A Survey of Artificial Intelligence in Gait-Based Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis

Recent years have witnessed an increasing global population affected by neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), which traditionally require extensive healthcare resources and human effort for medical diagnosis and monitoring. As a crucial disease-related motor symptom, human gait can be exploited to characterize different NDs. The current advances in artificial intelligence (AI) models enable automatic gait analysis for NDs identification and classification, opening a new avenue to facilitate faster and more cost-effective diagnosis of NDs. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent progress of machine learning and deep learning based AI techniques applied to diagnosis of five typical NDs through gait. We provide an overview of the process of AI-assisted NDs diagnosis, and present a systematic taxonomy of existing gait data and AI models. Through an extensive review and analysis of 164 studies, we identify and discuss the challenges, potential solutions, and future directions in this field. Finally, we envision the prospective utilization of 3D skeleton data for human gait representation and the development of more efficient AI models for NDs diagnosis. We provide a public resource repository to track and facilitate developments in this emerging field: https://github.com/Kali-Hac/AI4NDD-Survey.

LM2D: Lyrics- and Music-Driven Dance Synthesis

Dance typically involves professional choreography with complex movements that follow a musical rhythm and can also be influenced by lyrical content. The integration of lyrics in addition to the auditory dimension, enriches the foundational tone and makes motion generation more amenable to its semantic meanings. However, existing dance synthesis methods tend to model motions only conditioned on audio signals. In this work, we make two contributions to bridge this gap. First, we propose LM2D, a novel probabilistic architecture that incorporates a multimodal diffusion model with consistency distillation, designed to create dance conditioned on both music and lyrics in one diffusion generation step. Second, we introduce the first 3D dance-motion dataset that encompasses both music and lyrics, obtained with pose estimation technologies. We evaluate our model against music-only baseline models with objective metrics and human evaluations, including dancers and choreographers. The results demonstrate LM2D is able to produce realistic and diverse dance matching both lyrics and music. A video summary can be accessed at: https://youtu.be/4XCgvYookvA.

Unifying gradient regularization for Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) are a class of powerful deep learning methods widely used to learn representations of heterogeneous graphs. Despite the fast development of HGNNs, they still face some challenges such as over-smoothing, and non-robustness. Previous studies have shown that these problems can be reduced by using gradient regularization methods. However, the existing gradient regularization methods focus on either graph topology or node features. There is no universal approach to integrate these features, which severely affects the efficiency of regularization. In addition, the inclusion of gradient regularization into HGNNs sometimes leads to some problems, such as an unstable training process, increased complexity and insufficient coverage regularized information. Furthermore, there is still short of a complete theoretical analysis of the effects of gradient regularization on HGNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient regularization method called Grug, which iteratively applies regularization to the gradients generated by both propagated messages and the node features during the message-passing process. Grug provides a unified framework integrating graph topology and node features, based on which we conduct a detailed theoretical analysis of their effectiveness. Specifically, the theoretical analyses elaborate the advantages of Grug: 1) Decreasing sample variance during the training process (Stability); 2) Enhancing the generalization of the model (Universality); 3) Reducing the complexity of the model (Simplicity); 4) Improving the integrity and diversity of graph information utilization (Diversity). As a result, Grug has the potential to surpass the theoretical upper bounds set by DropMessage (AAAI-23 Distinguished Papers). In addition, we evaluate Grug on five public real-world datasets with two downstream tasks...

Brain-inspired Search Engine Assistant based on Knowledge Graph

Search engines can quickly response a hyperlink list according to query keywords. However, when a query is complex, developers need to repeatedly refine the search keywords and open a large number of web pages to find and summarize answers. Many research works of question and answering (Q and A) system attempt to assist search engines by providing simple, accurate and understandable answers. However, without original semantic contexts, these answers lack explainability, making them difficult for users to trust and adopt. In this paper, a brain-inspired search engine assistant named DeveloperBot based on knowledge graph is proposed, which aligns to the cognitive process of human and has the capacity to answer complex queries with explainability. Specifically, DeveloperBot firstly constructs a multi-layer query graph by splitting a complex multi-constraint query into several ordered constraints. Then it models the constraint reasoning process as subgraph search process inspired by the spreading activation model of cognitive science. In the end, novel features of the subgraph will be extracted for decision-making. The corresponding reasoning subgraph and answer confidence will be derived as explanations. The results of the decision-making demonstrate that DeveloperBot can estimate the answers and answer confidences with high accuracy. We implement a prototype and conduct a user study to evaluate whether and how the direct answers and the explanations provided by DeveloperBot can assist developers' information needs.