that becomes a significant barrier to clinical practice. Efficient solutions are urgently demanded but still less studied. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named EffiDiag for a fast and lightweight breast cancer diagnosis. To this end, a loss-modified U-net is developed at first to enable a fast suspected cancer Region Of Interest (ROI) localization. Therefore the subsequent patch-based classification, which commonly executes at the finest magnification hundreds of thousands times per WSI for cancer identification, could be carried out on these ROIs only rather than the whole WSI for speedup. Meanwhile, a super-efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) is devised to optimize the classification speed and resource consumption per classification. Experiments on the Camelyonl6 benchmark demonstrate, by integrating the two contributions into a well-established approach, 47x inference acceleration is obtained with limited accuracy drop, yet with much less resource consumption even compared to popular lightweight networks.

BACKGROUND: A large number of experimental studies show that the mutation and regulation of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are associated with various human diseases. Accurate prediction of lncRNA-disease associations can provide a new perspective for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The main function of many lncRNAs is still unclear and using traditional experiments to detect lncRNA-disease associations is time-consuming. RESULTS: In this paper, we develop a novel and effective method for the prediction of lncRNA-disease associations using network feature similarity and gradient boosting (LDNFSGB). In LDNFSGB, we first construct a comprehensive feature vector to effectively extract the global and local information of lncRNAs and diseases through considering the disease semantic similarity (DISSS), the lncRNA function similarity (LNCFS), the lncRNA Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity (LNCGS), the disease Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity (DISGS), and the lncRNA-disease interaction (LNCDIS). Particularly, two methods are used to calculate the DISSS (LNCFS) for considering the local and global information of disease semantics (lncRNA functions) respectively. An autoencoder is then used to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vector to obtain the optimal feature parameter from the original feature set. Furthermore, we employ the gradient boosting algorithm to obtain the lncRNA-disease association prediction. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, hold-out, leave-one-out cross-validation, and ten-fold cross-validation methods are implemented on three publicly available datasets to evaluate the performance of LDNFSGB. Extensive experiments show that LDNFSGB dramatically outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The case studies on six diseases, including cancers and non-cancers, further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in real-world applications.

Network virtualization provides a promising tool to allow multiple virtual networks (VNs) to run on a shared substrate network (SN) simultaneously. VN embedding (VNE) is one of the key technologies of network virtualization. The main goal of VNE is to effectively map VN requests to the SN, which is efficiently utilizes the network resources. The emergence of software defined networks provides a platform for network virtualization to be used and promoted. In a real environment, the resource requirements of tenants are generally different. A single VN mapping algorithm can not effectively handle the multi-demand problem of tenants. We propose a self-adaptive VNE algorithm. VN requests are divided into different types by an adaptive algorithm, we use an integer linear programming formulation to solve VNE problem. This paper considers three different types of VN requests. Type 1 VN requests for high bandwidth requirements, type 2 VN requests for low latency requirements, and type 3 VN requests for high bandwidth requirements and latency requirements. The simulation results show that the virtual network embedding algorithm proposed in this paper can make full use of the SN resources and improve the overall revenue, while effectively dealing with the multi-demand problem of tenants.

Salient object detection is a fundamental problem and has been received a great deal of attention in computer vision. Recently, deep learning model became a powerful tool for image feature extraction. In this study, the authors propose a multi‐scale deep neural network (MSDNN) for salient object detection. The proposed model first extracts global high‐level features and context information over the whole source image with the recurrent convolutional neural network. Then several stacked deconvolutional layers are adopted to get the multi‐scale feature representation and obtain a series of saliency maps. Finally, the authors investigate a fusion convolution module to build a final pixel level saliency map. The proposed model is extensively evaluated on six salient object detection benchmark datasets. Results show that the authors’ deep model significantly outperforms other 12 state‐of‐the‐art approaches.

Software-defined networks (SDNs) are novel networking architectures that decouple the network control and forwarding functions from the data plane. Unlike traditional networking, the control logic of SDNs is implemented in a logically centralized controller which provides a global network view and open programming interface to the applications. While SDNs have become a hot topic among both academia and industry in recent years, little attention has been paid on the security aspect. In this paper, we introduce a novel attack, namely, packet injection attack, in SDNs. By maliciously injecting manipulated packets into SDNs, attackers can affect the services and networking applications in the control plane, and largely consume the resources in the data plane. The consequences could be the disruption of applications built on the top of the topology manager service and rest API, as well as a huge consumption of network resources, such as the bandwidth of the OpenFlow channel. To defend against the packet injection attack, we present PacketChecker, a lightweight extension module on SDN controllers to effectively detect and mitigate the flooding of falsified packets. We implement a prototype of PacketChecker in floodlight controller and conduct experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the defense mechanism. The evaluation shows that the PacketChecker module can effectively mitigate the attack with a minor overhead to the SDN controller.

Multidimensional linear phase perfect reconstruction filter bank (MDLPPRFB) can be designed and implemented via lattice structure. The lattice structure for the MDLPPRFB with filter support N(MΞ) has been published by Muramatsu , where M is the decimation matrix, Ξ is a positive integer diagonal matrix, and N(N) denotes the set of integer vectors in the fundamental parallelepiped of the matrix N. Obviously, if Ξ is chosen to be other positive diagonal matrices instead of only positive integer ones, the corresponding lattice structure would provide more choices of filter banks, offering better trade-off between filter support and filter performance. We call such resulted filter bank as generalized-support MDLPPRFB (GSMDLPPRFB). The lattice structure for GSMDLPPRFB, however, cannot be designed by simply generalizing the process that Muramatsu employed. Furthermore, the related theories to assist the design also become different from those used by Muramatsu . Such issues will be addressed in this paper. To guide the design of GSMDLPPRFB, the necessary and sufficient conditions are established for a generalized-support multidimensional filter bank to be linear-phase. To determine the cases we can find a GSMDLPPRFB, the necessary conditions about the existence of it are proposed to be related with filter support and symmetry polarity (i.e., the number of symmetric filters ns and antisymmetric filters na). Based on a process (different from the one Muramatsu used) that combines several polyphase matrices to construct the starting block, one of the core building blocks of lattice structure, the lattice structure for GSMDLPPRFB is developed and shown to be minimal. Additionally, the result in this paper includes Muramatsu's as a special case.

This paper focuses on the construction of multidimensional biorthogonal multiwavelets and the perfect reconstruction multifilter banks. Based on the Hermite-Neville filter, two lifting structures have been proposed and systematically investigated, and a general design framework has been developed for building biorthogonal multiwavelets and Hermite interpolation filter banks with any multiplicity for any lattice in any dimension with any number of primal and dual vanishing moments. The construction is an important generalization of the Neville-based lifting scheme and inherits all of the advantages of lifting schemes such as fast transform, in-place computation and integer-to-integer transforms. Our multiwavelet systems preserve most of the desirable properties for applications, such as interpolating, short support, symmetry, and high vanishing moments.