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.

In the realm of multi-modality, text-guided image retouching techniques emerged with the advent of deep learning. Most currently available text-guided methods, however, rely on object-level supervision to constrain the region that may be modified. This not only makes it more challenging to develop these algorithms, but it also limits how widely deep learning can be used for image retouching. In this paper, we offer a text-guided mask-free image retouching approach that yields consistent results to address this concern. In order to perform image retouching without mask supervision, our technique can construct plausible and edge-sharp masks based on the text for each object in the image. Extensive experiments have shown that our method can produce high-quality, accurate images based on spoken language. The source code will be released soon.

Diffusion models, which learn to reverse a signal destruction process to generate new data, typically require the signal at each step to have the same dimension. We argue that, considering the spatial redundancy in image signals, there is no need to maintain a high dimensionality in the evolution process, especially in the early generation phase. To this end, we make a theoretical generalization of the forward diffusion process via signal decomposition. Concretely, we manage to decompose an image into multiple orthogonal components and control the attenuation of each component when perturbing the image. That way, along with the noise strength increasing, we are able to diminish those inconsequential components and thus use a lower-dimensional signal to represent the source, barely losing information. Such a reformulation allows to vary dimensions in both training and inference of diffusion models. Extensive experiments on a range of datasets suggest that our approach substantially reduces the computational cost and achieves on-par or even better synthesis performance compared to baseline methods. We also show that our strategy facilitates high-resolution image synthesis and improves FID of diffusion model trained on FFHQ at $1024\times1024$ resolution from 52.40 to 10.46. Code and models will be made publicly available.

While federated learning has shown strong results in optimizing a machine learning model without direct access to the original data, its performance may be hindered by intermittent client availability which slows down the convergence and biases the final learned model. There are significant challenges to achieve both stable and bias-free training under arbitrary client availability. To address these challenges, we propose a framework named Federated Graph-based Sampling (FedGS), to stabilize the global model update and mitigate the long-term bias given arbitrary client availability simultaneously. First, we model the data correlations of clients with a Data-Distribution-Dependency Graph (3DG) that helps keep the sampled clients data apart from each other, which is theoretically shown to improve the approximation to the optimal model update. Second, constrained by the far-distance in data distribution of the sampled clients, we further minimize the variance of the numbers of times that the clients are sampled, to mitigate long-term bias. To validate the effectiveness of FedGS, we conduct experiments on three datasets under a comprehensive set of seven client availability modes. Our experimental results confirm FedGS's advantage in both enabling a fair client-sampling scheme and improving the model performance under arbitrary client availability. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/WwZzz/FedGS}.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a task to link regions of images with their corresponding entities in Knowledge Bases (KBs), which is beneficial for many computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, image caption, and visual question answering. While existing tasks in VEL either rely on textual data to complement a multi-modal linking or only link objects with general entities, which fails to perform named entity linking on large amounts of image data. In this paper, we consider a purely Visual-based Named Entity Linking (VNEL) task, where the input only consists of an image. The task is to identify objects of interest (i.e., visual entity mentions) in images and link them to corresponding named entities in KBs. Since each entity often contains rich visual and textual information in KBs, we thus propose three different sub-tasks, i.e., visual to visual entity linking (V2VEL), visual to textual entity linking (V2TEL), and visual to visual-textual entity linking (V2VTEL). In addition, we present a high-quality human-annotated visual person linking dataset, named WIKIPerson. Based on WIKIPerson, we establish a series of baseline algorithms for the solution of each sub-task, and conduct experiments to verify the quality of proposed datasets and the effectiveness of baseline methods. We envision this work to be helpful for soliciting more works regarding VNEL in the future. The codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ict-bigdatalab/VNEL.

扩散模型（DMS）显示出高质量图像合成的巨大潜力。但是，当涉及到具有复杂场景的图像时，如何正确描述图像全局结构和对象细节仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务。在本文中，我们提出了弗里多（Frido），这是一种特征金字塔扩散模型，该模型执行了图像合成的多尺度粗到1个降解过程。我们的模型将输入图像分解为依赖比例的矢量量化特征，然后是用于产生图像输出的粗到细门。在上述多尺度表示阶段，可以进一步利用文本，场景图或图像布局等其他输入条件。因此，还可以将弗里多应用于条件或跨模式图像合成。我们对各种无条件和有条件的图像生成任务进行了广泛的实验，从文本到图像综合，布局到图像，场景环形图像到标签形象。更具体地说，我们在五个基准测试中获得了最先进的FID分数，即可可和开阔图像的布局到图像，可可和视觉基因组的场景环形图像以及可可的标签对图像图像。 。代码可在https://github.com/davidhalladay/frido上找到。

知识密集型语言任务（苏格兰信）通常需要大量信息来提供正确的答案。解决此问题的一种流行范式是将搜索系统与机器读取器相结合，前者检索支持证据，后者检查它们以产生答案。最近，读者组成部分在大规模预培养的生成模型的帮助下见证了重大进展。同时，搜索组件中的大多数现有解决方案都依赖于传统的``索引 - retrieve-then-Rank''管道，该管道遭受了巨大的内存足迹和端到端优化的困难。受到最新构建基于模型的IR模型的努力的启发，我们建议用新颖的单步生成模型替换传统的多步搜索管道，该模型可以极大地简化搜索过程并以端到端的方式进行优化。我们表明，可以通过一组经过适当设计的预训练任务来学习强大的生成检索模型，并被采用以通过进一步的微调来改善各种下游苏格兰短裙任务。我们将预训练的生成检索模型命名为Copusbrain，因为有关该语料库的所有信息均以其参数进行编码，而无需构造其他索引。经验结果表明，在苏格兰语基准上的检索任务并建立了新的最新性能，Copusbrain可以极大地超过强大的基准。我们还表明，在零农源和低资源设置下，科体班运行良好。

深度神经网络中的建筑进步导致了跨越一系列计算机视觉任务的巨大飞跃。神经建筑搜索（NAS）并没有依靠人类的专业知识，而是成为自动化建筑设计的有前途的途径。尽管图像分类的最新成就提出了机会，但NAS的承诺尚未对更具挑战性的语义细分任务进行彻底评估。将NAS应用于语义分割的主要挑战来自两个方面：（i）要处理的高分辨率图像； （ii）针对自动驾驶等应用的实时推理速度（即实时语义细分）的其他要求。为了应对此类挑战，我们在本文中提出了一种替代辅助的多目标方法。通过一系列自定义预测模型，我们的方法有效地将原始的NAS任务转换为普通的多目标优化问题。然后是用于填充选择的层次预筛选标准，我们的方法逐渐实现了一组有效的体系结构在细分精度和推理速度之间进行交易。对三个基准数据集的经验评估以及使用华为地图集200 dk的应用程序的实证评估表明，我们的方法可以识别架构明显优于人类专家手动设计和通过其他NAS方法自动设计的现有最先进的体系结构。

视觉和听觉信息对于确定视频中的显着区域都是有价值的。深度卷积神经网络（CNN）展示了应对视听显着性预测任务的强大能力。由于各种因素，例如拍摄场景和天气，源训练数据和目标测试数据之间通常存在适度的分布差异。域差异导致CNN模型目标测试数据的性能降解。本文提前尝试解决视听显着性预测的无监督域适应问题。我们提出了一种双重域交流学习算法，以减轻源数据和目标数据之间的域差异。首先，建立了一个特定的域歧视分支，以对齐听觉功能分布。然后，这些听觉功能通过跨模式自我发项模块融合到视觉特征中。设计了其他域歧视分支，以减少视觉特征的域差异和融合视听特征所隐含的视听相关性的差异。公共基准测试的实验表明，我们的方法可以减轻域差异引起的性能降解。