Automated Creation of the Legal Knowledge Graph Addressing Legislation on Violence Against Women: Resource, Methodology and Lessons Learned

Legal decision-making process requires the availability of comprehensive and detailed legislative background knowledge and up-to-date information on legal cases and related sentences/decisions. Legal Knowledge Graphs (KGs) would be a valuable tool to facilitate access to legal information, to be queried and exploited for the purpose, and to enable advanced reasoning and machine learning applications. Indeed, legal KGs may act as knowledge intensive component to be used by pre-dictive machine learning solutions supporting the decision process of the legal expert. Nevertheless, a few KGs can be found in the legal domain. To fill this gap, we developed a legal KG targeting legal cases of violence against women, along with clear adopted methodologies. Specifically, the paper introduces two complementary approaches for automated legal KG construction; a systematic bottom-up approach, customized for the legal domain, and a new solution leveraging Large Language Models. Starting from legal sentences publicly available from the European Court of Justice, the solutions integrate structured data extraction, ontology development, and semantic enrichment to produce KGs tailored for legal cases involving violence against women. After analyzing and comparing the results of the two approaches, the developed KGs are validated via suitable competency questions. The obtained KG may be impactful for multiple purposes: can improve the accessibility to legal information both to humans and machine, can enable complex queries and may constitute an important knowledge component to be possibly exploited by machine learning tools tailored for predictive justice.

How Effectively Can Large Language Models Connect SNP Variants and ECG Phenotypes for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction?

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) prediction remains a tremendous challenge due to its multifactorial etiology and global burden of morbidity and mortality. Despite the growing availability of genomic and electrophysiological data, extracting biologically meaningful insights from such high-dimensional, noisy, and sparsely annotated datasets remains a non-trivial task. Recently, LLMs has been applied effectively to predict structural variations in biological sequences. In this work, we explore the potential of fine-tuned LLMs to predict cardiac diseases and SNPs potentially leading to CVD risk using genetic markers derived from high-throughput genomic profiling. We investigate the effect of genetic patterns associated with cardiac conditions and evaluate how LLMs can learn latent biological relationships from structured and semi-structured genomic data obtained by mapping genetic aspects that are inherited from the family tree. By framing the problem as a Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning task, the models are prompted to generate disease labels and articulate informed clinical deductions across diverse patient profiles and phenotypes. The findings highlight the promise of LLMs in contributing to early detection, risk assessment, and ultimately, the advancement of personalized medicine in cardiac care.

Multi-Modal Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion-Based Feature Denoising

The sequential recommendation system utilizes historical user interactions to predict preferences. Effectively integrating diverse user behavior patterns with rich multimodal information of items to enhance the accuracy of sequential recommendations is an emerging and challenging research direction. This paper focuses on the problem of multi-modal multi-behavior sequential recommendation, aiming to address the following challenges: (1) the lack of effective characterization of modal preferences across different behaviors, as user attention to different item modalities varies depending on the behavior; (2) the difficulty of effectively mitigating implicit noise in user behavior, such as unintended actions like accidental clicks; (3) the inability to handle modality noise in multi-modal representations, which further impacts the accurate modeling of user preferences. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation model (M$^3$BSR). This model first removes noise in multi-modal representations using a Conditional Diffusion Modality Denoising Layer. Subsequently, it utilizes deep behavioral information to guide the denoising of shallow behavioral data, thereby alleviating the impact of noise in implicit feedback through Conditional Diffusion Behavior Denoising. Finally, by introducing a Multi-Expert Interest Extraction Layer, M$^3$BSR explicitly models the common and specific interests across behaviors and modalities to enhance recommendation performance. Experimental results indicate that M$^3$BSR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Community-Aware Social Community Recommendation

Social recommendation, which seeks to leverage social ties among users to alleviate the sparsity issue of user-item interactions, has emerged as a popular technique for elevating personalized services in recommender systems. Despite being effective, existing social recommendation models are mainly devised for recommending regular items such as blogs, images, and products, and largely fail for community recommendations due to overlooking the unique characteristics of communities. Distinctly, communities are constituted by individuals, who present high dynamicity and relate to rich structural patterns in social networks. To our knowledge, limited research has been devoted to comprehensively exploiting this information for recommending communities. To bridge this gap, this paper presents CASO, a novel and effective model specially designed for social community recommendation. Under the hood, CASO harnesses three carefully-crafted encoders for user embedding, wherein two of them extract community-related global and local structures from the social network via social modularity maximization and social closeness aggregation, while the third one captures user preferences using collaborative filtering with observed user-community affiliations. To further eliminate feature redundancy therein, we introduce a mutual exclusion between social and collaborative signals. Finally, CASO includes a community detection loss in the model optimization, thereby producing community-aware embeddings for communities. Our extensive experiments evaluating CASO against nine strong baselines on six real-world social networks demonstrate its consistent and remarkable superiority over the state of the art in terms of community recommendation performance.

MENDR: Manifold Explainable Neural Data Representations

Foundation models for electroencephalography (EEG) signals have recently demonstrated success in learning generalized representations of EEGs, outperforming specialized models in various downstream tasks. However, many of these models lack transparency in their pretraining dynamics and offer limited insight into how well EEG information is preserved within their embeddings. For successful clinical integration, EEG foundation models must ensure transparency in pretraining, downstream fine-tuning, and the interpretability of learned representations. Current approaches primarily operate in the temporal domain, overlooking advancements in digital signal processing that enable the extraction of deterministic and traceable features, such as wavelet-based representations. We propose MENDR (Manifold Explainable Neural Data Representations), a filter bank-based EEG foundation model built on a novel Riemannian Manifold Transformer architecture to resolve these issues. MENDR learns symmetric positive definite matrix embeddings of EEG signals and is pretrained on a large corpus comprising over 4,000 hours of EEG data, decomposed via discrete wavelet packet transforms into multi-resolution coefficients. MENDR significantly enhances interpretability by visualizing symmetric positive definite embeddings as geometric ellipsoids and supports accurate reconstruction of EEG signals from learned embeddings. Evaluations across multiple clinical EEG tasks demonstrate that MENDR achieves near state-of-the-art performance with substantially fewer parameters, underscoring its potential for efficient, interpretable, and clinically applicable EEG analysis.

Semantic Item Graph Enhancement for Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention for their improved performance by leveraging items' multimodal information. Prior methods often build modality-specific item-item semantic graphs from raw modality features and use them as supplementary structures alongside the user-item interaction graph to enhance user preference learning. However, these semantic graphs suffer from semantic deficiencies, including (1) insufficient modeling of collaborative signals among items and (2) structural distortions introduced by noise in raw modality features, ultimately compromising performance. To address these issues, we first extract collaborative signals from the interaction graph and infuse them into each modality-specific item semantic graph to enhance semantic modeling. Then, we design a modulus-based personalized embedding perturbation mechanism that injects perturbations with modulus-guided personalized intensity into embeddings to generate contrastive views. This enables the model to learn noise-robust representations through contrastive learning, thereby reducing the effect of structural noise in semantic graphs. Besides, we propose a dual representation alignment mechanism that first aligns multiple semantic representations via a designed Anchor-based InfoNCE loss using behavior representations as anchors, and then aligns behavior representations with the fused semantics by standard InfoNCE, to ensure representation consistency. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Textual and Visual Guided Task Adaptation for Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-Shot Segmentation(FSS) aims to efficient segmentation of new objects with few labeled samples. However, its performance significantly degrades when domain discrepancies exist between training and deployment. Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation(CD-FSS) is proposed to mitigate such performance degradation. Current CD-FSS methods primarily sought to develop segmentation models on a source domain capable of cross-domain generalization. However, driven by escalating concerns over data privacy and the imperative to minimize data transfer and training expenses, the development of source-free CD-FSS approaches has become essential. In this work, we propose a source-free CD-FSS method that leverages both textual and visual information to facilitate target domain task adaptation without requiring source domain data. Specifically, we first append Task-Specific Attention Adapters (TSAA) to the feature pyramid of a pretrained backbone, which adapt multi-level features extracted from the shared pre-trained backbone to the target task. Then, the parameters of the TSAA are trained through a Visual-Visual Embedding Alignment (VVEA) module and a Text-Visual Embedding Alignment (TVEA) module. The VVEA module utilizes global-local visual features to align image features across different views, while the TVEA module leverages textual priors from pre-aligned multi-modal features (e.g., from CLIP) to guide cross-modal adaptation. By combining the outputs of these modules through dense comparison operations and subsequent fusion via skip connections, our method produces refined prediction masks. Under both 1-shot and 5-shot settings, the proposed approach achieves average segmentation accuracy improvements of 2.18\% and 4.11\%, respectively, across four cross-domain datasets, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art CD-FSS methods. Code are available at https://github.com/ljm198134/TVGTANet.

Head Anchor Enhanced Detection and Association for Crowded Pedestrian Tracking

Visual pedestrian tracking represents a promising research field, with extensive applications in intelligent surveillance, behavior analysis, and human-computer interaction. However, real-world applications face significant occlusion challenges. When multiple pedestrians interact or overlap, the loss of target features severely compromises the tracker's ability to maintain stable trajectories. Traditional tracking methods, which typically rely on full-body bounding box features extracted from {Re-ID} models and linear constant-velocity motion assumptions, often struggle in severe occlusion scenarios. To address these limitations, this work proposes an enhanced tracking framework that leverages richer feature representations and a more robust motion model. Specifically, the proposed method incorporates detection features from both the regression and classification branches of an object detector, embedding spatial and positional information directly into the feature representations. To further mitigate occlusion challenges, a head keypoint detection model is introduced, as the head is less prone to occlusion compared to the full body. In terms of motion modeling, we propose an iterative Kalman filtering approach designed to align with modern detector assumptions, integrating 3D priors to better complete motion trajectories in complex scenes. By combining these advancements in appearance and motion modeling, the proposed method offers a more robust solution for multi-object tracking in crowded environments where occlusions are prevalent.

PriorRG: Prior-Guided Contrastive Pre-training and Coarse-to-Fine Decoding for Chest X-ray Report Generation

Chest X-ray report generation aims to reduce radiologists' workload by automatically producing high-quality preliminary reports. A critical yet underexplored aspect of this task is the effective use of patient-specific prior knowledge -- including clinical context (e.g., symptoms, medical history) and the most recent prior image -- which radiologists routinely rely on for diagnostic reasoning. Most existing methods generate reports from single images, neglecting this essential prior information and thus failing to capture diagnostic intent or disease progression. To bridge this gap, we propose PriorRG, a novel chest X-ray report generation framework that emulates real-world clinical workflows via a two-stage training pipeline. In Stage 1, we introduce a prior-guided contrastive pre-training scheme that leverages clinical context to guide spatiotemporal feature extraction, allowing the model to align more closely with the intrinsic spatiotemporal semantics in radiology reports. In Stage 2, we present a prior-aware coarse-to-fine decoding for report generation that progressively integrates patient-specific prior knowledge with the vision encoder's hidden states. This decoding allows the model to align with diagnostic focus and track disease progression, thereby enhancing the clinical accuracy and fluency of the generated reports. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-ABN datasets demonstrate that PriorRG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 3.6% BLEU-4 and 3.8% F1 score improvement on MIMIC-CXR, and a 5.9% BLEU-1 gain on MIMIC-ABN. Code and checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.

A Study of Gender Classification Techniques Based on Iris Images: A Deep Survey and Analysis

Gender classification is attractive in a range of applications, including surveillance and monitoring, corporate profiling, and human-computer interaction. Individuals' identities may be gleaned from information about their gender, which is a kind of soft biometric.Over the years, several methods for determining a person's gender have been devised. Some of the most well-known ones are based on physical characteristics like face, fingerprint, palmprint, DNA, ears, gait, and iris. On the other hand, facial features account for the vast majority of gender classification methods. Also, the iris is a significant biometric trait because the iris, according to research, remains basically constant during an individual's life. Besides that, the iris is externally visible and is non-invasive to the user, which is important for practical applications. Furthermore, there are already high-quality methods for segmenting and encoding iris images, and the current methods facilitate selecting and extracting attribute vectors from iris textures. This study discusses several approaches to determining gender. The previous works of literature are briefly reviewed. Additionally, there are a variety of methodologies for different steps of gender classification. This study provides researchers with knowledge and analysis of the existing gender classification approaches. Also, it will assist researchers who are interested in this specific area, as well as highlight the gaps and challenges in the field, and finally provide suggestions and future paths for improvement.