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.

Deep learning has been widely used in the perception (e.g., 3D object detection) of intelligent vehicle driving. Due to the beneficial Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, the deep learning based features from other agents can be shared to the ego vehicle so as to improve the perception of the ego vehicle. It is named as Cooperative Perception in the V2V research, whose algorithms have been dramatically advanced recently. However, all the existing cooperative perception algorithms assume the ideal V2V communication without considering the possible lossy shared features because of the Lossy Communication (LC) which is common in the complex real-world driving scenarios. In this paper, we first study the side effect (e.g., detection performance drop) by the lossy communication in the V2V Cooperative Perception, and then we propose a novel intermediate LC-aware feature fusion method to relieve the side effect of lossy communication by a LC-aware Repair Network (LCRN) and enhance the interaction between the ego vehicle and other vehicles by a specially designed V2V Attention Module (V2VAM) including intra-vehicle attention of ego vehicle and uncertainty-aware inter-vehicle attention. The extensive experiment on the public cooperative perception dataset OPV2V (based on digital-twin CARLA simulator) demonstrates that the proposed method is quite effective for the cooperative point cloud based 3D object detection under lossy V2V communication.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been ubiquitously adopted in internet of things and are becoming an integral of our daily life. When tackling the evolving learning tasks in real world, such as classifying different types of objects, DNNs face the challenge to continually retrain themselves according to the tasks on different edge devices. Federated continual learning is a promising technique that offers partial solutions but yet to overcome the following difficulties: the significant accuracy loss due to the limited on-device processing, the negative knowledge transfer caused by the limited communication of non-IID data, and the limited scalability on the tasks and edge devices. In this paper, we propose FedKNOW, an accurate and scalable federated continual learning framework, via a novel concept of signature task knowledge. FedKNOW is a client side solution that continuously extracts and integrates the knowledge of signature tasks which are highly influenced by the current task. Each client of FedKNOW is composed of a knowledge extractor, a gradient restorer and, most importantly, a gradient integrator. Upon training for a new task, the gradient integrator ensures the prevention of catastrophic forgetting and mitigation of negative knowledge transfer by effectively combining signature tasks identified from the past local tasks and other clients' current tasks through the global model. We implement FedKNOW in PyTorch and extensively evaluate it against state-of-the-art techniques using popular federated continual learning benchmarks. Extensive evaluation results on heterogeneous edge devices show that FedKNOW improves model accuracy by 63.24% without increasing model training time, reduces communication cost by 34.28%, and achieves more improvements under difficult scenarios such as large numbers of tasks or clients, and training different complex networks.

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D Object Detection is a crucial multi-view technique for autonomous driving systems. Recently, plenty of works are proposed, following a similar paradigm consisting of three essential components, i.e., camera feature extraction, BEV feature construction, and task heads. Among the three components, BEV feature construction is BEV-specific compared with 2D tasks. Existing methods aggregate the multi-view camera features to the flattened grid in order to construct the BEV feature. However, flattening the BEV space along the height dimension fails to emphasize the informative features of different heights. For example, the barrier is located at a low height while the truck is located at a high height. In this paper, we propose a novel method named BEV Slice Attention Network (BEV-SAN) for exploiting the intrinsic characteristics of different heights. Instead of flattening the BEV space, we first sample along the height dimension to build the global and local BEV slices. Then, the features of BEV slices are aggregated from the camera features and merged by the attention mechanism. Finally, we fuse the merged local and global BEV features by a transformer to generate the final feature map for task heads. The purpose of local BEV slices is to emphasize informative heights. In order to find them, we further propose a LiDAR-guided sampling strategy to leverage the statistical distribution of LiDAR to determine the heights of local slices. Compared with uniform sampling, LiDAR-guided sampling can determine more informative heights. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of BEV-SAN. Code will be released.

Vision-Centric Bird-Eye-View (BEV) perception has shown promising potential and attracted increasing attention in autonomous driving. Recent works mainly focus on improving efficiency or accuracy but neglect the domain shift problem, resulting in severe degradation of transfer performance. With extensive observations, we figure out the significant domain gaps existing in the scene, weather, and day-night changing scenarios and make the first attempt to solve the domain adaption problem for multi-view 3D object detection. Since BEV perception approaches are usually complicated and contain several components, the domain shift accumulation on multi-latent spaces makes BEV domain adaptation challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-level Multi-space Alignment Teacher-Student ($M^{2}ATS$) framework to ease the domain shift accumulation, which consists of a Depth-Aware Teacher (DAT) and a Multi-space Feature Aligned (MFA) student model. Specifically, DAT model adopts uncertainty guidance to sample reliable depth information in target domain. After constructing domain-invariant BEV perception, it then transfers pixel and instance-level knowledge to student model. To further alleviate the domain shift at the global level, MFA student model is introduced to align task-relevant multi-space features of two domains. To verify the effectiveness of $M^{2}ATS$, we conduct BEV 3D object detection experiments on four cross domain scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance (e.g., +12.6% NDS and +9.1% mAP on Day-Night). Code and dataset will be released.

The SNMMI Artificial Intelligence (SNMMI-AI) Summit, organized by the SNMMI AI Task Force, took place in Bethesda, MD on March 21-22, 2022. It brought together various community members and stakeholders from academia, healthcare, industry, patient representatives, and government (NIH, FDA), and considered various key themes to envision and facilitate a bright future for routine, trustworthy use of AI in nuclear medicine. In what follows, essential issues, challenges, controversies and findings emphasized in the meeting are summarized.

本文介绍了一种简单的有效学习算法，用于一般顺序决策。该算法将探索的乐观与模型估计的最大似然估计相结合，因此被命名为OMLE。我们证明，Omle了解了多项式数量的样本中一系列非常丰富的顺序决策问题的近乎最佳策略。这个丰富的类别不仅包括大多数已知的基于模型的基于模型的强化学习（RL）问题（例如表格MDP，计算的MDP，低证人等级问题，表格弱弱/可观察到的POMDP和多步可解码的POMDP），但是同样，许多新的具有挑战性的RL问题，尤其是在可观察到的部分环境中，这些问题以前尚不清楚。值得注意的是，本文解决的新问题包括（1）具有连续观察和功能近似的可观察到的POMDP，在其中我们实现了完全独立于观察空间的第一个样品复杂性； （2）条件良好的低级顺序决策问题（也称为预测状态表示（PSRS）），其中包括并概括了所有已知的可牵引的POMDP示例，这些示例在更固有的表示下； （3）在帆条件下进行一般顺序决策问题，这统一了我们在完全可观察和部分可观察的设置中对基于模型的RL的现有理解。帆条件是由本文确定的，可以将其视为贝尔曼/证人等级的自然概括，以解决部分可观察性。

事实证明，对预训练的模型进行迅速基于基于预训练的模型的微调对许多自然语言处理任务有效。但是，尚未对生物医学领域的迅速进行调整。生物医学单词在一般领域通常很少见，但在生物医学环境中无处不在，这在微观调整后即使在下游生物医学应用上都显着恶化了预训练的模型的性能，尤其是在低资源场景中。我们提出了一种简单而有效的方法，可以帮助模型在迅速调整过程中学习稀有的生物医学单词。实验结果表明，我们的方法可以使用少量的香草提示设置，无需任何额外的参数或培训步骤即可提高生物医学自然推理任务6％。

很少有分段旨在学习一个细分模型，该模型可以推广到只有几个培训图像的新课程。在本文中，我们提出了一个交叉引用和局部全球条件网络（CRCNET），以进行几次分割。与以前仅预测查询图像掩码的作品不同，我们提出的模型同时对支持图像和查询图像进行了预测。我们的网络可以更好地在两个图像中使用交叉引用机制找到同时出现的对象，从而有助于少量分割任务。为了进一步改善功能比较，我们开发了一个局部全球条件模块，以捕获全球和本地关系。我们还开发了一个掩模修补模块，以重新完善前景区域的预测。Pascal VOC 2012，MS Coco和FSS-1000数据集的实验表明，我们的网络实现了新的最新性能。

我们介绍了DeepGen，这是一个在网络范围内部署的系统，用于自动为宾果派客户创建赞助的搜索广告（ADS）。我们利用最新的自然语言生成（NLG）模型以抽象的方式从广告商的网页中生成流利的广告，并解决了实际问题，例如事实和推理速度。此外，我们的系统可实时创建自定义的广告，以响应用户的搜索查询，因此根据用户所需的内容突出显示了同一产品的不同方面。为了实现这一目标，我们的系统会提前生成各种较小广告的选择，并在查询时间选择最相关的广告选择，以将其缝合为完整的广告。我们通过培训可控的NLG模型来改善发电多样性，以生成相同网页的多个广告，突出显示不同的销售点。我们的系统设计通过首先运行具有不同目标训练的生成模型的合奏，然后使用多样性采样算法来选择各种各样的生成结果以进行在线选择，从而进一步改善了多样性。实验结果显示了我们提出的系统设计的有效性。我们的系统目前已在生产中部署，为Bing提供的全球广告提供$ {\ sim} 4 \％$。