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.

最近基于深度学习的医学图像注册方法实现了与传统优化算法在减少的运行时间时具有竞争力的结果。但是，深度神经网络通常需要大量标记的培训数据，并且容易受到培训和测试数据之间的领域变化。尽管基于按键的注册可以减轻典型的强度移位，但由于不同的视野，这些方法仍然遭受几何域移位。作为一种补救措施，在这项工作中，我们提出了一种用于图像注册的几何结构域适应性的新方法，将模型从标记的源调整为未标记的目标域。我们以基于按键的注册模型为基础，将用于几何特征学习的图形卷积与循环信念优化相结合，并提议通过自我增压来减少域的转移。为此，我们将模型嵌入了卑鄙的教师范式中。我们将平均教师扩展到这种情况下，通过1）调整随机增强方案和2）将学习的特征提取与可区分优化相结合。这使我们能够通过对学习学生和时间平均的教师模型的一致预测来指导未标记的目标域中的学习过程。我们评估了在两个具有挑战性的适应方案（dir-lab 4d ct to copd，copd to copd to Learn2Reg）下呼气到肺CT注册的方法。我们的方法一致地将基线模型提高了50％/47％，甚至匹配了对目标数据训练的模型的准确性。源代码可在https://github.com/multimodallearning/registration-da-mean-teacher上获得。

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。

迄今为止，迄今为止，众所周知，对广泛的互补临床相关任务进行了全面比较了医学图像登记方法。这限制了采用研究进展，以防止竞争方法的公平基准。在过去五年内已经探讨了许多新的学习方法，但优化，建筑或度量战略的问题非常适合仍然是开放的。 Learn2reg涵盖了广泛的解剖学：脑，腹部和胸部，方式：超声波，CT，MRI，群体：患者内部和患者内部和监督水平。我们为3D注册的培训和验证建立了较低的入境障碍，这帮助我们从20多个独特的团队中汇编了65多个单独的方法提交的结果。我们的互补度量集，包括稳健性，准确性，合理性和速度，使得能够独特地位了解当前的医学图像登记现状。进一步分析监督问题的转移性，偏见和重要性，主要是基于深度学习的方法的优越性，并将新的研究方向开放到利用GPU加速的常规优化的混合方法。

目前可变形的医学图像登记的方法通常难以满足以下所有标准：多功能适用性，小的计算或培训时间，以及能够估计大变形。此外，用于监督登记培训的端到端网络通常变得过于复杂，难以训练。对于Learn2Reg2021挑战，我们的目标是通过解耦特征学习和几何对齐来解决这些问题。首先，我们介绍了一种新的非常快速准确的优化方法。通过采用离散的位移和耦合的凸优化程序，我们能够强大地应对大变形。借助基于亚当的实例优化，我们实现了非常准确的注册性能，并通过使用正则化，我们获得了光滑和合理的变形字段。其次，对于不同的注册任务来说是多功能的，我们提取手工制作的功能，这些功能是模态和对比度不变，并将它们与来自特定于任务的分段U-Net的语义特征补充。通过我们的结果，我们能够实现整体学习2REG2021挑战的第二名，赢得任务1，并在另外两项任务中赢得任务1。

We revisit a simple Learning-from-Scratch baseline for visuo-motor control that uses data augmentation and a shallow ConvNet. We find that this baseline has competitive performance with recent methods that leverage frozen visual representations trained on large-scale vision datasets.

Poor sample efficiency continues to be the primary challenge for deployment of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for real-world applications, and in particular for visuo-motor control. Model-based RL has the potential to be highly sample efficient by concurrently learning a world model and using synthetic rollouts for planning and policy improvement. However, in practice, sample-efficient learning with model-based RL is bottlenecked by the exploration challenge. In this work, we find that leveraging just a handful of demonstrations can dramatically improve the sample-efficiency of model-based RL. Simply appending demonstrations to the interaction dataset, however, does not suffice. We identify key ingredients for leveraging demonstrations in model learning -- policy pretraining, targeted exploration, and oversampling of demonstration data -- which forms the three phases of our model-based RL framework. We empirically study three complex visuo-motor control domains and find that our method is 150%-250% more successful in completing sparse reward tasks compared to prior approaches in the low data regime (100K interaction steps, 5 demonstrations). Code and videos are available at: https://nicklashansen.github.io/modemrl

Linear-quadratic regulators (LQR) are a well known and widely used tool in control theory for both linear and nonlinear dynamics. For nonlinear problems, an LQR-based controller is usually only locally viable, thus, raising the problem of estimating the region of attraction (ROA). The need for good ROA estimations becomes especially pressing for underactuated systems, as a failure of controls might lead to unsafe and unrecoverable system states. Known approaches based on optimization or sampling, while working well, might be too slow in time critical applications and are hard to verify formally. In this work, we propose a novel approach to estimate the ROA based on the analytic solutions to linear ODEs for the torque limited simple pendulum. In simulation and physical experiments, we compared our approach to a Lyapunov-sampling baseline approach and found that our approach was faster to compute, while yielding ROA estimations of similar phase space area.

Many autonomous agents, such as intelligent vehicles, are inherently required to interact with one another. Game theory provides a natural mathematical tool for robot motion planning in such interactive settings. However, tractable algorithms for such problems usually rely on a strong assumption, namely that the objectives of all players in the scene are known. To make such tools applicable for ego-centric planning with only local information, we propose an adaptive model-predictive game solver, which jointly infers other players' objectives online and computes a corresponding generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) strategy. The adaptivity of our approach is enabled by a differentiable trajectory game solver whose gradient signal is used for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of opponents' objectives. This differentiability of our pipeline facilitates direct integration with other differentiable elements, such as neural networks (NNs). Furthermore, in contrast to existing solvers for cost inference in games, our method handles not only partial state observations but also general inequality constraints. In two simulated traffic scenarios, we find superior performance of our approach over both existing game-theoretic methods and non-game-theoretic model-predictive control (MPC) approaches. We also demonstrate our approach's real-time planning capabilities and robustness in two hardware experiments.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are deep learning models designed to process attributed graphs. GNNs can compute cluster assignments accounting both for the vertex features and for the graph topology. Existing GNNs for clustering are trained by optimizing an unsupervised minimum cut objective, which is approximated by a Spectral Clustering (SC) relaxation. SC offers a closed-form solution that, however, is not particularly useful for a GNN trained with gradient descent. Additionally, the SC relaxation is loose and yields overly smooth cluster assignments, which do not separate well the samples. We propose a GNN model that optimizes a tighter relaxation of the minimum cut based on graph total variation (GTV). Our model has two core components: i) a message-passing layer that minimizes the $\ell_1$ distance in the features of adjacent vertices, which is key to achieving sharp cluster transitions; ii) a loss function that minimizes the GTV in the cluster assignments while ensuring balanced partitions. By optimizing the proposed loss, our model can be self-trained to perform clustering. In addition, our clustering procedure can be used to implement graph pooling in deep GNN architectures for graph classification. Experiments show that our model outperforms other GNN-based approaches for clustering and graph pooling.