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.

Previous studies have explored generating accurately lip-synced talking faces for arbitrary targets given audio conditions. However, most of them deform or generate the whole facial area, leading to non-realistic results. In this work, we delve into the formulation of altering only the mouth shapes of the target person. This requires masking a large percentage of the original image and seamlessly inpainting it with the aid of audio and reference frames. To this end, we propose the Audio-Visual Context-Aware Transformer (AV-CAT) framework, which produces accurate lip-sync with photo-realistic quality by predicting the masked mouth shapes. Our key insight is to exploit desired contextual information provided in audio and visual modalities thoroughly with delicately designed Transformers. Specifically, we propose a convolution-Transformer hybrid backbone and design an attention-based fusion strategy for filling the masked parts. It uniformly attends to the textural information on the unmasked regions and the reference frame. Then the semantic audio information is involved in enhancing the self-attention computation. Additionally, a refinement network with audio injection improves both image and lip-sync quality. Extensive experiments validate that our model can generate high-fidelity lip-synced results for arbitrary subjects.

Neural network pruning has been a well-established compression technique to enable deep learning models on resource-constrained devices. The pruned model is usually specialized to meet specific hardware platforms and training tasks (defined as deployment scenarios). However, existing pruning approaches rely heavily on training data to trade off model size, efficiency, and accuracy, which becomes ineffective for federated learning (FL) over distributed and confidential datasets. Moreover, the memory- and compute-intensive pruning process of most existing approaches cannot be handled by most FL devices with resource limitations. In this paper, we develop FedTiny, a novel distributed pruning framework for FL, to obtain specialized tiny models for memory- and computing-constrained participating devices with confidential local data. To alleviate biased pruning due to unseen heterogeneous data over devices, FedTiny introduces an adaptive batch normalization (BN) selection module to adaptively obtain an initially pruned model to fit deployment scenarios. Besides, to further improve the initial pruning, FedTiny develops a lightweight progressive pruning module for local finer pruning under tight memory and computational budgets, where the pruning policy for each layer is gradually determined rather than evaluating the overall deep model structure. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedTiny, which outperforms state-of-the-art baseline approaches, especially when compressing deep models to extremely sparse tiny models.

Learning-based infrared small object detection methods currently rely heavily on the classification backbone network. This tends to result in tiny object loss and feature distinguishability limitations as the network depth increases. Furthermore, small objects in infrared images are frequently emerged bright and dark, posing severe demands for obtaining precise object contrast information. For this reason, we in this paper propose a simple and effective ``U-Net in U-Net'' framework, UIU-Net for short, and detect small objects in infrared images. As the name suggests, UIU-Net embeds a tiny U-Net into a larger U-Net backbone, enabling the multi-level and multi-scale representation learning of objects. Moreover, UIU-Net can be trained from scratch, and the learned features can enhance global and local contrast information effectively. More specifically, the UIU-Net model is divided into two modules: the resolution-maintenance deep supervision (RM-DS) module and the interactive-cross attention (IC-A) module. RM-DS integrates Residual U-blocks into a deep supervision network to generate deep multi-scale resolution-maintenance features while learning global context information. Further, IC-A encodes the local context information between the low-level details and high-level semantic features. Extensive experiments conducted on two infrared single-frame image datasets, i.e., SIRST and Synthetic datasets, show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed UIU-Net in comparison with several state-of-the-art infrared small object detection methods. The proposed UIU-Net also produces powerful generalization performance for video sequence infrared small object datasets, e.g., ATR ground/air video sequence dataset. The codes of this work are available openly at \url{https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TIP_UIU-Net}.

In terms of artificial intelligence, there are several security and privacy deficiencies in the traditional centralized training methods of machine learning models by a server. To address this limitation, federated learning (FL) has been proposed and is known for breaking down ``data silos" and protecting the privacy of users. However, FL has not yet gained popularity in the industry, mainly due to its security, privacy, and high cost of communication. For the purpose of advancing the research in this field, building a robust FL system, and realizing the wide application of FL, this paper sorts out the possible attacks and corresponding defenses of the current FL system systematically. Firstly, this paper briefly introduces the basic workflow of FL and related knowledge of attacks and defenses. It reviews a great deal of research about privacy theft and malicious attacks that have been studied in recent years. Most importantly, in view of the current three classification criteria, namely the three stages of machine learning, the three different roles in federated learning, and the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) guidelines on privacy protection, we divide attack approaches into two categories according to the training stage and the prediction stage in machine learning. Furthermore, we also identify the CIA property violated for each attack method and potential attack role. Various defense mechanisms are then analyzed separately from the level of privacy and security. Finally, we summarize the possible challenges in the application of FL from the aspect of attacks and defenses and discuss the future development direction of FL systems. In this way, the designed FL system has the ability to resist different attacks and is more secure and stable.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) aims at recognizing unseen relations by learning with merely a handful of annotated instances. To generalize to new relations more effectively, this paper proposes a novel pipeline for the FSRE task based on queRy-information guided Attention and adaptive Prototype fuSion, namely RAPS. Specifically, RAPS first derives the relation prototype by the query-information guided attention module, which exploits rich interactive information between the support instances and the query instances, in order to obtain more accurate initial prototype representations. Then RAPS elaborately combines the derived initial prototype with the relation information by the adaptive prototype fusion mechanism to get the integrated prototype for both train and prediction. Experiments on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 show a significant improvement of our method against state-of-the-art methods.

近年来，旨在在衣服变化下与人身份相匹配的换衣人重新识别（CC-REID）是近年来的一个新的研究主题。但是，典型的基于生物识别的CC-REID方法通常需要繁琐的姿势或身体部位估计器来从人类生物特征性状中学习布置性特征，这带有高计算成本。此外，由于监视图像的分辨率下降，性能受到了显着限制。为了解决上述限制，我们为CC-REID提出了一个有效的身份敏感知识传播框架（DECKPRO）。具体而言，引入了一个布 - 丝毫空间注意模块，以通过从人解析模块中获取知识来消除服装外观的注意力。为了减轻人类面孔的分辨率退化问题和对矿山身份敏感的提示，我们建议使用先前的面部知识恢复缺失的面部细节，然后将其传播到较小的网络。训练后，不再需要进行人类解析或面部修复的额外计算。广泛的实验表明，我们的框架的表现优于最先进的方法。我们的代码可在https://github.com/kimbingng/deskpro上找到。

主动扬声器检测在人机相互作用中起着至关重要的作用。最近，出现了一些端到端的视听框架。但是，这些模型的推理时间没有被探索，并且由于其复杂性和较大的输入大小而不适用于实时应用。此外，他们探索了类似的功能提取策略，该策略在音频和视觉输入中采用了Convnet。这项工作提出了一种新型的两流端到端框架融合，通过VGG-M从图像中提取的特征与原始MEL频率Cepstrum系数从音频波形提取。该网络在每个流上附有两个BigRu层，以处理融合之前每个流的时间动态。融合后，将一个BigRU层附着在建模联合时间动力学上。 AVA-ACTIVESPEAKER数据集的实验结果表明，我们的新功能提取策略对嘈杂信号的鲁棒性和推理时间比在这两种模式上使用Convnet的模型更好。提出的模型预测44.41 ms之内，足够快地用于实时应用程序。我们表现​​最佳的模型获得了88.929％的精度，与最先进的工作相同。

神经形态计算是一个新兴的研究领域，旨在通过整合来自神经科学和深度学习等多学科的理论和技术来开发新的智能系统。当前，已经为相关字段开发了各种软件框架，但是缺乏专门用于基于Spike的计算模型和算法的有效框架。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个基于Python的尖峰神经网络（SNN）模拟和培训框架，又名Spaic，旨在支持脑启发的模型和算法研究，并与深度学习和神经科学的特征集成在一起。为了整合两个压倒性学科的不同方法，以及灵活性和效率之间的平衡，SpaiC设计采用神经科学风格的前端和深度学习后端结构设计。我们提供了广泛的示例，包括神经回路模拟，深入的SNN学习和神经形态应用，展示了简洁的编码样式和框架的广泛可用性。 Spaic是一个专用的基于SPIKE的人工智能计算平台，它将显着促进新模型，理论和应用的设计，原型和验证。具有用户友好，灵活和高性能，它将有助于加快神经形态计算研究的快速增长和广泛的适用性。