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.

创建什么故事需要推理关于先前陈述以及变更条件的可能结果。人们可以在新条件下轻松生成连贯的结局，但目前系统会对原始故事进行最小的变化来挑战。因此，一个主要挑战是生成逻辑故事和用最小编辑重写之间的权衡。在本文中，我们提出了教育，这是一种基于编辑的无预测方法，用于反复重写。教育包括基于估计在线条件的因果效果的目标位置检测策略，这使故事的因果不变部分。 Bowat然后在流畅，一致性和最小编辑约束下生成故事。我们还提出了一种新的指标来缓解当前自动指标的缺点，更好地评估权衡。我们评估公共反事故事重写基准的教育。实验表明，教育根据自动和人类评估，达到了无监督的SOTA方法的最佳权衡。教育资源可用于：https：//github.com/jiangjiechen/educat。

后门攻击对NLP模型构成了新的威胁。在后门攻击中构建中毒数据的标准策略是将触发器（例如，稀有字）插入所选句子，并将原始标签更改为目标标签。该策略具有从触发器和标签视角轻松检测到的严重缺陷：注入的触发器，通常是一种罕见的单词，导致异常的自然语言表达，因此可以通过防御模型容易地检测到异常的自然语言表达;改变的目标标签会导致误报标记的示例，因此可以通过手动检查容易地检测到。要处理此问题，请在本文中，我们提出了一种新的策略来执行不需要外部触发的文本后门攻击，并且中毒样品被正确标记。拟议策略的核心思想是构建清洁标记的例子，其标签是正确的，但可以导致测试标签在与培训集合融合时的变化。为了产生中毒清洁标记的例子，我们提出了一种基于遗传算法的句子生成模型，以满足文本数据的不可微差特性。广泛的实验表明，拟议的攻击策略不仅有效，而且更重要的是，由于其令人触发和清洁的性质，难以防御。我们的工作标志着在NLP中开发令人触发的攻击策略的第一步。

令牌词汇的选择会影响机器翻译的性能。本文旨在弄清楚什么是良好的词汇，以及没有试用培训的最佳词汇。为了回答这些问题，我们首先为从信息理论的角度提供了对词汇的作用的替代理解。这是由此激励，我们制定了词汇化的追求 - 找到了具有正确尺寸的最佳令牌词典 - 作为最佳运输（OT）问题。我们提出Volt，简单而有效的解决方案，没有试用培训。经验结果表明，在不同场景中，Volt优于广泛使用的词汇，包括WMT-14英语 - 德语和TED的52翻译方向。例如，伏特达到近70％的词汇量减少和英语 - 德语翻译中的0.5个BLEU增益。此外，与BPE搜索相比，Volt在英语 - 德语翻译中将搜索时间从384 GPU小时从384 GPU小时到30 GPU小时。代码在https://github.com/jingjing-nlp/volt上获得。

Function approximation (FA) has been a critical component in solving large zero-sum games. Yet, little attention has been given towards FA in solving \textit{general-sum} extensive-form games, despite them being widely regarded as being computationally more challenging than their fully competitive or cooperative counterparts. A key challenge is that for many equilibria in general-sum games, no simple analogue to the state value function used in Markov Decision Processes and zero-sum games exists. In this paper, we propose learning the \textit{Enforceable Payoff Frontier} (EPF) -- a generalization of the state value function for general-sum games. We approximate the optimal \textit{Stackelberg extensive-form correlated equilibrium} by representing EPFs with neural networks and training them by using appropriate backup operations and loss functions. This is the first method that applies FA to the Stackelberg setting, allowing us to scale to much larger games while still enjoying performance guarantees based on FA error. Additionally, our proposed method guarantees incentive compatibility and is easy to evaluate without having to depend on self-play or approximate best-response oracles.

Correlated Equilibrium is a solution concept that is more general than Nash Equilibrium (NE) and can lead to outcomes with better social welfare. However, its natural extension to the sequential setting, the \textit{Extensive Form Correlated Equilibrium} (EFCE), requires a quadratic amount of space to solve, even in restricted settings without randomness in nature. To alleviate these concerns, we apply \textit{subgame resolving}, a technique extremely successful in finding NE in zero-sum games to solving general-sum EFCEs. Subgame resolving refines a correlation plan in an \textit{online} manner: instead of solving for the full game upfront, it only solves for strategies in subgames that are reached in actual play, resulting in significant computational gains. In this paper, we (i) lay out the foundations to quantify the quality of a refined strategy, in terms of the \textit{social welfare} and \textit{exploitability} of correlation plans, (ii) show that EFCEs possess a sufficient amount of independence between subgames to perform resolving efficiently, and (iii) provide two algorithms for resolving, one using linear programming and the other based on regret minimization. Both methods guarantee \textit{safety}, i.e., they will never be counterproductive. Our methods are the first time an online method has been applied to the correlated, general-sum setting.

In this paper, we study the \underline{R}obust \underline{o}ptimization for \underline{se}quence \underline{Net}worked \underline{s}ubmodular maximization (RoseNets) problem. We interweave the robust optimization with the sequence networked submodular maximization. The elements are connected by a directed acyclic graph and the objective function is not submodular on the elements but on the edges in the graph. Under such networked submodular scenario, the impact of removing an element from a sequence depends both on its position in the sequence and in the network. This makes the existing robust algorithms inapplicable. In this paper, we take the first step to study the RoseNets problem. We design a robust greedy algorithm, which is robust against the removal of an arbitrary subset of the selected elements. The approximation ratio of the algorithm depends both on the number of the removed elements and the network topology. We further conduct experiments on real applications of recommendation and link prediction. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Learning with noisy label (LNL) is a classic problem that has been extensively studied for image tasks, but much less for video in the literature. A straightforward migration from images to videos without considering the properties of videos, such as computational cost and redundant information, is not a sound choice. In this paper, we propose two new strategies for video analysis with noisy labels: 1) A lightweight channel selection method dubbed as Channel Truncation for feature-based label noise detection. This method selects the most discriminative channels to split clean and noisy instances in each category; 2) A novel contrastive strategy dubbed as Noise Contrastive Learning, which constructs the relationship between clean and noisy instances to regularize model training. Experiments on three well-known benchmark datasets for video classification show that our proposed tru{\bf N}cat{\bf E}-split-contr{\bf A}s{\bf T} (NEAT) significantly outperforms the existing baselines. By reducing the dimension to 10\% of it, our method achieves over 0.4 noise detection F1-score and 5\% classification accuracy improvement on Mini-Kinetics dataset under severe noise (symmetric-80\%). Thanks to Noise Contrastive Learning, the average classification accuracy improvement on Mini-Kinetics and Sth-Sth-V1 is over 1.6\%.

Conditional normalizing flows can generate diverse image samples for solving inverse problems. Most normalizing flows for inverse problems in imaging employ the conditional affine coupling layer that can generate diverse images quickly. However, unintended severe artifacts are occasionally observed in the output of them. In this work, we address this critical issue by investigating the origins of these artifacts and proposing the conditions to avoid them. First of all, we empirically and theoretically reveal that these problems are caused by ``exploding variance'' in the conditional affine coupling layer for certain out-of-distribution (OOD) conditional inputs. Then, we further validated that the probability of causing erroneous artifacts in pixels is highly correlated with a Mahalanobis distance-based OOD score for inverse problems in imaging. Lastly, based on our investigations, we propose a remark to avoid exploding variance and then based on it, we suggest a simple remedy that substitutes the affine coupling layers with the modified rational quadratic spline coupling layers in normalizing flows, to encourage the robustness of generated image samples. Our experimental results demonstrated that our suggested methods effectively suppressed critical artifacts occurring in normalizing flows for super-resolution space generation and low-light image enhancement without compromising performance.

Vision Transformer (ViT) extracts the final representation from either class token or an average of all patch tokens, following the architecture of Transformer in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, studies for the best way of aggregating the patch tokens are still limited to average pooling, while widely-used pooling strategies, such as max and GeM pooling, can be considered. Despite their effectiveness, the existing pooling strategies do not consider the architecture of ViT and the channel-wise difference in the activation maps, aggregating the crucial and trivial channels with the same importance. In this paper, we present Group Generalized Mean (GGeM) pooling as a simple yet powerful pooling strategy for ViT. GGeM divides the channels into groups and computes GeM pooling with a shared pooling parameter per group. As ViT groups the channels via a multi-head attention mechanism, grouping the channels by GGeM leads to lower head-wise dependence while amplifying important channels on the activation maps. Exploiting GGeM shows 0.1%p to 0.7%p performance boosts compared to the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance for ViT-Base and ViT-Large models in ImageNet-1K classification task. Moreover, GGeM outperforms the existing pooling strategies on image retrieval and multi-modal representation learning tasks, demonstrating the superiority of GGeM for a variety of tasks. GGeM is a simple algorithm in that only a few lines of code are necessary for implementation.