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.

Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM's MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM's MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.

眼科图像和衍生物，例如视网膜神经纤维层（RNFL）厚度图对于检测和监测眼科疾病至关重要（例如，青光眼）。对于计算机辅助诊断眼疾病，关键技术是自动从眼科图像中提取有意义的特征，这些特征可以揭示与功能视觉丧失相关的生物标志物（例如RNFL变薄模式）。然而，将结构性视网膜损伤与人类视力丧失联系起来的眼科图像的表示，主要是由于患者之间的解剖学变化很大。在存在图像伪像的情况下，这项任务变得更加具有挑战性，由于图像采集和自动细分，这很常见。在本文中，我们提出了一个耐伪造的无监督的学习框架，该框架称为眼科图像的学习表示。 Eyelearn具有一个伪影校正模块，可以学习可以最好地预测无伪影眼镜图像的表示形式。此外，Eyelearn采用聚类引导的对比度学习策略，以明确捕获内部和间形的亲和力。在训练过程中，图像在簇中动态组织，以形成对比样品，其中鼓励在相同或不同的簇中分别学习相似或不同的表示形式。为了评估包冰者，我们使用青光眼患者的现实世界眼科摄影图数据集使用学习的表示形式进行视野预测和青光眼检测。广泛的实验和与最先进方法的比较验证了眼球从眼科图像中学习最佳特征表示的有效性。

在图像之间生成健壮和可靠的对应关系是多种应用程序的基本任务。为了在全球和局部粒度上捕获上下文，我们提出了Aspanformer，这是一种基于变压器的无探测器匹配器，建立在层次的注意力结构上，采用了一种新颖的注意操作，能够以自适应方式调整注意力跨度。为了实现这一目标，首先，在每个跨注意阶段都会回归流图，以定位搜索区域的中心。接下来，在中心周围生成一个采样网格，其大小不是根据固定的经验配置为固定的，而是根据与流图一起估计的像素不确定性的自适应计算。最后，在派生区域内的两个图像上计算注意力，称为注意跨度。通过这些方式，我们不仅能够维持长期依赖性，而且能够在高相关性的像素之间获得细粒度的注意，从而补偿基本位置和匹配任务中的零件平滑度。在广泛的评估基准上的最新准确性验证了我们方法的强匹配能力。

近年来，人类面孔的影子化化身已经走了很长一段路，但是该地区的研究受到缺乏公开可用的高质量数据集的限制。在这项工作中，我们介绍了Multiface，这是一种新的多视图，高分辨率的人脸数据集，该数据集是从13个身份的神经面部渲染研究中收集的13个身份。我们介绍了Mugsy，这是一种大型多摄像机设备，可捕获面部表现的高分辨率同步视频。 Multiface的目的是缩小学术界高质量数据的可访问性的差距，并使VR触觉研究能够进行研究。随着数据集的释放，我们对不同模型体系结构对模型的新观点和表达式的插值能力进行消融研究。通过有条件的VAE模型作为我们的基线，我们发现添加空间偏见，纹理翘曲场和残差连接可改善新型视图合成的性能。我们的代码和数据可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/facebookresearch/multiface

大量的时间序列数据通常被组织成具有不同聚集水平的横截面结构。示例包括产品和地理组。与此类数据集相干决策和计划的必要条件是针对分散的系列的预测，可以准确地添加到汇总的系列预测中，这激发了新型层次结构预测算法的创建。机器学习社区对横截面层次预测系统的兴趣日益增长，我们正处于一个有利的时刻，以确保科学的努力基于声音基线。因此，我们提出了层次Forecast库，该库包含预处理的公开可用数据集，评估指标和一组编译的统计基线模型。我们基于Python的框架旨在弥合统计，计量经济学建模和机器学习预测研究之间的差距。代码和文档可在https://github.com/nixtla/hierarchicalforecast中找到。

In this paper, we propose a novel technique, namely INVALIDATOR, to automatically assess the correctness of APR-generated patches via semantic and syntactic reasoning. INVALIDATOR reasons about program semantic via program invariants while it also captures program syntax via language semantic learned from large code corpus using the pre-trained language model. Given a buggy program and the developer-patched program, INVALIDATOR infers likely invariants on both programs. Then, INVALIDATOR determines that a APR-generated patch overfits if: (1) it violates correct specifications or (2) maintains errors behaviors of the original buggy program. In case our approach fails to determine an overfitting patch based on invariants, INVALIDATOR utilizes a trained model from labeled patches to assess patch correctness based on program syntax. The benefit of INVALIDATOR is three-fold. First, INVALIDATOR is able to leverage both semantic and syntactic reasoning to enhance its discriminant capability. Second, INVALIDATOR does not require new test cases to be generated but instead only relies on the current test suite and uses invariant inference to generalize the behaviors of a program. Third, INVALIDATOR is fully automated. We have conducted our experiments on a dataset of 885 patches generated on real-world programs in Defects4J. Experiment results show that INVALIDATOR correctly classified 79% overfitting patches, accounting for 23% more overfitting patches being detected by the best baseline. INVALIDATOR also substantially outperforms the best baselines by 14% and 19% in terms of Accuracy and F-Measure, respectively.

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.