Advances in Artificial Intelligence for Perception Augmentation and Reasoning

Dear Colleagues,

The purpose of this Special Issue is to highlight the recent developments in applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in perception enhancement, activity recognition, natural language processing, intelligent reasoning, and so on. Over the past six decades, AI has been tremendously boosted by new algorithm designs, exponentially increased computing power, and an immense volume of calculation materials (data). At a turning point from "unusable" to "usable", the influence of AI on technological innovations is becoming more critical to social welfare.

The restoration and enhancement techniques for perception are active research areas in AI, and play essential roles in helping us to perceive and understand the world, including human activity recognition, surgical medicine, and remote sensing analysis.

Besides perception augmentation, intelligent reasoning by AI is another invaluable and promising direction. For instance, semantic reasoning and visual reasoning allow machines to function more like human intelligence when performing a reasoning task. This improvement can improve the experience of human–computer interaction and aid the decision-making process. In recent decades, intelligent reasoning has been widely used to address the significant technical issues involved in implementing AI in real-world applications, such as intelligent medical care, environmental analysis and prediction, autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, text classification, recommender systems, machine translation, and analog dialogues.

Success brought by AI can be found in several hot fields. For instance, a series of reusable models, such as deep learning modules and neural networks, have also been proposed to address computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, an enormous number of tasks involving multiple modalities still require exploration compared to those involving a single modality. For example, integrations between computer vision and natural language processing need to be further explored in cross-modality applications, such as visual question and answer (VQA), visual reasoning, and video translation; these tasks allow the processing of large-scale visual + text and even visual + text + voice-based datasets for different tasks. In addition, multi-source performance demands appropriate feature fusion and high-level and abstract forms of knowledge representation, which is believed to help AI achieve better results. After all, the primary goal of AI research is to enable machines to perform complex tasks that would typically require human intelligence.

This Special Issue welcomes new research works that show new theories, new methods, unique application strategies, and studies of AI in different fields. Potential topics in this collection include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Visual question and answer (VQA), visual reasoning;
• Semantic reasoning, semantic representation, knowledge base;
• Characterization inference, natural language reasoning;
• Meta-learning, transfer learning, less sample learning (small sample learning);
• Geospatial artificial intelligence, geospatial AI (GeoAI);
• AI in geostatistics, remote sensing, spatio-temporal simulation;
• AI for geospatial data acquisition, analysis, planning, and prediction;
• Artificial intelligence for augmented perception;
• Visual augmentation and reconstruction, 3d reconstruction of deformable surfaces;
• Medical image (e.g., CT, MRI, ultrasound) processing;
• Machine translation, text sentiment analysis, text classification;
• Recommendation algorithms, conversation systems;
• Video-based activity recognition, sensor-based activity recognition;
• Contrastive learning, representation learning, reinforcement learning;
• Haptics in human–machine interaction;
• Multimodal sensor-based analysis of manipulation skills;
• Theories, mechanisms, methods, and applications of artificial intelligence.

Prof. Dr. Wenfeng Zheng
Dr. Chao Liu
Prof. Dr. Bo Yang
Dr. Yichao Yang
Guest Editors

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