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.

在医学图像分析中需要进行几次学习的能力是对支持图像数据的有效利用，该数据被标记为对新类进行分类或细分新类，该任务否则需要更多的培训图像和专家注释。这项工作描述了一种完全3D原型的几种分段算法，因此，训练有素的网络可以有效地适应培训中缺乏的临床有趣结构，仅使用来自不同研究所的几个标记图像。首先，为了弥补机构在新型类别的情节适应中的广泛认识的空间变异性，新型的空间注册机制被整合到原型学习中，由分割头和空间对齐模块组成。其次，为了帮助训练观察到的不完美比对，提出了支持掩模调节模块，以进一步利用支持图像中可用的注释。使用589个骨盆T2加权MR图像的数据集分割了八个对介入计划的解剖结构的应用，该实验是针对介入八个机构的八个解剖结构的应用。结果证明了3D公式中的每种，空间登记和支持掩模条件的功效，所有这些条件都独立或集体地做出了积极的贡献。与先前提出的2D替代方案相比，不管支持数据来自相同还是不同的机构，都具有统计学意义的少量分割性能。

自我监督的对比表示学习提供了从未标记的医学数据集中学习有意义的视觉表示的优势，以进行转移学习。但是，将当前的对比度学习方法应用于医疗数据而不考虑其特定区域的解剖学特征可能会导致视觉表示，这些视觉表示在外观和语义上是不一致的。在本文中，我们建议通过解剖学对比度学习（AWCL）改善医学图像的视觉表示，该学习结合了解剖学信息，以以对比度学习方式增强正/阴性对采样。为自动化的胎儿超声成像任务展示了所提出的方法，从而使从解剖学上相似的相同或不同的超声扫描实现了正对，这些扫描在解剖学上相似，可以将其拉在一起，从而改善了表示的学习。我们从经验上研究了与粗粒和细粒度的粒度纳入解剖信息的效果，以进行对比学习，并发现使用细粒度的解剖学信息的学习能够保留阶层内差异比其对应物更有效。我们还分析了解剖比对我们的AWCL框架的影响，发现使用更独特但解剖学上的样品构成阳性对的影响会带来更好的质量表示。大规模胎儿超声数据集的实验表明，我们的方法对学习表征有效，可以很好地转移到三个临床下游任务，并且与受监督的Imagenet和当前的先进对比度学习方法相比，取得了优越的性能。特别是，在跨域分割任务上，AWCL的表现优于Imagenet监督方法，高于13.8％，基于最先进的对比度方法的方法为7.1％。

眼睛跟踪器可以在超声（US）扫描期间为超声检查员提供视觉指导。对于经验丰富的运营商来说，这种指导可能是有价值的，可以提高他们在操纵探测器以实现所需飞机方面的扫描技能。在本文中，提出了一种多模式的指导方法（多模式形式的指导方法）来捕获现实世界中的视频信号，同步注视和统一框架内的探测运动之间的逐步依赖性。为了了解目光运动与探测运动之间的因果关系，我们的模型利用多任务学习共同学习了两个相关任务：预测经验丰富的超声仪将在常规产科扫描中执行的凝视运动和探测信号。这两个任务通过模态感知的空间图关联，以检测多模式输入之间的共发生并共享有用的跨模式信息。多模式形式的扫描路径不是确定性的扫描路径，可以通过估计实际扫描的概率分布来扫描多样性。通过三个典型的产科扫描检查进行的实验表明，新方法在探针运动指导和凝视运动预测方面都优于单任务学习。多模态偏见还提供了一个视觉引导信号，对于224x288 US图像，错误率小于10像素。

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.

辅助抗菌处方的人工智能（AI）提出了重大的道德问题。利用与AI驱动的系统一起利用道德框架，同时考虑特定的复杂性，可以支持道德决策以应对抗菌抗性。

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。

We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. We use an autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) to determine if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provide explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model, which outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. However, we test the ability to determine the relevance of a bill with the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was state-of-the-art on many language tasks until text-davinci-003 was released on November 28, 2022. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than simply always predicting that a bill is irrelevant to a company. These results suggest that, as large language models continue to improve core natural language understanding capabilities, performance on corporate lobbying related tasks will continue to improve. We then discuss why this could be problematic for societal-AI alignment.

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.