Graph Neural Networks in EEG-based Emotion Recognition: A Survey

Compared to other modalities, EEG-based emotion recognition can intuitively respond to the emotional patterns in the human brain and, therefore, has become one of the most concerning tasks in the brain-computer interfaces field. Since dependencies within brain regions are closely related to emotion, a significant trend is to develop Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for EEG-based emotion recognition. However, brain region dependencies in emotional EEG have physiological bases that distinguish GNNs in this field from those in other time series fields. Besides, there is neither a comprehensive review nor guidance for constructing GNNs in EEG-based emotion recognition. In the survey, our categorization reveals the commonalities and differences of existing approaches under a unified framework of graph construction. We analyze and categorize methods from three stages in the framework to provide clear guidance on constructing GNNs in EEG-based emotion recognition. In addition, we discuss several open challenges and future directions, such as Temporal full-connected graph and Graph condensation.

Hi-SAM: Marrying Segment Anything Model for Hierarchical Text Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a profound vision foundation model pre-trained on a large-scale dataset, breaks the boundaries of general segmentation and sparks various downstream applications. This paper introduces Hi-SAM, a unified model leveraging SAM for hierarchical text segmentation. Hi-SAM excels in text segmentation across four hierarchies, including stroke, word, text-line, and paragraph, while realizing layout analysis as well. Specifically, we first turn SAM into a high-quality text stroke segmentation (TSS) model through a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach. We use this TSS model to iteratively generate the text stroke labels in a semi-automatical manner, unifying labels across the four text hierarchies in the HierText dataset. Subsequently, with these complete labels, we launch the end-to-end trainable Hi-SAM based on the TSS architecture with a customized hierarchical mask decoder. During inference, Hi-SAM offers both automatic mask generation (AMG) mode and promptable segmentation mode. In terms of the AMG mode, Hi-SAM segments text stroke foreground masks initially, then samples foreground points for hierarchical text mask generation and achieves layout analysis in passing. As for the promptable mode, Hi-SAM provides word, text-line, and paragraph masks with a single point click. Experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance of our TSS model: 84.86% fgIOU on Total-Text and 88.96% fgIOU on TextSeg for text stroke segmentation. Moreover, compared to the previous specialist for joint hierarchical detection and layout analysis on HierText, Hi-SAM achieves significant improvements: 4.73% PQ and 5.39% F1 on the text-line level, 5.49% PQ and 7.39% F1 on the paragraph level layout analysis, requiring 20x fewer training epochs. The code is available at https://github.com/ymy-k/Hi-SAM.

Bidirectional Trained Tree-Structured Decoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize bidirectional context information during the inference stage. Furthermore, current bidirectional training methods are primarily designed for string decoders and cannot adequately generalize to tree decoders, which offer superior generalization capabilities and structural analysis capacity. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure. Our method extends the bidirectional training strategy to the tree decoder, allowing for more effective training by leveraging bidirectional information. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the visual and linguistic perception of the HMER model separately and introduce the Shared Language Modeling (SLM) mechanism. Through the SLM, we enhance the model's robustness and generalization when dealing with visual ambiguity, particularly in scenarios with abundant training data. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating its ability to achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CROHME 2014, 2016, and 2019 datasets, as well as the HME100K dataset. The code used in our experiments will be publicly available.

scBeacon: single-cell biomarker extraction via identifying paired cell clusters across biological conditions with contrastive siamese networks

Despite the breakthroughs in biomarker discovery facilitated by differential gene analysis, challenges remain, particularly at the single-cell level. Traditional methodologies heavily rely on user-supplied cell annotations, focusing on individually expressed data, often neglecting the critical interactions between biological conditions, such as healthy versus diseased states. In response, here we introduce scBeacon, an innovative framework built upon a deep contrastive siamese network. scBeacon pioneers an unsupervised approach, adeptly identifying matched cell populations across varied conditions, enabling a refined differential gene analysis. By utilizing a VQ-VAE framework, a contrastive siamese network, and a greedy iterative strategy, scBeacon effectively pinpoints differential genes that hold potential as key biomarkers. Comprehensive evaluations on a diverse array of datasets validate scBeacon's superiority over existing single-cell differential gene analysis tools. Its precision and adaptability underscore its significant role in enhancing diagnostic accuracy in biomarker discovery. With the emphasis on the importance of biomarkers in diagnosis, scBeacon is positioned to be a pivotal asset in the evolution of personalized medicine and targeted treatments.

Multi-stream Cell Segmentation with Low-level Cues for Multi-modality Images

Cell segmentation for multi-modal microscopy images remains a challenge due to the complex textures, patterns, and cell shapes in these images. To tackle the problem, we first develop an automatic cell classification pipeline to label the microscopy images based on their low-level image characteristics, and then train a classification model based on the category labels. Afterward, we train a separate segmentation model for each category using the images in the corresponding category. Besides, we further deploy two types of segmentation models to segment cells with roundish and irregular shapes respectively. Moreover, an efficient and powerful backbone model is utilized to enhance the efficiency of our segmentation model. Evaluated on the Tuning Set of NeurIPS 2022 Cell Segmentation Challenge, our method achieves an F1-score of 0.8795 and the running time for all cases is within the time tolerance.

EENED: End-to-End Neural Epilepsy Detection based on Convolutional Transformer

Recently Transformer and Convolution neural network (CNN) based models have shown promising results in EEG signal processing. Transformer models can capture the global dependencies in EEG signals through a self-attention mechanism, while CNN models can capture local features such as sawtooth waves. In this work, we propose an end-to-end neural epilepsy detection model, EENED, that combines CNN and Transformer. Specifically, by introducing the convolution module into the Transformer encoder, EENED can learn the time-dependent relationship of the patient's EEG signal features and notice local EEG abnormal mutations closely related to epilepsy, such as the appearance of spikes and the sprinkling of sharp and slow waves. Our proposed framework combines the ability of Transformer and CNN to capture different scale features of EEG signals and holds promise for improving the accuracy and reliability of epilepsy detection. Our source code will be released soon on GitHub.

EEG-based Sleep Staging with Hybrid Attention

Sleep staging is critical for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. However, capturing both the spatial and temporal relationships within electroencephalogram (EEG) signals during different sleep stages remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called the Hybrid Attention EEG Sleep Staging (HASS) Framework. Specifically, we propose a well-designed spatio-temporal attention mechanism to adaptively assign weights to inter-channels and intra-channel EEG segments based on the spatio-temporal relationship of the brain during different sleep stages. Experiment results on the MASS and ISRUC datasets demonstrate that HASS can significantly improve typical sleep staging networks. Our proposed framework alleviates the difficulties of capturing the spatial-temporal relationship of EEG signals during sleep staging and holds promise for improving the accuracy and reliability of sleep assessment in both clinical and research settings.

An EEG Channel Selection Framework for Driver Drowsiness Detection via Interpretability Guidance

Drowsy driving has a crucial influence on driving safety, creating an urgent demand for driver drowsiness detection. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal can accurately reflect the mental fatigue state and thus has been widely studied in drowsiness monitoring. However, the raw EEG data is inherently noisy and redundant, which is neglected by existing works that just use single-channel EEG data or full-head channel EEG data for model training, resulting in limited performance of driver drowsiness detection. In this paper, we are the first to propose an Interpretability-guided Channel Selection (ICS) framework for the driver drowsiness detection task. Specifically, we design a two-stage training strategy to progressively select the key contributing channels with the guidance of interpretability. We first train a teacher network in the first stage using full-head channel EEG data. Then we apply the class activation mapping (CAM) to the trained teacher model to highlight the high-contributing EEG channels and further propose a channel voting scheme to select the top N contributing EEG channels. Finally, we train a student network with the selected channels of EEG data in the second stage for driver drowsiness detection. Experiments are designed on a public dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method is highly applicable and can significantly improve the performance of cross-subject driver drowsiness detection.

Interpretable and Robust AI in EEG Systems: A Survey

The close coupling of artificial intelligence (AI) and electroencephalography (EEG) has substantially advanced human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies in the AI era. Different from traditional EEG systems, the interpretability and robustness of AI-based EEG systems are becoming particularly crucial. The interpretability clarifies the inner working mechanisms of AI models and thus can gain the trust of users. The robustness reflects the AI's reliability against attacks and perturbations, which is essential for sensitive and fragile EEG signals. Thus the interpretability and robustness of AI in EEG systems have attracted increasing attention, and their research has achieved great progress recently. However, there is still no survey covering recent advances in this field. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey and summarize the interpretable and robust AI techniques for EEG systems. Specifically, we first propose a taxonomy of interpretability by characterizing it into three types: backpropagation, perturbation, and inherently interpretable methods. Then we classify the robustness mechanisms into four classes: noise and artifacts, human variability, data acquisition instability, and adversarial attacks. Finally, we identify several critical and unresolved challenges for interpretable and robust AI in EEG systems and further discuss their future directions.

Vision-Language Adaptive Mutual Decoder for OOV-STR

Recent works have shown huge success of deep learning models for common in vocabulary (IV) scene text recognition. However, in real-world scenarios, out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words are of great importance and SOTA recognition models usually perform poorly on OOV settings. Inspired by the intuition that the learned language prior have limited OOV preformence, we design a framework named Vision Language Adaptive Mutual Decoder (VLAMD) to tackle OOV problems partly. VLAMD consists of three main conponents. Firstly, we build an attention based LSTM decoder with two adaptively merged visual-only modules, yields a vision-language balanced main branch. Secondly, we add an auxiliary query based autoregressive transformer decoding head for common visual and language prior representation learning. Finally, we couple these two designs with bidirectional training for more diverse language modeling, and do mutual sequential decoding to get robuster results. Our approach achieved 70.31\% and 59.61\% word accuracy on IV+OOV and OOV settings respectively on Cropped Word Recognition Task of OOV-ST Challenge at ECCV 2022 TiE Workshop, where we got 1st place on both settings.