Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) enables agents to learn from human feedback without explicit reward engineering. However, existing methods rely on simple MLP architectures that treat state-action pairs independently, failing to exploit the temporal structure inherent in behavioral signals. Preference learning can be cast as estimating an underlying utility signal from sparse, noisy binary observations. We propose VATE (Variational Attention Trajectory Encoder), an online PbRL framework that integrates: (1) a variational encoder for robust signal manifold learning, (2) transformer-based temporal modeling for long-range dependency capture, and (3) multi-scale attention aggregation for adaptive signal fusion. Experiments on Meta-World and DMControl tasks demonstrate that VATE achieves strong sample efficiency and robustness over state-of-the-art baselines; additional teacher-sensitivity and ablation studies support its robustness under noisy feedback and validate each core component.

Aiming at the wind power characteristics of temporality, periodicity and complexity, the periodic law of short-term and long-term repetitive patterns is studied, and an integrated dual-channel prediction model is proposed. A practical periodic characteristic extracting strategy is designed to show the hidden periodic law of the original signal. Combining the grid search algorithm with the variation trend of amplitude/period, the optimal periodic step is determined. Based on the above analysis, the original signal is decomposed into temporal and periodic components. Then the temporal attention network and the encoder-decoder attention network are schemed out to dispose the two components respectively. Finally, the linear regression attention network is adopted to realize data fitting. The integrated forecasting framework can deal with the long-term and short-term dependencies of the original data at the same time, and ensure the rapid convergence of training process, thereby improve the prediction accuracy and stability. The multi-dimensional experimental verification is carried out through the comparison of evaluation indicators , prediction trends, scatter plots and box plots.

The combination of Raman spectroscopy and deep learning technology provides an automatic, rapid, and accurate scheme for the clinical diagnosis of pathogenic bacteria. However, the accuracy of existing deep learning methods is still limited because of the single and fixed scales of deep neural networks. We propose a deep neural network that can learn multi-scale features of Raman spectra by using the automatic combination of multi-receptive fields of convolutional layers. This model is based on the expert knowledge that the discrimination information of Raman spectra is composed of multi-scale spectral peaks. We enhance the interpretability of the model by visualizing the activated wavenumbers of the bacterial spectrum that can be used for reference in related work. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method achieves higher accuracy and efficiency for bacterial identification on isolate-level, empiric-treatment-level, and antibiotic-resistance-level tasks. The clinical bacterial identification task requires significantly fewer patient samples to achieve similar accuracy. Therefore, this method has tremendous potential for the identification of clinical pathogenic bacteria, antibiotic susceptibility testing, and prescription guidance.

The glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is a crucial index to measure renal function. In daily clinical practice, the GFR can be estimated using the Gates method, which requires the clinicians to define the region of interest (ROI) for the kidney and the corresponding background in dynamic renal scintigraphy. The manual placement of ROIs to estimate the GFR is subjective and labor-intensive, however, making it an undesirable and unreliable process. This work presents a fully automated ROI detection method to achieve accurate and robust GFR estimations. After image preprocessing, the ROI for each kidney was delineated using a shape prior constrained level set (spLS) algorithm and then the corresponding background ROIs were obtained according to the defined kidney ROIs. In computer simulations, the spLS method had the best performance in kidney ROI detection compared with the previous threshold method (threshold) and the Chan-Vese level set (cvLS) method. In further clinical applications, 223 sets of 99mTc-diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid renal scintigraphic images from patients with abnormal renal function were reviewed. Compared with the former ROI detection methods (threshold and cvLS), the GFR estimations based on the ROIs derived by the spLS method had the highest consistency and correlations (r = 0.98, p <; 0.001) with the reference estimated by experienced physicians. The results indicate that the proposed automated ROI detection method has great potential in automated ROI detection for accurate and robust GFR estimation in dynamic renal scintigraphy.

Tracer kinetic modeling with dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) requires a plasma time-activity curve (PTAC) as an input function. Several image-derived input function (IDIF) methods that rely on drawing the region of interest (ROI) in large vascular structures have been proposed to overcome the problems caused by the invasive approach for obtaining the PTAC, especially for small-animal studies. However, the manual placement of ROIs for estimating IDIF is subjective and labor-intensive, making it an undesirable and unreliable process. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid clustering method (HCM) that objectively delineates ROIs in dynamic PET images for the estimation of IDIFs, and demonstrate its application to the mouse PET studies acquired with [ (18)F]Fluoro-2-deoxy-2-D-glucose (FDG). We begin our HCM using k-means clustering for background removal. We then model the time-activity curves using polynomial regression mixture models in curve clustering for heart structure detection. The hierarchical clustering is finally applied for ROI refinements. The HCM achieved accurate ROI delineation in both computer simulations and experimental mouse studies. In the mouse studies, the predicted IDIF had a high correlation with the gold standard, the PTAC derived from the invasive blood samples. The results indicate that the proposed HCM has a great potential in ROI delineation for automatic estimation of IDIF in dynamic FDG-PET studies.