Integrating multimodal radiological images and clinical data is critical for survival prediction in rectal cancer. However, existing methods often lack sufficient consideration of 1) modality heterogeneity (caused by rectal peristalsis, noise artifacts, and missing modalities) and 2) site heterogeneity (caused by different imaging protocols and patient populations). These factors hinder the model from capturing reliable cross-modal relationships and adapting to distribution shifts across clinical sites. In this work, we propose UICSurv, a novel multimodal Survival prediction framework highlighted by Uncertainty-guided Iterative Contrastive fusion, to capture robust cross-site multimodal interactions while leveraging sample-level uncertainty to enhance fusion reliability. Specifically, UICSurv initializes a shared multimodal embedding and iteratively refines it by fusing each heterogeneous modality via the cross-attention mechanism. In each iteration, a novel Survival Contrastive Learning (SCL) strategy is designed to progressively enhance both cross-site alignment and survival discriminability of the multimodal embedding space. Moreover, we design an EvidenceHit module, which employs temporally consistent evidential learning to jointly estimate survival probabilities and uncertainty. The estimated uncertainty further guides the embedding alignment by reducing the interference of unreliable samples. All components operate synergistically within UICSurv to reinforce reliable survival prediction in rectal cancer. Extensive experiments on multimodal datasets of rectal cancer (collected from three sites) demonstrate the superiority of our method both in survival prediction and uncertainty estimation. The code is available open-source: https://github.com/ScorpioBao/UICSurv.

As critical visual details become obscured, the low visibility and high ISO noise in extremely low-light images pose a significant challenge to human pose estimation. Current methods fail to provide high-quality representations due to reliance on pixel-level enhancements that compromise semantics and the inability to effectively handle extreme low-light conditions for robust feature learning. In this work, we propose a frequency-based framework for low-light human pose estimation, rooted in the "divide-and-conquer" principle. Instead of uniformly enhancing the entire image, our method focuses on task-relevant information. By applying dynamic illumination correction to the low-frequency components and low-rank denoising to the high-frequency components, we effectively enhance both the semantic and texture information essential for accurate pose estimation. As a result, this targeted enhancement method results in robust, high-quality representations, significantly improving pose estimation performance. Extensive experiments demonstrating its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in various challenging low-light scenarios.

Pose distillation is widely adopted to reduce model size in human pose estimation. However, existing methods primarily emphasize the transfer of teacher knowledge while often neglecting the performance degradation resulted from the curse of capacity gap between teacher and student. To address this issue, we propose AgentPose, a novel pose distillation method that integrates a feature agent to model the distribution of teacher features and progressively aligns the distribution of student features with that of the teacher feature, effectively overcoming the capacity gap and enhancing the ability of knowledge transfer. Our comprehensive experiments conducted on the COCO dataset substantiate the effectiveness of our method in knowledge transfer, particularly in scenarios with a high capacity gap.

Accurate and reliable prediction of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression is crucial for effective interventions and treatment to delay its onset. Recently, deep learning models for AD progression achieve excellent predictive accuracy. However, their predictions lack reliability due to the non-calibration defects, that affects their recognition and acceptance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a temporal attention-aware evidential recurrent network for trustworthy prediction of AD progression. Specifically, evidential recurrent network explicitly models uncertainty of the output and converts it into a reliability measure for trustworthy AD progression prediction. Furthermore, considering that the actual scenario of AD progression prediction frequently relies on historical longitudinal data, we introduce temporal attention into evidential recurrent network, which improves predictive performance. We demonstrate the proposed model on the TADPOLE dataset. For predictive performance, the proposed model achieves mAUC of 0.943 and BCA of 0.881, which is comparable to the SOTA model MinimalRNN. More importantly, the proposed model provides reliability measures of the predicted results through uncertainty estimation and the ECE of the method on the TADPOLE dataset is 0.101, which is much lower than the SOTA model at 0.147, indicating that the proposed model can provide important decision-making support for risk-sensitive prediction of AD progression.

Trusted open set recognition aims to classify known classes and reject unknown ones, as well as outputs an uncertainty estimate to measure the reliability of recognition results, thus extending the application scenarios of traditional open set recognition methods to risk-sensitive fields. Current methods assume that the covariate distribution of the known classes remains constant during training and testing. However, due to the common occurrence of covariate shift in practical applications, existing methods often suffer from limited generalization. To this end, a causal evidence learning framework, highlighted by the controllable Evidential Uncertainty Guided Adversarial Data Augmentation (EUG-ADA) and Causal Adversarial Disentanglement (CausalAD) strategies, is proposed to support trusted open set recognition under covariate shift. Specifically, EUG-ADA generates high-quality augmentation samples to increase training data diversity, guided by controllable evidential uncertainty and constrained by semantic consistency. Moreover, it is complemented by the CausalAD, which learns causal representations through causal intervention, mitigating the risk of misrecognition of unknown classes caused by the model’s reliance on shortcuts for prediction. The combined effect of EUG-ADA and CausalAD enables the model to learn more generalized and robust causal evidence for trusted open set recognition. Finally, extensive experimental results on both real-world and synthetic data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating that it improves not only open set recognition performance under covariate shift but also the reliability of uncertainty estimates. The code is released onhttps://github.com/ScorpioBao/CEL-OSR.

Multispectral pedestrian detection is an important task due to its critical role in a wide spectrum of applications. Basically, the complementary information from color and thermal images could provide a more accurate and reliable pedestrian detection result. However, multimodal data usually suffer from the issue of dynamic change or corruption for some modalities. At the same time, as a safety-critical task, how to produce a stable and reliable detection result is also a key challenge. To address these challenges, we propose a stable multispectral pedestrian detection (SMPD) algorithm, providing a new paradigm for multispectral detection by dynamically integrating different modalities at an evidence level. Specifically, we introduce the Dirichlet distribution to characterize the distribution of the class probabilities, parameterized with evidence from different modalities. Then, multi-branch fusion, based on Dempster-Shafer theory, can integrate these pieces of evidence to obtain the detection result. In addition, a Plug-and-Play module, termed modal enhancement module, is introduced to enhance cross-modality interaction. This is an end-to-end framework, which can induce accurate detection and uncertainty estimation, and then endows the model with both reliability and robustness against noise or corruption. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Feature selection (FS) plays an important role in machine learning, which extracts important features and accelerates the learning process. In this paper, we propose a deep FS method that simultaneously conducts feature selection and differentiable $ k $-NN graph learning based on the Dirichlet Energy. The Dirichlet Energy identifies important features by measuring their smoothness on the graph structure, and facilitates the learning of a new graph that reflects the inherent structure in new feature subspace. We employ Optimal Transport theory to address the non-differentiability issue of learning $ k $-NN graphs in neural networks, which theoretically makes our method applicable to other graph neural networks for dynamic graph learning. Furthermore, the proposed framework is interpretable, since all modules are designed algorithmically. We validate the effectiveness of our model with extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Estimating individual treatment effect (ITE) is a challenging task due to the need for individual potential outcomes to be learned from biased data and counterfactuals are inherently unobservable. Some researchers propose to use generative adversarial approaches to infer the counterfactual outcomes based on the distribution of factual outcomes. However, these methods assume that complete confounding factors are observed, and simply treat all observed variables as confounding factors, ignoring identification of possible instrumental factors and adjustment factors, which will bring large deviation to ITE estimation when facing biased data. To address these issues, we propose a novel Variational Generative Adversarial Nets for ITE estimation by designing the collaborative learning strategy with Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN). Specifically, we employ VAE to infer the latent representations of observed variables to access complete latent factors while using GAN to infer unseen counterfactual outcomes and guide VAE for disentangling these latent factors into three sets corresponding to the instrumental, confounding, and adjustment factors. Then the disentangled latent confounding factors can be used to further control data bias using an adaptive weighting scheme. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data demonstrate learning disentangled latent factors for ITE estimation is effective, and our method has excellent performance even with high data bias.

Discovering genes closely related to complex dis-eases is extremely important for disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Most existing methods use a two-step strategy with the beginning feature fusion step and the following inductive learning step to predict the potential gene-disease associations, ignoring the reciprocal relationship between the two steps which could help each other in achieving more accurate prediction results. In this paper, we propose a novel One-step Multi-view Inductive Matrix Completion (OMIMC) model, highlighted by joint latent representation learning and weighted PU (positive-unlabeled) learning, to predict gene-disease associations. Specifically, our model employ the latent representation learning scheme to simultaneously capture the consistency and complementary information of the sample with multi-view (even the sample with missing views), and thus obtain the common latent representations for genes/diseases. Furthermore, considering that the gene-disease associations prediction is essentially a PU learning problem, we also introduce the adaptive weighting scheme into traditional inductive matrix completion model to penalize the observed and the unknown associations differently. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on several real data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Existing multitask Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy modeling methods always produce high complex fuzzy models with numerous redundant rules and consequent parameters. To this end, we propose a novel multitask TSK fuzzy modeling method called mtSparseTSK, which learns a compact set of fuzzy rules and shared consequent parameters across tasks in a unified procedure. Specifically, we consider the fuzzy rule reduction and consequent parameter selection across tasks by devising novel group sparsity regularizations in the learning criterion of the model. We also integrate the intertask relations in the proposed TSK model for multitask learning. We fully utilize the block structure in the TSK fuzzy models in formulating a joint block sparse optimization problem and develop a procedure for alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMMs) to find the optimal solution of the problem. Experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the distinctive performance of the proposed methods over the existing ones on multitask fuzzy system modeling.

As a natural extension of the traditional graph model, hypergraph has been extensively exploited and applied in many tasks such as image clustering, classification, etc. The performance of these tasks highly depends on building an informative hypergraph to accurately and robustly formulate the underlying data correlation. Existing hypergraph construction methods can only be suitable for simple Gaussian or outlier noise assumptions, which cannot be applied to more complex noise scenario in practical applications. To address this challenge, we propose a robust hypergraph learning model by adopting the Mixture of Gaussians (MoG) noise modeling strategy. In particular, our model adopts low-rank representation and sparse representation simultaneously to construct an informative hypergraph. The Correlation among nodes and the weights of edges can be obtained by seeking a low-rank and sparse representation matrix. The so-obtained hypergraph can capture both the global mixture of subspaces structure (by low-rank) and the locally linear structure (by sparse) of the data. Furthermore, an efficient Expectation-Maximization-like optimization algorithm is designed to solve the proposed model. Finally, the superiority of our model is demonstrated by extensive experiments on image clustering.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases. Understanding AD progression can empower the patients in taking proactive care. Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and AD Assessment Scale Cognitive subscale (ADAS-Cog) are two prevailing clinical measures designed to evaluate the AD progression. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised Temporal Multitask Matrix Completion (TMMC) framework, which combines a novel transductive multitask feature selection scheme, to simultaneously predict AD progression measured by MMSE and ADAS-Cog, and identify related biomarkers trackable of AD progression. Specifically, by treating the prediction of cognitive scores at each time point as a regression task, we first formulate AD progression problem as a standard Multitask Matrix Completion (MMC) model. Secondly, considering the limited number of samples available in this study, we introduce a transductive feature selection scheme to jointly select the task-shared features for multiple time points and the task-specific features for different time points, and thus alleviate the over-fitting defect caused by Small-Sample-Size issue. Thirdly, aiming at the small change of cognitive scores between successive time points for a patient, we employ a temporal regularization scheme to capture the temporal smoothness of cognitive scores. Furthermore, we design an efficient optimization algorithm based on Alternative Minimization and Difference of Convex Programming techniques to solve the proposed TMMC framework. Finally, the extensive experiments performed on real-world Alzheimer's disease dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our TMMC framework.

For real-world applications, multilabel learning usually suffers from unsatisfactory training data. Typically, features may be corrupted or class labels may be noisy or both. Ignoring noise in the learning process tends to result in an unreasonable model and, thus, inaccurate prediction. Most existing methods only consider either feature noise or label noise in multilabel learning. In this paper, we propose a unified robust multilabel learning framework for data with hybrid noise, that is, both feature noise and label noise. The proposed method, hybrid noise-oriented multilabel learning (HNOML), is simple but rather robust for noisy data. HNOML simultaneously addresses feature and label noise by bi-sparsity regularization bridged with label enrichment. Specifically, the label enrichment matrix explores the underlying correlation among different classes which improves the noisy labeling. Bridged with the enriching label matrix, the structured sparsity is imposed to jointly handle the corrupted features and noisy labeling. We utilize the alternating direction method (ADM) to efficiently solve our problem. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the advantages of our method over the state-of-the-art ones.

The resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) reflects functional activity of brain regions by blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signals. Up to now, many computer-aided diagnosis methods based on rs-fMRI have been developed for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These methods are mostly the binary classification approaches to determine whether a subject is an ASD patient or not. However, the disease often consists of several sub-categories, which are complex and thus still confusing to many automatic classification methods. Besides, existing methods usually focus on the functional connectivity (FC) features in grey matter regions, which only account for a small portion of the rs-fMRI data. Recently, the possibility to reveal the connectivity information in the white matter regions of rs-fMRI has drawn high attention. To this end, we propose to use the patch-based functional correlation tensor (PBFCT) features extracted from rs-fMRI in white matter, in addition to the traditional FC features from gray matter, to develop a novel multi-class ASD diagnosis method in this work. Our method has two stages. Specifically, in the first stage of multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA), the source subjects belonging to multiple clinical centers (thus called as source domains) are all transformed into the same target feature space. Thus each subject in the target domain can be linearly reconstructed by the transformed subjects. In the second stage of multi-view sparse representation (MVSR), a multi-view classifier for multi-class ASD diagnosis is developed by jointly using both views of the FC and PBFCT features. The experimental results using the ABIDE dataset verify the effectiveness of our method, which is capable of accurately classifying each subject into a respective ASD sub-category.

Accurately estimating network traffic from the partial measurements plays a crucial role in network management. However, the potential anomaly existing in real networks usually makes this goal difficult to achieve. Existing network traffic estimation methods generally impute network traffic independent of anomaly detection, which incurs significant performance degradation with network anomaly. To address this issue in the realistic network scenario, we propose a novel anomaly-aware network traffic estimation method to recover network traffic data concurrently with network anomaly detection. Specifically, by exploiting the inherent spatio-temporal characteristics, we first formulate the network traffic estimation as a low-rank tensor completion problem. Then, an outlier-robust tensor completion (OrTC) model is constructed by introducing both L2,1-norm regularization and LF-norm regularization, which can not only well fit the intrinsic low-rank property of real traffic data, but also is robust against both the dense noise and the sparse anomaly. Furthermore, an effective optimization algorithm OrTC-AM is designed to solve the non-convex and non-smooth OrTC model based on the popular alternating minimization method. Finally, the extensive experiments performed on the public dataset demonstrate that our proposed OrTC-AM method outperforms the previously widely used network traffic estimation methods.

WSN-as-a-Service (WaaS) is a novel application model of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Owners of WSNs provide data queries as services, while users pay for needed services as they use such services. The adoption of WaaS improves the usage of WSNs and reduces the cost of network deployment and maintenance. It is challenging to protect data from curious users while, at the same time, providing MAX/MIN query services. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving MAX/MIN query processing method for WaaS. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to discuss a privacy-preserving data query method in the WaaS environment. To implement privacy-preserving MAX/MIN queries, we propose a novel query protocol by adopting the idea of secure multiparty computation. The protocol consists of two cooperative query processing algorithms that are deployed in the aggregate sensor and normal sensors. During query processing, multiple rounds of secure interactions between sensors are performed. In each round, one bit of the query result is determined through cooperation of sensors, while the data of sensors participating in query processing remain private. Curious users cannot obtain any private data from the network even if a few compromised sensors collude with them. The analysis and evaluations indicate that the proposed protocol computes query results reliably, avoids the energy hole problem and is efficient in terms of communication cost.

Recently, the low‐rank and sparse (LRS) matrix decomposition has been introduced as an effective mean to solve the multi‐view registration. It views each available relative motion as a block element to reconstruct one sparse matrix, which then is used to approximate the low‐rank matrix, where global motions can be recovered for multi‐view registration. However, this approach is sensitive to the sparsity of the reconstructed matrix and it treats all block elements equally in spite of their varied reliabilities. Therefore, this study proposes an effective approach for multi‐view registration by weighted LRS matrix decomposition. On the basis of the inverse symmetry property of relative motions, it first proposes a completion method to reduce the sparsity of the reconstructed matrix. The reduced sparsity of the reconstructed matrix can improve the robustness and efficiency of LRS matrix decomposition. Then, it proposes the weighted LRS matrix decomposition, where each block element is assigned with one estimated weight to denote its reliability. By introducing the weight, more accurate registration results can be efficiently recovered from the estimated low‐rank matrix. Experimental results tested on public datasets illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the state‐of‐the‐art approaches on robustness, accuracy and efficiency.

Accurately estimating origin-destination (OD) network traffic is crucial for network management and capacity planning. However, the potential network anomaly and complex noise make this goal difficult to achieve. Existing network traffic estimation methods usually impute network traffic independent of anomaly detection, which ignores the potential relationship between the two tasks to help each other in achieving better performance. Moreover, these approaches can only be suitable for simple Gaussian or outlier noise assumptions, which cannot be applied to more complex noise distributions in practical applications. To address these issues, we propose a novel anomaly-tolerant network traffic estimation approach for simultaneously estimating network traffic and detecting network anomaly. Specifically, by utilizing the inherent low-rank property and temporal characteristic of traffic matrix, we formulate the network traffic estimation problem as a noise-immune temporal matrix completion (NiTMC) model, where the complex noise is fitted by mixture of Gaussian (MoG), and the network anomaly is smoothed by the L2,1-norm regularization. In addition, we also design a convergence-guaranteed optimization algorithm based on the expectation maximization (EM) and block coordinate update (BCU) methods to solve the proposed model. Furthermore, to deal with large-scale network problems, we develop a scalable and memory-efficient algorithm by employing stochastic proximal gradient descent (SPGD) method. Finally, the extensive experiments performed on real datasets demonstrate that our proposed NiTMC model outperforms the previously widely used network traffic estimation methods.

The O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter methylation and isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) mutation in high-grade gliomas (HGG) have proven to be the two important molecular indicators associated with better prognosis. Traditionally, the statuses of MGMT and IDH1 are obtained via surgical biopsy, which has limited their wider clinical implementation. Accurate presurgical prediction of their statuses based on preoperative multimodal neuroimaging is of great clinical value for a better treatment plan. Currently, the available data set associated with this study has several challenges, such as small sample size and complex, nonlinear (image) feature-to-(molecular) label relationship. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-label nonlinear matrix completion (MNMC) model to jointly predict both MGMT and IDH1 statuses in a multi-task framework. Specifically, we first employ a nonlinear random Fourier feature mapping to improve the linear separability of the data, and then use transductive multi-task feature selection (performed in a nonlinearly transformed feature space) to refine the imputed soft labels, thus alleviating the overfitting problem caused by small sample size. We further design an optimization algorithm with a guaranteed convergence ability based on a block prox-linear method to solve the proposed MNMC model. Finally, by using a single-center, multimodal brain imaging and molecular pathology data set of HGG, we derive brain functional and structural connectomics features to jointly predict MGMT and IDH1 statuses. Results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the previously widely used single- and multi-task machine learning methods. This paper also shows the promise of utilizing brain connectomics for HGG prognosis in a non-invasive manner.

Accurate and sufficient range measurements are essential for range-based localization in wireless sensor networks. However, noise and data missing are inevitable in distance ranging, which may degrade localization accuracy drastically. Existing localization approaches often degrade in terms of accuracy in the co-existence of incomplete and corrupted range measurements. To address this challenge, a noise-tolerant localization algorithm called NLIRM is presented. By utilizing the natural low rank property of Euclidean distance matrix, the reconstruction of partially sampled and noisy distance matrix is formulated as a norm-regularized matrix completion problem, where Gaussian noises and outliers are smoothed by Frobenius-norm and L1norm regularization, respectively. As far as we are aware of, this is the first scheme that can recover the missing range measurements and explicitly sift Gaussian noise and outlier simultaneously. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with traditional algorithms, NLIRM achieves better localization performance under the same experiment setting. In addition, our algorithm provides an accurate prediction of outlier positions, which is the prerequisite for malfunction diagnosis in WSN.

To bridge the gap between limited energy supplies of the sensor nodes and the system lifetime, duty-cycle Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with data aggregation are studied in this paper. We proposed a load-balanced and latency-efficient data aggregation scheduling for duty-cycled WSNs. A shortest path tree (SPT) is used as the routing structure for data aggregation scheduling. In SPT, parent-children assignments are well-designed to assign nodes from level h+1 to the parents at level h such that every parent has a balanced load, while reducing the sleep latency which is a period of time for a sender to wait for its parent to be active. Finally, through the simulation and comparisons, we prove the effectiveness of our approach.

With the rapid development of services and software, how to share, integrate and discover them properly in open and dynamic network environment is one of the most important challenges for software technology. With monad techniques, we present a novel formal semantic model for service oriented computing in a black-box observation way. The monad-based model can help us formally describe and further study on software components and services through monads' properties such as abstraction, reflection and composability. This model relatively improves service reuse and discovery, and it significantly facilitates web service composition and enables integration of legacy applications.