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Yueming Wang

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16 papers

2 author rows

JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article

A Habenula Neural Biomarker Simultaneously Tracks Weekly and Daily Symptom Variations During Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy for Depression

Shi Liu
Yu Qi
Shaohua Hu
Ning Wei
Jianmin Zhang
Junming Zhu
Hemmings Wu
Hailan Hu

Objective: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) targeting the lateral habenula (LHb) is a promising therapy for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) but its clinical effect has been variable, which can be improved by adaptive DBS (aDBS) guided by a neural biomarker of depression symptoms. Existing neural biomarkers, however, cannot simultaneously track slow and fast symptom dynamics, do not sufficiently respond to stimulation parameters, and lack neurobiological interpretability, which hinder their use in developing aDBS. Methods: We conducted a study on one TRD patient who achieved remission following a 41-week LHb DBS treatment, during which we assessed slow symptom variations using weekly clinical ratings and fast variations using daily self-reports. We recorded daily LHb local field potentials (LFP) concurrently with the reports during the entire treatment process. We then used machine learning methods to identify a personalized depression neural biomarker from spectral and temporal LFP features. Results: The neural biomarker was identified from classification of high and low depression symptom states with a cross-validated accuracy of 0. 97. It further simultaneously tracked both weekly (slow) and daily (fast) depression symptom variation dynamics, achieving test data explained variance of 0. 74 and 0. 63 respectively and responded to DBS frequency alterations. Finally, it can be neurobiologically interpreted as indicating LHb excitatory and inhibitory balance changes during DBS treatment. Conclusion: By collecting and analyzing a unique personalized dataset of weekly and daily LFP recordings and symptom evaluations, we identified a high-performance neural biomarker for depression during LHb DBS. Significance: Our results hold promise to facilitate future aDBS for treating TRD.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Cauchy Diffusion: A Heavy-tailed Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Speech Synthesis

Qi Lian
Yu Qi
Yueming Wang

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have gained popularity in devising neural vocoders and obtained outstanding performance. However, existing DDPM-based neural vocoders struggle to handle the prosody diversities due to their susceptibility to mode-collapse issues confronted with imbalanced data. We introduced Cauchy Diffusion, a model incorporating the Cauchy noises to address this challenge. The heavy-tailed Cauchy distribution exhibits better resilience to imbalanced speech data, potentially improving prosody modeling. Our experiments on the LJSpeech and VCTK datasets demonstrate that Cauchy Diffusion achieved state-of-the-art speech synthesis performance. Compared to existing neural vocoders, our Cauchy Diffusion notably improved speech diversity while maintaining superior speech quality. Remarkably, Cauchy Diffusion surpassed neural vocoders based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are explicitly optimized to improve diversity.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CRRL: Learning Channel-invariant Neural Representations for High-performance Cross-day Decoding

Xianhan Tan
Binli Luo
Yu Qi
Yueming Wang

Brain-computer interfaces have shown great potential in motor and speech rehabilitation, but still suffer from low performance stability across days, mostly due to the instabilities in neural signals. These instabilities, partially caused by neuron deaths and electrode shifts, leading to channel-level variabilities among different recording days. Previous studies mostly focused on aligning multi-day neural signals of onto a low-dimensional latent manifold to reduce the variabilities, while faced with difficulties when neural signals exhibit significant drift. Here, we propose to learn a channel-level invariant neural representation to address the variabilities in channels across days. It contains a channel-rearrangement module to learn stable representations against electrode shifts, and a channel reconstruction module to handle the missing neurons. The proposed method achieved the state-of-the-art performance with cross-day decoding tasks over two months, on multiple benchmark BCI datasets. The proposed approach showed good generalization ability that can be incorporated to different neural networks.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DeCorrNet: Enhancing Neural Decoding Performance by Eliminating Correlations in Noise

Xianhan Tan
Yu Qi
Yueming Wang

Neural decoding, which transforms neural signals into motor commands, plays a key role in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Existing neural decoding approaches mainly rely on the assumption of independent noises, which could perform poorly in case the assumption is invalid. However, correlations in noises have been commonly observed in neural signals. Specifically, noise in different neural channels can be similar or highly related, which could degrade the performance of those neural decoders. To tackle this problem, we propose the DeCorrNet, which explicitly removes noise correlation in neural decoding. DeCorrNet could incorporate diverse neural decoders as an ensemble module to enhance the neural decoding performance. Experiments with benchmark BCI datasets demonstrated the superiority of DeCorrNet and achieved state-of-the-art results.

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YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Dynamic and low-dimensional modeling of brain functional connectivity on Riemannian manifolds

Mingyu Wang
Yueming Wang
Yuxiao Yang

Modeling brain functional connectivity (FC) is key in investigating brain functions and dysfunctions. FC is typically quantified by symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices that are located on a Riemannian manifold rather than the regular Euclidean space, whose modeling faces three challenges. First, FC can be time-varying and the temporal dynamics of FC matrix time-series need to be modeled within the constraint of the SPD Riemannian manifold geometry, which remains elusive. Second, the FC matrix time-series exhibits considerable stochasticity, whose probability distribution is difficult to model on the Riemannian manifold. Third, FC matrices are high-dimensional and dimensionality reduction methods for SPD matrix time-series are still lacking. Here, we develop a Riemannian state-space modeling framework to simultaneously address the challenges. First, we construct a new Riemannian state-space model (RSSM) to define a hidden SPD matrix state to achieve dynamic, stochastic, and low-dimensional modeling of FC matrix time-series on the SPD Riemannian manifold. Second, we develop a new Riemannian Particle Filter (RPF) algorithm to estimate the hidden low-dimensional SPD matrix state and predict the FC matrix time-series. Third, we develop a new Riemannian Expectation Maximization (REM) algorithm to fit the RSSM parameters. We evaluate the proposed RSSM, RPF, and REM using simulation and real-world EEG datasets, demonstrating that the RSSM enables accurate prediction of the EEG FC time-series and classification of emotional states, outperforming traditional Euclidean methods. Our results have implications for modeling brain FC on the SPD Riemannian manifold to study various brain functions and dysfunctions.

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JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article

Dynamic Instance-Level Graph Learning Network of Intracranial Electroencephalography Signals for Epileptic Seizure Prediction

Qi Lian
Yueming Wang
Yu Qi

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is emerging as a valuable tool for diagnosing and treating epilepsy, with deep learning-based feature extraction methods demonstrating remarkable progress in BCI-aided systems. However, accurately identifying causal relationships in temporal dynamics of epileptic intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) signals remains a challenge. This paper proposes a Dynamic Instance-level Graph Learning Network (DIGLN) for seizure prediction using iEEG signals. The DIGLN comprises two core components: a grouped temporal neural network that extracts node features and a graph structure learning method to capture the causality from intra-channel to inter-channel. Furthermore, we propose a graphical interactive writeback technique to enable DIGLN to capture the causality from inter-channel to intra-channel. Consequently, our DIGLN enables patient-specific dynamic instance-level graph learning, facilitating the modelling of evolving signals and functional connectivities through end-to-end data-driven learning. Experimental results on the Freiburg iEEG dataset demonstrate the superior performance of DIGLN, surpassing other deep learning-based seizure prediction methods. Visualization results further confirm DIGLN’s capability to learn interpretable and diverse connections.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Self-Attentive Spatio-Temporal Calibration for Precise Intermediate Layer Matching in ANN-to-SNN Distillation

Di Hong
Yueming Wang

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising for low-power computation due to their event-driven mechanism but often suffer from lower accuracy compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). ANN-to-SNN knowledge distillation can improve SNN performance, but previous methods either focus solely on label information, missing valuable intermediate layer features, or use a layer-wise approach that neglects spatial and temporal semantic inconsistencies, leading to performance degradation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method called self-attentive spatio-temporal calibration (SASTC). SASTC uses self-attention to identify semantically aligned layer pairs between ANN and SNN, both spatially and temporally. This enables the autonomous transfer of relevant semantic information. Extensive experiments show that SASTC outperforms existing methods, effectively solving the mismatching problem. Superior accuracy results include 95.12% on CIFAR-10, 79.40% on CIFAR-100 with 2 time steps, and 68.69% on ImageNet with 4 time steps for static datasets, and 97.92% on DVS-Gesture and 83.60% on DVS-CIFAR10 for neuromorphic datasets. This marks the first time SNNs have outperformed ANNs on both CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, shedding the new light on the potential applications of SNNs.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Actions Speak Louder than Words: Trillion-Parameter Sequential Transducers for Generative Recommendations

Jiaqi Zhai
Lucy Liao
Xing Liu
Yueming Wang
Rui Li
Xuan Cao
Leon Gao
Zhaojie Gong

Large-scale recommendation systems are characterized by their reliance on high cardinality, heterogeneous features and the need to handle tens of billions of user actions on a daily basis. Despite being trained on huge volume of data with thousands of features, most Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) in industry fail to scale with compute. Inspired by success achieved by Transformers in language and vision domains, we revisit fundamental design choices in recommendation systems. We reformulate recommendation problems as sequential transduction tasks within a generative modeling framework (“Generative Recommenders”), and propose a new architecture, HSTU, designed for high cardinality, non-stationary streaming recommendation data. HSTU outperforms baselines over synthetic and public datasets by up to 65. 8% in NDCG, and is 5. 3x to 15. 2x faster than FlashAttention2-based Transformers on 8192 length sequences. HSTU-based Generative Recommenders, with 1. 5 trillion parameters, improve metrics in online A/B tests by 12. 4% and have been deployed on multiple surfaces of a large internet platform with billions of users. More importantly, the model quality of Generative Recommenders empirically scales as a power-law of training compute across three orders of magnitude, up to GPT-3/LLaMa-2 scale, which reduces carbon footprint needed for future model developments, and further paves the way for the first foundation models in recommendations.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Bridging the Semantic Latent Space between Brain and Machine: Similarity Is All You Need

Jiaxuan Chen
Yu Qi
Yueming Wang
Gang Pan

How our brain encodes complex concepts has been a longstanding mystery in neuroscience. The answer to this problem can lead to new understandings about how the brain retrieves information in large-scale data with high efficiency and robustness. Neuroscience studies suggest the brain represents concepts in a locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) strategy, i.e., similar concepts will be represented by similar responses. This finding has inspired the design of similarity-based algorithms, especially in contrastive learning. Here, we hypothesize that the brain and large neural network models, both using similarity-based learning rules, could contain a similar semantic embedding space. To verify that, this paper proposes a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) semantic learning network named BrainSem, aimed at seeking a joint semantic latent space that bridges the brain and a Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Given that our perception is inherently cross-modal, we introduce a fuzzy (one-to-many) matching loss function to encourage the models to extract high-level semantic components from neural signals. Our results claimed that using only a small set of fMRI recordings for semantic space alignment, we could obtain shared embedding valid for unseen categories out of the training set, which provided potential evidence for the semantic representation similarity between the brain and large neural networks. In a zero-shot classification task, our BrainSem achieves an 11.6% improvement over the state-of-the-art.

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YNIMG Journal 2023 Journal Article

Design and application of a multimodality-compatible 1Tx/6Rx RF coil for monkey brain MRI at 7T

Shuxian Qu
Sunhang Shi
Zhiyan Quan
Yang Gao
Minmin Wang
Yueming Wang
Gang Pan
Hsin-Yi Lai

OBJECTIVE: Blood-oxygen-level-dependent functional MRI allows to investigte neural activities and connectivity. While the non-human primate plays an essential role in neuroscience research, multimodal methods combining functional MRI with other neuroimaging and neuromodulation enable us to understand the brain network at multiple scales. APPROACH: In this study, a tight-fitting helmet-shape receive array with a single transmit loop for anesthetized macaque brain MRI at 7T was fabricated with four openings constructed in the coil housing to accommodate multimodal devices, and the coil performance was quantitatively evaluated and compared to a commercial knee coil. In addition, experiments over three macaques with infrared neural stimulation (INS), focused ultrasound stimulation (FUS), and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) were conducted. MAIN RESULTS: The RF coil showed higher transmit efficiency, comparable homogeneity, improved SNR and enlarged signal coverage over the macaque brain. Infrared neural stimulation was applied to the amygdala in deep brain region, and activations in stimulation sites and connected sites were detected, with the connectivity consistent with anatomical information. Focused ultrasound stimulation was applied to the left visual cortex, and activations were acquired along the ultrasound traveling path, with all time course curves consistent with pre-designed paradigms. The existence of transcranial direct current stimulation electrodes brought no interference to the RF system, as evidenced through high-resolution MPRAGE structure images. SIGNIFICANCE: This pilot study reveals the feasibility for brain investigation at multiple spatiotemporal scales, which may advance our understanding in dynamic brain networks.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

ESL-SNNs: An Evolutionary Structure Learning Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks

Jiangrong Shen
Qi Xu
Jian K. Liu
Yueming Wang
Gang Pan
Huajin Tang

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have manifested remarkable advantages in power consumption and event-driven property during the inference process. To take full advantage of low power consumption and improve the efficiency of these models further, the pruning methods have been explored to find sparse SNNs without redundancy connections after training. However, parameter redundancy still hinders the efficiency of SNNs during training. In the human brain, the rewiring process of neural networks is highly dynamic, while synaptic connections maintain relatively sparse during brain development. Inspired by this, here we propose an efficient evolutionary structure learning (ESL) framework for SNNs, named ESL-SNNs, to implement the sparse SNN training from scratch. The pruning and regeneration of synaptic connections in SNNs evolve dynamically during learning, yet keep the structural sparsity at a certain level. As a result, the ESL-SNNs can search for optimal sparse connectivity by exploring all possible parameters across time. Our experiments show that the proposed ESL-SNNs framework is able to learn SNNs with sparse structures effectively while reducing the limited accuracy. The ESL-SNNs achieve merely 0.28% accuracy loss with 10% connection density on the DVS-Cifar10 dataset. Our work presents a brand-new approach for sparse training of SNNs from scratch with biologically plausible evolutionary mechanisms, closing the gap in the expressibility between sparse training and dense training. Hence, it has great potential for SNN lightweight training and inference with low power consumption and small memory usage.

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TIST Journal 2022 Journal Article

Jointly Optimizing Expressional and Residual Models for 3D Facial Expression Removal

Qian Zheng
Yueming Wang
Zhenfang Hu
Xiaobo Zhang
Zhaohui Wu
Gang Pan

This article proposes a facial expression removal method to recover a 3D neutral face from a single 3D expressional or non-neutral face. We treat a 3D non-neutral face as the sum of its neutral one and the residual. This can be satisfied if the correspondence between 3D vertices of expressional faces and those of neutral faces is established. We propose a non-rigid deformation method to establish the correspondence between 3D faces. Then, according to algebra inequality, the minimization of a neutral face model can be replaced by the minimization of its upper bound, i.e., the errors of an expressional face model and a residual model. Thus, we co-optimize the representation errors of the latter two models and build the relationship between the representation coefficients of the two models. Given an expressional face as the input, its corresponding neutral face can be inferred by the associative representation parameters in these two models. In the testing stage, we use an iterative joint fitting scheme to obtain a more accurate recovery. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our method. The results show that our method obtains considerably better performance than existing methods in terms of average root mean square errors and recognition rates, and also better visual effects.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Tracking Functional Changes in Nonstationary Signals with Evolutionary Ensemble Bayesian Model for Robust Neural Decoding

Xinyun Zhu
Yu Qi
Gang Pan
Yueming Wang

Neural signals are typical nonstationary data where the functional mapping between neural activities and the intentions (such as the velocity of movements) can occasionally change. Existing studies mostly use a fixed neural decoder, thus suffering from an unstable performance given neural functional changes. We propose a novel evolutionary ensemble framework (EvoEnsemble) to dynamically cope with changes in neural signals by evolving the decoder model accordingly. EvoEnsemble integrates evolutionary computation algorithms in a Bayesian framework where the fitness of models can be sequentially computed with their likelihoods according to the incoming data at each time slot, which enables online tracking of time-varying functions. Two strategies of evolve-at-changes and history-model-archive are designed to further improve efficiency and stability. Experiments with simulations and neural signals demonstrate that EvoEnsemble can track the changes in functions effectively thus improving the accuracy and robustness of neural decoding. The improvement is most significant in neural signals with functional changes.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Dynamic Ensemble Modeling Approach to Nonstationary Neural Decoding in Brain-Computer Interfaces

Yu Qi
Bin Liu
Yueming Wang
Gang Pan

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have enabled prosthetic device control by decoding motor movements from neural activities. Neural signals recorded from cortex exhibit nonstationary property due to abrupt noises and neuroplastic changes in brain activities during motor control. Current state-of-the-art neural signal decoders such as Kalman filter assume fixed relationship between neural activities and motor movements, thus will fail if this assumption is not satisfied. We propose a dynamic ensemble modeling (DyEnsemble) approach that is capable of adapting to changes in neural signals by employing a proper combination of decoding functions. The DyEnsemble method firstly learns a set of diverse candidate models. Then, it dynamically selects and combines these models online according to Bayesian updating mechanism. Our method can mitigate the effect of noises and cope with different task behaviors by automatic model switching, thus gives more accurate predictions. Experiments with neural data demonstrate that the DyEnsemble method outperforms Kalman filters remarkably, and its advantage is more obvious with noisy signals.

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IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Jointly Learning Network Connections and Link Weights in Spiking Neural Networks

Yu Qi
Jiangrong Shen
Yueming Wang
Huajin Tang
Hang Yu
Zhaohui Wu
Gang Pan

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are considered to be biologically plausible and power-efficient on neuromorphic hardware. However, unlike the brain mechanisms, most existing SNN algorithms have fixed network topologies and connection relationships. This paper proposes a method to jointly learn network connections and link weights simultaneously. The connection structures are optimized by the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule with timing information, and the link weights are optimized by a supervised algorithm. The connection structures and the weights are learned alternately until a termination condition is satisfied. Experiments are carried out using four benchmark datasets. Our approach outperforms classical learning methods such as STDP, Tempotron, SpikeProp, and a state-of-the-art supervised algorithm. In addition, the learned structures effectively reduce the number of connections by about 24%, thus facilitate the computational efficiency of the network.

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IS Journal 2015 Journal Article

A Cauchy-Based State-Space Model for Seizure Detection in EEG Monitoring Systems

Yueming Wang
Yu Qi
Junming Zhu
Jianmin Zhang
Yiwen Wang
Gang Pan
Xiaoxiang Zheng
Zhaohui Wu

This article proposes a state-space model with Cauchy observation noise (SSMC) to detect seizure onset in a long-term EEG monitoring system. Facing the challenge of high false detection rates (FDRs) in many existing methods caused by impulsive EOG/EMG artifacts, the SSMC uses a nonlinear state-space model to encode the gradual changes of epileptic seizure signals and reject abrupt changes brought by artifacts. The Cauchy distribution is proposed to model impulsive observation noises because this heavy-tailed distribution is better at capturing abrupt changes in noise than Gaussian, thus reducing false alarms. Experiments are carried out on a dataset collected from an EEG-monitoring brain-machine interface system that contains 10 patients and 367 hours of EEG data. The authors' method achieves a high sensitivity of 100 percent with a low FDR of 0. 08 per hour and a median time delay of 8. 10 seconds, demonstrating the method's effectiveness.

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