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.

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has found success in operations research and machine learning applications as a powerful means to obtain solutions with favourable out-of-sample performances. Two compelling explanations for the success are the generalization bounds derived from Wasserstein DRO and the equivalency between Wasserstein DRO and the regularization scheme commonly applied in machine learning. Existing results on generalization bounds and the equivalency to regularization are largely limited to the setting where the Wasserstein ball is of a certain type and the decision criterion takes certain forms of an expected function. In this paper, we show that by focusing on Wasserstein DRO problems with affine decision rules, it is possible to obtain generalization bounds and the equivalency to regularization in a significantly broader setting where the Wasserstein ball can be of a general type and the decision criterion can be a general measure of risk, i.e., nonlinear in distributions. This allows for accommodating many important classification, regression, and risk minimization applications that have not been addressed to date using Wasserstein DRO. Our results are strong in that the generalization bounds do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality and the equivalency to regularization is exact. As a byproduct, our regularization results broaden considerably the class of Wasserstein DRO models that can be solved efficiently via regularization formulations.

Accurate and timely rain prediction is crucial for decision making and is also a challenging task. This paper presents a solution which won the 2 nd prize in the Weather4cast 2022 NeurIPS competition using 3D U-Nets and EarthFormers for 8-hour probabilistic rain prediction based on multi-band satellite images. The spatial context effect of the input satellite image has been deeply explored and optimal context range has been found. Based on the imbalanced rain distribution, we trained multiple models with different loss functions. To further improve the model performance, multi-model ensemble and threshold optimization were used to produce the final probabilistic rain prediction. Experiment results and leaderboard scores demonstrate that optimal spatial context, combined loss function, multi-model ensemble, and threshold optimization all provide modest model gain. A permutation test was used to analyze the effect of each satellite band on rain prediction, and results show that satellite bands signifying cloudtop phase (8.7 um) and cloud-top height (10.8 and 13.4 um) are the best predictors for rain prediction. The source code is available at https://github.com/bugsuse/weather4cast-2022-stage2.

We consider optimizing a function network in the noise-free grey-box setting with RKHS function classes, where the exact intermediate results are observable. We assume that the structure of the network is known (but not the underlying functions comprising it), and we study three types of structures: (1) chain: a cascade of scalar-valued functions, (2) multi-output chain: a cascade of vector-valued functions, and (3) feed-forward network: a fully connected feed-forward network of scalar-valued functions. We propose a sequential upper confidence bound based algorithm GPN-UCB along with a general theoretical upper bound on the cumulative regret. For the Mat\'ern kernel, we additionally propose a non-adaptive sampling based method along with its theoretical upper bound on the simple regret. We also provide algorithm-independent lower bounds on the simple regret and cumulative regret, showing that GPN-UCB is near-optimal for chains and multi-output chains in broad cases of interest.

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.

Seeking legal advice is often expensive. Recent advancements in machine learning for solving complex problems can be leveraged to help make legal services more accessible to the public. However, real-life applications encounter significant challenges. State-of-the-art language models are growing increasingly large, making parameter-efficient learning increasingly important. Unfortunately, parameter-efficient methods perform poorly with small amounts of data, which are common in the legal domain (where data labelling costs are high). To address these challenges, we propose parameter-efficient legal domain adaptation, which uses vast unsupervised legal data from public legal forums to perform legal pre-training. This method exceeds or matches the fewshot performance of existing models such as LEGAL-BERT on various legal tasks while tuning only approximately 0.1% of model parameters. Additionally, we show that our method can achieve calibration comparable to existing methods across several tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to explore parameter-efficient methods of tuning language models in the legal domain.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), a new novel view synthesis with implicit scene representation has taken the field of Computer Vision by storm. As a novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction method, NeRF models find applications in robotics, urban mapping, autonomous navigation, virtual reality/augmented reality, and more. Since the original paper by Mildenhall et al., more than 250 preprints were published, with more than 100 eventually being accepted in tier one Computer Vision Conferences. Given NeRF popularity and the current interest in this research area, we believe it necessary to compile a comprehensive survey of NeRF papers from the past two years, which we organized into both architecture, and application based taxonomies. We also provide an introduction to the theory of NeRF based novel view synthesis, and a benchmark comparison of the performance and speed of key NeRF models. By creating this survey, we hope to introduce new researchers to NeRF, provide a helpful reference for influential works in this field, as well as motivate future research directions with our discussion section.

变压器在图像处理领域取得了显着的成就。受到这一巨大成功的启发，变形金刚在3D点云处理中的应用引起了越来越多的关注。本文提出了一个新颖的点云表示学习网络，具有双重自我注意的3D点云变压器（3DPCT）和一个编码器解码器结构。具体而言，3DPCT具有一个层次编码器，该编码器包含两个用于分类任务的局部全球双重注意模块（分段任务的三个模块），每个模块都包含一个局部特征聚合（LFA）块和全局特征学习（ GFL）块。 GFL块是双重的自我注意事项，既有在点上的自我注意力，又可以提高特征提取。此外，在LFA中，为更好地利用了提取的本地信息，设计了一种新颖的点自我发明模型，称为点斑点自我注意力（PPSA）。在分类和分割数据集上都评估了性能，其中包含合成数据和现实世界数据。广泛的实验表明，所提出的方法在分类和分割任务上都达到了最新的结果。

本文衡量了跨语言寄存器变化的稳定性。寄存器是各种与语言上下文相关的语言。寄存器及其上下文之间的关系是功能的：构成寄存器的语言特征是由交流状况的需求和约束所激发的。该观点假设寄存器应该是通用的，因此我们期望定义寄存器的语言外部环境与寄存器所包含的语言特征集之间存在稳定的关系。在本文中，使用在可比的交流情况下生成的Corpora在60种语言中比较寄存器特定语言中的变化来测试寄存器变化的普遍性和鲁棒性：推文和Wikipedia文章。我们的发现证实了寄存器变化实际上是普遍的预测。

与LTE网络相比，5G的愿景在于提供较高的数据速率，低延迟（为了实现近实时应用程序），大大增加了基站容量以及用户的接近完美服务质量（QoS）。为了提供此类服务，5G系统将支持LTE，NR，NR-U和Wi-Fi等访问技术的各种组合。每种无线电访问技术（RAT）都提供不同类型的访问，这些访问应在用户中对其进行最佳分配和管理。除了资源管理外，5G系统还将支持双重连接服务。因此，网络的编排对于系统经理在旧式访问技术方面来说是一个更困难的问题。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于联合元学习（FML）的大鼠分配算法，该算法使RAN Intelligent Controller（RIC）能够更快地适应动态变化的环境。我们设计了一个包含LTE和5G NR服务技术的模拟环境。在模拟中，我们的目标是在传输的截止日期内满足UE需求，以提供更高的QoS值。我们将提出的算法与单个RL试剂，爬行动物算法和基于规则的启发式方法进行了比较。仿真结果表明，提出的FML方法分别在第一部部署回合21％和12％时达到了较高的缓存率。此外，在比较方法中，提出的方法最快地适应了新任务和环境。