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.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can adapt large language models to downstream tasks by training a small amount of newly added parameters. In multi-task settings, PEFT adapters typically train on each task independently, inhibiting transfer across tasks, or on the concatenation of all tasks, which can lead to negative interference. To address this, Polytropon (Ponti et al.) jointly learns an inventory of PEFT adapters and a routing function to share variable-size sets of adapters across tasks. Subsequently, adapters can be re-combined and fine-tuned on novel tasks even with limited data. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the ability to control which adapters are active for each task leads to sample-efficient generalization. Thus, we propose less expressive variants where we perform weighted averaging of the adapters before few-shot adaptation (Poly-mu) instead of learning a routing function. Moreover, we introduce more expressive variants where finer-grained task-adapter allocation is learned through a multi-head routing function (Poly-S). We test these variants on three separate benchmarks for multi-task learning. We find that Poly-S achieves gains on all three (up to 5.3 points on average) over strong baselines, while incurring a negligible additional cost in parameter count. In particular, we find that instruction tuning, where models are fully fine-tuned on natural language instructions for each task, is inferior to modular methods such as Polytropon and our proposed variants.

多实施学习（MIL）被广泛用于对病理整体幻灯片图像（WSIS）的计算机辅助解释，以解决缺乏像素或贴片的注释。通常，这种方法直接应用“自然图像驱动”的MIL算法，该算法忽略了WSIS的多尺度（即金字塔）性质。现成的MIL算法通常部署在单个WSIS（例如20x放大倍率）上，而人类病理学家通常以多尺度的方式汇总全球和局部模式（例如，通过放大不同大型）。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种新型的跨尺度注意机制，以明确地将尺度间相互作用汇总到单个MIL网络的克罗恩病（CD）（CD），这是炎症性肠病的一种形式。本文的贡献是两个方面：（1）提出了一种跨尺度注意机制，以从不同分辨率的多尺度相互作用汇总特征； （2）生成差异多尺度注意的可视化，以定位可解释的病变模式。通过训练来自20名CD患者的约250,000 H＆E染色的上升结肠（AC）斑块，在不同尺度上训练30个健康对照样品，我们的方法在曲线下（AUC）得分为0.8924，与基线模型相比达到0.8924。官方实施可在https://github.com/hrlblab/cs-mil上公开获得。

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

通用形态（UNIMORPH）项目是一项合作的努力，可为数百种世界语言实例化覆盖范围的标准化形态拐角。该项目包括两个主要的推力：一种无独立的特征架构，用于丰富的形态注释，并以各种语言意识到该模式的各种语言的带注释数据的类型级别资源。本文介绍了过去几年对几个方面的扩张和改进（自McCarthy等人（2020年）以来）。众多语言学家的合作努力增加了67种新语言，其中包括30种濒危语言。我们已经对提取管道进行了一些改进，以解决一些问题，例如缺少性别和马克龙信息。我们还修改了模式，使用了形态学现象所需的层次结构，例如多肢体协议和案例堆叠，同时添加了一些缺失的形态特征，以使模式更具包容性。鉴于上一个UniMorph版本，我们还通过16种语言的词素分割增强了数据库。最后，这个新版本通过通过代表来自metphynet的派生过程的实例丰富数据和注释模式来推动将衍生物形态纳入UniMorph中。

在各种科学和临床环境中，快速无创探测空间变化的非相关事件（例如人类头骨下方的脑血流）是一项必不可少的任务。所使用的主要光学技术之一是弥漫性相关光谱（DC），其经典实现使用单个或几个单光子检测器，导致空间定位精度较差，时间分辨率相对较低。 Here, we propose a technique termed Classifying Rapid decorrelation Events via Parallelized single photon dEtection (CREPE)}, a new form of DCS that can probe and classify different decorrelating movements hidden underneath turbid volume with high sensitivity using parallelized speckle detection from a $32\times32 $像素SPAD阵列。我们通过对隐藏在5mm组织样的幻影下的不同时空 - 偏置模式进行分类来评估我们的设置，该模式由快速反相关的动态散射介质制成。十二个多模式纤维用于从组织幻影表面的不同位置收集散射光。为了验证我们的设置，我们通过在Multi-Kilo-Hertz速率下调制的数字微龙器设备（DMD）以及含有流动流体的容器幻影。除了具有胜过经典无监督学习方法的深层对比学习算法外，我们证明我们的方法可以准确地检测和分类浊度散射介质下的不同瞬态去相关事件（发生在0.1-0.4s中），而无需任何数据标记。这有可能应用于非侵入性的深层组织运动模式，例如在紧凑和静态检测探针内以多赫兹速率识别正常或异常的脑血流事件。

对世界各地的急诊部门（ED）服务的需求不断增长，特别是在Covid-19大流行下。风险三环在优先考虑最需要它们的患者的有限医疗资源方面发挥着至关重要的作用。最近，普遍使用电子健康记录（EHR）已经产生了大量的存储数据，伴随着开发可改善紧急护理的预测模型的巨大机会。然而，没有基于大型公共EHR的广泛接受的ED基准，这是新的研究人员可以轻松访问的基准。填补这种差距的成功可以使研究人员更快，方便地开始研究，而无需详细数据预处理，并促进不同研究和方法之间的比较。在本文中，基于医疗信息MART为重症监护IV急诊部门（MIMIC-IV-ED）数据库，我们提出了一款公共ED基准套件，并获得了从2011年到2019年的50万ED访问的基准数据集。三个ed已经介绍了基于预测任务（住院，关键结果和72小时ED Revisit），其中实施了各种流行的方法，从机器学习方法到临床评分系统进行了实施。他们的性能结果评估并进行了比较。我们的代码是开源，因此任何具有访问模仿-IV-ED的人都可以遵循相同的数据处理步骤，构建基准，并重现实验。本研究提供了洞察力，建议，以及未来研究人员的协议，以处理原始数据并快速建立紧急护理模型。

通过动态散射介质进行非侵入性光学成像具有许多重要的生物医学应用，但仍然是一项艰巨的任务。尽管标准弥漫成像方法测量光吸收或荧光发射，但也良好的是，散射的相干光的时间相关性通过组织像光强度一样扩散。然而，迄今为止，很少有作品旨在通过实验测量和处理这种时间相关数据，以证明去相关动力学的深度组织视频重建。在这项工作中，我们利用单光子雪崩二极管（SPAD）阵列摄像机同时监视单photon水平的斑点波动的时间动力学，从12种不同的幻影组织通过定制的纤维束阵列传递的位置。然后，我们应用深度神经网络将所获得的单光子测量值转换为迅速去摩擦组织幻像下散射动力学的视频。我们证明了重建瞬态（0.1-0.4s）动态事件的图像的能力，该动态事件发生在非相关的组织幻影下，并以毫米级分辨率进行重构，并突出显示我们的模型如何灵活地扩展到埋藏的phantom船只内的流速。

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}