In recent years, the appearance of the broad learning system (BLS) is poised to revolutionize conventional artificial intelligence methods. It represents a step toward building more efficient and effective machine-learning methods that can be extended to a broader range of necessary research fields. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the BLS in data mining and neural networks for the first time, focusing on summarizing various BLS methods from the aspects of its algorithms, theories, applications, and future open research questions. First, we introduce the basic pattern of BLS manifestation, the universal approximation capability, and essence from the theoretical perspective. Furthermore, we focus on BLS’s various improvements based on the current state of the theoretical research, which further improves its flexibility, stability, and accuracy under general or specific conditions, including classification, regression, semisupervised, and unsupervised tasks. Due to its remarkable efficiency, impressive generalization performance, and easy extendibility, BLS has been applied in different domains. Next, we illustrate BLS’s practical advances, such as computer vision, biomedical engineering, control, and natural language processing. Finally, the future open research problems and promising directions for BLSs are pointed out.

Sentiment analysis uses a series of automated cognitive methods to determine the author’s or speaker’s attitudes toward an expressed object or text’s overall emotional tendencies. In recent years, the growing scale of opinionated text from social networks has brought significant challenges to humans’ sentimental tendency mining. The pretrained language model designed to learn contextual representation achieves better performance than traditional learning word vectors. However, the existing two basic approaches for applying pretrained language models to downstream tasks, feature-based and fine-tuning methods, are usually considered separately. What is more, different sentiment analysis tasks cannot be handled by the single task-specific contextual representation. In light of these pros and cons, we strive to propose a broad multitask transformer network (BMT-Net) to address these problems. BMT-Net takes advantage of both feature-based and fine-tuning methods. It was designed to explore the high-level information of robust and contextual representation. Primarily, our proposed structure can make the learned representations universal across tasks via multitask transformers. In addition, BMT-Net can roundly learn the robust contextual representation utilized by the broad learning system due to its powerful capacity to search for suitable features in deep and broad ways. The experiments were conducted on two popular datasets of binary Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST-2) and SemEval Sentiment Analysis in Twitter (Twitter). Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the improved representation with both deep and broad ways is shown to achieve a better $F1$ -score of 0.778 in Twitter and accuracy of 94.0% in the SST-2 dataset, respectively. These experimental results demonstrate the abilities of recognition in sentiment analysis and highlight the significance of previously overlooked design decisions about searching contextual features in deep and broad spaces.

With increasing social globalization, interaction between people from different cultures has become more frequent. However, there are significant differences in the expression and comprehension of emotions across cultures. Therefore, developing computational models that can accurately identify emotions among different cultures has become a significant research problem. This study aims to investigate the similarities and differences in emotion cognition processes in different cultural groups by employing a fusion of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movement (EM) signals. Specifically, an effective adaptive region selection method is proposed to investigate the most emotion-related activated brain regions in different groups. By selecting these commonly activated regions, we can eliminate redundant features and facilitate the development of portable acquisition devices. Subsequently, the multiple stacked broad learning system (MSBLS) is designed to explore the complementary information of EEG and EM features and the effective emotional information still contained in the residual value. The intracultural subject-dependent (ICSD), intracultural subject-independent, and cross-cultural subject-independent (CCSI) experiments have been conducted on the SEED-CHN, SEED-GER, and SEED-FRA datasets. Extensive experiments manifest that MSBLS achieves superior performance compared with current state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we discover that some brain regions (the anterior frontal, temporal, and middle parieto-occipital lobes) and Gamma frequency bands show greater activation during emotion cognition in diverse cultural groups.

Although multimodal physiological data from the central and peripheral nervous systems can objectively respond to human emotional states, the individual differences caused by non-stationary and low signal-to-noise properties bring several challenges to cross-subject emotion recognition tasks. Many previous studies usually focused on learning high correlation information between different modalities, which easily leads to incomplete descriptions of different physiological signals and difficulties in aligning critical emotional information. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel multimodal emotion recognition model for improving the generalization performance to unseen target domain subjects, termed Completeness-induced Adaptative Broad Learning (CiABL). The proposed CiABL can gradely explore the completeness modality representation that encompasses both modality-relevant and modality-independent information, avoiding the loss of performance due to spurious correlations from different modalities. Subsequently, a well-designed weighted representation distribution alignment mechanism of CiABL can appropriately align the marginal and conditional distributions to reduce the influences of individual differences greatly. Extensive experiments on the SEED and SEED-FRA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed CiABL, which outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. In addition, CiABL can precisely quantify the importance of global features to properly explain the modality contribution and averaged activation patterns of the brain under cross-subject emotion recognition tasks.

Recognizing novel sub-categories with scarce samples is an essential and challenging research topic in computer vision. Existing literature addresses this challenge by employing local-based representation approaches, which may not sufficiently facilitate meaningful object-specific semantic understanding, leading to a reliance on apparent background correlations. Moreover, they primarily rely on high-dimensional local descriptors to construct complex embedding space, potentially limiting the generalization. To address the above challenges, this article proposes a novel model, Robust Saliency-aware Distillation (RSaD), for few-shot fine-grained visual recognition. RSaD introduces additional saliency-aware supervision via saliency detection to guide the model toward focusing on the intrinsic discriminative regions. Specifically, RSaD utilizes the saliency detection model to emphasize the critical regions of each sub-category, providing additional object-specific information for fine-grained prediction. RSaD transfers such information with two symmetric branches in a mutual learning paradigm. Furthermore, RSaD exploits inter-regional relationships to enhance the informativeness of the representation and subsequently summarize the highlighted details into contextual embeddings to facilitate the effective transfer, enabling quick generalization to novel sub-categories. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated on three widely used benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance.