Pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, existing pre-training methods underutilize the benefits of language understanding for generation. Inspired by the idea of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we propose a GAN-style model for encoder-decoder pre-training by introducing an auxiliary discriminator, unifying the ability of language understanding and generation in a single model. Our model, named as GanLM, is trained with two pre-training objectives: replaced token detection and replaced token denoising. Specifically, given masked source sentences, the generator outputs the target distribution and the discriminator predicts whether the target sampled tokens from distribution are incorrect. The target sentence is replaced with misclassified tokens to construct noisy previous context, which is used to generate the gold sentence. In general, both tasks improve the ability of language understanding and generation by selectively using the denoising data. Extensive experiments in language generation benchmarks show that GanLM with the powerful language understanding capability outperforms various strong pre-trained language models (PLMs) and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

We present a robust, privacy-preserving visual localization algorithm using event cameras. While event cameras can potentially make robust localization due to high dynamic range and small motion blur, the sensors exhibit large domain gaps making it difficult to directly apply conventional image-based localization algorithms. To mitigate the gap, we propose applying event-to-image conversion prior to localization which leads to stable localization. In the privacy perspective, event cameras capture only a fraction of visual information compared to normal cameras, and thus can naturally hide sensitive visual details. To further enhance the privacy protection in our event-based pipeline, we introduce privacy protection at two levels, namely sensor and network level. Sensor level protection aims at hiding facial details with lightweight filtering while network level protection targets hiding the entire user's view in private scene applications using a novel neural network inference pipeline. Both levels of protection involve light-weight computation and incur only a small performance loss. We thus project our method to serve as a building block for practical location-based services using event cameras. The code and dataset will be made public through the following link: https://github.com/82magnolia/event_localization.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have been proven capable of synthesizing high-quality images with remarkable diversity when trained on large amounts of data. However, to our knowledge, few-shot image generation tasks have yet to be studied with DDPM-based approaches. Modern approaches are mainly built on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and adapt models pre-trained on large source domains to target domains using a few available samples. In this paper, we make the first attempt to study when do DDPMs overfit and suffer severe diversity degradation as training data become scarce. Then we propose to adapt DDPMs pre-trained on large source domains to target domains using limited data. Our results show that utilizing knowledge from pre-trained DDPMs can significantly accelerate convergence and improve the quality and diversity of the generated images. Moreover, we propose a DDPM-based pairwise similarity loss to preserve the relative distances between generated samples during domain adaptation. In this way, we further improve the generation diversity of the proposed DDPM-based approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches qualitatively and quantitatively on a series of few-shot image generation tasks and achieve results better than current state-of-the-art GAN-based approaches in quality and diversity.

This paper presents ReasonFormer, a unified reasoning framework for mirroring the modular and compositional reasoning process of humans in complex decision-making. Inspired by dual-process theory in cognitive science, the representation module (automatic thinking) and reasoning modules (controlled thinking) are decoupled to capture different levels of cognition. Upon the top of the representation module, the pre-trained reasoning modules are modular and professional in specific and fundamental reasoning skills (e.g., logic, simple QA, etc). To mimic the controlled compositional thinking process, different reasoning modules are dynamically activated and composed in both parallel and cascaded manners to control what reasoning skills are activated and how deep the reasoning process will be reached to solve the current problems. The unified reasoning framework solves multiple tasks with a single model, and is trained and inferred in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on 11 datasets requiring different reasoning skills and complexity, ReasonFormer demonstrates substantial performance boosts, revealing the compositional reasoning ability. Few-shot experiments exhibit better generalization ability by learning to compose pre-trained skills for new tasks with limited data, and decoupling the representation module and the reasoning modules. Further analysis shows the modularity of reasoning modules as different tasks activate distinct reasoning skills at different reasoning depths.

我们介绍了遮阳板，一个新的像素注释的新数据集和一个基准套件，用于在以自我为中心的视频中分割手和活动对象。遮阳板注释Epic-kitchens的视频，其中带有当前视频分割数据集中未遇到的新挑战。具体而言，我们需要确保像素级注释作为对象经历变革性相互作用的短期和长期一致性，例如洋葱被剥皮，切成丁和煮熟 - 我们旨在获得果皮，洋葱块，斩波板，刀，锅以及表演手的准确像素级注释。遮阳板引入了一条注释管道，以零件为ai驱动，以进行可伸缩性和质量。总共，我们公开发布257个对象类的272K手册语义面具，990万个插值密集口罩，67K手动关系，涵盖36小时的179个未修剪视频。除了注释外，我们还引入了视频对象细分，互动理解和长期推理方面的三个挑战。有关数据，代码和排行榜：http：//epic-kitchens.github.io/visor

在这项工作中，我们研究了基于价值的深钢筋学习（DRL）中简单但普遍适用的奖励成型案例。我们表明，线性转换形式的奖励转移等同于更改函数近似中$ q $ function的初始化。基于这样的等价性，我们带来了关键的见解，即积极的奖励转移会导致保守的剥削，而负面的奖励转移会导致好奇心驱动的探索。因此，保守的剥削改善了离线RL价值估计，乐观的价值估计改善了在线RL的勘探。我们验证了对一系列RL任务的见解，并显示了其对基准的改进：（1）在离线RL中，保守的剥削可根据现成的算法提高性能； （2）在在线连续控制中，具有不同转移常数的多个值函数可用于应对探索 - 诠释困境，以提高样品效率； （3）在离散控制任务中，负奖励转移可以改善基于好奇心的探索方法。

可变选择是统计和机器学习中的重要问题。Copula熵（CE）是用于测量统计独立性的数学概念，最近已应用于变量选择。在本文中，我们建议将基于CE的方法应用于可变选择来生存分析。这个想法是测量变量与事件与CE的时间之间的相关性，然后根据其CE值选择变量。进行了模拟数据和两个实际癌症数据的实验，以将所提出的方法与两种相关方法进行比较：随机生存森林和套索cox。实验结果表明，所提出的方法可以选择更容易解释的“右”变量，并带来更好的预测性能。

变压器结构由一系列编码器和解码器网络层堆叠，在神经机器翻译中实现了重大发展。但是，假设下层提供了微不足道或冗余的信息，那么香草变压器主要利用顶层表示形式，从而忽略了潜在有价值的底层特征。在这项工作中，我们提出了组转换器模型（GTRAN），该模型将编码器和解码器的多层表示分为不同的组，然后融合这些组特征以生成目标词。为了证实所提出方法的有效性，对三个双语翻译基准和两个多语言翻译任务进行了广泛的实验和分析实验，包括IWLST-14，IWLST-17，IWLST-17，LDC，WMT-14和OPUS-100基准。实验和分析结果表明，我们的模型通过一致的增益优于其变压器对应物。此外，它可以成功扩展到60个编码层和36个解码器层。