With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has become a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions only based on contexts augmented with a few training examples. It has been a new trend exploring ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress, challenges, and future work in ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques of ICL, including training strategies, prompting strategies, and so on. Finally, we present the challenges of ICL and provide potential directions for further research. We hope our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL in future work.

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.

Camouflaged objects are seamlessly blended in with their surroundings, which brings a challenging detection task in computer vision. Optimizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) for camouflaged object detection (COD) tends to activate local discriminative regions while ignoring complete object extent, causing the partial activation issue which inevitably leads to missing or redundant regions of objects. In this paper, we argue that partial activation is caused by the intrinsic characteristics of CNN, where the convolution operations produce local receptive fields and experience difficulty to capture long-range feature dependency among image regions. In order to obtain feature maps that could activate full object extent, keeping the segmental results from being overwhelmed by noisy features, a novel framework termed Cross-Model Detail Querying network (DQnet) is proposed. It reasons the relations between long-range-aware representations and multi-scale local details to make the enhanced representation fully highlight the object regions and eliminate noise on non-object regions. Specifically, a vanilla ViT pretrained with self-supervised learning (SSL) is employed to model long-range dependencies among image regions. A ResNet is employed to enable learning fine-grained spatial local details in multiple scales. Then, to effectively retrieve object-related details, a Relation-Based Querying (RBQ) module is proposed to explore window-based interactions between the global representations and the multi-scale local details. Extensive experiments are conducted on the widely used COD datasets and show that our DQnet outperforms the current state-of-the-arts.

From a visual scene containing multiple people, human is able to distinguish each individual given the context descriptions about what happened before, their mental/physical states or intentions, etc. Above ability heavily relies on human-centric commonsense knowledge and reasoning. For example, if asked to identify the "person who needs healing" in an image, we need to first know that they usually have injuries or suffering expressions, then find the corresponding visual clues before finally grounding the person. We present a new commonsense task, Human-centric Commonsense Grounding, that tests the models' ability to ground individuals given the context descriptions about what happened before, and their mental/physical states or intentions. We further create a benchmark, HumanCog, a dataset with 130k grounded commonsensical descriptions annotated on 67k images, covering diverse types of commonsense and visual scenes. We set up a context-object-aware method as a strong baseline that outperforms previous pre-trained and non-pretrained models. Further analysis demonstrates that rich visual commonsense and powerful integration of multi-modal commonsense are essential, which sheds light on future works. Data and code will be available https://github.com/Hxyou/HumanCog.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model (REVEAL) that learns to encode world knowledge into a large-scale memory, and to retrieve from it to answer knowledge-intensive queries. REVEAL consists of four key components: the memory, the encoder, the retriever and the generator. The large-scale memory encodes various sources of multimodal world knowledge (e.g. image-text pairs, question answering pairs, knowledge graph triplets, etc) via a unified encoder. The retriever finds the most relevant knowledge entries in the memory, and the generator fuses the retrieved knowledge with the input query to produce the output. A key novelty in our approach is that the memory, encoder, retriever and generator are all pre-trained end-to-end on a massive amount of data. Furthermore, our approach can use a diverse set of multimodal knowledge sources, which is shown to result in significant gains. We show that REVEAL achieves state-of-the-art results on visual question answering and image captioning.

As a novel distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) faces serious challenges in dealing with massive clients with heterogeneous data distribution and computation and communication resources. Various client-variance-reduction schemes and client sampling strategies have been respectively introduced to improve the robustness of FL. Among others, primal-dual algorithms such as the alternating direction of method multipliers (ADMM) have been found being resilient to data distribution and outperform most of the primal-only FL algorithms. However, the reason behind remains a mystery still. In this paper, we firstly reveal the fact that the federated ADMM is essentially a client-variance-reduced algorithm. While this explains the inherent robustness of federated ADMM, the vanilla version of it lacks the ability to be adaptive to the degree of client heterogeneity. Besides, the global model at the server under client sampling is biased which slows down the practical convergence. To go beyond ADMM, we propose a novel primal-dual FL algorithm, termed FedVRA, that allows one to adaptively control the variance-reduction level and biasness of the global model. In addition, FedVRA unifies several representative FL algorithms in the sense that they are either special instances of FedVRA or are close to it. Extensions of FedVRA to semi/un-supervised learning are also presented. Experiments based on (semi-)supervised image classification tasks demonstrate superiority of FedVRA over the existing schemes in learning scenarios with massive heterogeneous clients and client sampling.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

双层金属管（BMT）在工程应用中起着极其至关重要的作用，旋转弯曲弯曲（RDB）可以实现高精度弯曲处理，但是，该产品将进一步弹回。由于BMT的复杂结构和数据集获取的高成本，基于机制研究和机器学习的现有方法无法满足Spresback预测的工程要求。根据初步机制分析，提出了物理逻辑增强网络（PE-NET）。该体系结构包括ES-NET等效BMT与单层管等效，SP-NET用于带有足够的单层管样品的浮回本的最终预测。具体而言，在第一阶段，通过理论驱动的预探测和数据驱动的预处理，ES-NET和SP-NET分别构建。在第二阶段，在物理逻辑下，PE-NET由ES-NET和SP-NET组装，然后与小样本BMT数据集和复合损耗函数进行微调。 FE模拟数据集，小样本数据集BMT BMT弹回角预测验证了所提出方法的有效性和稳定性，并证明了跨性别和工程应用程序的潜在方法。

人类对象与铰接物体的相互作用在日常生活中很普遍。尽管单视图3D重建方面取得了很多进展，但从RGB视频中推断出一个铰接的3D对象模型仍然具有挑战性，显示一个人操纵对象的人。我们从RGB视频中划定了铰接的3D人体对象相互作用重建的任务，并对这项任务进行了五个方法家族的系统基准：3D平面估计，3D Cuboid估计，CAD模型拟合，隐式现场拟合以及自由 - 自由 - 形式网状配件。我们的实验表明，即使提供了有关观察到的对象的地面真相信息，所有方法也难以获得高精度结果。我们确定使任务具有挑战性的关键因素，并为这项具有挑战性的3D计算机视觉任务提出指示。短视频摘要https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5talkbojzwc

联合超分辨率和反音调映射（SR-ITM）旨在提高具有分辨率和动态范围具有质量缺陷的视频的视觉质量。当使用4K高动态范围（HDR）电视来观看低分辨率标准动态范围（LR SDR）视频时，就会出现此问题。以前依赖于学习本地信息的方法通常在保留颜色合规性和远程结构相似性方面做得很好，从而导致了不自然的色彩过渡和纹理伪像。为了应对这些挑战，我们建议联合SR-ITM的全球先验指导的调制网络（GPGMNET）。特别是，我们设计了一个全球先验提取模块（GPEM），以提取颜色合规性和结构相似性，分别对ITM和SR任务有益。为了进一步利用全球先验并保留空间信息，我们使用一些用于中间特征调制的参数，设计多个全球先验的指导空间调制块（GSMB），其中调制参数由共享的全局先验和空间特征生成来自空间金字塔卷积块（SPCB）的地图。通过这些精心设计的设计，GPGMNET可以通过较低的计算复杂性实现更高的视觉质量。广泛的实验表明，我们提出的GPGMNET优于最新方法。具体而言，我们提出的模型在PSNR中超过了0.64 dB的最新模型，其中69 $ \％$ $ $较少，3.1 $ \ times $ speedup。该代码将很快发布。