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.

Automatically identifying feature correspondences between multimodal images is facing enormous challenges because of the significant differences both in radiation and geometry. To address these problems, we propose a novel feature matching method, named R2FD2, that is robust to radiation and rotation differences.Our R2FD2 is conducted in two critical contributions, consisting of a repeatable feature detector and a rotation-invariant feature descriptor. In the first stage, a repeatable feature detector called the Multi-channel Auto-correlation of the Log-Gabor is presented for feature detection, which combines the multi-channel auto-correlation strategy with the Log-Gabor wavelets to detect interest points with high repeatability and uniform distribution. In the second stage, a rotation-invariant feature descriptor is constructed, named the Rotation-invariant Maximum index map of the Log-Gabor, which consists of two components: fast assignment of dominant orientation and construction of feature representation. In the process of fast assignment of dominant orientation, a Rotation-invariant Maximum Index Map is built to address rotation deformations. Then, the proposed RMLG incorporates the rotation-invariant RMIM with the spatial configuration of DAISY to depict a more discriminative feature representation, which improves RMLGs resistance to radiation and rotation variances.

High-fidelity facial avatar reconstruction from a monocular video is a significant research problem in computer graphics and computer vision. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown impressive novel view rendering results and has been considered for facial avatar reconstruction. However, the complex facial dynamics and missing 3D information in monocular videos raise significant challenges for faithful facial reconstruction. In this work, we propose a new method for NeRF-based facial avatar reconstruction that utilizes 3D-aware generative prior. Different from existing works that depend on a conditional deformation field for dynamic modeling, we propose to learn a personalized generative prior, which is formulated as a local and low dimensional subspace in the latent space of 3D-GAN. We propose an efficient method to construct the personalized generative prior based on a small set of facial images of a given individual. After learning, it allows for photo-realistic rendering with novel views and the face reenactment can be realized by performing navigation in the latent space. Our proposed method is applicable for different driven signals, including RGB images, 3DMM coefficients, and audios. Compared with existing works, we obtain superior novel view synthesis results and faithfully face reenactment performance.

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

Speech representation learning has improved both speech understanding and speech synthesis tasks for single language. However, its ability in cross-lingual scenarios has not been explored. In this paper, we extend the pretraining method for cross-lingual multi-speaker speech synthesis tasks, including cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing. We propose a speech-text joint pretraining framework, where we randomly mask the spectrogram and the phonemes given a speech example and its transcription. By learning to reconstruct the masked parts of the input in different languages, our model shows great improvements over speaker-embedding-based multi-speaker TTS methods. Moreover, our framework is end-to-end for both the training and the inference without any finetuning effort. In cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing tasks, our experiments show that our model outperforms speaker-embedding-based multi-speaker TTS methods. The code and model are publicly available at PaddleSpeech.

部分可观察性 - 代理只能观察有关系统真正潜在状态的部分信息 - 在增强学习（RL）的现实应用中无处不在。从理论上讲，在最坏情况下，由于指数样本的复杂性下限，在最坏情况下学习了近距离观察性的近乎最佳政策。最近的工作已经确定了几个可通过多项式样本学习的可学性亚类，例如部分可观察到的马尔可夫决策过程（POMDPS）具有某些可揭示或可分解性条件。但是，这一研究仍处于起步阶段，（1）缺乏统一的结构条件，从而缺乏样品效率学习； （2）现有的已知拖拉子类的样品复杂性远非锋利； （3）与完全可观察的RL相比，可用的样品效率算法更少。本文在预测状态表示（PSRS）的一般环境中，上面的所有三个方面都在部分可观察到的RL方向前进。首先，我们提出了一种称为\ emph {b稳定性}的自然和统一的结构条件。 B稳定的PSR包括绝大多数已知的可牵引子类，例如弱揭示的POMDP，低级别的未来pomdps，可解码的POMDP和常规PSR。接下来，我们证明可以在相关问题参数中使用多项式样本学习任何B稳定PSR。当在上述子类中实例化时，我们的样本复杂性比当前最好的复杂性大大改善。最后，我们的结果是通过三种算法同时实现的：乐观的最大似然估计，估计到决策和基于模型的乐观后验采样。后两种算法是用于POMDPS/PSR的样品有效学习的新算法。

寻找统一的复杂性度量和样本效率学习的算法是增强学习研究的核心主题（RL）。 Foster等人最近提出了决策估计系数（DEC）。 （2021）作为样品有效的NO-REGRET RL的必要和足够的复杂度度量。本文通过DEC框架朝着RL的统一理论取得了进步。首先，我们提出了两项​​新的DEC类型复杂性度量：探索性DEC（EDEC）和无奖励DEC（RFDEC）。我们表明，它们对于样本有效的PAC学习和无奖励学习是必要的，因此扩展了原始DEC，该DEC仅捕获了无需重新学习。接下来，我们为所有三个学习目标设计新的统一样品效率算法。我们的算法实例化估计到决策的变体（E2D）元算法具有强大而通用的模型估计值。即使在无重组的设置中，我们的算法E2D-TA也会在Foster等人的算法上提高。 （2021）需要对DEC的变体进行边界，该变体可能是过于大的，或者设计特定问题的估计值。作为应用程序，我们恢复了现有的，并获得了使用单个算法的各种可拖动RL问题的新样品学习结果。最后，作为一种连接，我们根据后采样或最大似然估计重新分析了两种现有的基于乐观模型的算法，表明它们在与DEC相似的结构条件下具有与E2D-TA相似的遗憾界限。

ICECUBE是一种用于检测1 GEV和1 PEV之间大气和天体中微子的光学传感器的立方公斤阵列，该阵列已部署1.45 km至2.45 km的南极的冰盖表面以下1.45 km至2.45 km。来自ICE探测器的事件的分类和重建在ICeCube数据分析中起着核心作用。重建和分类事件是一个挑战，这是由于探测器的几何形状，不均匀的散射和冰中光的吸收，并且低于100 GEV的光，每个事件产生的信号光子数量相对较少。为了应对这一挑战，可以将ICECUBE事件表示为点云图形，并将图形神经网络（GNN）作为分类和重建方法。 GNN能够将中微子事件与宇宙射线背景区分开，对不同的中微子事件类型进行分类，并重建沉积的能量，方向和相互作用顶点。基于仿真，我们提供了1-100 GEV能量范围的比较与当前ICECUBE分析中使用的当前最新最大似然技术，包括已知系统不确定性的影响。对于中微子事件分类，与当前的IceCube方法相比，GNN以固定的假阳性速率（FPR）提高了信号效率的18％。另外，GNN在固定信号效率下将FPR的降低超过8（低于半百分比）。对于能源，方向和相互作用顶点的重建，与当前最大似然技术相比，分辨率平均提高了13％-20％。当在GPU上运行时，GNN能够以几乎是2.7 kHz的中位数ICECUBE触发速率的速率处理ICECUBE事件，这打开了在在线搜索瞬态事件中使用低能量中微子的可能性。

在本文中，我们介绍了SynkB，这是一种自动提取化学合成方案的知识库。类似于专有化学数据库，例如Reaxsys，SynkB允许化学家检索有关合成程序的结构化知识。通过利用自然语言处理程序文本的最新进展，SynkB支持有关反应条件的更灵活的查询，因此有可能帮助化学家在设计新的合成路线时搜索相关反应中使用的条件。使用定制的变压器模型从美国和欧盟专利中描述的600万个合成程序中自动提取信息，我们表明，在许多查询中，SynkB的召回率高于ReaxSys，同时保持高精度。我们计划使SynkB作为开源工具可用；相反，专有化学数据库需要昂贵的订阅。

Recently, model-based agents have achieved better performance than model-free ones using the same computational budget and training time in single-agent environments. However, due to the complexity of multi-agent systems, it is tough to learn the model of the environment. The significant compounding error may hinder the learning process when model-based methods are applied to multi-agent tasks. This paper proposes an implicit model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning method based on value decomposition methods. Under this method, agents can interact with the learned virtual environment and evaluate the current state value according to imagined future states in the latent space, making agents have the foresight. Our approach can be applied to any multi-agent value decomposition method. The experimental results show that our method improves the sample efficiency in different partially observable Markov decision process domains.