Shulan Ruan

dblp:272/6455 · DBLP profile ↗
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18ranked-venue papers
4as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7466-8909ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 9 · 3 first-author · 8 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 1 first-author · 7 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 4 · 4 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Global Structure-aware and Feature-augmented Graph Neural Network for Heterophilic Graphs
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used across various fields under the homophily assumption that connected nodes are similar. However, in heterophilic graphs, where connected nodes tend to have dissimilar features, existing GNNs still face some limitations. From the perspective of structure, shallow GNNs could not capture the high-order node information, whereas deep GNNs may suffer from the over-smoothing problem. From the perspective of feature, the useful information of high-order similar nodes is often weakened by low-order dissimilar nodes in the feature update phase. To address the above problems, we propose a Global Structure-aware and Feature-augmented Graph Neural Network (GSF-GNN) to alleviate the limitations from the perspectives of structure and feature. Specifically, from the structure perspective, we design a Structure-based Global Propagation (SGP) module to establish global connections among nodes and adaptively adjust edge weights for message propagation. From the feature perspective, we introduce a Feature-augmented Compensatory Update (FCU) module, which employs a multi-view feature updating mechanism to enhance node features from different perspectives. Our theoretical analysis formally demonstrates the effectiveness of GSF-GNN in heterophilic graphs. Experiments on heterophilic and homophilic benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of GSF-GNN across various graph structures. Moreover, GSF-GNN achieves stable performance across multiple layers and effectively alleviates the over-smoothing problem. Our codes are available on https://github.com/huijieliu2023/GSF-GNN .
Huijie Liu 0001, Shulan Ruan, Qi Liu 0003, Mingyue Cheng 0004, Zhenya Huang, Yu Liu 0005, Enhong Chen, You He 0002
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.2
2025 SentiFormer: Metadata Enhanced Transformer for Image Sentiment Analysis
abstract
As more and more internet users post images online to express their daily emotions, image sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention. Recently, researchers generally tend to design different neural networks to extract visual features from images for sentiment analysis. Despite the significant progress, metadata, the data (e.g., text descriptions and keyword tags) for describing the image, has not been sufficiently explored in this task. In this paper, we propose a novel Metadata Enhanced Transformer for sentiment analysis (SentiFormer) to fuse multiple metadata and the corresponding image into a unified framework. Specifically, we first obtain multiple metadata of the image and unify the representations of diverse data. To adaptively learn the appropriate weights for each metadata, we then design an adaptive relevance learning module to highlight more effective information while suppressing weaker ones. Moreover, we further develop a cross-modal fusion module to fuse the adaptively learned representations and make the final prediction. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority and rationality of our proposed method.
Shulan Ruan, Mingzheng Yang, Dongxuan Han, Huijie Liu 0001, Kai Zhang 0038, Qi Liu 0003
ICASSP2
2025 Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception with Semantic and Statistical Compression
Yuankun Zeng, Zhi Li 0057, Shulan Ruan, Yu Liu 0005, You He 0002
PRCV (11)4
2025 Multi-View Heterogeneous HyperGNN for Heterophilic Knowledge Combination Prediction
abstract
Knowledge combination prediction involves analyzing current knowledge elements and their relationships, then forecasting how these elements, drawn from various fields, can be creatively combined to form new, innovative solutions. This process is critical for countries and businesses to understand future technology trends and promote innovation in an era of rapid scientific and technological advancement. Existing methods often overlook the integration of knowledge combinations from multiple views, along with their inherent heterophily and the dual “many-to-one” property, where a single knowledge combination can include multiple elements, and a single element may belong to various combinations. To this end, we propose a novel framework named Multi-viewHeterogeneousHyperGNN forHeterophilicKnowledgeCombinationPrediction (H3KCP). Specifically, H3KCP first constructs a hypergraph reflecting the dual “many-to-one” property of knowledge combinations, where each hyperedge may contain several nodes and each node can also belong to multiple hyperedges. Next, the framework employs a multi-view fusion approach to model knowledge combinations, considering heterophily and integrating insights from co-occurrence, co-citation, and hierarchical structure-based views. Furthermore, our analysis of H3KCP from a spectral graph perspective offers insights into its rationality. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world patent datasets and the Open Academic Graph dataset validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, yielding significant insights into knowledge combinations. Our code and dataset are publicly available onhttps://github.com/huijieliu2023/H3KCP.
Huijie Liu 0001, Shulan Ruan, Han Wu 0002, Zhenya Huang, Defu Lian, Qi Liu 0003, Enhong Chen
IEEE Trans. Big Data2
2025 CPWS: Confident Programmatic Weak Supervision for High-Quality Data Labeling
abstract
Programmatic Weak Supervision (PWS) is a recent data labeling paradigm, which employs several Labeling Functions (LFs) to provide weak labels and involves a Label Model (LM) for label aggregation. Despite the significant progress, there still remain some inherent challenges in PWS. From the view of labeling, LFs may wrongly label some data points. From the view of data, some data points themselves may be low-quality (e.g., ambiguous texts or blurred images). These largely stem from the lack of an explicit evaluation mechanism for LFs or data points. To this end, inspired by confident learning focusing on label quality, we propose a Confident PWS (CPWS) approach for high-quality data labeling. Specifically, several LFs are firstly utilized to provide weak labels for unlabeled data. Then, we develop an explicit Dual Evaluation Mechanism (DEM) to evaluate the quality of both LFs and data points, which not only employs data to evaluate trained models but also leverages trained models to evaluate data. Along this line, we further design a Distribution-Guided Pruning Strategy (DPS) to prune low-quality data and aggregate weak labels under the guidance of label class distribution. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed approach.
Shulan Ruan, Huijie Liu 0001, Zhao Chen 0003, Kun Zhang 0015, Caleb Chen Cao, Enhong Chen, Lei Chen 0002
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.1
2024 Predictive Accuracy-Based Active Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Jun Shi 0007, Shulan Ruan, Minfan Zhao, Hong An, Xudong Xue
IJCAI2
2024 Caption matters: a new perspective for knowledge-based visual question answering
Shulan Ruan, Likang Wu, Huijie Liu 0001, Kai Zhang 0038, Kun Zhang 0015, Qi Liu 0003, Enhong Chen
Knowl. Inf. Syst.2
2024 Color Enhanced Cross Correlation Net for Image Sentiment Analysis
abstract
Automatic analysis of image sentiment has gained considerable attention with the increasing throughput of user-generated visual contents online. Recently, researchers generally tend to design different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to extract image content features for sentiment analysis. However, they underestimated the importance of image color, which has been proved very crucial for image sentiment expressing by psychology and art theory. Moreover, we further observe that the coordination of content and color is the main form of image sentiment expressing. Different combinations of content and color could express extremely different sentiments. To that end, in this paper, we propose a Color Enhanced Cross Correlation Net (CECCN), a novel architecture for image sentiment analysis that not only leverages contents and colors simultaneously, but also takes their correlations into consideration. Specifically, we first use a pre-trained CNN to extract content features and color moment to collect color features from multiple color spaces. Then, we propose a novel Cross Correlation (CC) method to model the correlations between content features and color features with attention mechanism and sequence convolution, in which sentiment expressing of content and color can be enhanced by each other. Finally, we integrate these two types of information for better image sentiment analysis. Extensive experiments on two popular and well-studied benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and rationality of our proposed CECCN.
Shulan Ruan, Kun Zhang 0015, Le Wu 0001, Tong Xu 0001, Qi Liu 0003, Enhong Chen
IEEE Trans. Multim.1
2024 Description-Enhanced Label Embedding Contrastive Learning for Text Classification
abstract
Text classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing, which requires an agent to determine the most appropriate category for input sentences. Recently, deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance in this area, especially pretrained language models (PLMs). Usually, these methods concentrate on input sentences and corresponding semantic embedding generation. However, for another essential component: labels, most existing works either treat them as meaningless one-hot vectors or use vanilla embedding methods to learn label representations along with model training, underestimating the semantic information and guidance that these labels reveal. To alleviate this problem and better exploit label information, in this article, we employ self-supervised learning (SSL) in model learning process and design a novel self-supervised relation of relation ( [Formula: see text]) classification task for label utilization from a one-hot manner perspective. Then, we propose a novel relation of relation learning network( [Formula: see text]-Net) for text classification, in which text classification and [Formula: see text] classification are treated as optimization targets. Meanwhile, triplet loss is employed to enhance the analysis of differences and connections among labels. Moreover, considering that one-hot usage is still short of exploiting label information, we incorporate external knowledge from WordNet to obtain multiaspect descriptions for label semantic learning and extend [Formula: see text]-Net to a novel description-enhanced label embedding network(DELE) from a label embedding perspective. One step further, since these fine-grained descriptions may introduce unexpected noise, we develop a mutual interaction module to select appropriate parts from input sentences and labels simultaneously based on contrastive learning (CL) for noise mitigation. Extensive experiments on different text classification tasks reveal that [Formula: see text]-Net can effectively improve the classification performance and DELE can make better use of label information and further improve the performance. As a byproduct, we have released the codes to facilitate other research.
Kun Zhang 0015, Le Wu 0001, Guangyi Lv, Enhong Chen, Shulan Ruan, Jing Liu 0001, Zhiqiang Zhang 0012, Jun Zhou 0011, Meng Wang 0001
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst.5
2023 PaperLM: A Pre-trained Model for Hierarchical Examination Paper Representation Learning
abstract
Representation learning of examination papers is significantly crucial for online education systems, as it benefits various applications such as estimating paper difficulty and examination paper retrieval. Previous works mainly explore the representation learning of individual questions in an examination paper, with limited attention given to the examination paper as a whole. In fact, the structure of examination papers is strongly correlated with paper properties such as paper difficulty, which existing paper representation methods fail to capture adequately. To this end, we propose a pre-trained model namely PaperLM to learn the representation of examination papers. Our model integrates both the text content and hierarchical structure of examination papers within a single framework by converting the path of the Examination Organization Tree (EOT) into embedding. Furthermore, we specially design three pre-training objectives for PaperLM, namely EOT Node Relationship Prediction (ENRP), Question Type Prediction (QTP) and Paper Contrastive Learning (PCL), aiming to capture features from text and structure effectively. We pre-train our model on a real-world examination paper dataset, and then evaluate the model with three down-stream tasks: paper difficulty estimation, examination paper retrieval, and paper clustering. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Minghui Shan, Shulan Ruan, Zhi Cao 0006, Shiwei Tong, Qi Liu 0003, Yu Su 0002, Shijin Wang 0001
CIKM3
2023 Actor-Multi-Scale Context Bidirectional Higher Order Interactive Relation Network for Spatial-Temporal Action Localization
abstract
The key to video action detection lies in the understanding of interaction between persons and background objects in a video. Current methods usually employ object detectors to extract objects directly or use grid features to represent objects in the environment, which underestimate the great potential of multi-scale context information (e.g., objects and scenes of different sizes). How to exactly represent the multi-scale context and make full utilization of it still remains an unresolved challenge for spatial-temporal action localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Actor-Multi-Scale Context Bidirectional Higher Order Interactive Relation Network (AMCRNet) that extracts multi-scale context through multiple pooling layers with different sizes. Specifically, we develop an Interactive Relation Extraction module to model the higher-order relation between the target person and the context (e.g., other persons and objects). Along this line, we further propose a History Feature Bank and Interaction method to achieve better performance by modeling such relation across continuing video clips. Extensive experimental results on AVA2.2 and UCF101-24 demonstrate the superiority and rationality of our proposed AMCRNet.
Jun Yu 0011, Yingshuai Zheng, Shulan Ruan, Qi Liu 0003, Zhiyuan Cheng 0014
IJCAI3
2023 H-DenseFormer: An Efficient Hybrid Densely Connected Transformer for Multimodal Tumor Segmentation
Jun Shi 0007, Hongyu Kan, Shulan Ruan, Minfan Zhao, Zhaohui Wang 0002, Hong An, Xudong Xue
MICCAI (4)3
2023 Multi-View Attention Learning for Residual Disease Prediction of Ovarian Cancer
abstract
In the treatment of ovarian cancer, precise residual disease prediction is significant for clinical and surgical decision-making. However, traditional methods are either invasive (e.g., laparoscopy) or time-consuming (e.g., manual analysis). Recently, deep learning methods make many efforts in automatic analysis of medical images. Despite the remarkable progress, most of them underestimated the importance of 3D image information of disease, which might brings a limited performance for residual disease prediction, especially in small-scale datasets. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-View Attention Learning (MuVAL) method for residual disease prediction, which focuses on the comprehensive learning of 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images in a multi-view manner. Specifically, we first obtain multi-view of 3D CT images from transverse, coronal and sagittal views. To better represent the image features in a multi-view manner, we further leverage attention mechanism to help find the more relevant slices in each view. Extensive experiments on a dataset of 111 patients show that our method outperforms existing deep-learning methods.
Xiangneng Gao, Shulan Ruan, Jun Shi 0007, Guoqing Hu
SMC2
2022 Causal Narrative Comprehension: A New Perspective for Emotion Cause Extraction
abstract
Emotion Cause Extraction (ECE) aims to reveal the cause clauses behind a given emotion expressed in a text, which has become an emerging topic in broad research communities, such as affective computing and natural language processing. Despite the fact that current methods about the ECE task have made great progress in text semantic understanding from lexicon- and sentence-level, they always ignore the certain causal narratives of emotion text. Significantly, these causal narratives are presented in the form of semantic structure and highly helpful for structure-level emotion cause understanding. Nevertheless, causal narrative is just an abstract narratological concept and its involving semantics is quite different from the common sequential information. Thus, how to properly model and utilize such particular narrative information to boost the ECE performance still remains an unresolved challenge. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Causal Narrative Comprehension Model (CNCM) for emotion cause extraction, which learns and leverages causal narrative information smartly to address the above problem. Specifically, we develop a Narrative-aware Causal Association (NCA) unit, which mines the narrative cue about emotional results and uses the semantic correlation between causes and results to model causal narratives of documents. Besides, we design a Result-aware Emotion Attention (REA) unit to make full use of the known result of causal narrative for multiple understanding about emotional causal associations. Through the ingenious combination and collaborative utilization of these two units, we could better identify the emotion cause in the text with causal narrative comprehension. Extensive experiments on the public English and Chinese benchmark datasets of ECE task have validated the effectiveness of CNCM with significant margin by comparing with the state-of-the-art baselines, which demonstrates the potential of narrative information in long text understanding.
Kun Zhang 0015, Shulan Ruan, Hanqing Tao, Sirui Zhao, Hao Wang 0076, Qi Liu 0003, Enhong Chen
IEEE Trans. Affect. Comput.3
2021 Making the Relation Matters: Relation of Relation Learning Network for Sentence Semantic Matching
abstract
Sentence semantic matching is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing, which requires an agent to determine the semantic relation among input sentences. Recently, deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance in this area, especially BERT. Despite the effectiveness of these models, most of them treat output labels as meaningless one-hot vectors, underestimating the semantic information and guidance of relations that these labels reveal, especially for tasks with a small number of labels. To address this problem, we propose a Relation of Relation Learning Network (R2-Net) for sentence semantic matching. Specifically, we first employ BERT to encode the input sentences from a global perspective. Then a CNN-based encoder is designed to capture keywords and phrase information from a local perspective. To fully leverage labels for better relation information extraction, we introduce a self-supervised relation of relation classification task for guiding R2-Net to consider more about labels. Meanwhile, a triplet loss is employed to distinguish the intra-class and inter-class relations in a finer granularity. Empirical experiments on two sentence semantic matching tasks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model. As a byproduct, we have released the codes to facilitate other researches.
Kun Zhang 0015, Le Wu 0001, Guangyi Lv, Meng Wang 0001, Enhong Chen, Shulan Ruan
AAAI6
2021 DARNet: Dual-Attention Residual Network for Automatic Diagnosis of COVID-19 via CT Images
abstract
The ongoing global pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses a serious threat to public health and the economy. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 is essential to prevent the further spread of the disease and reduce its mortality. Chest Computed tomography (CT) is an effective tool for the early diagnosis of lung diseases including pneumonia. However, detecting COVID-19 from CT is demanding and prone to human errors as some early-stage patients may have negative findings on images. Recently, many deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance in this regard. Despite their effectiveness, most of these methods underestimate the rich spatial information preserved in the 3D structure or suffer from the propagation of errors. To address this problem, we propose a Dual-Attention Residual Network (DARNet) to automatically identify COVID-19 from other common pneumonia (CP) and healthy people using 3D chest CT images. Specifically, we design a dual-attention module consisting of channel-wise attention and depth-wise attention mechanisms. The former is utilized to enhance channel independence, while the latter is developed to recalibrate the depth-level features. Then, we integrate them in a unified manner to extract and refine the features at different levels to further improve the diagnostic performance. We evaluate DARNet on a large public CT dataset and obtain superior performance. Besides, the ablation study and visualization analysis prove the effectiveness and interpretability of the proposed method.
Jun Shi 0007, Huite Yi, Shulan Ruan, Zhaohui Wang 0002, Hong An
BIBM3
2021 DAE-GAN: Dynamic Aspect-aware GAN for Text-to-Image Synthesis
abstract
Text-to-image synthesis refers to generating an image from a given text description, the key goal of which lies in photo realism and semantic consistency. Previous methods usually generate an initial image with sentence embedding and then refine it with fine-grained word embedding. Despite the significant progress, the ‘aspect’ information (e.g., red eyes) contained in the text, referring to several words rather than a word that depicts ‘a particular part or feature of something’, is often ignored, which is highly helpful for synthesizing image details. How to make better utilization of aspect information in text-to-image synthesis still remains an unresolved challenge. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Dynamic Aspect-awarE GAN (DAE-GAN) that represents text information comprehensively from multiple granularities, including sentence-level, word-level, and aspect-level. Moreover, inspired by human learning behaviors, we develop a novel Aspect-aware Dynamic Re-drawer (ADR) for image refinement, in which an Attended Global Refinement (AGR) module and an Aspect-aware Local Refinement (ALR) module are alternately employed. AGR utilizes word-level embedding to globally enhance the previously generated image, while ALR dynamically employs aspect-level embedding to refine image details from a local perspective. Finally, a corresponding matching loss function is designed to ensure the text-image semantic consistency at different levels. Extensive experiments on two well-studied and publicly available datasets (i.e., CUB-200 and COCO) demonstrate the superiority and rationality of our method.
Shulan Ruan, Yong Zhang 0034, Kun Zhang 0015, Yanbo Fan, Fan Tang, Qi Liu 0003, Enhong Chen
ICCV1
2020 Context-Aware Generation-Based Net For Multi-Label Visual Emotion Recognition
abstract
Visual Emotion Recognition has attracted more and more research attention in recent years. Existing approaches mainly depend on facial expression or analyze the whole image between positive and negative. Actually, people can recognize multiple emotions from one image based on global and 10-cal information. In this paper, we propose a Context-Aware Generation-Based Net (CAGBN), a novel architecture that makes full use of global and local information of the image by considering both the whole image and details of the target person. Inspired by psychological studies that when viewing a person in his situation, we tend to give judgments gradually rather than assign all labels at the same time, CAGBN transforms the multi-label classification problem into a sequence generation task for better recognition. Extensive experimental results on the emotion recognition dataset demonstrate the superiority and rationality of CAGBN.
Shulan Ruan, Kun Zhang 0015, Yijun Wang 0002, Hanqing Tao, Weidong He, Guangyi Lv, Enhong Chen
ICME1