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.

心电图（ECG）是心脏病的广泛使用的非侵入性诊断工具。许多研究设计了ECG分析模型（例如分类器）来协助诊断。作为一项上游任务，研究建立了生成模型来综合ECG数据，这对提供培训样本，隐私保护和减少注释是有益的。但是，以前的ECG生成方法通常既不合成多视图数据，也不涉及心脏病状况。在本文中，我们提出了一种新型的，用于多视图ECG合成的新型疾病的生成对抗网络，称为ME-GAN，该网络获得了以心脏病为条件的全磁心电图表示，并将其投射到多个标准视图上，以产生ECG信号。由于心脏病的心电图表现通常位于特定波形中，因此我们提出了一种新的“混合标准化”，以精确地注入合适的位置。此外，我们提出了一个视图歧视者，将无序的心电图视图恢复为预定的顺序，监督发电机以获取代表正确视图特征的ECG。此外，提出了一个新的度量RFID，以评估合成的ECG信号的质量。全面的实验验证了我们的ME-GAN在具有可信赖的病态表现的多视图ECG信号合成上表现良好。

计算机辅助医学图像分割已广泛应用于诊断和治疗，以获得靶器官和组织的形状和体积的临床有用信息。在过去的几年中，基于卷积神经网络（CNN）的方法（例如，U-Net）占主导地位，但仍遭受了不足的远程信息捕获。因此，最近的工作提出了用于医学图像分割任务的计算机视觉变压器变体，并获得了有希望的表现。这种变压器通过计算配对贴片关系来模拟远程依赖性。然而，它们促进了禁止的计算成本，尤其是在3D医学图像（例如，CT和MRI）上。在本文中，我们提出了一种称为扩张变压器的新方法，该方法在本地和全球范围内交替捕获的配对贴片关系进行自我关注。灵感来自扩张卷积核，我们以扩张的方式进行全球自我关注，扩大接收领域而不增加所涉及的斑块，从而降低计算成本。基于这种扩展变压器的设计，我们构造了一个用于3D医学图像分割的U形编码器解码器分层体系结构。 Synapse和ACDC数据集的实验表明，我们的D-Ager Model从头开始培训，以低计算成本从划痕训练，优于各种竞争力的CNN或基于变压器的分段模型，而不耗时的每训练过程。

表格数据在现实世界中普遍存在。虽然许多常用的神经组件（例如，卷积）和可扩展的神经网络（例如，Reset）已经由机器学习界开发，但是很少有人对表格数据有效，并且对于表格数据结构，很少有设计。在本文中，我们为表格数据提出了一种新颖且灵活的神经组件，称为抽象层（ABStlay），其学会明确地统一相关输入功能并为语义抽象生成更高级别的功能。此外，我们设计了一种结构重新参数化方法来压缩ABStlay，从而通过参考阶段的清晰边际降低计算复杂度。使用ABStlays建立了一个特殊的基本块，我们通过堆叠这些块来构建用于表格数据分类和回归的深度抽象网络（DANET）系列。在DANET中，引入特殊的快捷路径以从原始表格特征获取信息，协助不同级别的功能交互。七个现实世界的表格数据集的综合实验表明，我们的ABStlay和Danets对表格数据分类和回归有效，并且计算复杂性优于竞争方法。此外，我们评估DANET的性能收益，因为它深入了解我们的方法的可扩展性。我们的代码可在https://github.com/whatashot/danet上获得。

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is beneficial for dealing with dynamic scenes due to the continuous property of the real-world environment. On the one hand, some methods alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem between continuous frames. On the other hand, other methods employ the previous frame as the prior information to assist in segmenting the current frame. Although the previous methods achieve superior performances on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, they can not generalize well on other unseen domains. Thus, we explore a new task, the video generalizable semantic segmentation (VGSS) task that considers both continuous frames and domain generalization. In this paper, we propose a class-wise non-salient region generalized (CNSG) framework for the VGSS task. Concretely, we first define the class-wise non-salient feature, which describes features of the class-wise non-salient region that carry more generalizable information. Then, we propose a class-wise non-salient feature reasoning strategy to select and enhance the most generalized channels adaptively. Finally, we propose an inter-frame non-salient centroid alignment loss to alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem in the VGSS task. We also extend our video-based framework to the image-based generalizable semantic segmentation (IGSS) task. Experiments demonstrate that our CNSG framework yields significant improvement in the VGSS and IGSS tasks.

In this paper, we improve the kernel alignment regret bound for online kernel learning in the regime of the Hinge loss function. Previous algorithm achieves a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T})^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity (space and per-round time) of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T}})$, where $\mathcal{A}_T$ is called \textit{kernel alignment}. We propose an algorithm whose regret bound and computational complexity are better than previous results. Our results depend on the decay rate of eigenvalues of the kernel matrix. If the eigenvalues of the kernel matrix decay exponentially, then our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_T})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\ln^2{T})$. Otherwise, our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT)^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT})$. We extend our algorithm to batch learning and obtain a $O(\frac{1}{T}\sqrt{\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{A}_T]})$ excess risk bound which improves the previous $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ bound.

Modeling noise transition matrix is a kind of promising method for learning with label noise. Based on the estimated noise transition matrix and the noisy posterior probabilities, the clean posterior probabilities, which are jointly called Label Distribution (LD) in this paper, can be calculated as the supervision. To reliably estimate the noise transition matrix, some methods assume that anchor points are available during training. Nonetheless, if anchor points are invalid, the noise transition matrix might be poorly learned, resulting in poor performance. Consequently, other methods treat reliable data points, extracted from training data, as pseudo anchor points. However, from a statistical point of view, the noise transition matrix can be inferred from data with noisy labels under the clean-label-domination assumption. Therefore, we aim to estimate the noise transition matrix without (pseudo) anchor points. There is evidence showing that samples are more likely to be mislabeled as other similar class labels, which means the mislabeling probability is highly correlated with the inter-class correlation. Inspired by this observation, we propose an instance-specific Label Distribution Regularization (LDR), in which the instance-specific LD is estimated as the supervision, to prevent DCNNs from memorizing noisy labels. Specifically, we estimate the noisy posterior under the supervision of noisy labels, and approximate the batch-level noise transition matrix by estimating the inter-class correlation matrix with neither anchor points nor pseudo anchor points. Experimental results on two synthetic noisy datasets and two real-world noisy datasets demonstrate that our LDR outperforms existing methods.