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.

Artificial intelligence methods including deep neural networks (DNN) can provide rapid molecular classification of tumors from routine histology with accuracy that matches or exceeds human pathologists. Discerning how neural networks make their predictions remains a significant challenge, but explainability tools help provide insights into what models have learned when corresponding histologic features are poorly defined. Here, we present a method for improving explainability of DNN models using synthetic histology generated by a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). We show that cGANs generate high-quality synthetic histology images that can be leveraged for explaining DNN models trained to classify molecularly-subtyped tumors, exposing histologic features associated with molecular state. Fine-tuning synthetic histology through class and layer blending illustrates nuanced morphologic differences between tumor subtypes. Finally, we demonstrate the use of synthetic histology for augmenting pathologist-in-training education, showing that these intuitive visualizations can reinforce and improve understanding of histologic manifestations of tumor biology.

Text-based games present a unique class of sequential decision making problem in which agents interact with a partially observable, simulated environment via actions and observations conveyed through natural language. Such observations typically include instructions that, in a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, can directly or indirectly guide a player towards completing reward-worthy tasks. In this work, we study the ability of RL agents to follow such instructions. We conduct experiments that show that the performance of state-of-the-art text-based game agents is largely unaffected by the presence or absence of such instructions, and that these agents are typically unable to execute tasks to completion. To further study and address the task of instruction following, we equip RL agents with an internal structured representation of natural language instructions in the form of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), a formal language that is increasingly used for temporally extended reward specification in RL. Our framework both supports and highlights the benefit of understanding the temporal semantics of instructions and in measuring progress towards achievement of such a temporally extended behaviour. Experiments with 500+ games in TextWorld demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a tremendous impact across most areas of science. Applications of AI in healthcare have the potential to improve our ability to detect, diagnose, prognose, and intervene on human disease. For AI models to be used clinically, they need to be made safe, reproducible and robust, and the underlying software framework must be aware of the particularities (e.g. geometry, physiology, physics) of medical data being processed. This work introduces MONAI, a freely available, community-supported, and consortium-led PyTorch-based framework for deep learning in healthcare. MONAI extends PyTorch to support medical data, with a particular focus on imaging, and provide purpose-specific AI model architectures, transformations and utilities that streamline the development and deployment of medical AI models. MONAI follows best practices for software-development, providing an easy-to-use, robust, well-documented, and well-tested software framework. MONAI preserves the simple, additive, and compositional approach of its underlying PyTorch libraries. MONAI is being used by and receiving contributions from research, clinical and industrial teams from around the world, who are pursuing applications spanning nearly every aspect of healthcare.

与伯特（Bert）等语言模型相比，已证明知识增强语言表示的预培训模型在知识基础构建任务（即〜关系提取）中更有效。这些知识增强的语言模型将知识纳入预训练中，以生成实体或关系的表示。但是，现有方法通常用单独的嵌入表示每个实体。结果，这些方法难以代表播出的实体和大量参数，在其基础代币模型之上（即〜变压器），必须使用，并且可以处理的实体数量为由于内存限制，实践限制。此外，现有模型仍然难以同时代表实体和关系。为了解决这些问题，我们提出了一个新的预培训模型，该模型分别从图书中学习实体和关系的表示形式，并分别在文本中跨越跨度。通过使用SPAN模块有效地编码跨度，我们的模型可以代表实体及其关系，但所需的参数比现有模型更少。我们通过从Wikipedia中提取的知识图对我们的模型进行了预训练，并在广泛的监督和无监督的信息提取任务上进行了测试。结果表明，我们的模型比基线学习对实体和关系的表现更好，而在监督的设置中，微调我们的模型始终优于罗伯塔，并在信息提取任务上取得了竞争成果。

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

我们考虑在动态系统中进行的实验，在某些实验单元上的干预措施通过限制约束（例如有限的库存）影响其他单位。尽管具有实践意义，但这个“马尔可夫”干扰问题的最佳估计量在很大程度上是启发式性的，而且他们的偏见尚不很好地理解。我们在政策评估之一等实验中正式推论问题。与最先进的启发式方法相比，虽然公正的估计量显然受到了差异的巨大惩罚。我们介绍了一个上的估计器：Q（DQ）估计器中的差异。我们表明，DQ估计器通常可以比非政策评估的差异呈指数级的差异。同时，其偏见是干预措施的二阶。这产生了惊人的偏见变化权衡，因此DQ估计器有效地主导了最新的替代方案。从理论的角度来看，我们介绍了三种独立的新型技术，这些技术对强化理论（RL）具有独立感兴趣。我们的经验评估包括一组在城市级乘车模拟器上进行的实验。

柱生成（CG）是解决大规模优化问题的有效方法。CG通过求解列（即变量）的子集并逐渐包括可以改善当前子问题的解决方案的新列。通过反复解决定价问题，根据需要产生新列，这通常是NP - 硬的并且是CG方法的瓶颈。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种基于机器学习的定价启发式（MLPH），可以有效地产生许多高质量的柱。在CG的每次迭代中，我们的MLPH利用ML模型来预测定价问题的最佳解决方案，然后用于引导采样方法以有效地产生多个高质量柱。使用图形着色问题，我们经验证明，与六种最先进的方法相比，MLPH显着增强，并且CG的改善可能导致分支和价格精确方法的显着更好的性能。

库存记录不正确，经常发生，某些措施的年销售额约为4％。手动检测库存不准确性的成本较高，现有算法解决方案几乎完全依赖于从纵向数据中学习，这在现代零售操作引起的动态环境中不足。取而代之的是，我们提出了基于商店和SKU上的横截面数据的解决方案，观察到检测库存不准确性可以被视为识别（低级别）泊松矩阵中异常的问题。在低级别矩阵中检测到的最先进的方法显然不足。具体而言，从理论的角度来看，这些方法的恢复保证要求需要观察到无反对的条目，而噪音消失了（在我们的问题中，在许多应用中都不是这种情况）。如此有动力，我们提出了一种在概念上简单的入门方法，以在低级别的泊松矩阵中进行异常检测。我们的方法适合一类概率异常模型。我们表明，我们的算法所产生的成本以最低最佳最佳速率接近最佳算法。使用来自消费品零售商的合成数据和真实数据，我们表明我们的方法可提供超过现有检测方法的10倍成本降低。在此过程中，我们建立了最新的工作，该工作寻求矩阵完成的入门错误保证，并为次指定矩阵确定此类保证，这是独立利益的结果。

In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians).The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimise the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity.To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VG-GFace2, on MS-Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the face recognition of IJB datasets, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. The dataset and models are publicly available 1 .