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.

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。

超越地球轨道的人类空间勘探将涉及大量距离和持续时间的任务。为了有效减轻无数空间健康危害，数据和空间健康系统的范式转移是实现地球独立性的，而不是Earth-Reliance所必需的。有希望在生物学和健康的人工智能和机器学习领域的发展可以解决这些需求。我们提出了一个适当的自主和智能精密空间健康系统，可以监控，汇总和评估生物医学状态;分析和预测个性化不良健康结果;适应并响应新累积的数据;并提供对其船员医务人员的个人深度空间机组人员和迭代决策支持的预防性，可操作和及时的见解。在这里，我们介绍了美国国家航空航天局组织的研讨会的建议摘要，以便在太空生物学和健康中未来的人工智能应用。在未来十年，生物监测技术，生物标志科学，航天器硬件，智能软件和简化的数据管理必须成熟，并编织成精确的空间健康系统，以使人类在深空中茁壮成长。

空间生物学研究旨在了解太空飞行对生物的根本影响，制定支持深度空间探索的基础知识，最终生物工程航天器和栖息地稳定植物，农作物，微生物，动物和人类的生态系统，为持续的多行星寿命稳定。要提高这些目标，该领域利用了来自星空和地下模拟研究的实验，平台，数据和模型生物。由于研究扩展到低地球轨道之外，实验和平台必须是最大自主，光，敏捷和智能化，以加快知识发现。在这里，我们介绍了由美国国家航空航天局的人工智能，机器学习和建模应用程序组织的研讨会的建议摘要，这些应用程序为这些空间生物学挑战提供了关键解决方案。在未来十年中，将人工智能融入太空生物学领域将深化天空效应的生物学理解，促进预测性建模和分析，支持最大自主和可重复的实验，并有效地管理星载数据和元数据，所有目标使生活能够在深空中茁壮成长。

虽然我们注意临床自然语言处理（NLP）的最新进展，但我们可以注意到临床和翻译研究界的一些抵抗，因为透明度，可解释性和可用性有限，采用NLP模型。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种开放的自然语言处理开发框架。我们通过实施NLP算法为国家Covid队列协作（N3C）进行了评估。基于Covid-19相关临床笔记的信息提取的利益，我们的工作包括1）使用Covid-19标志和症状作为用例的开放数据注释过程，2）一个社区驱动的规则集合平台，3）合成文本数据生成工作流程，用于生成信息提取任务的文本而不涉及人为受试者。 Corpora来自来自三个不同机构的文本（Mayo Clinic，肯塔基州大学，明尼苏达大学）。用单个机构（Mayo）规则集进行了金标准注释。这导致了0.876,0.706和0.694的F-Scors分别用于Mayo，Minnesota和肯塔基测试数据集。作为N3C NLP子群体的联盟努力的研究表明，创建联邦NLP算法开发和基准测试平台的可行性，以增强多机构临床NLP研究和采用。虽然我们在这项工作中使用Covid-19作为用例，但我们的框架足以适用于临床NLP的其他兴趣领域。

Recent face recognition experiments on a major benchmark (LFW [14]) show stunning performance-a number of algorithms achieve near to perfect score, surpassing human recognition rates. In this paper, we advocate evaluations at the million scale (LFW includes only 13K photos of 5K people). To this end, we have assembled the MegaFace dataset and created the first MegaFace challenge. Our dataset includes One Million photos that capture more than 690K different individuals. The challenge evaluates performance of algorithms with increasing numbers of "distractors" (going from 10 to 1M) in the gallery set. We present both identification and verification performance, evaluate performance with respect to pose and a persons age, and compare as a function of training data size (#photos and #people). We report results of state of the art and baseline algorithms. The MegaFace dataset, baseline code, and evaluation scripts, are all publicly released for further experimentations 1 .

The performance of inertial navigation systems is largely dependent on the stable flow of external measurements and information to guarantee continuous filter updates and bind the inertial solution drift. Platforms in different operational environments may be prevented at some point from receiving external measurements, thus exposing their navigation solution to drift. Over the years, a wide variety of works have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming, by exploiting knowledge of the system current conditions and turning it into an applicable source of information to update the navigation filter. This paper aims to provide an extensive survey of information aided navigation, broadly classified into direct, indirect, and model aiding. Each approach is described by the notable works that implemented its concept, use cases, relevant state updates, and their corresponding measurement models. By matching the appropriate constraint to a given scenario, one will be able to improve the navigation solution accuracy, compensate for the lost information, and uncover certain internal states, that would otherwise remain unobservable.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

In the present work we propose an unsupervised ensemble method consisting of oblique trees that can address the task of auto-encoding, namely Oblique Forest AutoEncoders (briefly OF-AE). Our method is a natural extension of the eForest encoder introduced in [1]. More precisely, by employing oblique splits consisting in multivariate linear combination of features instead of the axis-parallel ones, we will devise an auto-encoder method through the computation of a sparse solution of a set of linear inequalities consisting of feature values constraints. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/CDAlecsa/Oblique-Forest-AutoEncoders.

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.