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.

Although synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) can achieve the seeing-through effect by blurring out off-focus foreground occlusions while recovering in-focus occluded scenes from multi-view images, its performance is often deteriorated by dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions. To address the problem, this paper presents an Event-based SAI (E-SAI) method by relying on the asynchronous events with extremely low latency and high dynamic range acquired by an event camera. Specifically, the collected events are first refocused by a Refocus-Net module to align in-focus events while scattering out off-focus ones. Following that, a hybrid network composed of spiking neural networks (SNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed to encode the spatio-temporal information from the refocused events and reconstruct a visual image of the occluded targets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed E-SAI method can achieve remarkable performance in dealing with very dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions and produce high-quality images from pure events. Codes and datasets are available at https://dvs-whu.cn/projects/esai/.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at extracting opinionated aspect terms in review texts and determining their sentiment polarities, which is widely studied in both academia and industry. As a fine-grained classification task, the annotation cost is extremely high. Domain adaptation is a popular solution to alleviate the data deficiency issue in new domains by transferring common knowledge across domains. Most cross-domain ABSA studies are based on structure correspondence learning (SCL), and use pivot features to construct auxiliary tasks for narrowing down the gap between domains. However, their pivot-based auxiliary tasks can only transfer knowledge of aspect terms but not sentiment, limiting the performance of existing models. In this work, we propose a novel Syntax-guided Domain Adaptation Model, named SDAM, for more effective cross-domain ABSA. SDAM exploits syntactic structure similarities for building pseudo training instances, during which aspect terms of target domain are explicitly related to sentiment polarities. Besides, we propose a syntax-based BERT mask language model for further capturing domain-invariant features. Finally, to alleviate the sentiment inconsistency issue in multi-gram aspect terms, we introduce a span-based joint aspect term and sentiment analysis module into the cross-domain End2End ABSA. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with respect to Micro-F1 metric for the cross-domain End2End ABSA task.

基于深度学习的模型占主导地位的生产推荐系统的当前景观。此外，近年来目睹了模型规模的指数增长 - 从谷歌的2016年模型，最新的Facebook的型号有10亿个参数，具有12万亿参数。型号容量的每次跳跃都有显着的质量增强，这使我们相信100万亿参数的时代即将来临。然而，即使在工业规模数据中心内，这些模型的培训也在挑战。这种困难是从训练计算的惊人的异质性继承 - 模型的嵌入层可以包括总模型尺寸的99.99％，这是极其内存密集的;虽然其余的神经网络越来越多地计算密集型。为支持培训此类巨大模式，迫切需要有效的分布式培训系统。在本文中，我们通过仔细共同设计优化算法和分布式系统架构来解决这一挑战。具体而言，为了确保培训效率和训练精度，我们设计一种新型混合训练算法，其中嵌入层和密集的神经网络由不同的同步机制处理;然后，我们构建一个名为Persia的系统（短暂的并行推荐培训系统，其中包含混合加速），以支持这种混合培训算法。理论上的示范和实证研究均达到100万亿参数，以证明了波斯的系统设计和实施。我们将Pensia公开使用（在https://github.com/persiamml/persia），以便任何人都能够以100万亿参数的规模轻松培训推荐模型。

无监督的对话结构学习是自然语言处理中的一个重要而有意义的任务。提取的对话结构和过程可以帮助分析人类对话，并在对话系统的设计和评估中发挥重要作用。传统的对话系统要求专家手动设计对话结构，这是非常昂贵的。但通过无监督的对话结构学习，可以自动获得对话结构，降低开发人员构建对话过程的成本。学习的对话结构可用于促进下游任务系统的对话生成，提高对话机器人回复的逻辑和一致性。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于伯特的无监督对话结构学习算法Dsbert（对话结构伯特）。与以前的SOTA型号VRNN和SVRNN不同，我们组合BERT和AutoEncoder，可以有效地组合上下文信息。为了更好地防止模型落入本地最佳解决方案并使对话状态分布更加均匀，合理，我们还提出了三个可用于对话结构学习的均衡损失功能。实验结果表明，Dsbert可以产生更接近真实结构的对话结构，可以将句子与不同的语义区分开到不同的隐藏状态。

软致动器在符合性和形态方面表现出具有很大的优势，用于操纵细腻物体和在密闭空间中的检查。对于可以提供扭转运动的软致动器有一个未满足的需要。放大工作空间并增加自由度。为此目标，我们呈现由硅胶制成的折纸启发的软充气执行器（OSPas）。原型可以输出多于一个旋转的旋转（高达435 {\ DEG}），比以前的同行更大。我们描述了设计和制作方法，构建了运动学模型和仿真模型，并分析和优化参数。最后，我们通过整合到能够同时抓住和提升脆弱或扁平物体的夹具，这是一种能够与扭转致动器的直角拾取和放置物品的多功能机器人，以及柔软的蛇通过扭转致动器的扭转能够改变姿态和方向的机器人。

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.

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.

Embedding words in vector space is a fundamental first step in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP). Typical NLP solutions employ pre-defined vector representations to improve generalization by co-locating similar words in vector space. For instance, Word2Vec is a self-supervised predictive model that captures the context of words using a neural network. Similarly, GLoVe is a popular unsupervised model incorporating corpus-wide word co-occurrence statistics. Such word embedding has significantly boosted important NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, document classification, and machine translation. However, the embeddings are dense floating-point vectors, making them expensive to compute and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we instead propose to represent the semantics of words with a few defining words that are related using propositional logic. To produce such logical embeddings, we introduce a Tsetlin Machine-based autoencoder that learns logical clauses self-supervised. The clauses consist of contextual words like "black," "cup," and "hot" to define other words like "coffee," thus being human-understandable. We evaluate our embedding approach on several intrinsic and extrinsic benchmarks, outperforming GLoVe on six classification tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the interpretability of our embedding using the logical representations acquired during training. We also visualize word clusters in vector space, demonstrating how our logical embedding co-locate similar words.

The surrogate loss of variational autoencoders (VAEs) poses various challenges to their training, inducing the imbalance between task fitting and representation inference. To avert this, the existing strategies for VAEs focus on adjusting the tradeoff by introducing hyperparameters, deriving a tighter bound under some mild assumptions, or decomposing the loss components per certain neural settings. VAEs still suffer from uncertain tradeoff learning.We propose a novel evolutionary variational autoencoder (eVAE) building on the variational information bottleneck (VIB) theory and integrative evolutionary neural learning. eVAE integrates a variational genetic algorithm into VAE with variational evolutionary operators including variational mutation, crossover, and evolution. Its inner-outer-joint training mechanism synergistically and dynamically generates and updates the uncertain tradeoff learning in the evidence lower bound (ELBO) without additional constraints. Apart from learning a lossy compression and representation of data under the VIB assumption, eVAE presents an evolutionary paradigm to tune critical factors of VAEs and deep neural networks and addresses the premature convergence and random search problem by integrating evolutionary optimization into deep learning. Experiments show that eVAE addresses the KL-vanishing problem for text generation with low reconstruction loss, generates all disentangled factors with sharp images, and improves the image generation quality,respectively. eVAE achieves better reconstruction loss, disentanglement, and generation-inference balance than its competitors.