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.

结构重新参数化（REP）方法已在传统的卷积网络上取得了重大的性能提高。大多数当前的REP方法依靠先验知识来选择重新聚集操作。但是，体系结构的性能受到操作类型和先验知识的限制。为了打破这项限制，在这项工作中，设计了改进的重新参数化搜索空间，其中包括更多类型的重新参数操作。具体而言，搜索空间可以进一步提高卷积网络的性能。为了有效地探索该搜索空间，基于神经体系结构搜索（NAS）设计了自动重新参数增强策略，该策略可以搜索出色的重新参数化体系结构。此外，我们可视化体系结构的输出功能，以分析形成重新参数架构的原因。在公共数据集中，我们取得了更好的结果。在与RESNET相同的训练条件下，我们将Resnet-50的准确性提高了Imagenet-1K的1.82％。

Late-life depression (LLD) is a highly prevalent mood disorder occurring in older adults and is frequently accompanied by cognitive impairment (CI). Studies have shown that LLD may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the heterogeneity of presentation of geriatric depression suggests that multiple biological mechanisms may underlie it. Current biological research on LLD progression incorporates machine learning that combines neuroimaging data with clinical observations. There are few studies on incident cognitive diagnostic outcomes in LLD based on structural MRI (sMRI). In this paper, we describe the development of a hybrid representation learning (HRL) framework for predicting cognitive diagnosis over 5 years based on T1-weighted sMRI data. Specifically, we first extract prediction-oriented MRI features via a deep neural network, and then integrate them with handcrafted MRI features via a Transformer encoder for cognitive diagnosis prediction. Two tasks are investigated in this work, including (1) identifying cognitively normal subjects with LLD and never-depressed older healthy subjects, and (2) identifying LLD subjects who developed CI (or even AD) and those who stayed cognitively normal over five years. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first attempts to study the complex heterogeneous progression of LLD based on task-oriented and handcrafted MRI features. We validate the proposed HRL on 294 subjects with T1-weighted MRIs from two clinically harmonized studies. Experimental results suggest that the HRL outperforms several classical machine learning and state-of-the-art deep learning methods in LLD identification and prediction tasks.

Autonomous robotic surgery has advanced significantly based on analysis of visual and temporal cues in surgical workflow, but relational cues from domain knowledge remain under investigation. Complex relations in surgical annotations can be divided into intra- and inter-relations, both valuable to autonomous systems to comprehend surgical workflows. Intra- and inter-relations describe the relevance of various categories within a particular annotation type and the relevance of different annotation types, respectively. This paper aims to systematically investigate the importance of relational cues in surgery. First, we contribute the RLLS12M dataset, a large-scale collection of robotic left lateral sectionectomy (RLLS), by curating 50 videos of 50 patients operated by 5 surgeons and annotating a hierarchical workflow, which consists of 3 inter- and 6 intra-relations, 6 steps, 15 tasks, and 38 activities represented as the triplet of 11 instruments, 8 actions, and 16 objects, totaling 2,113,510 video frames and 12,681,060 annotation entities. Correspondingly, we propose a multi-relation purification hybrid network (MURPHY), which aptly incorporates novel relation modules to augment the feature representation by purifying relational features using the intra- and inter-relations embodied in annotations. The intra-relation module leverages a R-GCN to implant visual features in different graph relations, which are aggregated using a targeted relation purification with affinity information measuring label consistency and feature similarity. The inter-relation module is motivated by attention mechanisms to regularize the influence of relational features based on the hierarchy of annotation types from the domain knowledge. Extensive experimental results on the curated RLLS dataset confirm the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating that relations matter in surgical workflow analysis.

Many real-world applications of language models (LMs), such as code autocomplete and writing assistance, involve human-LM interaction, but the main LM benchmarks are non-interactive, where a system produces output without human intervention. To evaluate human-LM interaction, we develop a framework, Human-AI Language-based Interaction Evaluation (H-LINE), that expands non-interactive evaluation along three dimensions, capturing (i) the interactive process, not only the final output; (ii) the first-person subjective experience, not just a third-party assessment; and (iii) notions of preference beyond quality. We then design five tasks ranging from goal-oriented to open-ended to capture different forms of interaction. On four state-of-the-art LMs (three variants of OpenAI's GPT-3 and AI21's J1-Jumbo), we find that non-interactive performance does not always result in better human-LM interaction and that first-person and third-party metrics can diverge, suggesting the importance of examining the nuances of human-LM interaction.

End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) aims to translate source speech into target translation without generating the intermediate transcript. However, existing approaches for E2E ST degrade considerably when only limited ST data are available. We observe that an ST model's performance strongly correlates with its embedding similarity from speech and transcript. In this paper, we propose Word-Aligned COntrastive learning (WACO), a novel method for few-shot speech-to-text translation. Our key idea is bridging word-level representations for both modalities via contrastive learning. We evaluate WACO and other methods on the MuST-C dataset, a widely used ST benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that WACO outperforms the best baseline methods by 0.7-8.5 BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel data. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WACO .

Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations.

Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), such as social gathering restrictions, have shown effectiveness to slow the transmission of COVID-19 by reducing the contact of people. To support policy-makers, multiple studies have first modeled human mobility via macro indicators (e.g., average daily travel distance) and then studied the effectiveness of NPIs. In this work, we focus on mobility modeling and, from a micro perspective, aim to predict locations that will be visited by COVID-19 cases. Since NPIs generally cause economic and societal loss, such a micro perspective prediction benefits governments when they design and evaluate them. However, in real-world situations, strict privacy data protection regulations result in severe data sparsity problems (i.e., limited case and location information). To address these challenges, we formulate the micro perspective mobility modeling into computing the relevance score between a diffusion and a location, conditional on a geometric graph. we propose a model named Deep Graph Diffusion Infomax (DGDI), which jointly models variables including a geometric graph, a set of diffusions and a set of locations.To facilitate the research of COVID-19 prediction, we present two benchmarks that contain geometric graphs and location histories of COVID-19 cases. Extensive experiments on the two benchmarks show that DGDI significantly outperforms other competing methods.

This paper presents an algorithm to solve the Soft k-Means problem globally. Unlike Fuzzy c-Means, Soft k-Means (SkM) has a matrix factorization-type objective and has been shown to have a close relation with the popular probability decomposition-type clustering methods, e.g., Left Stochastic Clustering (LSC). Though some work has been done for solving the Soft k-Means problem, they usually use an alternating minimization scheme or the projected gradient descent method, which cannot guarantee global optimality since the non-convexity of SkM. In this paper, we present a sufficient condition for a feasible solution of Soft k-Means problem to be globally optimal and show the output of the proposed algorithm satisfies it. Moreover, for the Soft k-Means problem, we provide interesting discussions on stability, solutions non-uniqueness, and connection with LSC. Then, a new model, named Minimal Volume Soft k-Means (MVSkM), is proposed to address the solutions non-uniqueness issue. Finally, experimental results support our theoretical results.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has revolutionized free viewpoint rendering tasks and achieved impressive results. However, the efficiency and accuracy problems hinder its wide applications. To address these issues, we propose Geometry-Aware Generalized Neural Radiance Field (GARF) with a geometry-aware dynamic sampling (GADS) strategy to perform real-time novel view rendering and unsupervised depth estimation on unseen scenes without per-scene optimization. Distinct from most existing generalized NeRFs, our framework infers the unseen scenes on both pixel-scale and geometry-scale with only a few input images. More specifically, our method learns common attributes of novel-view synthesis by an encoder-decoder structure and a point-level learnable multi-view feature fusion module which helps avoid occlusion. To preserve scene characteristics in the generalized model, we introduce an unsupervised depth estimation module to derive the coarse geometry, narrow down the ray sampling interval to proximity space of the estimated surface and sample in expectation maximum position, constituting Geometry-Aware Dynamic Sampling strategy (GADS). Moreover, we introduce a Multi-level Semantic Consistency loss (MSC) to assist more informative representation learning. Extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor datasets show that comparing with state-of-the-art generalized NeRF methods, GARF reduces samples by more than 25\%, while improving rendering quality and 3D geometry estimation.