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.

Accurate polyp segmentation is of great importance for colorectal cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, due to the high cost of producing accurate mask annotations, existing polyp segmentation methods suffer from severe data shortage and impaired model generalization. Reversely, coarse polyp bounding box annotations are more accessible. Thus, in this paper, we propose a boosted BoxPolyp model to make full use of both accurate mask and extra coarse box annotations. In practice, box annotations are applied to alleviate the over-fitting issue of previous polyp segmentation models, which generate fine-grained polyp area through the iterative boosted segmentation model. To achieve this goal, a fusion filter sampling (FFS) module is firstly proposed to generate pixel-wise pseudo labels from box annotations with less noise, leading to significant performance improvements. Besides, considering the appearance consistency of the same polyp, an image consistency (IC) loss is designed. Such IC loss explicitly narrows the distance between features extracted by two different networks, which improves the robustness of the model. Note that our BoxPolyp is a plug-and-play model, which can be merged into any appealing backbone. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on five challenging benchmarks confirm that our proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the context. This requires the capability to infer the correlations between events. Recent works have attempted to improve event correlation reasoning by using pretrained language models and incorporating external knowledge~(e.g., discourse relations). Though promising results have been achieved, some challenges still remain. First, the pretrained language models adopted by current works ignore event-level knowledge, resulting in an inability to capture the correlations between events well. Second, modeling correlations between events with discourse relations is limited because it can only capture explicit correlations between events with discourse markers, and cannot capture many implicit correlations. To this end, we propose a novel generative approach for this task, in which a pretrained language model is fine-tuned with an event-centric pretraining objective and predicts the next event within a generative paradigm. Specifically, we first introduce a novel event-level blank infilling strategy as the learning objective to inject event-level knowledge into the pretrained language model, and then design a likelihood-based contrastive loss for fine-tuning the generative model. Instead of using an additional prediction layer, we perform prediction by using sequence likelihoods generated by the generative model. Our approach models correlations between events in a soft way without any external knowledge. The likelihood-based prediction eliminates the need to use additional networks to make predictions and is somewhat interpretable since it scores each word in the event. Experimental results on the multi-choice narrative cloze~(MCNC) task demonstrate that our approach achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/zhufq00/mcnc}.

Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm that enables knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous artificial intelligence (AIoT) devices through centralized global model aggregation. FL suffers from model inaccuracy and slow convergence due to the model heterogeneity of the AIoT devices involved. Although various existing methods try to solve the bottleneck of the model heterogeneity problem, most of them improve the accuracy of heterogeneous models in a coarse-grained manner, which makes it still a great challenge to deploy large-scale AIoT devices. To alleviate the negative impact of this problem and take full advantage of the diversity of each heterogeneous model, we propose an efficient framework named HierarchyFL, which uses a small amount of public data for efficient and scalable knowledge across a variety of differently structured models. By using self-distillation and our proposed ensemble library, each hierarchical model can intelligently learn from each other on cloud servers. Experimental results on various well-known datasets show that HierarchyFL can not only maximize the knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous models in large-scale AIoT systems, but also greatly improve the model performance of each involved heterogeneous AIoT device.

Whole-slide images (WSI) in computational pathology have high resolution with gigapixel size, but are generally with sparse regions of interest, which leads to weak diagnostic relevance and data inefficiency for each area in the slide. Most of the existing methods rely on a multiple instance learning framework that requires densely sampling local patches at high magnification. The limitation is evident in the application stage as the heavy computation for extracting patch-level features is inevitable. In this paper, we develop RLogist, a benchmarking deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for fast observation strategy on WSIs. Imitating the diagnostic logic of human pathologists, our RL agent learns how to find regions of observation value and obtain representative features across multiple resolution levels, without having to analyze each part of the WSI at the high magnification. We benchmark our method on two whole-slide level classification tasks, including detection of metastases in WSIs of lymph node sections, and subtyping of lung cancer. Experimental results demonstrate that RLogist achieves competitive classification performance compared to typical multiple instance learning algorithms, while having a significantly short observation path. In addition, the observation path given by RLogist provides good decision-making interpretability, and its ability of reading path navigation can potentially be used by pathologists for educational/assistive purposes. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/tencent-ailab/RLogist}.

Deep learning (DL)-based tomographic SAR imaging algorithms are gradually being studied. Typically, they use an unfolding network to mimic the iterative calculation of the classical compressive sensing (CS)-based methods and process each range-azimuth unit individually. However, only one-dimensional features are effectively utilized in this way. The correlation between adjacent resolution units is ignored directly. To address that, we propose a new model-data-driven network to achieve tomoSAR imaging based on multi-dimensional features. Guided by the deep unfolding methodology, a two-dimensional deep unfolding imaging network is constructed. On the basis of it, we add two 2D processing modules, both convolutional encoder-decoder structures, to enhance multi-dimensional features of the imaging scene effectively. Meanwhile, to train the proposed multifeature-based imaging network, we construct a tomoSAR simulation dataset consisting entirely of simulation data of buildings. Experiments verify the effectiveness of the model. Compared with the conventional CS-based FISTA method and DL-based gamma-Net method, the result of our proposed method has better performance on completeness while having decent imaging accuracy.

Benefiting from a relatively larger aperture's angle, and in combination with a wide transmitting bandwidth, near-field synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides a high-resolution image of a target's scattering distribution-hot spots. Meanwhile, imaging result suffers inevitable degradation from sidelobes, clutters, and noises, hindering the information retrieval of the target. To restore the image, current methods make simplified assumptions; for example, the point spread function (PSF) is spatially consistent, the target consists of sparse point scatters, etc. Thus, they achieve limited restoration performance in terms of the target's shape, especially for complex targets. To address these issues, a preliminary study is conducted on restoration with the recent promising deep learning inverse technique in this work. We reformulate the degradation model into a spatially variable complex-convolution model, where the near-field SAR's system response is considered. Adhering to it, a model-based deep learning network is designed to restore the image. A simulated degraded image dataset from multiple complex target models is constructed to validate the network. All the images are formulated using the electromagnetic simulation tool. Experiments on the dataset reveal their effectiveness. Compared with current methods, superior performance is achieved regarding the target's shape and energy estimation.

This work focuses on 3D Radar imaging inverse problems. Current methods obtain undifferentiated results that suffer task-depended information retrieval loss and thus don't meet the task's specific demands well. For example, biased scattering energy may be acceptable for screen imaging but not for scattering diagnosis. To address this issue, we propose a new task-oriented imaging framework. The imaging principle is task-oriented through an analysis phase to obtain task's demands. The imaging model is multi-cognition regularized to embed and fulfill demands. The imaging method is designed to be general-ized, where couplings between cognitions are decoupled and solved individually with approximation and variable-splitting techniques. Tasks include scattering diagnosis, person screen imaging, and parcel screening imaging are given as examples. Experiments on data from two systems indicate that the pro-posed framework outperforms the current ones in task-depended information retrieval.

随着向设备深度学习的转变，确保在各种计算平台上的AI服务的一致行为变得非常重要。我们的工作解决了降低视力倒数的预测不一致的新兴问题：由较不准确的模型正确预测但错误地预测的测试样品。我们介绍了回归约束的神经体系结构搜索（Reg-NAS），以设计一个高度准确的模型家庭，这些模型会导致更少的负面流动。 Reg-NAS由两个组成部分组成：（1）一种新型的体系结构约束，使较大的模型能够包含较小的权重，从而最大化权重共享。这一想法源于我们的观察结果，即网络之间的重量较大会导致相似的样本预测，并导致负面量较少。 （2）一种新颖的搜索奖励，在体系结构搜索指标中同时结合了TOP-1的准确性和负面翻转。我们证明，\ regnas可以在三个流行的架构搜索空间中成功找到具有很少负面额的理想体系结构。与现有的最新方法相比，Reg-NAS可实现33-48％的负面流量相对减少。

随着卷积神经网络（CNN）的蓬勃发展，诸如VGG-16和Resnet-50之类的CNN广泛用作SAR船检测中的骨架。但是，基于CNN的骨干很难对远程依赖性进行建模，并且导致缺乏浅层特征图中缺乏足够的高质量语义信息，从而导致在复杂的背景和小型船只中的检测性能不佳。为了解决这些问题，我们提出了一种基于SWIN Transformer的SAR船检测方法，并提出了功能增强功能功能金字塔网络（FEFPN）。SWIN Transformer用作建模远程依赖性并生成层次特征图的骨架。提出了FEFPN，以进一步提高特征地图的质量，通过逐渐增强各级特征地图的语义信息，尤其是浅层中的特征地图。在SAR船检测数据集（SSDD）上进行的实验揭示了我们提出的方法的优势。