Spatial transcriptomics has significantly advanced tissue biology and makes it possible to study the spatial interactions of cells in the microenvironment of complex tissues. However, accurately inferring intercellular communication from these data remains challenging due to the need to effectively integrate spatial topology with high-dimensional gene expression information. To address this challenge, we propose DAHGT-CCI, a novel method for inferring intercellular communication from spatial transcriptomics data. By fusing multimodal heterogeneous features to construct a unified node representation and introducing a meta-relation-aware dynamic attention mechanism, DAHGT-CCI can adaptively learn the weights of edges in the graph, thereby achieving superior precision and fine-grained inference of intercellular interactions. We evaluated the performance of DAHGT-CCI on six different spatial transcriptomics datasets. In these benchmarks, DAHGT-CCI outperformed existing graph-based learning methods and cell-cell communication inference models in terms of accuracy, AUROC, recall, and F1 score. These results demonstrate that DAHGT-CCI can more accurately reconstruct cell communication networks in complex tissue microenvironments, offering an indispensable computational tool for studying developmental processes, disease mechanisms, and potential therapeutic targets from a spatially resolved perspective.
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Partial Multi-Label Feature Selection (PMLFS) integrates partial multi-label learning and Multi-Label Feature Selection (MLFS) within a unified optimization framework. Owing to the presence of noisy labels, it is more practical and challenging compared to traditional MLFS. However, existing methods often focus solely on label disambiguation while neglecting to distinguish the contributions of features to ground-truth labels and noisy labels. To address this, we propose a novel MLFS method based on information decomposition and orthogonality constraints, named PML-IDOC. The method partitions partial label information into ground-truth label information and noisy label information, imposing a local orthogonality constraint between ground-truth and noisy labels to prevent the latter from interfering with the former. Unlike previous approaches that constrain the low-rank property and sparsity of noisy labels, our method constructs separate mapping relationships from instances to ground-truth labels and noisy labels. By enforcing global orthogonality between the two coefficient matrices, it ensures low correlation between them, thus achieving the decoupling of feature contributions to ground-truth and noisy labels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PML-IDOC. The code is available at https://github.com/yunbao520/PML-IDOC
Spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are brain-inspired and spike-driven, achieve high energy efficiency. However, a performance gap between SNNs and artificial neural networks (ANNs) still remains. Knowledge distillation (KD) is commonly adopted to improve SNN performance, but existing methods typically enforce uniform alignment across all timesteps, either from a teacher network or through inter-temporal self-distillation, implicitly assuming that per-timestep predictions should be treated equally. In practice, SNN predictions vary and evolve over time, and intermediate timesteps need not all be individually correct even when the final aggregated output is correct. Under such conditions, effective distillation should not force every timestep toward the same supervision target, but instead provide corrective guidance to erroneous timesteps while preserving useful temporal dynamics. To address this issue, we propose Selective Alignment Knowledge Distillation (SeAl-KD), which selectively aligns class-level and temporal knowledge by equalizing competing logits at erroneous timesteps and reweighting temporal alignment based on confidence and inter-timestep similarity. Extensive experiments on static image and neuromorphic event-based datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing distillation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/KaiSUN1/SeAl.
Continual adversarial defense (CAD) aims to defend target models against continuously emerging attacks. However, existing CAD methods typically rely on maintaining large amounts of replay data or multiple expert modules to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, or suffer from reduced robustness against adversarial examples or degraded performance on clean images. As a result, they often fail to provide clear advantages over standalone robust models. To address these limitations, we formulate four fundamental principles for CAD: (1) continual adaptation to new attacks without catastrophic forgetting, (2) few-shot adaptation, (3) memory-efficient adaptation, and (4) high classification accuracy on both clean and adversarial data. Guided by these principles, we explore and integrate cutting-edge techniques from continual learning, few-shot learning, and ensemble learning, and propose Universal Continual Adversarial Defense (UCAD), a universal framework that enables both standard and robust models to perform effective defense under the CAD setting. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UCAD against multi-stage adversarial attacks and demonstrate significant improvements over a wide range of baseline methods. Moreover, we observe that as the number of encountered attacks increases, UCAD becomes increasingly robust, consistently enhancing the defense capability of existing robust models until saturation.
We investigate the complexity of stable (or perturbation-resilient) instances of k-Means and k-Median clustering problems in metrics with small doubling dimension. While these problems have been extensively studied under multiplicative perturbation resilience in low-dimensional Euclidean spaces, we adopt a more general notion of stability, termed "almost stable", known from the literature as (alpha,epsilon)-perturbation resilience. Additionally, we extend our results to k-Means/k-Median with penalties, where each data point is either assigned to a cluster centre or incurs a penalty. We show that certain special cases of almost stable k-Means/k-Median (with penalties) are solvable in polynomial time. To complement this, we also examine the hardness of almost stable instances and (1 + 1/poly(n))-stable instances of k-Means/k-Median (with penalties), proving super-polynomial lower bounds on the runtime of any exact algorithm under the widely believed Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH).
We introduce and study the multi-agent stochastic shortest path (MSSP) problem, in which k agents strive to reach a target state, aiming to minimize the expected time to reach the target by any agent. We analyze the computational and strategy-complexity of the problem in both autonomous and coordinated settings, and we design efficient strategy-synthesis algorithms. The algorithms are experimentally evaluated on instances of increasing size against natural baselines.
Multi-view clustering aims to utilize information from multiple feature representations to uncover underlying data structures. Most existing methods emphasize learning a consensus representation by enforcing consistency across views. However, those structures that cannot be directly incorporated into the clustering space receive little attention, and are often discarded as noise in practice. In this paper, we argue that such information can be informative signals for the clustering process and should be explicitly modeled rather than suppressed or ignored. Specifically, we propose salient-residual decoupled multi-view learning for clustering, SRDMVC, introducing a novel decomposition-fusion iterative optimization, which separates the feature space into a salient space and a residual subspace effectively and fuses them using a novel attention mechanism. The residual subspace can capture the deep-level structure of view information, making positive contributions to the clustering process, under proper constraints. Without assuming stronger view alignment or complementarity, SRDMVC enhances cluster discrimination, avoids spurious consensus, and alleviates representation degradation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the method we propose.
Dynamic graph neural networks (DyGNNs) are widely used to model evolving interactions, but may fail under data distribution shift. Due to limited and unreliable interventions and insufficient disentanglement, the existing dynamic graph domain generalization approaches lead to suboptimal results. We formalize a message sufficiency causal view: a node representation is fully mediated by its received message multiset. Building on this perspective, we propose Latent environment Extrapolation and Message Disentanglement (LEMD), a novel robust representation learning framework for dynamic graph domain generalization. A message extrapolation mechanism under soft uncertainty constraints is proposed to obtain the diverse counterfactual message distributions. Causal information is disentangled fully from the messages to suppress shortcuts via a recoverable evolving disentanglement module. We further provide rigorous theoretical analysis and proofs to ensure the effectiveness of LEMD. Across all six datasets and two tasks, LEMD consistently improves over state-of-the-art dynamic graph generalization baselines under distribution shift, and achieves the best performance increase of 7.7% relative compared to the suboptimal baseline. The code of LEMD for reviewer is available at https://github.com/W-WuJi/LEMD.
Argumentation dynamics provides techniques for revising argumentation theories in real-world domains (e.g., an autonomous medical diagnostic agent). Within this context, enforcement in abstract argumentation has become a prominent topic. Enforcement aims to modify an argumentation framework to satisfy given acceptability conditions while minimizing change from the original framework. Motivated by the need to address both syntactic and semantic notions of change, we propose formula-based enforcement, a generic framework that strictly generalizes existing approaches, by additionally covering cases they cannot handle, including semantic change. We analyze its complexity under central argumentation semantics, obtaining results from NP-completeness to completeness for the third level of the polynomial hierarchy. For second-level complete variants, we present an exact procedure based on MaxSAT solving and counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR), and evaluate it empirically.
Responsibility allocation---determining the extent to which agents are accountable for outcomes---is a fundamental challenge in the design and analysis of multi-agent systems. In this work, we model such systems as concurrent stochastic multi-player games and introduce a notion of retrospective (backward) counterfactual responsibility, which quantifies an agent's accountability for outcomes resulting from a given strategy profile. To allocate responsibility among agents, we utilise the Shapley value and formally show that this method satisfies key desirable properties, including fairness and consistency. Building on this foundation, we propose a formal framework that supports both verification and strategic reasoning in responsibility-aware multi-agent systems. Furthermore, by adopting Nash equilibrium as the solution concept, we demonstrate how to compute stable strategy profiles in which agents trade off responsibility against expected reward.
Optimization in industrial systems often involves calibrating from a semi-optimized state, where global exploration methods like Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Bayesian Optimization (BO) are inefficient or unsafe. We propose Causal Newton Optimization (CNO), an online algorithm that iteratively calibrates inputs under a known causal graph but unknown structural equations. CNO estimates local linear causal effects via additive interventions and employs a log-linear variance regression to robustly guide Newton-based updates. Evaluations on synthetic systems and a chemical plant simulator demonstrate that CNO achieves the best balance between objective improvement and robustness. While traditional PID control suits standard dynamical systems, CNO significantly outperforms RL and BO in complex structural causal models, providing the robust stability vital for safety-critical real-world applications.
Code-switching (CS) speech translation (ST) aims to translate speech that alternates between multiple languages into a target language text, posing significant challenges due to the complexity of semantic modeling and the scarcity of CS data. Previous studies mainly rely on the models themselves to implicitly learn semantic representations and resort to costly manual annotations. To mitigate these limitations, we propose enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) speech projector composed of language expert groups, where each group specializes in the semantic space of a specific language for fine-grained speech feature modeling. A language-specific loss and an intra-group load balancing loss are jointly introduced to guide efficient token routing across and within expert groups. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-stage training paradigm that utilizes readily available automatic speech recognition (ASR) and monolingual ST data, facilitating speech-text alignment and improving translation performance. To bridge the data gap for smooth domain transfer, a transition loss is employed to improve adaptation to CS scenarios. Extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach, achieving average improvements of 0.86 BLEU and 0.93 COMET over SeamlessM4T, with maximum improvements of 1.49 BLEU and 1.41 COMET across different test sets. Our code and supplementary appendices are available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/CSST-SSA.
Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval (RSITR) aims to achieve precise retrieval between remote sensing images and textual descriptions. However, existing methods neglect the multi-dimensional cognitive attributes inherent in remote sensing data and struggle to handle them simultaneously, leading to suboptimal retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Progressive Decoupling-Aggregation-Refinement framework for RSITR (PDAR-RSITR) to comprehensively capture multi-dimensional cognitive attributes. Specifically, we adapt Multi-dimensional Cognitive Decoupling to learn features across cognitive attributes of different dimensions via multi-process clustering. Subsequently, we utilize Salient Cognitive Aggregation to select and aggregate the most salient attributes via dynamic routing. Furthermore, we propose Expert Collaborative Refinement to enhance critical cross-modal relationships via three complementary expert perspectives. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PDAR-RSITR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics.
With the rising demand for trustworthy AI in clinical practice, strong interpretability is now a critical requirement as well as accuracy. However, the modality gap for medical visual question answering is quite severe when continuous visual signals are forcibly projected into discrete text space for reasoning, and the loss of necessary diagnostic information leads to low precision and black-box opacity. To address this problem, we propose MedVCoT, which incorporates latent visual reasoning into the medical visual question answering(VQA) domain. Rather than merely integrating modules, MedVCoT utilizes the specialized expertise of MedSAM to train a large vision-language model so that it can autonomously generate consistent and continuous latent visual tokens within Visual Chain-of-Thought. This mechanism forces the model to explicitly "see" the lesion in the latent space before formulating a textual diagnosis, ensuring answers are causally rooted in verifiable visual evidence rather than statistical hallucination. We achieve this through a progressive 3-stage training procedure: medical feature alignment, visual reasoning learning by utilizing latent tokens generated, and instruction tuning for complex clinical scenarios. Extensive experiments show that MedVCoT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, outperforming other methods by large margins. Meanwhile, it provides pixel-level segmentation masks to validate its diagnostic reasoning. Our demo is available at https://zhuqh19.github.io/MedVCoT.
Model counting of Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) formulas is a critical problem in applications such as probabilistic inference and network reliability. For example, it is often used for query evaluation in probabilistic databases. Due to the computational intractability of exact DNF counting, there has been a line of research into a variety of approximation algorithms. We develop a new Monte Carlo approach with an adaptive stopping rule and short-circuit formula evaluation. We prove it achieves Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning bounds and has asymptotically improved time and randomness complexity compared to previous methods. We also show experimentally that it out-performs prior algorithms by at least three orders of magnitude in running time and scalability.
Virtual Knowledge Graphs (VKGs) provide unified access to legacy relational data sources through a high-level ontology modeling a domain of interest. The content of the ontology elements (classes and properties) is virtually mapped to underlying data sources through declarative mappings. The standard approach to interacting with a VKG system is to use SPARQL as the query language. However, the complexity of SPARQL creates a high entry barrier for normal users. In this paper, we study the VKG-QA task, which enables users to interact with the VKGs through a natural language (NL) interface by translating their questions into SPARQL queries. One critical challenge in such translation is silent failures, where a syntactically correct SPARQL query returns empty results because it involves ontology elements that lack mappings to the underlying data. To address this, we propose NaVQA (Navigation-based VKG Question Answering), a framework leveraging Large Language Models that (1) identifies and indexes the active ontology elements based on the mapping specifications, and (2) iteratively constructs a query graph from the NL question using the active ontology elements and their relations to synthesize SPARQL. Experiments on three real-world VKGs show that NaVQA significantly mitigates silent failures and outperforms existing baselines.
The learnware paradigm aims to construct a dock system that maintains a collection of learnwares, each consisting of a well-established model coupled with a specification, thereby enabling users to directly reuse existing models to solve their tasks without training models from scratch. As a core component of the paradigm, the specification sketches the model’s properties and establishes reusability between the learnware and user tasks. Existing methods have demonstrated promising performance by designing specifications that characterize the task distributions mastered by well-established models. However, in complex real-world scenarios, task distributions often overlap, thereby weakening the uniqueness of specifications and obscuring the reusability relationships between learnwares and tasks. In this paper, we design an Explicitly Distinctive Specification (EDS) that enforces specification uniqueness, improving the discriminative capability of the learnware paradigm and avoiding ambiguity caused by overlapping task distributions. This specification method explicitly leverages distributional discrepancies between specifications to strengthen the uniqueness of the model properties sketched during the submitting stage and subsequently exploits the enhanced distributional discriminability in the deploying stage to improve learnware reusability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and strong performance of the proposed EDS within the learnware paradigm under complex task scenarios.
Graph pre-training and prompt tuning provide an effective route to label-efficient node classification by learning transferable backbones and adapting them with lightweight prompts. However, existing pre-train-and-prompt pipelines often generalize poorly across graphs with diverse homophily due to two fundamental limitations: (i) spectral bias, where learned representations overemphasize a single frequency band, and (ii) prompt misalignment, where spatial-domain prompts cannot explicitly modulate critical spectral components and may even disrupt frequency-aware backbones. In this paper, we propose SCA-GPPT, a spectrum-aware framework that unifies Spectrum-based Graph Pre-training and Cluster-Augmented Prompt Tuning. First, we present a systematic spectral analysis of graph prompting, revealing the inherent limitations of spatial-domain prompts in capturing attenuated high-frequency signals. Second, we explicitly learn complementary low- and high-frequency spectral filters via parameterized Chebyshev polynomials and employ band-aware contrastive learning to model diverse spectral patterns during pre-training. For downstream adaptation, we freeze the pre-trained backbone and introduce cluster-augmented prompts that directly adapt Chebyshev coefficients while enforcing global structural consistency, enabling stable few-shot transfer across varying homophily regimes. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCA-GPPT consistently outperforms strong baselines under both transductive and inductive settings. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SCA-GPPT-17B2.
Retinal angiography provides critical vascular information, yet optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) acquisition remains slower and less accessible than conventional structural OCT. A key open question is: how angiographic signals can be recovered? To address the issues of artifacts and structural blurring in existing generative methods, we propose a wavelet flow matching-based model, FlowOCT. This method operates directly on OCT wavelet coefficients, learning frequency-specific velocity fields to map them to the OCTA wavelet distribution. To ensure anatomical accuracy of the vasculature, we introduce constraints such as depth-wise contrastive alignment and two-dimensional projection consistency. Given the sparse nature of vascular signals in OCTA data, a structure-focused loss function and corresponding evaluation metrics are designed. Experiment results show that FlowOCT outperforms existing methods in terms of both image quality and perceptual similarity. Downstream diagnostic tasks further validate its superior authenticity and generalization capability. Code is available at https://github.com/cnu-medilab/FlowOCT.
Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in automated electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis. However, the long-tailed distribution of real-world ECG data remains a critical challenge. Existing methods mainly operate at the signal feature level and fail to exploit semantic relationships among diagnostic labels, which limits their ability to effectively recognize rare categories. To address this issue, we propose a Semantics-Guided Representation Learning (SGRL) framework, designed to leverage semantic priors to guide feature learning and thereby correct feature bias under long-tailed distributions. Specifically, we propose a Label Semantic Prompt Adaptation (LSPA) strategy, which introduces ECG-calibrated learnable parameters into label prompts to generate adaptive label semantic embeddings under a semantic-consistency constraint, thereby overcoming the limitations of coarse-grained label prompts in characterizing fine-grained intra-class morphological variations. Subsequently, we propose Semantic-Guided Representation Decorrelation (SGRD) that fuses ECG embeddings with adaptive label semantics and suppresses inter-class semantic correlations to obtain discriminative class semantic anchors, thereby improving tail-class separability. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of SGRL in long-tailed ECG classification tasks. Our code is available on https://github.com/gfywudi/SGRL.