Sepsis is one of the main causes of death in ICU patients, and accurate and stable early prediction is essential for clinical intervention. Existing methods mostly rely on traditional time series models (e.g., LSTM, Transformer) or clinical scoring criteria (e.g., SOFA, qSOFA), but face two major challenges: 1) spurious correlations in the data affect the robustness of the model; 2) Lack of modeling the underlying causal relationships in the data space. We propose a Serialized Causal Disentanglement Model (SCDM) that decouples latent variables into sepsis-related factors ($u$), other disease-related factors ($v$), and irrelevant confounders ($s$). Based on the MIMIC-IV v2.2 dataset (3,511 positive samples and 17,538 negative samples), SCDM took patient clinical indicators, personal information, and clinical notes as input, and achieved an AUC of 0.765-0.928in the prediction task 48 to 0 hours before the onset of sepsis. The performance is significantly better than the baseline models (e.g., Transformer's 0.662-0.910, MGP-AttTCN's 0.692-0.913). Experiments show that optimizing the time window (5 hours of continuous observation) and variable selection (45 key indicators) can improve the performance of the model. The effectiveness of causal unwinding is verified by the visualization of Grad CAM and t-SNE, key clinical indicators such as platelet count, lactic acid, and respiratory rate are further identified to provide interpretable decision support for doctors. Our study provides a high-precision and interpretable causal disentanglement framework for early prediction of sepsis, which is expected to promote the development of intelligent diagnosis and treatment in the ICU.

The surge in detecting fake news on social networks leads to increased research attention, particularly in the realm of deep learning models based on graph neural networks (GNNs). However, as research progresses, concerns emerge about the vulnerability of these detection models. In this study, we introduce an attack problem that perturbs user-news engagements by injecting bots to shield the targeted fake news from being detected by GNN-based fake news detection models. We propose a black-box attack method named Query-enhanced Surrogate-based Attack under Assortativity Constraint (QSA-AC) to work for this attack problem. QSA-AC combines surrogate-based and query-based approaches to improve attack effectiveness. At the same time, QSA-AC maintains a balance between attack effectiveness and imperceptibility by adjusting the local fluctuations of the assortativity with respect to the news on the social network. In addition, we introduce an evaluation metric, local strength assortativity perturbation rate (LSAPR), to assess the imperceptibility of the attack from the local perspective. Extensive experiments on two fake news datasets demonstrate that the proposed QSA-AC can achieve the optimal attack effectiveness, and control the trade-off between the attack effectiveness and imperceptibility.

This study delves into multi-variable meteorological spatial-temporal prediction, focusing on the simultaneous forecasting of key meteorological parameters such as temperature, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure. The core challenge of this task lies in identifying commonalities across different variables while capturing their unique features and the interactions among them. To address this, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework tailored for multi-variable meteorological forecasting. Our framework integrates a convolutional variable-specific visual representation module and a variable-interactive spatial-temporal inference module. The former extracts distinct variable information independently for each variable, while the latter employs a tri-level attention mechanism across space, time, and variables to uncover both commonalities and interactions among the variables. An adaptive multi-loss optimization strategy and a local information aggregation module are introduced to balance task optimization complexities and enhance representation stability. Comprehensive experiments across various meteorological prediction tasks confirm the effectiveness of our methods, showcasing superior performance over existing approaches.

Most existing 3D object classification and retrieval algorithms rely on one-off supervised learning on closed 3D object sets and tend to provide rigid convolutional neural networks with little scalability. Such limitations substantially restrict their potential to learn newly emerged 3D object classes continually in the real world. Aiming to go beyond these limitations, we innovatively propose two new and challenging tasks: class-incremental 3D object classification (CI-3DOC) and class-incremental 3D object retrieval (CI-3DOR), the key to which is class-incremental 3D representation learning. It expects the network to update continually to learn new 3D class representations without forgetting the previously learned ones. To this end, we design a novel balanced distillation network(BDNet)that uses a dual supervision mechanism to balance between consolidating old knowledge (stability) and adapting to new 3D object classes (plasticity) carefully. On the one hand, we employ stability-based supervision to retain the stable and discriminative information of old classes that greatly benefit both classification and retrieval tasks. On the other hand, we use plasticity-based supervision to improve the network's generalization for learning new class 3D representations by transferring knowledge from a temporary teacher network to the current model. By properly handling the relationship between the two modules, we achieve a surprising performance improvement. Furthermore, considering there is no available dataset for evaluation, we build two 3D datasets, INOR-1 and INOR-2, to evaluate these two new tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform other state-of-the-art class-incremental learning methods. Even if we store 500-1000 fewer 3D objects than SOTA methods,BDNetstill achieves comparable performance.

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) aims to answer the image-aware question via the external knowledge, which requires an agent to not only understand images but also explicitly retrieve and integrate knowledge facts. Intuitively, to accurately answer the question, we humans can validate the retrieved knowledge based on our memory, and then align the knowledge facts with the image regions to infer answers. However, most existing methods ignore the process of knowledge validation and alignment. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Modal Validation and Domain Interaction Learning method, which consists of two components: 1) Multi-modal validation for knowledge retrieval. We propose the multi-modal validation module (MMV) to evaluate the confidence of each retrieved knowledge fact via images and questions, which preserves knowledge candidates effective for inferring answers. 2) Domain interaction for knowledge integration. We propose the Domain Interaction TRansformer module (DI-TR) to align visual regions with knowledge facts by the interaction learning in the improved transformer. Specifically, the inter-domain and intra-domain masks are injected into each self-attention layer to control the integration scope. The proposed method outperforms several strong baselines on three widely-used knowledge-based datasets: KRVQA, OK-VQA and VQA2.0. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modal knowledge validation and domain interaction learning.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a task that involves predicting an answer to a question depending on the content of an image. However, recent VQA methods have relied more on language priors between the question and answer rather than the image content. To address this issue, many debiasing methods have been proposed to reduce language bias in model reasoning. However, the bias can be divided into two categories: good bias and bad bias. Good bias can benefit to the answer prediction, while the bad bias may associate the models with the unrelated information. Therefore, instead of excluding good and bad bias indiscriminately in existing debiasing methods, we proposed a bias discrimination module to distinguish them. Additionally, bad bias may reduce the model’s reliance on image content during answer reasoning and thus attend little on image features updating. To tackle this, we leverage Markov theory to construct a Markov field with image regions and question words as nodes. This helps with feature updating for both image regions and question words, thereby facilitating more accurate and comprehensive reasoning about both the image content and question. To verify the effectiveness of our network, we evaluate our network on VQA v2 and VQA cp v2 datasets and conduct extensive quantity and quality studies to verify the effectiveness of our proposed network. Experimental resu- lts show that our network achieves significant performance against the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract - Finding tampered regions in images is a common research topic in machine learning and computer vision. Although many image manipulation location algorithms have been proposed, most of them only focus on RGB images with different color spaces, and the frequency information that contains the potential tampering clues is often ignored. Moreover, among the manipulation operations, splicing and copy-move are two frequently used methods, but as their characteristics are quite different, specific methods have been individually designed for detecting the operations of either splicing or copy-move, and it is very difficult to widely apply these methods in practice. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel end-to-end two-stream boundary-aware network (abbreviated as TBNet) is proposed for generic image manipulation localization where the RGB stream, the frequency stream, and the boundary artifact location are explored in a unified framework. Specifically, we first design an adaptive frequency selection module (AFS) to adaptively select the appropriate frequency to mine inconsistent statistics and eliminate the interference of redundant statistics. Then, an adaptive cross-attention fusion module (ACF) is proposed to adaptively fuse the RGB feature and the frequency feature. Finally, the boundary artifact location network (BAL) is designed to locate the boundary artifacts for which the parameters are jointly updated by the outputs of the ACF, and its results are further fed into the decoder. Thus, the parameters of the RGB stream, the frequency stream, and the boundary artifact location network are jointly optimized, and their latent complementary relationships are fully mined. The results of the extensive experiments performed on six public benchmarks of the image manipulation localization task, namely, CASIA1.0, COVER, Carvalho, In-The-Wild, NIST-16, and IMD-2020, demonstrate that the proposed TBNet can substantially outperform state-of-the-art generic image manipulation localization methods in terms of MCC, F1, and AUC while maintaining robustness with respect to various attacks. Compared with DeepLabV3+ on the CASIA1.0, COVER, Carvalho, In-The-Wild, and NIST-16 datasets, the improvements in MCC/F1 reach 11%/11.1%, 8.2%/10.3%, 10.2%/11.6%, 8.9%/6.2%, and 13.3%/16.0%, respectively. Moreover, when IMD2020 is utilized, its AUC improvement can achieve 14.7%.

Under the heavy management on the increasing 3D models, the topic of image-based 3D model retrieval which organizes unlabeled 3D models based on abundant knowledge learned from labeled 2D images has drawn attention. However, prior methods are limited in aligning semantically at corresponding categories of two domains due to the lack of label information in the 3D domain. To this end, this paper proposes an improved semantic representation learning by multiple clustering approach, which improves the reliability of pseudo labels for 3D models, so as to achieve class-level semantic alignment. Specifically, this paper first extracts features for 2D images and 3D models. Then it clusters combining the 3D features with the semantic information from multiple clustering on 3D model features to obtain more reliable target pseudo labels. Extensive experiments have shown that the proposed method has achieved the gain of 3.0%-205.0% averagely for popular retrieval metrics on the benchmark of monocular image-based 3D object retrieval (MI3DOR), and 1.3%-69.7% on another advanced benchmark, MI3DOR-2.

View-based 3D model retrieval has become an important task in both computer vision and machine learning domains. Although deep learning methods have achieved excellent performances on view-based 3D model retrieval, the intrinsic correlation and the degree of view discrimination among multiple views in a 3D model have not been effectively exploited. To obtain a more efficient feature descriptor for 3D model retrieval, in this work, we propose the pairwise view weighted graph network (abbreviated PVWGN) for view-based 3D model retrieval where non-local graph layers are embedded into the network architecture to automatically mine the intrinsic relationship among multiple views of a 3D model. Furthermore, the view weighted layer is employed in the PVWGN to adaptively assign the weight to each view according to its aggregation information. In addition, the pairwise discrimination loss function is designed to improve the feature discrimination of the 3D model. Most importantly, these three issues are integrated into a unified framework. Extensive experimental results on the ModelNet40 and ModelNet10 3D model retrieval datasets show that PVWGN can outperform all state-of-the-art methods on the 3D model retrieval task with mAPs of 93.2% and 96.2%, respectively.