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Creators/Authors contains: "Zhang, Aiying"

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  1. Functional Magnetic Resonance Image (fMRI) is commonly employed to study human brain activity, since it offers insight into the relationship between functional fluctuations and human behavior. To enhance analysis and comprehension of brain activity, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to the analysis of functional connectivities (FC) derived from fMRI data, due to their ability to capture the synergistic interactions among brain regions. However, in the human brain, performing complex tasks typically involves the activation of certain pathways, which could be represented as paths across graphs. As such, conventional GNNs struggle to learn from these pathways due to the long-range dependencies of multiple pathways. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework BrainMAP to learn multiple pathways in brain networks. BrainMAP leverages sequential models to identify long-range correlations among sequentialized brain regions and incorporates an aggregation module based on Mixture of Experts (MoE) to learn from multiple pathways. Our comprehensive experiments highlight BrainMAP's superior performance. Furthermore, our framework enables explanatory analyses of crucial brain regions involved in tasks. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 11, 2026
  2. This article presents a novel method for learning time‐varying dynamic Bayesian networks. The proposed method breaks down the dynamic Bayesian network learning problem into a sequence of regression inference problems and tackles each problem using the Markov neighborhood regression technique. Notably, the method demonstrates scalability concerning data dimensionality, accommodates time‐varying network structure, and naturally handles multi‐subject data. The proposed method exhibits consistency and offers superior performance compared to existing methods in terms of estimation accuracy and computational efficiency, as supported by extensive numerical experiments. To showcase its effectiveness, we apply the proposed method to an fMRI study investigating the effective connectivity among various regions of interest (ROIs) during an emotion‐processing task. Our findings reveal the pivotal role of the subcortical‐cerebellum in emotion processing. 
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  3. Abstract Setaria italica(foxtail millet), a founder crop of East Asian agriculture, is a model plant for C4 photosynthesis and developing approaches to adaptive breeding across multiple climates. Here we established theSetariapan-genome by assembling 110 representative genomes from a worldwide collection. The pan-genome is composed of 73,528 gene families, of which 23.8%, 42.9%, 29.4% and 3.9% are core, soft core, dispensable and private genes, respectively; 202,884 nonredundant structural variants were also detected. The characterization of pan-genomic variants suggests their importance during foxtail millet domestication and improvement, as exemplified by the identification of the yield geneSiGW3, where a 366-bp presence/absence promoter variant accompanies gene expression variation. We developed a graph-based genome and performed large-scale genetic studies for 68 traits across 13 environments, identifying potential genes for millet improvement at different geographic sites. These can be used in marker-assisted breeding, genomic selection and genome editing to accelerate crop improvement under different climatic conditions. 
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