The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

文化遗产的理解和保存对于社会来说是一个重要的问题，因为它代表了其身份的基本方面。绘画代表了文化遗产的重要组成部分，并且是不断研究的主题。但是，观众认为绘画与所谓的HVS（人类视觉系统）行为严格相关。本文重点介绍了一定数量绘画的视觉体验期间观众的眼动分析。在进一步的详细信息中，我们引入了一种新的方法来预测人类的视觉关注，这影响了人类的几种认知功能，包括对场景的基本理解，然后将其扩展到绘画图像。拟议的新建筑摄入图像并返回扫描路径，这是一系列积分，具有引起观众注意力的很有可能性。我们使用FCNN（完全卷积的神经网络），其中利用了可区分的渠道选择和软弧度模块。我们还将可学习的高斯分布纳入网络瓶颈上，以模拟自然场景图像中的视觉注意力过程偏见。此外，为了减少不同域之间的变化影响（即自然图像，绘画），我们敦促模型使用梯度反转分类器从其他域中学习无监督的一般特征。在准确性和效率方面，我们的模型获得的结果优于现有的最先进的结果。

可以使用X射线自由电子激光器的强脉冲和短脉冲直接通过单次相干衍射成像直接观察到自由飞行中孤立的纳米样品的结构和动力学。广角散射图像甚至编码样品的三维形态信息，但是该信息的检索仍然是一个挑战。到目前为止，只有通过与高度约束模型拟合，需要对单镜头实现有效的三维形态重建，这需要有关可能的几何形状的先验知识。在这里，我们提出了一种更通用的成像方法。依赖于允许凸多面体描述的任何样品形态的模型，我们从单个银纳米颗粒中重建广角衍射模式。除了具有高对称性的已知结构动机外，我们还检索了以前无法访问的不完美形状和聚集物。我们的结果为单个纳米颗粒的真实3D结构确定以及最终的超快纳米级动力学的3D电影开辟了新的途径。

多级分类问题的广义线性模型是现代机器学习任务的基本构建块之一。在本手稿中，我们通过具有任何凸损耗和正规化的经验风险最小化（ERM）来描述与通用手段和协方士的k $高斯的混合。特别是，我们证明了表征ERM估计的精确渐近剂，以高维度，在文献中扩展了关于高斯混合分类的几个先前结果。我们举例说明我们在统计学习中的两个兴趣任务中的两个任务：a）与稀疏手段的混合物进行分类，我们研究了$ \ ell_2 $的$ \ ell_1 $罚款的效率; b）Max-Margin多级分类，在那里我们在$ k> 2 $的多级逻辑最大似然估计器上表征了相位过渡。最后，我们讨论了我们的理论如何超出合成数据的范围，显示在不同的情况下，高斯混合在真实数据集中密切地捕获了分类任务的学习曲线。

在2015年和2019年之间，地平线的成员2020年资助的创新培训网络名为“Amva4newphysics”，研究了高能量物理问题的先进多变量分析方法和统计学习工具的定制和应用，并开发了完全新的。其中许多方法已成功地用于提高Cern大型Hadron撞机的地图集和CMS实验所执行的数据分析的敏感性;其他几个人，仍然在测试阶段，承诺进一步提高基本物理参数测量的精确度以及新现象的搜索范围。在本文中，在研究和开发的那些中，最相关的新工具以及对其性能的评估。

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Artificial neural networks can learn complex, salient data features to achieve a given task. On the opposite end of the spectrum, mathematically grounded methods such as topological data analysis allow users to design analysis pipelines fully aware of data constraints and symmetries. We introduce a class of persistence-based neural network layers. Persistence-based layers allow the users to easily inject knowledge about symmetries (equivariance) respected by the data, are equipped with learnable weights, and can be composed with state-of-the-art neural architectures.

In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward signal, and subject to this constraint also maximises the second reward signal, and so on. We present a family of both action-value and policy gradient algorithms that can be used to solve such problems, and prove that they converge to policies that are lexicographically optimal. We evaluate the scalability and performance of these algorithms empirically, demonstrating their practical applicability. As a more specific application, we show how our algorithms can be used to impose safety constraints on the behaviour of an agent, and compare their performance in this context with that of other constrained reinforcement learning algorithms.

Neural style transfer is a deep learning technique that produces an unprecedentedly rich style transfer from a style image to a content image and is particularly impressive when it comes to transferring style from a painting to an image. It was originally achieved by solving an optimization problem to match the global style statistics of the style image while preserving the local geometric features of the content image. The two main drawbacks of this original approach is that it is computationally expensive and that the resolution of the output images is limited by high GPU memory requirements. Many solutions have been proposed to both accelerate neural style transfer and increase its resolution, but they all compromise the quality of the produced images. Indeed, transferring the style of a painting is a complex task involving features at different scales, from the color palette and compositional style to the fine brushstrokes and texture of the canvas. This paper provides a solution to solve the original global optimization for ultra-high resolution images, enabling multiscale style transfer at unprecedented image sizes. This is achieved by spatially localizing the computation of each forward and backward passes through the VGG network. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons show that our method produces a style transfer of unmatched quality for such high resolution painting styles.