Salient object detection (SOD) aims to mimic human visual perception by identifying the most eye-catching objects within a scene, and has remained a popular research topic for many years. The introduction of thermal (T) images offers additional information for challenging scenarios such as those with low light and complex backgrounds, and thus enhance performance when combined with RGB images. In this paper, we have, to the best of our ability, conducted the first comprehensive survey of dual-modality RGB-T SOD. We summarize and categorize published RGB-T SOD models, emphasizing their characteristics and features. Important components of these models are classified and elaborated, such as feature extraction, modality fusion, and loss function design. Following this, we analyze existing RGB-T SOD datasets and evaluation metrics. We evaluate a selection of representative SOD models using unified protocols and statistical analysis. We also present comparative experiments on the impact of the choice of loss function and the usage of datasets on performance. Finally, we consider several key issues and potential solutions in RGB-T SOD research, revealing promising directions for future efforts. We hope this survey will offer an effective way to understand the current state of the technology and, more importantly, stimulate discussion within the community.

In the research field of RGB-Thermal saliency object detection (RGB-T SOD), the effective exploitation of the complementary characteristics of the two modalities represents a major challenge for enhancing detection performance. Current fusion methodologies can be roughly classified into early fusion and middle fusion strategies, with prevalent techniques primarily encompassing concatenation, summation, and multiplication of the two modalities. To in depth assess the efficacy of these fusion strategies, we took an empirical investigation on them. Our findings demonstrate that the concatenation of middle features constitutes a more advantageous fusion strategy, yielding superior performance and demonstrating enhanced stability. Furthermore, observing the unique properties of thermal (T) images, we introduced gamma correction as a novel data augmentation methodology to RGB-T SOD. We subsequently evaluated the responses across varying correction parameter ranges, revealing that while the response to this data augmentation technique differs across various models, data augmentation is found to be effective in general. Building upon these findings, we proposed the Gamma Correction Network (GaCNet). Specifically, we also integrated image pyramid mechanism in a lightweight manner, which facilitates a more effective recovery of fine-grained image details. Significant improvement was achieved on commonly used RGB-T testing datasets, especially in VT821 dataset, manifesting the effectiveness of our method.

In biochemical modeling, some foundational systems can exhibit sudden and profound behavioral shifts, such as the cellular signaling pathway models, in which the physiological responses promptly react to environmental changes, resulting in steep changes in their dynamic model trajectories. These steep changes are one of the major challenges in biochemical modeling governed by nonlinear differential equations. One promising way to tackle this challenge is converting the input data from the time domain to the frequency domain through Fourier Neural Operators, which enhances the ability to analyze data periodicity and regularity. However, the effectiveness of these Fourier based methods diminishes in scenarios with complex abrupt switches. To address this limitation, an innovative Multiscale Attention Wavelet Neural Operator (MAWNO) method is proposed in this paper, which comprehensively combines the attention mechanism with the versatile wavelet transforms to effectively capture these abrupt switches. Specifically, the wavelet transform scrutinizes data across multiple scales to extract the characteristics of abrupt signals into wavelet coefficients, while the self-attention mechanism is adeptly introduced to enhance the wavelet coefficients in high-frequency signals that can better characterize the abrupt switches. Experimental results substantiate MAWNO’s supremacy in terms of accuracy on three classical biochemical models featuring periodic and steep trajectories. https://github.com/SUDERS/MAWNO.

Recent dynamic hypergraph neural networks (DHGNNs) are designed to adaptively optimize the hypergraph structure to avoid the dependence on the initial hypergraph structure, thus capturing more hidden information for representation learning. However, most existing DHGNNs cannot adjust the hyperedge number and thus fail to fully explore the underlying hypergraph structure. This paper proposes a new method, namely, totally hypergraph neural network (TDHNN), to adjust the hyperedge number for optimizing the hypergraph structure. Specifically, the proposed method first captures hyperedge feature distribution to obtain dynamical hyperedge features rather than fixed ones, by conducting the sampling from the learned distribution. The hypergraph is then constructed based on the attention coefficients of both sampled hyperedges and nodes. The node features are dynamically updated by designing a simple hypergraph convolution algorithm. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to SOTA methods. The source code can be accessed via https://github.com/HHW-zhou/TDHNN.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved promising results for semi-supervised learning tasks on the graph-structured data. However, most existing methods assume that the training data are with correct labels, but in the real world, the graph-structured data often carry noisy labels to reduce the effectiveness of GNNs. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new label correction method, called multi-teacher self-training (MTS-GNN for short), to conduct semi-supervised node classification with noisy labels. Specifically, we first save the parameters of the model training in the earlier iterations as teacher models, and then use them to guide the processes, including model training, noisy label removal, and pseudo-label selection, in the later iterations of the training process of semi-supervised node classification. As a result, based on the guidance of the teacher models, the proposed method achieves the model effectiveness by solving the over-fitting issue, improves the accuracy of noisy label removal and the quality of pseudo-label selection. Extensive experimental results on real datasets show that our method achieves the best effectiveness, compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Although meta-learning and metric learning have been widely applied for few-shot node classification (FSNC), some limitations still need to be addressed, such as expensive time costs for the meta-train and difficult of exploring the complex structure inherent the graph data. To address in issues, this paper proposes a new data augmentation method to conduct FSNC on the graph data including parameter initialization and parameter fine-tuning. Specifically, parameter initialization only conducts a multi-classification task on the base classes, resulting in good generalization ability and less time cost. Parameter fine-tuning designs two data augmentation methods (i.e., support augmentation and shot augmentation) on the novel classes to generate sufficient node features so that any traditional supervised classifiers can be used to classify the query set. As a result, the proposed method is the first work of data augmentation for FSNC. Experiment results show the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposed method, compared to state-of-the-art methods, in terms of different classification tasks.

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) have been widely used in processing graphs and networks data. However, some recent research experiments show that the existing graph convolutional networks have isseus when integrating node features and topology structure. In order to remedy the weakness, we propose a new GCN architecture. Firstly, the proposed architecture introduces the cross-stitch networks into GCN with improved cross-stitch units. Cross-stitch networks spread information/knowledge between node features and topology structure, and obtains consistent learned representation by integrating information of node features and topology structure at the same time. Therefore, the proposed model can capture various channel information in all images through multiple channels. Secondly, an attention mechanism is to further extract the most relevant information between channel embeddings. Experiments on six benchmark datasets shows that our method outperforms all comparison methods on different evaluation indicators.

The functional connectomic profile is one of the non-invasive imaging biomarkers in the computer-assisted diagnostic system for many neuro-diseases. However, the diagnostic power of functional connectivity is challenged by mixed frequency-specific neuronal oscillations in the brain, which makes the single Functional Connectivity Network (FCN) often underpowered to capture the disease-related functional patterns. To address this challenge, we propose a novel functional connectivity analysis framework to conduct joint feature learning and personalized disease diagnosis, in a semi-supervised manner, aiming at focusing on putative multi-band functional connectivity biomarkers from functional neuroimaging data. Specifically, we first decompose the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signals into multiple frequency bands by the discrete wavelet transform, and then cast the alignment of all fully-connected FCNs derived from multiple frequency bands into a parameter-free multi-band fusion model. The proposed fusion model fuses all fully-connected FCNs to obtain a sparsely-connected FCN (sparse FCN for short) for each individual subject, as well as lets each sparse FCN be close to its neighbored sparse FCNs and be far away from its furthest sparse FCNs. Furthermore, we employ the$\ell _{{1}}$-SVM to conduct joint brain region selection and disease diagnosis. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed framework on various neuro-diseases,i.e.,Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and the experimental results demonstrate that our framework shows more reasonable results, compared to state-of-the-art methods, in terms of classification performance and the selected brain regions. The source code can be visited by the urlhttps://github.com/reynard-hu/mbbna.

Brain functional connectivity analysis on fMRI data could improve the understanding of human brain function. However, due to the influence of the inter-subject variability and the heterogeneity across subjects, previous methods of functional connectivity analysis are often insufficient in capturing disease-related representation so that decreasing disease diagnosis performance. In this paper, we first propose a new multi-graph fusion framework to fine-tune the original representation derived from Pearson correlation analysis, and then employ L1-SVM on fine-tuned representations to conduct joint brain region selection and disease diagnosis for avoiding the issue of the curse of dimensionality on high-dimensional data. The multi-graph fusion framework automatically learns the connectivity number for every node (i.e., brain region) and integrates all subjects in a unified framework to output homogenous and discriminative representations of all subjects. Experimental results on two real data sets, i.e., fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), verified the effectiveness of our proposed framework, compared to state-of-the-art methods.