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.

基于深度学习的无监督光流估计器由于对地面真理的成本和难度而引起了越来越多的关注。尽管多年来通过平均终点误差（EPE）衡量的性能有所提高，但沿运动边界（MBS）的流量估计仍然较差，而流动不平稳，通常假定的流动不平滑，而神经网络计算的功能为多个动作污染。为了改善无监督的设置中的流量，我们设计了一个框架，该框架通过分析沿边界候选者的视觉变化来检测MB，并用更远的动作取代接近检测的动作。我们提出的算法比具有相同输入的基线方法更准确地检测边界，并且可以改善任何流动预测变量的估计值，而无需额外的训练。

我们提出了Tain（视频插值的变压器和注意力），这是一个用于视频插值的残留神经网络，旨在插入中间框架，并在其周围连续两个图像框架下进行插值。我们首先提出一个新型的视觉变压器模块，称为交叉相似性（CS），以与预测插值框架相似的外观相似的外观。然后，这些CS特征用于完善插值预测。为了说明CS功能中的遮挡，我们提出了一个图像注意（IA）模块，以使网络可以从另一个框架上关注CS功能。此外，我们还使用封闭式贴片来增强培训数据集，该补丁可以跨帧移动，以改善网络对遮挡和大型运动的稳健性。由于现有方法产生平滑的预测，尤其是在MB附近，因此我们根据图像梯度使用额外的训练损失来产生更清晰的预测。胜过不需要流量估计并与基于流程的方法相当执行的现有方法，同时在VIMEO90K，UCF101和SNU-FILM基准的推理时间上具有计算有效的效率。

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。

与无监督培训相比，对光流预测因子的监督培训通常会产生更好的准确性。但是，改进的性能通常以较高的注释成本。半监督的培训与注释成本相比，准确性的准确性。我们使用一种简单而有效的半监督训练方法来表明，即使一小部分标签也可以通过无监督的训练来提高流量准确性。此外，我们提出了基于简单启发式方法的主动学习方法，以进一步减少实现相同目标准确性所需的标签数量。我们对合成和真实光流数据集的实验表明，我们的半监督网络通常需要大约50％的标签才能达到接近全标签的精度，而在Sintel上有效学习只有20％左右。我们还分析并展示了有关可能影响主动学习绩效的因素的见解。代码可在https://github.com/duke-vision/optical-flow-active-learning-release上找到。

我们提出了一个卷积神经网络，该卷积神经网络共同检测了运动边界（MBS）和遮挡区域（OCC）的视频，两者在前向后和向后。检测很困难，因为光流沿MBS是不连续的，并且在OCC中未定义，而许多流量估计器假设光滑度和到处定义的流程。在同时在两个时间方向上推理，我们将估计的映射直接扭曲在两个框架之间。由于帧之间的外观经常在MBS或OV中信号附近，因此构造一个成本块，其为一帧中的每个特征记录在搜索范围内具有匹配的特征的最低差异。该成本块是二维的，并且比流动分析中使用的四维成本量便宜得多。成本块特征由编码器计算，MB和OCC估计由解码器计算。我们发现将解码器层布置精细到粗，而不是粗细，提高性能。 Monet以烧结和飞行电影基准测试的所有任务优于最先进的技术，而不会对它们进行任何微调。

Estimating the 6D pose of objects is one of the major fields in 3D computer vision. Since the promising outcomes from instance-level pose estimation, the research trends are heading towards category-level pose estimation for more practical application scenarios. However, unlike well-established instance-level pose datasets, available category-level datasets lack annotation quality and provided pose quantity. We propose the new category level 6D pose dataset HouseCat6D featuring 1) Multi-modality of Polarimetric RGB+P and Depth, 2) Highly diverse 194 objects of 10 household object categories including 2 photometrically challenging categories, 3) High-quality pose annotation with an error range of only 1.35 mm to 1.74 mm, 4) 41 large scale scenes with extensive viewpoint coverage, 5) Checkerboard-free environment throughout the entire scene. We also provide benchmark results of state-of-the-art category-level pose estimation networks.

We introduce M-VADER: a diffusion model (DM) for image generation where the output can be specified using arbitrary combinations of images and text. We show how M-VADER enables the generation of images specified using combinations of image and text, and combinations of multiple images. Previously, a number of successful DM image generation algorithms have been introduced that make it possible to specify the output image using a text prompt. Inspired by the success of those models, and led by the notion that language was already developed to describe the elements of visual contexts that humans find most important, we introduce an embedding model closely related to a vision-language model. Specifically, we introduce the embedding model S-MAGMA: a 13 billion parameter multimodal decoder combining components from an autoregressive vision-language model MAGMA and biases finetuned for semantic search.

Recent work in large language modeling (LLMs) has used fine-tuning to align outputs with the preferences of a prototypical user. This work assumes that human preferences are static and homogeneous across individuals, so that aligning to a a single "generic" user will confer more general alignment. Here, we embrace the heterogeneity of human preferences to consider a different challenge: how might a machine help people with diverse views find agreement? We fine-tune a 70 billion parameter LLM to generate statements that maximize the expected approval for a group of people with potentially diverse opinions. Human participants provide written opinions on thousands of questions touching on moral and political issues (e.g., "should we raise taxes on the rich?"), and rate the LLM's generated candidate consensus statements for agreement and quality. A reward model is then trained to predict individual preferences, enabling it to quantify and rank consensus statements in terms of their appeal to the overall group, defined according to different aggregation (social welfare) functions. The model produces consensus statements that are preferred by human users over those from prompted LLMs (>70%) and significantly outperforms a tight fine-tuned baseline that lacks the final ranking step. Further, our best model's consensus statements are preferred over the best human-generated opinions (>65%). We find that when we silently constructed consensus statements from only a subset of group members, those who were excluded were more likely to dissent, revealing the sensitivity of the consensus to individual contributions. These results highlight the potential to use LLMs to help groups of humans align their values with one another.

在过去几年中，水下车辆操纵器系统（UVMS）变得越来越小，越来越小，在计划和控制系统时，考虑操纵器和车辆之间的耦合力变得越来越重要。但是，处理这些力的典型方法需要媒介物的精确流体动力模型，并在操纵器上使用低级扭矩控制，这两者在现场都很少见。因此，许多UVMS控制方法都是基于运动学的，无法固有地解释这些效果。我们的工作通过训练模拟UVMS数据上的复发性神经网络来弥合运动学控制与动态之间的差距，以根据系统以前的状态预测将来车辆的音高。运动学计划者和控制者可以使用此指标来合并动态知识，而无需计算昂贵的模型，从而提高了他们执行水下操纵任务的能力。