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Feixiang Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Feixiang Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

P2E-VQ: ECG-linked representation augmentation for PPG via discrete patch retrieval

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is widely used in consumer wearables because of its low cost and ease of acquisition. However, unlike electrocardiography (ECG), PPG measures peripheral pulse dynamics rather than cardiac electrical activity, limiting its ability to predict cardiac conditions that rely on ECG-specific morphological cues. Existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by reconstructing ECG signals from PPG signals. However, this inverse mapping is inherently ill-posed, and faithful waveform reconstruction does not necessarily translate into improved downstream performance. To address this challenge, we propose P2E-VQ, a retrieval-augmented framework that replaces ECG waveform reconstruction with ECG-linked representation retrieval. Specifically, P2E-VQ converts PPG patches into discrete tokens and retrieves ECG-linked information from a memory bank constructed exclusively from the training data. This process augments PPG representations while requiring only PPG signals during inference. Extensive experiments on five public datasets covering six downstream tasks, including clinical endpoint prediction and affective state recognition, demonstrate that P2E-VQ consistently outperforms pretrained baselines under a unified frozen-feature linear-probing protocol.

cs.LG

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

cs.CV

Disentangled Fine-Grained Prototype Learning for Incomplete Image-Tabular Classification

The missing-modality problem poses a significant challenge in image-tabular multimodal learning across a wide range of multimedia applications, including product understanding, recommendation systems, and medical diagnosis. This challenge is particularly pronounced when the two modalities are highly heterogeneous, as images and tabular attributes differ substantially in their semantic granularity and data distributions. Existing methods learn modality-invariant representations through disentanglement and alignment over global token-averaged features, capturing only coarse cross-modal consistency and overlooking fine-grained semantic and distributional misalignment, which hampers the exploitation of complementary cues under missing modalities. To address this, we propose DFPL, a novel framework for fine-grained prototype learning. Specifically, Shared-Specific Prototype Modeling (SSPM) extracts compact and diverse shared and modality-specific prototypes, and further performs prototype-level disentanglement to suppress redundant intra-modality correlations. Additionally, we propose a Prototype-guided Fine-grained Alignment (PFA) module that jointly enforces prototype-level distribution matching and prototype-to-class semantic alignment within a unified prototype space, thereby preserving both fine-grained distributional and semantic consistency across modalities. We further introduce a Class-aware Multi-scale Aggregation (CMA) module to adaptively aggregate shared semantics and modality-specific characteristics from global and prototype levels for robust predictions. Extensive experiments on three diverse image-tabular benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the previous approaches under various missing-modality settings. Code will be made publicly available.

cs.CV

Interpreting V1 Population Activity via Image-Neural Latent Representation Alignment

Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying visual computation has long been a central challenge in neuroscience. Recent alignment based approaches have improved the accuracy of decoding visual stimuli from brain activity, yet they provide limited insight into the neural computations that give rise to these improvements. To address this gap, we propose Dual-Tower Image-Neural Alignment (DINA), an interpretable contrastive framework for analyzing population level visual computations in primary visual cortex (V1). DINA jointly trains a biologically motivated dual-tower architecture that aligns visual stimuli and corresponding V1 population responses in a shared latent space at the level of intermediate feature maps, enabling both accurate decoding and direct access to interpretable feature maps. Evaluated on large-scale two-photon calcium imaging data from mouse V1, DINA achieves accurate neural-based decoding while revealing that decoding performance is primarily supported by coarse, low-level visual structure, rather than semantic category information or fine-grained details. Further analysis reveals that alignable feature maps emerge from multiple spatially distributed image regions, capturing both shape and texture cues, and are predominantly reconstructed by sparse subsets of strongly responsive neurons and their functional interactions. Together, these results confirm that, beyond enabling accurate decoding, DINA provides a principled framework for probing the computational mechanisms underlying visual processing in V1.

cs.NE

Leveraging Persistence Image to Enhance Robustness and Performance in Curvilinear Structure Segmentation

Segmenting curvilinear structures in medical images is essential for analyzing morphological patterns in clinical applications. Integrating topological properties, such as connectivity, improves segmentation accuracy and consistency. However, extracting and embedding such properties - especially from Persistence Diagrams (PD) - is challenging due to their non-differentiability and computational cost. Existing approaches mostly encode topology through handcrafted loss functions, which generalize poorly across tasks. In this paper, we propose PIs-Regressor, a simple yet effective module that learns persistence image (PI) - finite, differentiable representations of topological features - directly from data. Together with Topology SegNet, which fuses these features in both downsampling and upsampling stages, our framework integrates topology into the network architecture itself rather than auxiliary losses. Unlike existing methods that depend heavily on handcrafted loss functions, our approach directly incorporates topological information into the network structure, leading to more robust segmentation. Our design is flexible and can be seamlessly combined with other topology-based methods to further enhance segmentation performance. Experimental results show that integrating topological features enhances model robustness, effectively handling challenges like overexposure and blurring in medical imaging. Our approach on three curvilinear benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both pixel-level accuracy and topological fidelity.

cs.CV

Action-Dynamics Modeling and Cross-Temporal Interaction for Online Action Understanding

Action understanding, encompassing action detection and anticipation, plays a crucial role in numerous practical applications. However, untrimmed videos are often characterized by substantial redundant information and noise. Moreover, in modeling action understanding, the influence of the agent's intention on the action is often overlooked. Motivated by these issues, we propose a novel framework called the State-Specific Model (SSM), designed to unify and enhance both action detection and anticipation tasks. In the proposed framework, the Critical State-Based Memory Compression module compresses frame sequences into critical states, reducing information redundancy. The Action Pattern Learning module constructs a state-transition graph with multi-dimensional edges to model action dynamics in complex scenarios, on the basis of which potential future cues can be generated to represent intention. Furthermore, our Cross-Temporal Interaction module models the mutual influence between intentions and past as well as current information through cross-temporal interactions, thereby refining present and future features and ultimately realizing simultaneous action detection and anticipation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets -- including EPIC-Kitchens-100, THUMOS'14, TVSeries, and the introduced Parkinson's Disease Mouse Behaviour (PDMB) dataset -- demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed framework compared to other state-of-the-art approaches. These results highlight the importance of action dynamics learning and cross-temporal interactions, laying a foundation for future action understanding research.

cs.CV

RetiBridge: Bridging Quantitative Retinal Biomarkers and Qualitative Diagnosis with a Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Large Language Model

Retinal biomarkers captured by color fundus photography and optical coherence tomography provide clinically valuable evidence for both ocular and systemic diseases. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promise for retinal image interpretation, yet existing ophthalmic models rarely quantify these clinically relevant biomarkers or explicitly translate their measurements into qualitative, evidence-grounded diagnostic conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce RetiBridge, a knowledge-guided multimodal large language model that jointly analyzes color fundus photography (CFP), optical coherence tomography (OCT), and text, explicitly bridging quantitative retinal biomarkers to qualitative clinical sub-inferences and coherent diagnostic conclusions. RetiBridge combines knowledge-guided instruction generation, OCT-biomarker alignment, and supervised multimodal instruction tuning to learn a biomarker-grounded quantitative-to-qualitative diagnostic pathway. Using 15,611 paired CFP-OCT samples from UK Biobank with 31 OCT and 6 CFP biomarkers, we construct the Grounded Ophthalmic Understanding benchmark to evaluate diagnostic classification, report generation quality, and fine-grained clinical quality. Despite using only LoRA-based fine-tuning of a 7B-parameter Qwen2 backbone, RetiBridge outperforms all evaluated open-source 7B and 32B baselines, achieving the highest quantitative accuracy, evidence grounding, coverage completeness, and BERTScore, while surpassing OpenAI o3 on these key biomarker-grounded metrics. Our code and data are released in the RetiBridge repository.

cs.AI

GLCP: Global-to-Local Connectivity Preservation for Tubular Structure Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of tubular structures, such as vascular networks, plays a critical role in various medical domains. A remaining significant challenge in this task is structural fragmentation, which can adversely impact downstream applications. Existing methods primarily focus on designing various loss functions to constrain global topological structures. However, they often overlook local discontinuity regions, leading to suboptimal segmentation results. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Global-to-Local Connectivity Preservation (GLCP) framework that can simultaneously perceive global and local structural characteristics of tubular networks. Specifically, we propose an Interactive Multi-head Segmentation (IMS) module to jointly learn global segmentation, skeleton maps, and local discontinuity maps, respectively. This enables our model to explicitly target local discontinuity regions while maintaining global topological integrity. In addition, we design a lightweight Dual-Attention-based Refinement (DAR) module to further improve segmentation quality by refining the resulting segmentation maps. Extensive experiments on both 2D and 3D datasets demonstrate that our GLCP achieves superior accuracy and continuity in tubular structure segmentation compared to several state-of-the-art approaches. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/FeixiangZhou/GLCP.

cs.CV

Aligning Neuronal Coding of Dynamic Visual Scenes with Foundation Vision Models

Our brains represent the ever-changing environment with neurons in a highly dynamic fashion. The temporal features of visual pixels in dynamic natural scenes are entrapped in the neuronal responses of the retina. It is crucial to establish the intrinsic temporal relationship between visual pixels and neuronal responses. Recent foundation vision models have paved an advanced way of understanding image pixels. Yet, neuronal coding in the brain largely lacks a deep understanding of its alignment with pixels. Most previous studies employ static images or artificial videos derived from static images for emulating more real and complicated stimuli. Despite these simple scenarios effectively help to separate key factors influencing visual coding, complex temporal relationships receive no consideration. To decompose the temporal features of visual coding in natural scenes, here we propose Vi-ST, a spatiotemporal convolutional neural network fed with a self-supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) prior, aimed at unraveling the temporal-based encoding patterns of retinal neuronal populations. The model demonstrates robust predictive performance in generalization tests. Furthermore, through detailed ablation experiments, we demonstrate the significance of each temporal module. Furthermore, we introduce a visual coding evaluation metric designed to integrate temporal considerations and compare the impact of different numbers of neuronal populations on complementary coding. In conclusion, our proposed Vi-ST demonstrates a novel modeling framework for neuronal coding of dynamic visual scenes in the brain, effectively aligning our brain representation of video with neuronal activity. The code is available at https://github.com/wurining/Vi-ST.

cs.CV

Towards Adaptive Pseudo-label Learning for Semi-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Alleviating noisy pseudo labels remains a key challenge in Semi-Supervised Temporal Action Localization (SS-TAL). Existing methods often filter pseudo labels based on strict conditions, but they typically assess classification and localization quality separately, leading to suboptimal pseudo-label ranking and selection. In particular, there might be inaccurate pseudo labels within selected positives, alongside reliable counterparts erroneously assigned to negatives. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Adaptive Pseudo-label Learning (APL) framework to facilitate better pseudo-label selection. Specifically, to improve the ranking quality, Adaptive Label Quality Assessment (ALQA) is proposed to jointly learn classification confidence and localization reliability, followed by dynamically selecting pseudo labels based on the joint score. Additionally, we propose an Instance-level Consistency Discriminator (ICD) for eliminating ambiguous positives and mining potential positives simultaneously based on inter-instance intrinsic consistency, thereby leading to a more precise selection. We further introduce a general unsupervised Action-aware Contrastive Pre-training (ACP) to enhance the discrimination both within actions and between actions and backgrounds, which benefits SS-TAL. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.3 demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under various semi-supervised settings.

cs.CV

SMC-NCA: Semantic-guided Multi-level Contrast for Semi-supervised Temporal Action Segmentation

Semi-supervised temporal action segmentation (SS-TA) aims to perform frame-wise classification in long untrimmed videos, where only a fraction of videos in the training set have labels. Recent studies have shown the potential of contrastive learning in unsupervised representation learning using unlabelled data. However, learning the representation of each frame by unsupervised contrastive learning for action segmentation remains an open and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic-guided Multi-level Contrast scheme with a Neighbourhood-Consistency-Aware unit (SMC-NCA) to extract strong frame-wise representations for SS-TAS. Specifically, for representation learning, SMC is first used to explore intra- and inter-information variations in a unified and contrastive way, based on action-specific semantic information and temporal information highlighting relations between actions. Then, the NCA module, which is responsible for enforcing spatial consistency between neighbourhoods centered at different frames to alleviate over-segmentation issues, works alongside SMC for semi-supervised learning (SSL). Our SMC outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks, offering improvements of up to 17.8% and 12.6% in terms of Edit distance and accuracy, respectively. Additionally, the NCA unit results in significantly better segmentation performance in the presence of only 5% labelled videos. We also demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of the proposed method on our Parkinson Disease's Mouse Behaviour (PDMB) dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/FeixiangZhou/SMC-NCA.

cs.CV

DGNet: Distribution Guided Efficient Learning for Oil Spill Image Segmentation

Successful implementation of oil spill segmentation in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is vital for marine environmental protection. In this paper, we develop an effective segmentation framework named DGNet, which performs oil spill segmentation by incorporating the intrinsic distribution of backscatter values in SAR images. Specifically, our proposed segmentation network is constructed with two deep neural modules running in an interactive manner, where one is the inference module to achieve latent feature variable inference from SAR images, and the other is the generative module to produce oil spill segmentation maps by drawing the latent feature variables as inputs. Thus, to yield accurate segmentation, we take into account the intrinsic distribution of backscatter values in SAR images and embed it in our segmentation model. The intrinsic distribution originates from SAR imagery, describing the physical characteristics of oil spills. In the training process, the formulated intrinsic distribution guides efficient learning of optimal latent feature variable inference for oil spill segmentation. The efficient learning enables the training of our proposed DGNet with a small amount of image data. This is economically beneficial to oil spill segmentation where the availability of oil spill SAR image data is limited in practice. Additionally, benefiting from optimal latent feature variable inference, our proposed DGNet performs accurate oil spill segmentation. We evaluate the segmentation performance of our proposed DGNet with different metrics, and experimental evaluations demonstrate its effective segmentations.

cs.CV

Cross-Skeleton Interaction Graph Aggregation Network for Representation Learning of Mouse Social Behaviour

Automated social behaviour analysis of mice has become an increasingly popular research area in behavioural neuroscience. Recently, pose information (i.e., locations of keypoints or skeleton) has been used to interpret social behaviours of mice. Nevertheless, effective encoding and decoding of social interaction information underlying the keypoints of mice has been rarely investigated in the existing methods. In particular, it is challenging to model complex social interactions between mice due to highly deformable body shapes and ambiguous movement patterns. To deal with the interaction modelling problem, we here propose a Cross-Skeleton Interaction Graph Aggregation Network (CS-IGANet) to learn abundant dynamics of freely interacting mice, where a Cross-Skeleton Node-level Interaction module (CS-NLI) is used to model multi-level interactions (i.e., intra-, inter- and cross-skeleton interactions). Furthermore, we design a novel Interaction-Aware Transformer (IAT) to dynamically learn the graph-level representation of social behaviours and update the node-level representation, guided by our proposed interaction-aware self-attention mechanism. Finally, to enhance the representation ability of our model, an auxiliary self-supervised learning task is proposed for measuring the similarity between cross-skeleton nodes. Experimental results on the standard CRMI13-Skeleton and our PDMB-Skeleton datasets show that our proposed model outperforms several other state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV

SWIPENET: Object detection in noisy underwater images

In recent years, deep learning based object detection methods have achieved promising performance in controlled environments. However, these methods lack sufficient capabilities to handle underwater object detection due to these challenges: (1) images in the underwater datasets and real applications are blurry whilst accompanying severe noise that confuses the detectors and (2) objects in real applications are usually small. In this paper, we propose a novel Sample-WeIghted hyPEr Network (SWIPENET), and a robust training paradigm named Curriculum Multi-Class Adaboost (CMA), to address these two problems at the same time. Firstly, the backbone of SWIPENET produces multiple high resolution and semantic-rich Hyper Feature Maps, which significantly improve small object detection. Secondly, a novel sample-weighted detection loss function is designed for SWIPENET, which focuses on learning high weight samples and ignore learning low weight samples. Moreover, inspired by the human education process that drives the learning from easy to hard concepts, we here propose the CMA training paradigm that first trains a clean detector which is free from the influence of noisy data. Then, based on the clean detector, multiple detectors focusing on learning diverse noisy data are trained and incorporated into a unified deep ensemble of strong noise immunity. Experiments on two underwater robot picking contest datasets (URPC2017 and URPC2018) show that the proposed SWIPENET+CMA framework achieves better accuracy in object detection against several state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV

Cost-sensitive Boosting Pruning Trees for depression detection on Twitter

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders, and a large number of depressed people commit suicide each year. Potential depression sufferers usually do not consult psychological doctors because they feel ashamed or are unaware of any depression, which may result in severe delay of diagnosis and treatment. In the meantime, evidence shows that social media data provides valuable clues about physical and mental health conditions. In this paper, we argue that it is feasible to identify depression at an early stage by mining online social behaviours. Our approach, which is innovative to the practice of depression detection, does not rely on the extraction of numerous or complicated features to achieve accurate depression detection. Instead, we propose a novel classifier, namely, Cost-sensitive Boosting Pruning Trees (CBPT), which demonstrates a strong classification ability on two publicly accessible Twitter depression detection datasets. To comprehensively evaluate the classification capability of the CBPT, we use additional three datasets from the UCI machine learning repository and the CBPT obtains appealing classification results against several state of the arts boosting algorithms. Finally, we comprehensively explore the influence factors of model prediction, and the results manifest that our proposed framework is promising for identifying Twitter users with depression.

cs.LG

Deep Learning Based Brain Tumor Segmentation: A Survey

Brain tumor segmentation is one of the most challenging problems in medical image analysis. The goal of brain tumor segmentation is to generate accurate delineation of brain tumor regions. In recent years, deep learning methods have shown promising performance in solving various computer vision problems, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. A number of deep learning based methods have been applied to brain tumor segmentation and achieved promising results. Considering the remarkable breakthroughs made by state-of-the-art technologies, we use this survey to provide a comprehensive study of recently developed deep learning based brain tumor segmentation techniques. More than 100 scientific papers are selected and discussed in this survey, extensively covering technical aspects such as network architecture design, segmentation under imbalanced conditions, and multi-modality processes. We also provide insightful discussions for future development directions.

eess.IV

Structured Context Enhancement Network for Mouse Pose Estimation

Automated analysis of mouse behaviours is crucial for many applications in neuroscience. However, quantifying mouse behaviours from videos or images remains a challenging problem, where pose estimation plays an important role in describing mouse behaviours. Although deep learning based methods have made promising advances in human pose estimation, they cannot be directly applied to pose estimation of mice due to different physiological natures. Particularly, since mouse body is highly deformable, it is a challenge to accurately locate different keypoints on the mouse body. In this paper, we propose a novel Hourglass network based model, namely Graphical Model based Structured Context Enhancement Network (GM-SCENet) where two effective modules, i.e., Structured Context Mixer (SCM) and Cascaded Multi-Level Supervision (CMLS) are subsequently implemented. SCM can adaptively learn and enhance the proposed structured context information of each mouse part by a novel graphical model that takes into account the motion difference between body parts. Then, the CMLS module is designed to jointly train the proposed SCM and the Hourglass network by generating multi-level information, increasing the robustness of the whole network.Using the multi-level prediction information from SCM and CMLS, we develop an inference method to ensure the accuracy of the localisation results. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach against several baselines...

cs.CV

Muti-view Mouse Social Behaviour Recognition with Deep Graphical Model

Home-cage social behaviour analysis of mice is an invaluable tool to assess therapeutic efficacy of neurodegenerative diseases. Despite tremendous efforts made within the research community, single-camera video recordings are mainly used for such analysis. Because of the potential to create rich descriptions of mouse social behaviors, the use of multi-view video recordings for rodent observations is increasingly receiving much attention. However, identifying social behaviours from various views is still challenging due to the lack of correspondence across data sources. To address this problem, we here propose a novel multiview latent-attention and dynamic discriminative model that jointly learns view-specific and view-shared sub-structures, where the former captures unique dynamics of each view whilst the latter encodes the interaction between the views. Furthermore, a novel multi-view latent-attention variational autoencoder model is introduced in learning the acquired features, enabling us to learn discriminative features in each view. Experimental results on the standard CRMI13 and our multi-view Parkinson's Disease Mouse Behaviour (PDMB) datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the other state of the arts technologies and effectively deals with the imbalanced data problem.

cs.CV