Shared Attention-based Autoencoder with Hierarchical Fusion-based Graph Convolution Network for sEEG SOZ Identification

Diagnosing seizure onset zone (SOZ) is a challenge in neurosurgery, where stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) serves as a critical technique. In sEEG SOZ identification, the existing studies focus solely on the intra-patient representation of epileptic information, overlooking the general features of epilepsy across patients and feature interdependencies between feature elements in each contact site. In order to address the aforementioned challenges, we propose the shared attention-based autoencoder (sATAE). sATAE is trained by sEEG data across all patients, with attention blocks introduced to enhance the representation of interdependencies between feature elements. Considering the spatial diversity of sEEG across patients, we introduce graph-based method for identification SOZ of each patient. However, the current graph-based methods for sEEG SOZ identification rely exclusively on static graphs to model epileptic networks. Inspired by the finding of neuroscience that epileptic network is intricately characterized by the interplay of sophisticated equilibrium between fluctuating and stable states, we design the hierarchical fusion-based graph convolution network (HFGCN) to identify the SOZ. HFGCN integrates the dynamic and static characteristics of epileptic networks through hierarchical weighting across different hierarchies, facilitating a more comprehensive learning of epileptic features and enriching node information for sEEG SOZ identification. Combining sATAE and HFGCN, we perform comprehensive experiments with sATAE-HFGCN on the self-build sEEG dataset, which includes sEEG data from 17 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. The results show that our method, sATAE-HFGCN, achieves superior performance for identifying the SOZ of each patient, effectively addressing the aforementioned challenges, providing an efficient solution for sEEG-based SOZ identification.

SleepCoT: A Lightweight Personalized Sleep Health Model via Chain-of-Thought Distillation

We present a novel approach to personalized sleep health management using few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation, enabling small-scale language models (> 2B parameters) to rival the performance of large language models (LLMs) in specialized health domains. Our method simultaneously distills problem-solving strategies, long-tail expert knowledge, and personalized recommendation capabilities from larger models into more efficient, compact models. Unlike existing systems, our approach offers three key functionalities: generating personalized sleep health recommendations, supporting user-specific follow-up inquiries, and providing responses to domain-specific knowledge questions. We focus on sleep health due to its measurability via wearable devices and its impact on overall well-being. Our experimental setup, involving GPT-4o for data synthesis, Qwen-max for instruction set creation, and Qwen2.5 1.5B for model distillation, demonstrates significant improvements over baseline small-scale models in penalization, reasoning, and knowledge application. Experiments using 100 simulated sleep reports and 1,000 domain-specific questions shows our model achieves comparable performance to larger models while maintaining efficiency for real-world deployment. This research not only advances AI-driven health management but also provides a novel approach to leveraging LLM capabilities in resource-constrained environments, potentially enhancing the accessibility of personalized healthcare solutions.

Task-Oriented Edge-Assisted Cooperative Data Compression, Communications and Computing for UGV-Enhanced Warehouse Logistics

Only the chairs can edit This paper explores the growing need for task-oriented communications in warehouse logistics, where traditional communication Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)-such as latency, reliability, and throughput-often do not fully meet task requirements. As the complexity of data flow management in large-scale device networks increases, there is also a pressing need for innovative cross-system designs that balance data compression, communication, and computation. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented, edge-assisted framework for cooperative data compression, communication, and computing in Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV)-enhanced warehouse logistics. In this framework, two UGVs collaborate to transport cargo, with control functions-navigation for the front UGV and following/conveyance for the rear UGV-offloaded to the edge server to accommodate their limited on-board computing resources. We develop a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based two-stage point cloud data compression algorithm that dynamically and collaboratively adjusts compression ratios according to task requirements, significantly reducing communication overhead. System-level simulations of our UGV logistics prototype demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and its potential for swift real-world implementation.

Multi-Scale Temporal Transformer For Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition plays a crucial role in human-machine interaction systems. Recently various optimized Transformers have been successfully applied to speech emotion recognition. However, the existing Transformer architectures focus more on global information and require large computation. On the other hand, abundant speech emotional representations exist locally on different parts of the input speech. To tackle these problems, we propose a Multi-Scale TRansfomer (MSTR) for speech emotion recognition. It comprises of three main components: (1) a multi-scale temporal feature operator, (2) a fractal self-attention module, and (3) a scale mixer module. These three components can effectively enhance the transformer's ability to learn multi-scale local emotion representations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MSTR model significantly outperforms a vanilla Transformer and other state-of-the-art methods across three speech emotion datasets: IEMOCAP, MELD and, CREMAD. In addition, it can greatly reduce the computational cost.

Online Multi-level Contrastive Representation Distillation for Cross-Subject fNIRS Emotion Recognition

Utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals for emotion recognition is a significant advancement in understanding human emotions. However, due to the lack of artificial intelligence data and algorithms in this field, current research faces the following challenges: 1) The portable wearable devices have higher requirements for lightweight models; 2) The objective differences of physiology and psychology among different subjects aggravate the difficulty of emotion recognition. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cross-subject fNIRS emotion recognition method, called the Online Multi-level Contrastive Representation Distillation framework (OMCRD). Specifically, OMCRD is a framework designed for mutual learning among multiple lightweight student networks. It utilizes multi-level fNIRS feature extractor for each sub-network and conducts multi-view sentimental mining using physiological signals. The proposed Inter-Subject Interaction Contrastive Representation (IS-ICR) facilitates knowledge transfer for interactions between student models, enhancing cross-subject emotion recognition performance. The optimal student network can be selected and deployed on a wearable device. Some experimental results demonstrate that OMCRD achieves state-of-the-art results in emotional perception and affective imagery tasks.

AS-Speech: Adaptive Style For Speech Synthesis

In recent years, there has been significant progress in Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis technology, enabling the high-quality synthesis of voices in common scenarios. In unseen situations, adaptive TTS requires a strong generalization capability to speaker style characteristics. However, the existing adaptive methods can only extract and integrate coarse-grained timbre or mixed rhythm attributes separately. In this paper, we propose AS-Speech, an adaptive style methodology that integrates the speaker timbre characteristics and rhythmic attributes into a unified framework for text-to-speech synthesis. Specifically, AS-Speech can accurately simulate style characteristics through fine-grained text-based timbre features and global rhythm information, and achieve high-fidelity speech synthesis through the diffusion model. Experiments show that the proposed model produces voices with higher naturalness and similarity in terms of timbre and rhythm compared to a series of adaptive TTS models.

Timeliness-Fidelity Tradeoff in 3D Scene Representations

Real-time three-dimensional (3D) scene representations serve as one of the building blocks that bolster various innovative applications, e.g., digital manufacturing, Virtual/Augmented/Extended/Mixed Reality (VR/AR/XR/MR), and the metaverse. Despite substantial efforts that have been made to real-time communications and computing, real-time 3D scene representations remain a challenging task. This paper investigates the tradeoff between timeliness and fidelity in real-time 3D scene representations. Specifically, we establish a framework to evaluate the impact of communication delay on the tradeoff, where the real-world scenario is monitored by multiple cameras that communicate with an edge server. To improve fidelity for 3D scene representations, we propose to use a single-step Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) method that leverages the Age of Information (AoI) to decide if the received image needs to be involved in 3D scene representations and rendering. We test our framework and the proposed approach with different well-known 3D scene representation methods. Simulation results reveal that real-time 3D scene representation can be sensitively affected by communication delay, and our proposed method can achieve optimal 3D scene representation results.

Real-Time Interactions Between Human Controllers and Remote Devices in Metaverse

Supporting real-time interactions between human controllers and remote devices remains a challenging goal in the Metaverse due to the stringent requirements on computing workload, communication throughput, and round-trip latency. In this paper, we establish a novel framework for real-time interactions through the virtual models in the Metaverse. Specifically, we jointly predict the motion of the human controller for 1) proactive rendering in the Metaverse and 2) generating control commands to the real-world remote device in advance. The virtual model is decoupled into two components for rendering and control, respectively. To dynamically adjust the prediction horizons for rendering and control, we develop a two-step human-in-the-loop continuous reinforcement learning approach and use an expert policy to improve the training efficiency. An experimental prototype is built to verify our algorithm with different communication latencies. Compared with the baseline policy without prediction, our proposed method can reduce 1) the Motion-To-Photon (MTP) latency between human motion and rendering feedback and 2) the root mean squared error (RMSE) between human motion and real-world remote devices significantly.

VideoCoT: A Video Chain-of-Thought Dataset with Active Annotation Tool

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are flourishing, but mainly focus on images with less attention than videos, especially in sub-fields such as prompt engineering, video chain-of-thought (CoT), and instruction tuning on videos. Therefore, we try to explore the collection of CoT datasets in videos to lead to video OpenQA and improve the reasoning ability of MLLMs. Unfortunately, making such video CoT datasets is not an easy task. Given that human annotation is too cumbersome and expensive, while machine-generated is not reliable due to the hallucination issue, we develop an automatic annotation tool that combines machine and human experts, under the active learning paradigm. Active learning is an interactive strategy between the model and human experts, in this way, the workload of human labeling can be reduced and the quality of the dataset can be guaranteed. With the help of the automatic annotation tool, we strive to contribute three datasets, namely VideoCoT, TopicQA, TopicCoT. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective benchmark based on the collected datasets, which exploits CoT to maximize the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness our solution.

Disentangled Pre-training for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Detecting human-object interaction (HOI) has long been limited by the amount of supervised data available. Recent approaches address this issue by pre-training according to pseudo-labels, which align object regions with HOI triplets parsed from image captions. However, pseudo-labeling is tricky and noisy, making HOI pre-training a complex process. Therefore, we propose an efficient disentangled pre-training method for HOI detection (DP-HOI) to address this problem. First, DP-HOI utilizes object detection and action recognition datasets to pre-train the detection and interaction decoder layers, respectively. Then, we arrange these decoder layers so that the pre-training architecture is consistent with the downstream HOI detection task. This facilitates efficient knowledge transfer. Specifically, the detection decoder identifies reliable human instances in each action recognition dataset image, generates one corresponding query, and feeds it into the interaction decoder for verb classification. Next, we combine the human instance verb predictions in the same image and impose image-level supervision. The DP-HOI structure can be easily adapted to the HOI detection task, enabling effective model parameter initialization. Therefore, it significantly enhances the performance of existing HOI detection models on a broad range of rare categories. The code and pre-trained weight are available at https://github.com/xingaoli/DP-HOI.