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.

机器学习算法可以在当代智能系统中进行高级决策。研究表明，它们的模型性能与解释性之间存在权衡。具有较高性能的机器学习模型通常基于更复杂的算法，因此缺乏解释性，反之亦然。但是，从最终用户的角度来看，这种权衡几乎没有经验证据。我们旨在通过进行两个用户实验来提供经验证据。使用两个不同的数据集，我们首先测量五种常见的机器学习算法的权衡。其次，我们解决了最终用户对可解释的人工智能增强的看法的问题，旨在增加对高性能复杂模型的决策逻辑的理解。我们的结果与权衡曲线的广泛假设有所不同，并表明模型性能和解释性之间的权衡在最终用户的感知中逐渐少得多。这与假定的固有模型可解释性形成鲜明对比。此外，我们发现折衷是由于数据复杂性而成为情境。我们的第二次实验的结果表明，尽管可以使用可解释的人工智能增强来提高解释性，但解释的类型在最终用户感知中起着至关重要的作用。

域适应（DA）最近在医学影像社区提出了强烈的兴趣。虽然已经提出了大量DA技术进行了用于图像分割，但大多数这些技术已经在私有数据集或小公共可用数据集上验证。此外，这些数据集主要解决了单级问题。为了解决这些限制，与第24届医学图像计算和计算机辅助干预（Miccai 2021）结合第24届国际会议组织交叉模态域适应（Crossmoda）挑战。 Crossmoda是无监督跨型号DA的第一个大型和多级基准。挑战的目标是分割参与前庭施瓦新瘤（VS）的后续和治疗规划的两个关键脑结构：VS和Cochleas。目前，使用对比度增强的T1（CET1）MRI进行VS患者的诊断和监测。然而，使用诸如高分辨率T2（HRT2）MRI的非对比度序列越来越感兴趣。因此，我们创建了一个无人监督的跨模型分段基准。训练集提供注释CET1（n = 105）和未配对的非注释的HRT2（n = 105）。目的是在测试集中提供的HRT2上自动对HRT2进行单侧VS和双侧耳蜗分割（n = 137）。共有16支球队提交了评估阶段的算法。顶级履行团队达成的表现水平非常高（最佳中位数骰子 - vs：88.4％; Cochleas：85.7％）并接近完全监督（中位数骰子 - vs：92.5％;耳蜗：87.7％）。所有顶级执行方法都使用图像到图像转换方法将源域图像转换为伪目标域图像。然后使用这些生成的图像和为源图像提供的手动注释进行培训分割网络。

迁移率和加热部门的连续电气化将对分布网格运行引入新的挑战。不协调的灵活单元激活，例如，电动车辆同时充电作为对价格信号的反应，可以系统地触发变压器或线路保护。实时识别这种快速升高的灵活性激活将允许抵消以避免潜在的社会和财务成本。在这项工作中，提出了一种用于识别快速升高灵活性激活事件的新型数据处理流水线。管道结合了无监督事件检测和开放式分类的技术。实际负载数据的系统评估演示了所提出的管道的主要构建块可以通过满足分布式事件检测架构中应用的重要要求的方法来实现。为了检测灵活性激活事件，识别了上部性能限制。此外，证明了与广泛应用的闭合分类器相比，用于分类的开放式分类器的应用可以提高性能。

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Transformer has achieved impressive successes for various computer vision tasks. However, most of existing studies require to pretrain the Transformer backbone on a large-scale labeled dataset (e.g., ImageNet) for achieving satisfactory performance, which is usually unavailable for medical images. Additionally, due to the gap between medical and natural images, the improvement generated by the ImageNet pretrained weights significantly degrades while transferring the weights to medical image processing tasks. In this paper, we propose Bootstrap Own Latent of Transformer (BOLT), a self-supervised learning approach specifically for medical image classification with the Transformer backbone. Our BOLT consists of two networks, namely online and target branches, for self-supervised representation learning. Concretely, the online network is trained to predict the target network representation of the same patch embedding tokens with a different perturbation. To maximally excavate the impact of Transformer from limited medical data, we propose an auxiliary difficulty ranking task. The Transformer is enforced to identify which branch (i.e., online/target) is processing the more difficult perturbed tokens. Overall, the Transformer endeavours itself to distill the transformation-invariant features from the perturbed tokens to simultaneously achieve difficulty measurement and maintain the consistency of self-supervised representations. The proposed BOLT is evaluated on three medical image processing tasks, i.e., skin lesion classification, knee fatigue fracture grading and diabetic retinopathy grading. The experimental results validate the superiority of our BOLT for medical image classification, compared to ImageNet pretrained weights and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches.

Decompilation aims to transform a low-level program language (LPL) (eg., binary file) into its functionally-equivalent high-level program language (HPL) (e.g., C/C++). It is a core technology in software security, especially in vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. In recent years, with the successful application of neural machine translation (NMT) models in natural language processing (NLP), researchers have tried to build neural decompilers by borrowing the idea of NMT. They formulate the decompilation process as a translation problem between LPL and HPL, aiming to reduce the human cost required to develop decompilation tools and improve their generalizability. However, state-of-the-art learning-based decompilers do not cope well with compiler-optimized binaries. Since real-world binaries are mostly compiler-optimized, decompilers that do not consider optimized binaries have limited practical significance. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based approach named NeurDP, that targets compiler-optimized binaries. NeurDP uses a graph neural network (GNN) model to convert LPL to an intermediate representation (IR), which bridges the gap between source code and optimized binary. We also design an Optimized Translation Unit (OTU) to split functions into smaller code fragments for better translation performance. Evaluation results on datasets containing various types of statements show that NeurDP can decompile optimized binaries with 45.21% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art neural decompilation frameworks.

Existing measures and representations for trajectories have two longstanding fundamental shortcomings, i.e., they are computationally expensive and they can not guarantee the `uniqueness' property of a distance function: dist(X,Y) = 0 if and only if X=Y, where $X$ and $Y$ are two trajectories. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful way to represent trajectories and measure the similarity between two trajectories using a distributional kernel to address these shortcomings. It is a principled approach based on kernel mean embedding which has a strong theoretical underpinning. It has three distinctive features in comparison with existing approaches. (1) A distributional kernel is used for the very first time for trajectory representation and similarity measurement. (2) It does not rely on point-to-point distances which are used in most existing distances for trajectories. (3) It requires no learning, unlike existing learning and deep learning approaches. We show the generality of this new approach in three applications: (a) trajectory anomaly detection, (b) anomalous sub-trajectory detection, and (c) trajectory pattern mining. We identify that the distributional kernel has (i) a unique data-dependent property and the above uniqueness property which are the key factors that lead to its superior task-specific performance; and (ii) runtime orders of magnitude faster than existing distance measures.

Detecting abrupt changes in data distribution is one of the most significant tasks in streaming data analysis. Although many unsupervised Change-Point Detection (CPD) methods have been proposed recently to identify those changes, they still suffer from missing subtle changes, poor scalability, or/and sensitive to noise points. To meet these challenges, we are the first to generalise the CPD problem as a special case of the Change-Interval Detection (CID) problem. Then we propose a CID method, named iCID, based on a recent Isolation Distributional Kernel (IDK). iCID identifies the change interval if there is a high dissimilarity score between two non-homogeneous temporal adjacent intervals. The data-dependent property and finite feature map of IDK enabled iCID to efficiently identify various types of change points in data streams with the tolerance of noise points. Moreover, the proposed online and offline versions of iCID have the ability to optimise key parameter settings. The effectiveness and efficiency of iCID have been systematically verified on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Function approximation (FA) has been a critical component in solving large zero-sum games. Yet, little attention has been given towards FA in solving \textit{general-sum} extensive-form games, despite them being widely regarded as being computationally more challenging than their fully competitive or cooperative counterparts. A key challenge is that for many equilibria in general-sum games, no simple analogue to the state value function used in Markov Decision Processes and zero-sum games exists. In this paper, we propose learning the \textit{Enforceable Payoff Frontier} (EPF) -- a generalization of the state value function for general-sum games. We approximate the optimal \textit{Stackelberg extensive-form correlated equilibrium} by representing EPFs with neural networks and training them by using appropriate backup operations and loss functions. This is the first method that applies FA to the Stackelberg setting, allowing us to scale to much larger games while still enjoying performance guarantees based on FA error. Additionally, our proposed method guarantees incentive compatibility and is easy to evaluate without having to depend on self-play or approximate best-response oracles.