In plain words: A tool learns which brain connections matter from a few labeled scans, then builds training examples that keep those key links intact instead of randomly scrambling them. On two psychiatric datasets it diagnosed more accurately than other pre-training approaches, especially when labels were scarce.
Abstract · Structure Matters: Brain Graph Augmentation via Learnable Edge Masking for Data-efficient Psychiatric Diagnosis
The limited availability of labeled brain network data makes it challenging to achieve accurate and interpretable psychiatric diagnoses. While self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising solution, existing methods often rely on augmentation strategies that can disrupt crucial structural semantics in brain graphs. To address this, we propose SAM-BG, a two-stage framework for learning brain graph representations with structural semantic preservation. In the pre-training stage, an edge masker is trained on a small labeled subset to capture key structural semantics. In the SSL stage, the extracted structural priors guide a structure-aware augmentation process, enabling the model to learn more semantically meaningful and robust representations. Experiments on two real-world psychiatric datasets demonstrate that SAM-BG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in small-labeled data settings, and uncovers clinically relevant connectivity patterns that enhance interpretability. Our code is available at https://github.com/mjliu99/SAM-BG.
Mujie Liu, Chenze Wang, Liping Chen, Nguyen Linh Dan Le, Niharika Tewari, Ting Dang, Jiangang Ma, Feng Xia
arXiv:2509.09744 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Sep 11, 2025 · updated Sep 24, 2025
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