Guest Editorial Introduction to the Special Section on Weakly-Supervised Deep Learning and Its Applications

Researchers in biomedical engineering are increasingly turning to weakly-supervised deep learning (WSDL) techniques [1] to tackle challenges in biomedical data analysis, which often involves noisy, limited, or imprecise expert annotations [2]. WSDL methods have emerged as a solution to alleviate the manual annotation burden for structured biomedical data like signals, images, and videos [3] while enabling deep neural network models to learn from larger-scale datasets at a reduced annotation cost. With the proliferation of advanced deep learning techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), graph neural networks (GNNs) [4], vision transformers (ViTs) [5], and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models [6], research endeavors are focused on solving WSDL problems and applying these techniques to various biomedical analysis tasks.