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.

Unsupervised domain adaptation reduces the reliance on data annotation in deep learning by adapting knowledge from a source to a target domain. For privacy and efficiency concerns, source-free domain adaptation extends unsupervised domain adaptation by adapting a pre-trained source model to an unlabeled target domain without accessing the source data. However, most existing source-free domain adaptation methods to date focus on the transductive setting, where the target training set is also the testing set. In this paper, we address source-free domain adaptation in the more realistic inductive setting, where the target training and testing sets are mutually exclusive. We propose a new semi-supervised fine-tuning method named Dual Moving Average Pseudo-Labeling (DMAPL) for source-free inductive domain adaptation. We first split the unlabeled training set in the target domain into a pseudo-labeled confident subset and an unlabeled less-confident subset according to the prediction confidence scores from the pre-trained source model. Then we propose a soft-label moving-average updating strategy for the unlabeled subset based on a moving-average prototypical classifier, which gradually adapts the source model towards the target domain. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms previous methods by large margins.

Knowledge distillation is often used to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher model to a relatively weak student model. Traditional knowledge distillation methods include response-based methods and feature-based methods. Response-based methods are used the most widely but suffer from lower upper limit of model performance, while feature-based methods have constraints on the vocabularies and tokenizers. In this paper, we propose a tokenizer-free method liberal feature-based distillation (LEAD). LEAD aligns the distribution between teacher model and student model, which is effective, extendable, portable and has no requirements on vocabularies, tokenizer, or model architecture. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of LEAD on several widely-used benchmarks, including MS MARCO Passage, TREC Passage 19, TREC Passage 20, MS MARCO Document, TREC Document 19 and TREC Document 20.

Recently, due to the increasing requirements of medical imaging applications and the professional requirements of annotating medical images, few-shot learning has gained increasing attention in the medical image semantic segmentation field. To perform segmentation with limited number of labeled medical images, most existing studies use Proto-typical Networks (PN) and have obtained compelling success. However, these approaches overlook the query image features extracted from the proposed representation network, failing to preserving the spatial connection between query and support images. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised few-shot medical image segmentation network and introduce a novel Cycle-Resemblance Attention (CRA) module to fully leverage the pixel-wise relation between query and support medical images. Notably, we first line up multiple attention blocks to refine more abundant relation information. Then, we present CRAPNet by integrating the CRA module with a classic prototype network, where pixel-wise relations between query and support features are well recaptured for segmentation. Extensive experiments on two different medical image datasets, e.g., abdomen MRI and abdomen CT, demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing state-of-the-art methods.

最近，视觉变压器及其变体在人类和多视图人类姿势估计中均起着越来越重要的作用。将图像补丁视为令牌，变形金刚可以对整个图像中的全局依赖项进行建模或其他视图中的图像。但是，全球关注在计算上是昂贵的。结果，很难将这些基于变压器的方法扩展到高分辨率特征和许多视图。在本文中，我们提出了代币螺旋的姿势变压器（PPT）进行2D人姿势估计，该姿势估计可以找到粗糙的人掩模，并且只能在选定的令牌内进行自我注意。此外，我们将PPT扩展到多视图人类姿势估计。我们建立在PPT的基础上，提出了一种新的跨视图融合策略，称为人类区域融合，该策略将所有人类前景像素视为相应的候选者。可可和MPII的实验结果表明，我们的PPT可以在减少计算的同时匹配以前的姿势变压器方法的准确性。此外，对人类360万和滑雪姿势的实验表明，我们的多视图PPT可以有效地从多个视图中融合线索并获得新的最新结果。

在智能决策系统的核心上，如何代表和优化政策是一个基本问题。这个问题的根源挑战是政策空间的大规模和高复杂性，这加剧了政策学习的困难，尤其是在现实世界中。对于理想的替代政策领域，最近在低维潜在空间中的政策表示表明其在改善政策的评估和优化方面的潜力。这些研究所涉及的关键问题是，我们应根据哪些标准抽象出所需的压缩和泛化的政策空间。但是，文献中对政策抽象的理论和政策表示学习方法的研究较少。在这项工作中，我们做出了最初的努力来填补空缺。首先，我们提出了一个统一的政策抽象理论，其中包含与不同级别的政策特征相关的三种类型的策略抽象。然后，我们将它们推广到三个策略指标，以量化政策的距离（即相似性），以便在学习策略表示方面更方便使用。此外，我们建议基于深度度量学习的政策表示学习方法。对于实证研究，我们研究了拟议的政策指标和代表的功效，分别表征政策差异和传达政策概括。我们的实验均在政策优化和评估问题中进行，其中包含信任区域政策优化（TRPO），多样性引导的进化策略（DGES）和非政策评估（OPE）。自然而然地，实验结果表明，对于所有下游学习问题，都没有普遍的最佳抽象。虽然影响力 - 反应抽象可以是通常的首选选择。

重要性采样（IS）是非政策评估中的一种流行技术，它重新赋予了重播缓冲液中轨迹的回归以提高样本效率。但是，对IS进行培训可能是不稳定的，以前试图解决此问题的尝试主要集中于分析IS的差异。在本文中，我们揭示了不稳定性与IS的重复使用偏见的新概念有关 - 由重复使用缓冲液重用进行评估和优化引起的非政策评估偏差。从理论上讲，我们证明了对当前策略的非政策评估和优化，并通过重播缓冲区的数据导致目标高估，这可能会导致错误的梯度更新并退化性能。我们进一步提供了重复使用偏差的高概率上限，并表明控制上限的一个项可以通过引入非政策算法的稳定性概念来控制重复使用偏置。基于这些分析，我们最终提出了一种新颖的偏见调查重要性抽样（BIRIS）框架以及实际算法，可以减轻重复使用偏见的负面影响。实验结果表明，我们基于BIRIS的方法可以显着提高一系列连续控制任务的样品效率。

在鸟眼中学习强大的表现（BEV），以进行感知任务，这是趋势和吸引行业和学术界的广泛关注。大多数自动驾驶算法的常规方法在正面或透视视图中执行检测，细分，跟踪等。随着传感器配置变得越来越复杂，从不同的传感器中集成了多源信息，并在统一视图中代表功能至关重要。 BEV感知继承了几个优势，因为代表BEV中的周围场景是直观和融合友好的。对于BEV中的代表对象，对于随后的模块，如计划和/或控制是最可取的。 BEV感知的核心问题在于（a）如何通过从透视视图到BEV来通过视图转换来重建丢失的3D信息； （b）如何在BEV网格中获取地面真理注释； （c）如何制定管道以合并来自不同来源和视图的特征； （d）如何适应和概括算法作为传感器配置在不同情况下各不相同。在这项调查中，我们回顾了有关BEV感知的最新工作，并对不同解决方案进行了深入的分析。此外，还描述了该行业的BEV方法的几种系统设计。此外，我们推出了一套完整的实用指南，以提高BEV感知任务的性能，包括相机，激光雷达和融合输入。最后，我们指出了该领域的未来研究指示。我们希望该报告能阐明社区，并鼓励对BEV感知的更多研究。我们保留一个活跃的存储库来收集最新的工作，并在https://github.com/openperceptionx/bevperception-survey-recipe上提供一包技巧的工具箱。

卷积神经网络可以在语义细分任务中实现出色的性能。但是，这种神经网络方法在很大程度上依赖于昂贵的像素级注释。半监督学习是解决这个问题的有前途的决议，但其表现仍然远远落后于完全受监督的对手。这项工作提出了一个带有三个模块的跨教师培训框架，可显着改善传统的半监督学习方法。核心是跨教师模块，可以同时减少同伴网络之间的耦合以及教师和学生网络之间的错误积累。此外，我们提出了两个互补的对比学习模块。高级模块可以将高质量的知识从标记的数据传输到未标记的数据，并在特征空间中促进类之间的分离。低级模块可以鼓励从同伴网络中的高质量功能学习的低质量功能。在实验中，跨教师模块显着提高了传统的学生教师方法的性能，而我们的框架在基准数据集上的表现优于现行方法。我们的CTT源代码将发布。

基于文本的人搜索是一项具有挑战性的任务，旨在搜索具有查询文本描述的图像库中具有相同身份的行人图像。近年来，基于文本的人搜索取得了良好的进步，而最先进的方法通过学习图像和文本之间的本地细粒度对应来实现出色的性能。但是，现有方法通过手工制作的拆分或外部工具从图像和文本中明确提取图像零件和文本短语，然后进行复杂的跨模式本地匹配。此外，现有方法很少考虑由图像特定信息引起的方式之间的信息不平等问题。在本文中，我们提出了一个有效的联合信息和语义对齐网络（ISANET），用于基于文本的人搜索。具体而言，我们首先设计一个特定图像的信息抑制模块，该模块分别通过关系引导定位和通道注意过滤抑制图像背景和环境因素。该设计可以有效地减轻信息不平等问题，并实现图像和文本之间的信息对齐。其次，我们建议一个隐性的本地对齐模块，以将图像和文本功能适应一组模态共享的语义主题中心，并隐式地学习图像和文本之间的本地细粒度对应关系，而无需其他监督信息和复杂的跨模式互动。此外，引入了全球一致性作为当地观点的补充。在多个数据库上进行的广泛实验证明了所提出的ISANET的有效性和优势。