Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods often incorporate auxiliary tasks to improve performance. However, existing approaches face limitations due to insufficient integration and a lack of flexible uncertainty estimation, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a multitasks-based Deep Evidential Fusion Network (DEFNet) for BIQA, which performs multitask optimization with the assistance of scene and distortion type classification tasks. To achieve a more robust and reliable representation, we design a novel trustworthy information fusion strategy. It first combines diverse features and patterns across sub-regions to enhance information richness, and then performs local-global information fusion by balancing fine-grained details with coarse-grained context. Moreover, DEFNet exploits advanced uncertainty estimation technique inspired by evidential learning with the help of normal-inverse gamma distribution mixture. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and authentic distortion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Additional evaluation and analysis are carried out to highlight its strong generalization capability and adaptability to previously unseen scenarios.

Chung-ju Huang, Huiqiang Zhao, Yuanpeng He, Lijian Li, Wenpin Jiao, Zhi Jin, Peixuan Chen, Leye Wang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a key role in promoting various multimedia and AI applications. However, with the explosive growth of multi-modal information, traditional knowledge graph completion (KGC) models cannot be directly applied. This has attracted a large number of researchers to study multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC). Since MMKG extends KG to the visual and textual domains, MMKGC faces two main challenges: (1) how to deal with the fine-grained modality information interaction and awareness; (2) how to ensure the dominant role of graph structure in multi-modal knowledge fusion and deal with the noise generated by other modalities during modality fusion. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel MMKGC model named TSAM, which integrates fine-grained modality interaction and dominant graph structure to form a high-performance MMKGC framework. Specifically, to solve the challenges, TSAM proposes the Fine-grained Modality Awareness Fusion method (FgMAF), which uses pre-trained language models better to capture fine-grained semantic information interaction of different modalities and employs an attention mechanism to achieve fine-grained modality awareness and fusion. Additionally, TSAM presents the Structure-aware Contrastive Learning method (SaCL), which utilizes two contrastive learning approaches to align other modalities more closely with the structured modality. Extensive experiments show the proposed TSAM model significantly outperforms existing MMKGC models on widely used multi-modal datasets. The code is available athttps://github.com/2391134843/TSAM.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in code generation, yet they still face challenges when tackling tasks that extend beyond their basic capabilities. Recently, the concept of self-debugging has been proposed as a way to enhance code generation performance by leveraging execution feedback from tests. However, the availability of high-quality tests in real-world scenarios is often limited. In this context, self-debugging with self-generated tests emerges as a promising solution, though its limitations and practical potential have not been fully explored. To address this gap, we investigate the efficacy of self-debugging in code generation tasks. We propose and analyze two distinct paradigms for the self-debugging process: post-execution and in-execution self-debugging. Our findings reveal that post-execution self-debugging struggles with the test bias introduced by self-generated tests, which can lead to misleading feedback. In contrast, in-execution self-debugging enables LLMs to mitigate this bias and leverage intermediate states during program execution. By focusing on runtime information rather than relying solely on potentially flawed self-generated tests, this approach demonstrates significant promise for improving the robustness and accuracy of LLMs in code generation tasks.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) has emerged as a powerful technique for extracting valuable insights from data characterized by multiple perspectives or modalities. Despite significant advancements, existing MVC methods struggle with effectively quantifying the consistency and complementarity among views, and are particularly susceptible to the adverse effects of noisy views, known as the Noisy-View Drawback (NVD). To address these challenges, we propose CE-MVC, a novel framework that integrates an adaptive weighting algorithm with a parameter-decoupled deep model. Leveraging the concept of conditional entropy and normalized mutual information, CE-MVC quantitatively assesses and weights the informative contribution of each view, facilitating the construction of robust unified representations. The parameter-decoupled design enables independent processing of each view, effectively mitigating the influence of noise and enhancing overall clustering performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CE-MVC outperforms existing approaches, offering a more resilient and accurate solution for multi-view clustering tasks.

Medical image segmentation aims to identify anatomical structures at the voxel-level. Segmentation accuracy relies on distinguishing voxel differences. Compared to advancements achieved in studies of the inter-class variance, the intra-class variance receives less attention. Moreover, traditional linear classifiers, limited by a single learnable weight per class, struggle to capture this finer distinction. To address the above challenges, we propose a Multi-Prototype-based Embedding Refinement method for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Specifically, we design a multi-prototype-based classification strategy, rethinking the segmentation from the perspective of structural relationships between voxel embeddings. The intra-class variations are explored by clustering voxels along the distribution of multiple prototypes in each class. Next, we introduce a consistency constraint to alleviate the limitation of linear classifiers. This constraint integrates different classification granularities from a linear classifier and the proposed prototype-based classifier. In the thorough evaluation on two popular benchmarks, our method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Briley-byl123/MPER.

Although current semi-supervised medical segmentation methods can achieve decent performance, they are still affected by the uncertainty in unlabeled data and model predictions, and there is currently a lack of effective strategies that can explore the uncertain aspects of both simultaneously. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose Evidential Prototype Learning (EPL), which utilizes an extended probabilistic framework to effectively fuse voxel-level evidential predictions from different classifiers and achieves prototype fusion utilization of labeled and unlabeled data under a generalized evidential framework, leveraging voxel-level dual uncertainty masking. The uncertainty measure not only enables the model to self-correct predictions but also improves the guided learning process with pseudo-labels and is able to feed back into the construction of hidden features. The method proposed in this paper has been experimented on LA, Pancreas-CT and TBAD datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in three different labeled ratios, which strongly demonstrates the effectiveness of our strategy. The source code will be made publicly available.

In practical scenarios, time series forecasting necessitates not only accuracy but also efficiency. Consequently, the exploration of model architectures remains a perennially trending topic in research. To address these challenges, we propose a novel backbone architecture named Time Evidence Fusion Network (TEFN) from the perspective of information fusion. Specifically, we introduce the Basic Probability Assignment (BPA) Module based on evidence theory to capture the uncertainty of multivariate time series data from both channel and time dimensions. Additionally, we develop a novel multi-source information fusion method to effectively integrate the two distinct dimensions from BPA output, leading to improved forecasting accuracy. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that TEFN achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining significantly lower complexity and reduced training time. Also, our experiments show that TEFN exhibits high robustness, with minimal error fluctuations during hyperparameter selection. Furthermore, due to the fact that BPA is derived from fuzzy theory, TEFN offers a high degree of interpretability. Therefore, the proposed TEFN balances accuracy, efficiency, stability, and interpretability, making it a desirable solution for time series forecasting.

Although existing semi-supervised image segmentation methods have achieved good performance, they cannot effectively utilize multiple sources of voxel-level uncertainty for targeted learning. Therefore, we propose two main improvements. First, we introduce a novel pignistic co-evidential fusion strategy using generalized evidential deep learning , extended by traditional D–S evidence theory, to obtain a more precise uncertainty measure for each voxel in medical samples. This assists the model in learning mixed labeled information and establishing semantic associations between labeled and unlabeled data. Second, we introduce the concept of information volume of mass function (IVUM) to evaluate the constructed evidence, implementing two evidential learning schemes. One optimizes evidential deep learning by combining the information volume of the mass function with original uncertainty measures. The other integrates the learning pattern based on the co-evidential fusion strategy, using IVUM to design a new optimization objective. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our method.

Cross-hospital collaboration has the potential to mitigate disparities in medical resources across different regions. However, strict privacy regulations prohibit the direct sharing of sensitive patient information between hospitals. Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) provides a novel privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm designed to maximizes data utility across multiple hospitals. Nevertheless, traditional VFL methods primarily benefit patients with overlapping data, leaving non-overlapping patients without guaranteed improvements in distributed healthcare prediction services. While some existing knowledge transfer techniques attempt to improve prediction performance for non-overlapping patients, they fail to adequately address scenarios where overlapping and non-overlapping patients originate from different domains, resulting in challenges such as feature and label heterogeneity. To address these issues, we propose UniTrans, a unified vertical federated knowledge transfer framework for edge healthcare collaboration. Our framework consists of three key steps. First, we extract the federated representation of overlapping patients by employing an effective vertical federated representation learning method to model multi-party joint features online. Next, each hospital learns a local knowledge transfer module offline, enabling the domain-adaptive transfer of knowledge from the federated representation of overlapping patients to the enriched representation of local non-overlapping patients. Finally, hospitals utilize these enriched local representations to enhance performance across various downstream medical prediction tasks. Extensive experiments on real-world medical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of UniTrans in both intra-domain and cross-domain knowledge transfer. The code of UniTrans is available athttps://github.com/Chung-ju/Unitrans.

Recently, prototype learning has emerged in semi-supervised medical image segmentation and achieved remarkable performance. However, the scarcity of labeled data limits the expressiveness of prototypes in previous methods, potentially hindering the complete representation of prototypes for class embedding. To overcome this issue, we propose an efficient prototype consistency learning via joint uncertainty quantification and data augmentation (EPCL-JUDA) to enhance the semantic expression of prototypes based on the framework of Mean-Teacher. The concatenation of original and augmented labeled data is fed into student network to generate expressive prototypes. Then, a joint uncertainty quantification method is devised to optimize pseudo-labels and generate reliable prototypes for original and augmented unlabeled data separately. High-quality global prototypes for each class are formed by fusing labeled and unlabeled prototypes, which are utilized to generate prototype-to-features to conduct consistency learning. Notably, a prototype network is proposed to reduce high memory requirements brought by the introduction of augmented data. Extensive experiments on Left Atrium, Pancreas-NIH, Type B Aortic Dissection datasets demonstrate EPCL-JUDA’s superiority over previous state-of-the-art approaches, confirming the effectiveness of our framework. The code will be released soon.

Existing semi-supervised medical segmentation co-learning frameworks have realized that model performance can be diminished by the biases in model recognition caused by low-quality pseudo-labels. Due to the averaging nature of their pseudo-label integration strategy, they fail to explore the reliability of pseudo-labels from different sources. In this paper, we propose a mutual evidential deep learning (MEDL) framework that offers a potentially viable solution for pseudo-label generation in semi-supervised learning from two perspectives. First, we introduce networks with different architectures to generate complementary evidence for unlabeled samples and adopt an improved class-aware evidential fusion to guide the confident synthesis of evidential predictions sourced from diverse architectural networks. Second, utilizing the uncertainty in the fused evidence, we design an asymptotic Fisher information-based evidential learning strategy. This strategy enables the model to initially focus on unlabeled samples with more reliable pseudo-labels, gradually shifting attention to samples with lower-quality pseudo-labels while avoiding over-penalization of mislabeled classes in high data uncertainty samples. Additionally, for labeled data, we continue to adopt an uncertainty-driven asymptotic learning strategy, gradually guiding the model to focus on challenging voxels. Extensive experiments on five mainstream datasets have demonstrated that MEDL achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Weakly supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) is a task of targeting at localizing complete action instances and categorizing them with video-level labels. Action-background ambiguity, primarily caused by background noise resulting from aggregation and intra-action variation, is a significant challenge for existing WS-TAL methods. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid multi-head attention (HMHA) module and generalized uncertainty-based evidential fusion (GUEF) module to address the problem. The proposed HMHA effectively enhances RGB and optical flow features by filtering redundant information and adjusting their feature distribution to better align with the WS-TAL task. Additionally, the proposed GUEF adaptively eliminates the interference of background noise by fusing snippet-level evidences to refine uncertainty measurement and select superior foreground feature information, which enables the model to concentrate on integral action instances to achieve better action localization and classification performance. Experimental results conducted on the THUMOS14 dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available in https://github.com/heyuanpengpku/GUEF/tree/main.

Fuzzy time series forecasting (FTSF) is a typical forecasting method with wide application. Traditional FTSF is regarded as an expert system, which leads to the loss of the ability to recognize undefined features. The mentioned is the main reason for poor forecasting with FTSF. To solve the problem, the proposed model differential fuzzy convolutional neural network (DFCNN) utilizes a convolution neural network to reimplement FTSF with learnable ability. DFCNN is capable of recognizing potential information and improving forecasting accuracy. Thanks to the learnable ability of the neural network, the length of fuzzy rules established in FTSF is expended to an arbitrary length that the expert is not able to handle by the expert system. At the same time, FTSF usually cannot achieve satisfactory performance of nonstationary time series due to the trend of nonstationary time series. The trend of nonstationary time series causes the fuzzy set established by FTSF to be invalid and causes the forecasting to fail. DFCNN utilizes the difference algorithm to weaken the nonstationary time series so that DFCNN can forecast the nonstationary time series with a low error that FTSF cannot forecast in satisfactory performance. After the mass of experiments, DFCNN has an excellent prediction effect, which is ahead of the existing FTSF and common time series forecasting algorithms. Finally, DFCNN provides further ideas for improving FTSF and holds continued research value.

An open issue of the Dempster combination rule is the conflicting management, which is very important in multisource data fusion, such as group decision making and target recognition. To address this issue, an improved method to generate basic probability assignment is presented. Then, a new combination method to assign the conflicting mass function without the normalization is proposed to handle a highly conflicting environment. Compared with other methods, this proposed method is convenient in computing and has better accuracy to predict potential possibilities especially when disposing of extreme status. Some numerical examples and real benchmark data collected in UCI database are illustrated to verify the validity and rationality of the proposed method.