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.

电子健康记录（EHR）是现代医疗系统的重要组成部分，影响医疗保健提供，运营和研究。尽管在EHR中进行了结构化信息，但非结构化的文本仍吸引了很多关注，并已成为一个令人兴奋的研究领域。最近的神经自然语言处理（NLP）方法的成功导致了处理非结构化临床笔记的新方向。在这项工作中，我们创建了一个用于临床文本的Python库，Ehrkit。该库包含两个主要部分：模拟III特定功能和任务特定功能。第一部分介绍了用于访问MIMIC-III NoteEvents数据的接口列表，包括基本搜索，信息检索和信息提取。第二部分集成了许多第三方库，用于多达12个删除NLP任务，例如命名实体识别，摘要，机器翻译等。

具有更多数据，计算和参数的缩放语言模型在自然语言处理方面取得了重大进展。例如，由于缩放，GPT-3能够在内心学习任务上实现强烈结果。但是，培训这些大密度模型需要大量的计算资源。在本文中，我们提出并开发了名为Glam（通用语言模型）的语言模型系列，它使用稀疏激活的专家架构来规模模型容量，同时与致密变体相比，也产生显着更少的训练成本。最大的Glam具有1.2万亿参数，比GPT-3大约为7倍。它仅消耗了用于训练GPT-3的1/3的能量，并且需要一半的计算拖鞋进行推理，同时仍然在29个NLP任务中实现更好的整体零射击和一次性性能。

近年来，游戏AI研究取得了巨大的突破，尤其是在增强学习（RL）中。尽管他们成功了，但基础游戏通常是通过自己的预设环境和游戏机制实现的，因此使研究人员难以创建不同的游戏环境。但是，测试RL代理对各种游戏环境的测试对于最近努力研究RL的概括并避免可能发生过度拟合的问题至关重要。在本文中，我们将Gridd呈现为游戏AI研究的新平台，该平台提供了高度可配置的游戏，不同的观察者类型和有效的C ++核心引擎的独特组合。此外，我们提出了一系列基线实验，以研究RL剂的不同观察构构和泛化能力的影响。

In the era of noisy intermediate scale quantum devices, variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are currently one of the main strategies for building quantum machine learning models. These models are made up of a quantum part and a classical part. The quantum part is given by a parametrization $U$, which, in general, is obtained from the product of different quantum gates. By its turn, the classical part corresponds to an optimizer that updates the parameters of $U$ in order to minimize a cost function $C$. However, despite the many applications of VQCs, there are still questions to be answered, such as for example: What is the best sequence of gates to be used? How to optimize their parameters? Which cost function to use? How the architecture of the quantum chips influences the final results? In this article, we focus on answering the last question. We will show that, in general, the cost function will tend to a typical average value the closer the parameterization used is from a $2$-design. Therefore, the closer this parameterization is to a $2$-design, the less the result of the quantum neural network model will depend on its parametrization. As a consequence, we can use the own architecture of the quantum chips to defined the VQC parametrization, avoiding the use of additional swap gates and thus diminishing the VQC depth and the associated errors.

Dataset scaling, also known as normalization, is an essential preprocessing step in a machine learning pipeline. It is aimed at adjusting attributes scales in a way that they all vary within the same range. This transformation is known to improve the performance of classification models, but there are several scaling techniques to choose from, and this choice is not generally done carefully. In this paper, we execute a broad experiment comparing the impact of 5 scaling techniques on the performances of 20 classification algorithms among monolithic and ensemble models, applying them to 82 publicly available datasets with varying imbalance ratios. Results show that the choice of scaling technique matters for classification performance, and the performance difference between the best and the worst scaling technique is relevant and statistically significant in most cases. They also indicate that choosing an inadequate technique can be more detrimental to classification performance than not scaling the data at all. We also show how the performance variation of an ensemble model, considering different scaling techniques, tends to be dictated by that of its base model. Finally, we discuss the relationship between a model's sensitivity to the choice of scaling technique and its performance and provide insights into its applicability on different model deployment scenarios. Full results and source code for the experiments in this paper are available in a GitHub repository.\footnote{https://github.com/amorimlb/scaling\_matters}

We describe a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) that simulates the flow induced by the astronomical tide in a synthetic port channel, with dimensions based on the Santos - S\~ao Vicente - Bertioga Estuarine System. PINN models aim to combine the knowledge of physical systems and data-driven machine learning models. This is done by training a neural network to minimize the residuals of the governing equations in sample points. In this work, our flow is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations with some approximations. There are two main novelties in this paper. First, we design our model to assume that the flow is periodic in time, which is not feasible in conventional simulation methods. Second, we evaluate the benefit of resampling the function evaluation points during training, which has a near zero computational cost and has been verified to improve the final model, especially for small batch sizes. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the approximations used in the Navier-Stokes equations regarding the modeling of turbulence and how it interacts with PINNs.

Language modeling, a central task in natural language processing, involves estimating a probability distribution over strings. In most cases, the estimated distribution sums to 1 over all finite strings. However, in some pathological cases, probability mass can ``leak'' onto the set of infinite sequences. In order to characterize the notion of leakage more precisely, this paper offers a measure-theoretic treatment of language modeling. We prove that many popular language model families are in fact tight, meaning that they will not leak in this sense. We also generalize characterizations of tightness proposed in previous works.

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.

Vision Transformers convert images to sequences by slicing them into patches. The size of these patches controls a speed/accuracy tradeoff, with smaller patches leading to higher accuracy at greater computational cost, but changing the patch size typically requires retraining the model. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply randomizing the patch size at training time leads to a single set of weights that performs well across a wide range of patch sizes, making it possible to tailor the model to different compute budgets at deployment time. We extensively evaluate the resulting model, which we call FlexiViT, on a wide range of tasks, including classification, image-text retrieval, open-world detection, panoptic segmentation, and semantic segmentation, concluding that it usually matches, and sometimes outperforms, standard ViT models trained at a single patch size in an otherwise identical setup. Hence, FlexiViT training is a simple drop-in improvement for ViT that makes it easy to add compute-adaptive capabilities to most models relying on a ViT backbone architecture. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/google-research/big_vision