EEG Signal Denoising Using pix2pix GAN: Enhancing Neurological Data Analysis

Electroencephalography (EEG) is essential in neuroscience and clinical practice, yet it suffers from physiological artifacts, particularly electromyography (EMG), which distort signals. We propose a deep learning model using pix2pixGAN to remove such noise and generate reliable EEG signals. Leveraging the EEGdenoiseNet dataset, we created synthetic datasets with controlled EMG noise levels for model training and testing across a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) from -7 to 2. Our evaluation metrics included RRMSE and Pearson's CC, assessing both time and frequency domains, and compared our model with others. The pix2pixGAN model excelled, especially under high noise conditions, showing significant improvements in lower RRMSE and higher CC values. This demonstrates the model's superior accuracy and stability in purifying EEG signals, offering a robust solution for EEG analysis challenges and advancing clinical and neuroscience applications.

EPIC: Efficient Position-Independent Context Caching for Serving Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are critical for a wide range of applications, but serving them efficiently becomes increasingly challenging as inputs become more complex. Context caching improves serving performance by exploiting inter-request dependency and reusing key-value (KV) cache across requests, thus improving time-to-first-token (TTFT). However, existing prefix-based context caching requires exact token prefix matches, limiting cache reuse in few-shot learning, multi-document QA, or retrieval-augmented generation, where prefixes may vary. In this paper, we present EPIC, an LLM serving system that introduces position-independent context caching (PIC), enabling modular KV cache reuse regardless of token chunk position (or prefix). EPIC features two key designs: AttnLink, which leverages static attention sparsity to minimize recomputation for accuracy recovery, and KVSplit, a customizable chunking method that preserves semantic coherence. Our experiments demonstrate that Epic delivers up to 8x improvements in TTFT and 7x throughput over existing systems, with negligible or no accuracy loss. By addressing the limitations of traditional caching approaches, Epic enables more scalable and efficient LLM inference.

Cross-Age Contrastive Learning for Age-Invariant Face Recognition

Cross-age facial images are typically challenging and expensive to collect, making noise-free age-oriented datasets relatively small compared to widely-used large-scale facial datasets. Additionally, in real scenarios, images of the same subject at different ages are usually hard or even impossible to obtain. Both of these factors lead to a lack of supervised data, which limits the versatility of supervised methods for age-invariant face recognition, a critical task in applications such as security and biometrics. To address this issue, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning approach named Cross-Age Contrastive Learning (CACon). Thanks to the identity-preserving power of recent face synthesis models, CACon introduces a new contrastive learning method that leverages an additional synthesized sample from the input image. We also propose a new loss function in association with CACon to perform contrastive learning on a triplet of samples. We demonstrate that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in homogeneous-dataset experiments on several age-invariant face recognition benchmarks but also outperforms other methods by a large margin in cross-dataset experiments.

PLM-GNN: A Webpage Classification Method based on Joint Pre-trained Language Model and Graph Neural Network

The number of web pages is growing at an exponential rate, accumulating massive amounts of data on the web. It is one of the key processes to classify webpages in web information mining. Some classical methods are based on manually building features of web pages and training classifiers based on machine learning or deep learning. However, building features manually requires specific domain knowledge and usually takes a long time to validate the validity of features. Considering webpages generated by the combination of text and HTML Document Object Model(DOM) trees, we propose a representation and classification method based on a pre-trained language model and graph neural network, named PLM-GNN. It is based on the joint encoding of text and HTML DOM trees in the web pages. It performs well on the KI-04 and SWDE datasets and on practical dataset AHS for the project of scholar's homepage crawling.

Improving Face-Based Age Estimation with Attention-Based Dynamic Patch Fusion

With the increasing popularity of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recent works on face-based age estimation employ these networks as the backbone. However, state-of-the-art CNN-based methods treat each facial region equally, thus entirely ignoring the importance of some facial patches that may contain rich age-specific information. In this paper, we propose a face-based age estimation framework, called Attention-based Dynamic Patch Fusion (ADPF). In ADPF, two separate CNNs are implemented, namely the AttentionNet and the FusionNet. The AttentionNet dynamically locates and ranks age-specific patches by employing a novel Ranking-guided Multi-Head Hybrid Attention (RMHHA) mechanism. The FusionNet uses the discovered patches along with the facial image to predict the age of the subject. Since the proposed RMHHA mechanism ranks the discovered patches based on their importance, the length of the learning path of each patch in the FusionNet is proportional to the amount of information it carries (the longer, the more important). ADPF also introduces a novel diversity loss to guide the training of the AttentionNet and reduce the overlap among patches so that the diverse and important patches are discovered. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several age estimation benchmark datasets.

Age-Oriented Face Synthesis with Conditional Discriminator Pool and Adversarial Triplet Loss

The vanilla Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are commonly used to generate realistic images depicting aged and rejuvenated faces. However, the performance of such vanilla GANs in the age-oriented face synthesis task is often compromised by the mode collapse issue, which may result in the generation of faces with minimal variations and a poor synthesis accuracy. In addition, recent age-oriented face synthesis methods use the L1 or L2 constraint to preserve the identity information on synthesized faces, which implicitly limits the identity permanence capabilities when these constraints are associated with a trivial weighting factor. In this paper, we propose a method for the age-oriented face synthesis task that achieves a high synthesis accuracy with strong identity permanence capabilities. Specifically, to achieve a high synthesis accuracy, our method tackles the mode collapse issue with a novel Conditional Discriminator Pool (CDP), which consists of multiple discriminators, each targeting one particular age category. To achieve strong identity permanence capabilities, our method uses a novel Adversarial Triplet loss. This loss, which is based on the Triplet loss, adds a ranking operation to further pull the positive embedding towards the anchor embedding resulting in significantly reduced intra-class variances in the feature space. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of synthesis accuracy and identity permanence capabilities, qualitatively and quantitatively.

Fusion Network for Face-based Age Estimation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been applied to age-related research as the core framework. Although faces are composed of numerous facial attributes, most works with CNNs still consider a face as a typical object and do not pay enough attention to facial regions that carry age-specific feature for this particular task. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN architecture called Fusion Network (FusionNet) to tackle the age estimation problem. Apart from the whole face image, the FusionNet successively takes several age-specific facial patches as part of the input to emphasize the age-specific features. Through experiments, we show that the FusionNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art models on the MORPH II benchmark.