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.

This paper focuses on the prevalent performance imbalance in the stages of incremental learning. To avoid obvious stage learning bottlenecks, we propose a brand-new stage-isolation based incremental learning framework, which leverages a series of stage-isolated classifiers to perform the learning task of each stage without the interference of others. To be concrete, to aggregate multiple stage classifiers as a uniform one impartially, we first introduce a temperature-controlled energy metric for indicating the confidence score levels of the stage classifiers. We then propose an anchor-based energy self-normalization strategy to ensure the stage classifiers work at the same energy level. Finally, we design a voting-based inference augmentation strategy for robust inference. The proposed method is rehearsal free and can work for almost all continual learning scenarios. We evaluate the proposed method on four large benchmarks. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in setting up new state-of-the-art overall performance. \emph{Code is available at} \url{https://github.com/iamwangyabin/ESN}.

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.

Named entity recognition is a traditional task in natural language processing. In particular, nested entity recognition receives extensive attention for the widespread existence of the nesting scenario. The latest research migrates the well-established paradigm of set prediction in object detection to cope with entity nesting. However, the manual creation of query vectors, which fail to adapt to the rich semantic information in the context, limits these approaches. An end-to-end entity detection approach with proposer and regressor is presented in this paper to tackle the issues. First, the proposer utilizes the feature pyramid network to generate high-quality entity proposals. Then, the regressor refines the proposals for generating the final prediction. The model adopts encoder-only architecture and thus obtains the advantages of the richness of query semantics, high precision of entity localization, and easiness of model training. Moreover, we introduce the novel spatially modulated attention and progressive refinement for further improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves advanced performance in flat and nested NER, achieving a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 80.74 on the GENIA dataset and 72.38 on the WeiboNER dataset.

鉴于其广泛的应用，已经对人面部交换的任务进行了许多尝试。尽管现有的方法主要依赖于乏味的网络和损失设计，但它们仍然在源和目标面之间的信息平衡中挣扎，并倾向于产生可见的人工制品。在这项工作中，我们引入了一个名为StylesWap的简洁有效的框架。我们的核心想法是利用基于样式的生成器来增强高保真性和稳健的面部交换，因此可以采用发电机的优势来优化身份相似性。我们仅通过最小的修改来确定，StyleGAN2体系结构可以成功地处理来自源和目标的所需信息。此外，受到TORGB层的启发，进一步设计了交换驱动的面具分支以改善信息的融合。此外，可以采用stylegan倒置的优势。特别是，提出了交换引导的ID反转策略来优化身份相似性。广泛的实验验证了我们的框架会产生高质量的面部交换结果，从而超过了最先进的方法，既有定性和定量。

循环闭合检测是在复杂环境中长期机器人导航的关键技术。在本文中，我们提出了一个全局描述符，称为正态分布描述符（NDD），用于3D点云循环闭合检测。描述符编码点云的概率密度分数和熵作为描述符。我们还提出了快速旋转对准过程，并将相关系数用作描述符之间的相似性。实验结果表明，我们的方法在准确性和效率上都优于最新点云描述符。源代码可用，可以集成到现有的LIDAR射测和映射（壤土）系统中。

美国的意识形态分裂在日常交流中变得越来越突出。因此，关于政治两极分化的许多研究，包括最近采取计算观点的许多努力。通过检测文本语料库中的政治偏见，可以尝试描述和辨别该文本的两极分性。从直觉上讲，命名的实体（即，用作名词的名词和短语）和文本中的标签经常带有有关政治观点的信息。例如，使用“支持选择”一词的人可能是自由的，而使用“亲生生命”一词的人可能是保守的。在本文中，我们试图揭示社交媒体文本数据中的政治极性，并通过将极性得分分配给实体和标签来量化这些极性。尽管这个想法很简单，但很难以可信赖的定量方式进行这种推论。关键挑战包括少数已知标签，连续的政治观点，以及在嵌入单词媒介中的极性得分和极性中性语义含义的保存。为了克服这些挑战，我们提出了极性感知的嵌入多任务学习（PEM）模型。该模型包括（1）自制的上下文保护任务，（2）基于注意力的推文级别的极性推导任务，以及（3）对抗性学习任务，可促进嵌入式的极性维度及其语义之间的独立性方面。我们的实验结果表明，我们的PEM模型可以成功学习极性感知的嵌入。我们检查了各种应用，从而证明了PEM模型的有效性。我们还讨论了我们的工作的重要局限性，并在将PEM模型应用于现实世界情景时的压力谨慎。

从单眼图像中学习的自我监督深度学习通常依赖于暂时相邻图像帧之间的2D像素光度关系。但是，他们既没有完全利用3D点的几何对应关系，也没有有效地应对闭塞或照明不一致引起的光度扭曲中的歧义。为了解决这些问题，这项工作提出了密度量构建网络（DEVNET），这是一种新型的自我监管的单眼深度学习框架，可以考虑3D空间信息，并利用相邻的相机flustums中的更强的几何约束。我们的DEVNET不是直接从单个图像中回归像素值，而是将摄像头划分为多个平行的平面，并预测每个平面上的点闭塞概率密度。最终的深度图是通过沿相应射线集成密度来生成的。在训练过程中，引入了新颖的正则化策略和损失功能，以减轻光度歧义和过度拟合。如果没有明显放大的模型参数的大小或运行时间，DEVNET在Kitti-2015室外数据集和NYU-V2室内数据集上均优于几个代表性基准。特别是，在深度估计的任务中，在Kitti-2015和NYU-V2上，DEVNET均减少了4％的根平方。代码可在https://github.com/gitkaichenzhou/devnet上找到。

在本文中，我们提出了一种新的机构指导的半监督计数方法。首先，我们建立了一个可学习的辅助结构，即密度代理，将公认的前景区域特征带到相应的密度子类（代理）和推开背景的区域。其次，我们提出了密度引导的对比度学习损失，以巩固主链特征提取器。第三，我们通过使用变压器结构进一步完善前景特征来构建回归头。最后，提供了有效的噪声抑郁丧失，以最大程度地减少注释噪声的负面影响。对四个挑战性人群计数数据集进行的广泛实验表明，我们的方法在很大的边距中实现了与最先进的半监督计数方法相比最先进的性能。代码可用。