Lateralization is an effective model for exploring changes in brain activity and is widely used to assess brain function. Seafarers, as an occupation working in marine environments, are subjected to long-term specialized occupational demands and experiences, which inevitably impact brain function. By utilizing lateralization, the influence of occupational experience on brain activity can be further explored. A novel Effective Connectivity Lateralization Analysis (ECLA) framework is proposed, which incorporates a Transformer-based Granger causality model (Transformer-GC) to analyze the effects of seafaring on brain plasticity. The Transformer-GC model constructs effective connectivity (EC) matrices, and lateralization indices are derived to investigate occupational influences on brain activity. Two control groups of non-seafarers are included to identify seafarers' unique occupational plasticity brain networks. Results show that Transformer-GC achieves an accuracy improvement of nearly 16% and 19.4% over the GRU-based and MVGC model, respectively, and a 5% gain over Pearson-based functional connectivity, confirming its superior performance. Moreover, the results of the ECLA showed significant differences in VentralAttention, Somatomotor, DorsalAttention in the seafarer, demonstrating that these brain networks are affected by the long-term work of seafarers. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of ECLA in revealing the impact of long-term maritime work on brain plasticity, particularly in identifying the brain network of seafarers' occupational plasticity. It is shown that occupational experience can reshape the lateralization of brain functional activity, offering new insights into neural plasticity across different professions.

Fashion image editing is a valuable tool for designers to convey their creative ideas by visualizing design concepts. With the recent advances in text editing methods, significant progress has been made in fashion image editing. However, they face two key challenges: spurious correlations in training data often induce changes in other areas when editing an area representing the intended editing concept, and these models typically lack the ability to edit multiple concepts simultaneously. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel Text-driven Fashion Image ediTing framework called T-FIT to mitigate the impact of spurious correlation by integrating counterfactual reasoning with compositional concept learning to precisely ensure compositional multi-concept fashion image editing relying solely on text descriptions. Specifically, T-FIT includes three key components. (i) Counterfactual abduction module, which learns an exogenous variable of the source image by a denoising U-Net model. (ii) Concept learning module, which identifies concepts in fashion image editing—such as clothing types and colors and projects a target concept into the space spanned from a series of textual prompts. (iii) Concept composition module, which enables simultaneous adjustments of multiple concepts by aggregating each concept’s direction vector obtained from the concept learning module. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various fashion image editing tasks, including single-concept editing (e.g., sleeve length, clothing type) and multi-concept editing (e.g., color & sleeve length).

A key challenge for controllable image editing is that visual attributes with semantic meanings are not always independent, resulting in spurious correlations in model training. However, most existing methods ignore such issues, leading to biased causal visual representation learning and unintended changes to unrelated regions or attributes in the edited images. To bridge this gap, we propose a diffusion-based causal visual representation learning framework called CIDiffuser to capture causal representations of visual attributes based on structural causal models to address the spurious correlation. Specifically, we first decompose the image representation into a high-level semantic representation for core attributes of the image and a low-level stochastic representation for other random or less structured aspects, with the former extracted by a semantic encoder and the latter derived via a stochastic encoder. We then introduce a causal effect learning module to capture the direct causal effect, that is, the difference of potential outcomes before and after intervening on the visual attributes. In addition, a diffusion-based learning strategy is designed to optimize the representation learning process. Empirical evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, enabling highly controllable image editing by modifying learned visual representations.

Imbalanced Time-Series Classification is a critical, yet challenging task across a spectrum of real-world applications. Previous oversampling and generative approaches primarily target the minority class and often rely on static decision boundaries or similarity-based heuristics. However, these methods overlook the underlying causal factors that govern the distinction between majority and minority classes, particularly in scenarios with ambiguous class boundaries. As a result, the generated samples may fail to enhance class separability, thereby limiting improvements in classification performance. To this end, we propose a CounterFactual Augmentation Minority Generation (CFAMG) method based on generative models that aims to discover the causal factors that determine different classes from a causality perspective. Specifically, our method first utilizes a disentangled classifier to distinguish between causal and non-causal factors. Next, we perform counterfactual intervention by replacing the causal factors of majority class samples with those from minority class samples, creating an intervened latent representation that reflects minority characteristics while preserving essential structures. Finally, the trained minority class decoder generates counterfactual minority samples that resemble real minority instances yet remain distinguishable from the original majority class. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both univariate and multivariate imbalanced time-series classification tasks. The code is published at https://github.com/WangLei-CQU/CFAMG.

The primary goal of cancer risk prediction is to find dominant features, with each being responsible for cancer diagnosis. As a result, selected feature sets often converge to inexplicable and implausible results. Existing score-based causal models adopt a score function to learn a local causal structure to explicitly characterize a unique causal configuration as a variable number of nodes and links, which however suffer from nonconvex optimization and global incompleteness. This leads us to present a score-based approach to construct a causal network by optimizing a score function with a convex solution under the constraint of causal Markov property. It can be analytically shown that the resulting causal network satisfies the causal Markov property, and as a result, all cause-effect dependencies can be retained and are globally consistent. An additional node selector is introduced to choose the most dominant causal features. Empirical evaluations on three benchmarks and one in-house cancer risk datasets suggest our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts.