This paper presents a novel graph-based deep learning model for tasks involving relations between two nodes (edge-centric tasks), where the focus lies on predicting relationships and interactions between pairs of nodes rather than node properties themselves. This model combines supervised and self-supervised learning, taking into account for the loss function the embeddings learned and patterns with and without ground truth. Additionally it incorporates an attention mechanism that leverages both node and edge features. The architecture, trained end-to-end, comprises two primary components: embedding generation and prediction. First, a graph neural network (GNN) transform raw node features into dense, low-dimensional embeddings, incorporating edge attributes. Then, a feedforward neural model processes the node embeddings to produce the final output. Experiments demonstrate that our model matches or exceeds existing methods for protein-protein interactions prediction and Gene Ontology (GO) terms prediction. The model also performs effectively with one-hot encoding for node features, providing a solution for the previously unsolved problem of predicting similarity between compounds with unknown structures.
The group recommendation (GR) aims to suggest items for a group of users in social networks. Existing work typically considers individual preferences as the sole factor in aggregating group preferences. Actually, social influence is also an important factor in modeling users' contributions to the final group decision. However, existing methods either neglect the social influence of individual members or bundle preferences and social influence together as a unified representation. As a result, these models emphasize the preferences of the majority within the group rather than the actual interaction items, which we refer to as the preference bias issue in GR. Moreover, the self-supervised learning (SSL) strategies they designed to address the issue of group data sparsity fail to account for users' contextual social weights when regulating group representations, leading to suboptimal results. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel model based on Disentangled Modeling of Preferences and Social Influence for Group Recommendation (DisRec). Concretely, we first design a user-level disentangling network to disentangle the preferences and social influence of group members with separate embedding propagation schemes based on (hyper)graph convolution networks. We then introduce a socialbased contrastive learning strategy, selectively excluding user nodes based on their social importance to enhance group representations and alleviate the group-level data sparsity issue. The experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two realworld datasets.
Electroencephalograph (EEG) is a crucial tool for studying brain activity. Recently, self-supervised learning methods leveraging large unlabeled datasets have emerged as a potential solution to the scarcity of widely available annotated EEG data. However, current methods suffer from at least one of the following limitations: i) sub-optimal EEG signal modeling, ii) model sizes in the hundreds of millions of trainable parameters, and iii) reliance on private datasets and/or inconsistent public benchmarks, hindering reproducibility. To address these challenges, we introduce a Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations using alternating attention (CEReBrO), a new small EEG foundation model. Our tokenization scheme represents EEG signals at a per-channel patch granularity. We propose an alternating attention mechanism that jointly models intra-channel temporal dynamics and inter-channel spatial correlations, achieving 2x speed improvement with 6x less memory required compared to standard self-attention. We present several model sizes ranging from 3.6 million to 85 million parameters. Pre-trained on over 20,000 hours of publicly available scalp EEG recordings with diverse channel configurations, our models set new benchmarks in emotion detection and seizure detection tasks, with competitive performance in anomaly classification and gait prediction. This validates our models' effectiveness and efficiency.
Recent breakthroughs in autonomous driving have been propelled by advances in robust world modeling, fundamentally transforming how vehicles interpret dynamic scenes and execute safe decision-making. World models have emerged as a linchpin technology, offering high-fidelity representations of the driving environment that integrate multi-sensor data, semantic cues, and temporal dynamics. This paper systematically reviews recent advances in world models for autonomous driving, proposing a three-tiered taxonomy: (i) Generation of Future Physical World, covering Image-, BEV-, OG-, and PC-based generation methods that enhance scene evolution modeling through diffusion models and 4D occupancy forecasting; (ii) Behavior Planning for Intelligent Agents, combining rule-driven and learning-based paradigms with cost map optimization and reinforcement learning for trajectory generation in complex traffic conditions; (ii) Interaction between Prediction and Planning, achieving multi-agent collaborative decision-making through latent space diffusion and memory-augmented architectures. The study further analyzes training paradigms, including self-supervised learning, multimodal pretraining, and generative data augmentation, while evaluating world models' performance in scene understanding and motion prediction tasks. Future research must address key challenges in self-supervised representation learning, long-tail scenario generation, and multimodal fusion to advance the practical deployment of world models in complex urban environments. Overall, the comprehensive analysis provides a technical roadmap for harnessing the transformative potential of world models in advancing safe and reliable autonomous driving solutions.
Supervised fine-tuning methods (SFT) perform great efficiency on artificial intelligence interpretation in SAR images, leveraging the powerful representation knowledge from pre-training models. Due to the lack of domain-specific pre-trained backbones in SAR images, the traditional strategies are loading the foundation pre-train models of natural scenes such as ImageNet, whose characteristics of images are extremely different from SAR images. This may hinder the model performance on downstream tasks when adopting SFT on small-scale annotated SAR data. In this paper, an self-supervised learning (SSL) method of masked image modeling based on Masked Auto-Encoders (MAE) is proposed to learn feature representations of SAR images during the pre-training process and benefit the object detection task in SAR images of SFT. The evaluation experiments on the large-scale SAR object detection benchmark named SARDet-100k verify that the proposed method captures proper latent representations of SAR images and improves the model generalization in downstream tasks by converting the pre-trained domain from natural scenes to SAR images through SSL. The proposed method achieves an improvement of 1.3 mAP on the SARDet-100k benchmark compared to only the SFT strategies.
Reconstructing MR images using deep neural networks from undersampled k-space data without using fully sampled training references offers significant value in practice, which is a self-supervised regression problem calling for effective prior knowledge and supervision. The Siamese architectures are motivated by the definition "invariance" and shows promising results in unsupervised visual representative learning. Building homologous transformed images and avoiding trivial solutions are two major challenges in Siamese-based self-supervised model. In this work, we explore Siamese architecture for MRI reconstruction in a self-supervised training fashion called SiamRecon. We show the proposed approach mimics an expectation maximization algorithm. The alternative optimization provide effective supervision signal and avoid collapse. The proposed SiamRecon achieves the state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy in the field of self-supervised learning on both single-coil brain MRI and multi-coil knee MRI.
Longitudinal MRI analysis is crucial for predicting disease outcomes, particularly in chronic conditions like hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), where early detection can significantly influence treatment strategies and patient prognosis. Yet, due to challenges like limited data availability, subtle parenchymal changes, and the irregular timing of medical screenings, current approaches have so far focused on cross-sectional imaging data. To address this, we propose HCCNet, a novel model architecture that integrates a 3D adaptation of the ConvNeXt CNN architecture with a Transformer encoder, capturing both the intricate spatial features of 3D MRIs and the complex temporal dependencies across different time points. HCCNet utilizes a two-stage pre-training process tailored for longitudinal MRI data. The CNN backbone is pre-trained using a self-supervised learning framework adapted for 3D MRIs, while the Transformer encoder is pre-trained with a sequence-order-prediction task to enhance its understanding of disease progression over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of HCCNet by applying it to a cohort of liver cirrhosis patients undergoing regular MRI screenings for HCC surveillance. Our results show that HCCNet significantly improves predictive accuracy and reliability over baseline models, providing a robust tool for personalized HCC surveillance. The methodological approach presented in this paper is versatile and can be adapted to various longitudinal MRI screening applications. Its ability to handle varying patient record lengths and irregular screening intervals establishes it as an invaluable framework for monitoring chronic diseases, where timely and accurate disease prognosis is critical for effective treatment planning.
Self-supervised learning holds the promise to learn good representations from real-world continuous uncurated data streams. However, most existing works in visual self-supervised learning focus on static images or artificial data streams. Towards exploring a more realistic learning substrate, we investigate streaming self-supervised learning from long-form real-world egocentric video streams. Inspired by the event segmentation mechanism in human perception and memory, we propose "Memory Storyboard" that groups recent past frames into temporal segments for more effective summarization of the past visual streams for memory replay. To accommodate efficient temporal segmentation, we propose a two-tier memory hierarchy: the recent past is stored in a short-term memory, and the storyboard temporal segments are then transferred to a long-term memory. Experiments on real-world egocentric video datasets including SAYCam and KrishnaCam show that contrastive learning objectives on top of storyboard frames result in semantically meaningful representations which outperform those produced by state-of-the-art unsupervised continual learning methods.
Current self-supervised learning methods for 3D medical imaging rely on simple pretext formulations and organ- or modality-specific datasets, limiting their generalizability and scalability. We present 3DINO, a cutting-edge SSL method adapted to 3D datasets, and use it to pretrain 3DINO-ViT: a general-purpose medical imaging model, on an exceptionally large, multimodal, and multi-organ dataset of ~100,000 3D medical imaging scans from over 10 organs. We validate 3DINO-ViT using extensive experiments on numerous medical imaging segmentation and classification tasks. Our results demonstrate that 3DINO-ViT generalizes across modalities and organs, including out-of-distribution tasks and datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on the majority of evaluation metrics and labeled dataset sizes. Our 3DINO framework and 3DINO-ViT will be made available to enable research on 3D foundation models or further finetuning for a wide range of medical imaging applications.
Advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) for machine vision have improved representation robustness and model performance, giving rise to pre-trained backbones like \emph{ResNet} and \emph{ViT} models tuned with SSL methods such as \emph{SimCLR}. Due to the computational and data demands of pre-training, the utilization of such backbones becomes a strenuous necessity. However, employing these backbones may inherit vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. While adversarial robustness has been studied under \emph{white-box} and \emph{black-box} settings, the robustness of models tuned on pre-trained backbones remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the role of tuning meta-information in mitigating exploitation risks is unclear. This work systematically evaluates the adversarial robustness of such models across $20,000$ combinations of tuning meta-information, including fine-tuning techniques, backbone families, datasets, and attack types. We propose using proxy models to transfer attacks, simulating varying levels of target knowledge by fine-tuning these proxies with diverse configurations. Our findings reveal that proxy-based attacks approach the effectiveness of \emph{white-box} methods, even with minimal tuning knowledge. We also introduce a naive "backbone attack," leveraging only the backbone to generate adversarial samples, which outperforms \emph{black-box} attacks and rivals \emph{white-box} methods, highlighting critical risks in model-sharing practices. Finally, our ablations reveal how increasing tuning meta-information impacts attack transferability, measuring each meta-information combination.
Medical images acquired from standardized protocols show consistent macroscopic or microscopic anatomical structures, and these structures consist of composable/decomposable organs and tissues, but existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods do not appreciate such composable/decomposable structure attributes inherent to medical images. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel SSL approach called ACE to learn anatomically consistent embedding via composition and decomposition with two key branches: (1) global consistency, capturing discriminative macro-structures via extracting global features; (2) local consistency, learning fine-grained anatomical details from composable/decomposable patch features via corresponding matrix matching. Experimental results across 6 datasets 2 backbones, evaluated in few-shot learning, fine-tuning, and property analysis, show ACE's superior robustness, transferability, and clinical potential. The innovations of our ACE lie in grid-wise image cropping, leveraging the intrinsic properties of compositionality and decompositionality of medical images, bridging the semantic gap from high-level pathologies to low-level tissue anomalies, and providing a new SSL method for medical imaging.
Foundation models have revolutionized computer vision by achieving vastly superior performance across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining on extensive datasets. However, their application in surgical computer vision has been limited. This study addresses this gap by introducing SurgeNetXL, a novel surgical foundation model that sets a new benchmark in surgical computer vision. Trained on the largest reported surgical dataset to date, comprising over 4.7 million video frames, SurgeNetXL achieves consistent top-tier performance across six datasets spanning four surgical procedures and three tasks, including semantic segmentation, phase recognition, and critical view of safety (CVS) classification. Compared with the best-performing surgical foundation models, SurgeNetXL shows mean improvements of 2.4, 9.0, and 12.6 percent for semantic segmentation, phase recognition, and CVS classification, respectively. Additionally, SurgeNetXL outperforms the best-performing ImageNet-based variants by 14.4, 4.0, and 1.6 percent in the respective tasks. In addition to advancing model performance, this study provides key insights into scaling pretraining datasets, extending training durations, and optimizing model architectures specifically for surgical computer vision. These findings pave the way for improved generalizability and robustness in data-scarce scenarios, offering a comprehensive framework for future research in this domain. All models and a subset of the SurgeNetXL dataset, including over 2 million video frames, are publicly available at: https://github.com/TimJaspers0801/SurgeNet.
Semantic segmentation is essential for comprehending images, but the process necessitates a substantial amount of detailed annotations at the pixel level. Acquiring such annotations can be costly in the real-world. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation is a technique that uses virtual data with labels to train a model and adapts it to real data without labels. Some recent works use contrastive learning, which is a powerful method for self-supervised learning, to help with this technique. However, these works do not take into account the diversity of features within each class when using contrastive learning, which leads to errors in class prediction. We analyze the limitations of these works and propose a novel framework called Pseudo-label Guided Pixel Contrast (PGPC), which overcomes the disadvantages of previous methods. We also investigate how to use more information from target images without adding noise from pseudo-labels. We test our method on two standard UDA benchmarks and show that it outperforms existing methods. Specifically, we achieve relative improvements of 5.1% mIoU and 4.6% mIoU on the Grand Theft Auto V (GTA5) to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes tasks based on DAFormer, respectively. Furthermore, our approach can enhance the performance of other UDA approaches without increasing model complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/embar111/pgpc
Analyzing large-scale datasets, especially involving complex and high-dimensional data like images, is particularly challenging. While self-supervised learning (SSL) has proven effective for learning representations from unlabelled data, it typically focuses on flat, non-hierarchical structures, missing the multi-level relationships present in many real-world datasets. Hierarchical clustering (HC) can uncover these relationships by organizing data into a tree-like structure, but it often relies on rigid similarity metrics that struggle to capture the complexity of diverse data types. To address these we envision $\texttt{InfoHier}$, a framework that combines SSL with HC to jointly learn robust latent representations and hierarchical structures. This approach leverages SSL to provide adaptive representations, enhancing HC's ability to capture complex patterns. Simultaneously, it integrates HC loss to refine SSL training, resulting in representations that are more attuned to the underlying information hierarchy. $\texttt{InfoHier}$ has the potential to improve the expressiveness and performance of both clustering and representation learning, offering significant benefits for data analysis, management, and information retrieval.
Turn-taking is a fundamental aspect of conversation, but current Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems often rely on simplistic, silence-based models, leading to unnatural pauses and interruptions. This paper investigates, for the first time, the application of general turn-taking models, specifically TurnGPT and Voice Activity Projection (VAP), to improve conversational dynamics in HRI. These models are trained on human-human dialogue data using self-supervised learning objectives, without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning. We propose methods for using these models in tandem to predict when a robot should begin preparing responses, take turns, and handle potential interruptions. We evaluated the proposed system in a within-subject study against a traditional baseline system, using the Furhat robot with 39 adults in a conversational setting, in combination with a large language model for autonomous response generation. The results show that participants significantly prefer the proposed system, and it significantly reduces response delays and interruptions.
Unsupervised and self-supervised representation learning has become popular in recent years for learning useful features from unlabelled data. Representation learning has been mostly developed in the neural network literature, and other models for representation learning are surprisingly unexplored. In this work, we introduce and analyze several kernel-based representation learning approaches: Firstly, we define two kernel Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models using contrastive loss functions and secondly, a Kernel Autoencoder (AE) model based on the idea of embedding and reconstructing data. We argue that the classical representer theorems for supervised kernel machines are not always applicable for (self-supervised) representation learning, and present new representer theorems, which show that the representations learned by our kernel models can be expressed in terms of kernel matrices. We further derive generalisation error bounds for representation learning with kernel SSL and AE, and empirically evaluate the performance of these methods in both small data regimes as well as in comparison with neural network based models.
This paper presents EarthView, a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for self-supervision on remote sensing data, intended to enhance deep learning applications on Earth monitoring tasks. The dataset spans 15 tera pixels of global remote-sensing data, combining imagery from a diverse range of sources, including NEON, Sentinel, and a novel release of 1m spatial resolution data from Satellogic. Our dataset provides a wide spectrum of image data with varying resolutions, harnessed from different sensors and organized coherently into an accessible HuggingFace dataset in parquet format. This data spans five years, from 2017 to 2022. Accompanying the dataset, we introduce EarthMAE, a tailored Masked Autoencoder, developed to tackle the distinct challenges of remote sensing data. Trained in a self-supervised fashion, EarthMAE effectively processes different data modalities such as hyperspectral, multispectral, topographical data, segmentation maps, and temporal structure. This model helps us show that pre-training on Satellogic data improves performance on downstream tasks. While there is still a gap to fill in MAE for heterogeneous data, we regard this innovative combination of an expansive, diverse dataset and a versatile model adapted for self-supervised learning as a stride forward in deep learning for Earth monitoring.
Recent advancements have highlighted the efficacy of self-supervised learning (SSL) features in various speech-related tasks, providing lightweight and versatile multi-view speech representations. However, our study reveals that while SSL features expedite model convergence, they conflict with traditional spectral features like FBanks in terms of update directions. In response, we propose a novel generalized feature fusion framework grounded in conditional computation, featuring a gradient-sensitive gating network and a multi-stage dropout strategy. This framework mitigates feature conflicts and bolsters model robustness to multi-view input features. By integrating SSL and spectral features, our approach accelerates convergence and maintains performance on par with spectral models across multiple speech translation tasks on the MUSTC dataset.
This paper examines how linguistic similarity affects cross-lingual phonetic representation in speech processing for low-resource languages, emphasizing effective source language selection. Previous cross-lingual research has used various source languages to enhance performance for the target low-resource language without thorough consideration of selection. Our study stands out by providing an in-depth analysis of language selection, supported by a practical approach to assess phonetic proximity among multiple language families. We investigate how within-family similarity impacts performance in multilingual training, which aids in understanding language dynamics. We also evaluate the effect of using phonologically similar languages, regardless of family. For the phoneme recognition task, utilizing phonologically similar languages consistently achieves a relative improvement of 55.6% over monolingual training, even surpassing the performance of a large-scale self-supervised learning model. Multilingual training within the same language family demonstrates that higher phonological similarity enhances performance, while lower similarity results in degraded performance compared to monolingual training.
Neural View Synthesis (NVS), such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting, effectively creates photorealistic scenes from sparse viewpoints, typically evaluated by quality assessment methods like PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. However, these full-reference methods, which compare synthesized views to reference views, may not fully capture the perceptual quality of neurally synthesized scenes (NSS), particularly due to the limited availability of dense reference views. Furthermore, the challenges in acquiring human perceptual labels hinder the creation of extensive labeled datasets, risking model overfitting and reduced generalizability. To address these issues, we propose NVS-SQA, a NSS quality assessment method to learn no-reference quality representations through self-supervision without reliance on human labels. Traditional self-supervised learning predominantly relies on the "same instance, similar representation" assumption and extensive datasets. However, given that these conditions do not apply in NSS quality assessment, we employ heuristic cues and quality scores as learning objectives, along with a specialized contrastive pair preparation process to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning. The results show that NVS-SQA outperforms 17 no-reference methods by a large margin (i.e., on average 109.5% in SRCC, 98.6% in PLCC, and 91.5% in KRCC over the second best) and even exceeds 16 full-reference methods across all evaluation metrics (i.e., 22.9% in SRCC, 19.1% in PLCC, and 18.6% in KRCC over the second best).