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.

Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years, in large part due to the release of publicly available benchmarking tasks. Unfortunately, some dimensions of this progress are illusory: the majority of the popular IR benchmarks today focus exclusively on downstream task accuracy and thus conceal the costs incurred by systems that trade away efficiency for quality. Latency, hardware cost, and other efficiency considerations are paramount to the deployment of IR systems in user-facing settings. We propose that IR benchmarks structure their evaluation methodology to include not only metrics of accuracy, but also efficiency considerations such as a query latency and the corresponding cost budget for a reproducible hardware setting. For the popular IR benchmarks MS MARCO and XOR-TyDi, we show how the best choice of IR system varies according to how these efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed. We hope that future benchmarks will adopt these guidelines toward more holistic IR evaluation.

我们介绍了使用多级知识蒸馏（KD）训练的新的交叉语言信息检索（CLIR）模型。老师和学生是异构的系统 - 前者是依赖于机器翻译和单晶IR的管道，而后者执行单个CLIR操作。我们表明学生可以通过优化两个相应的KD目标来学习多语言表示和CLIR。使用英语唯一的检索器的学习多语言表示是使用一种新颖的跨语言对齐算法来实现，使得贪婪地重新定位教师令牌进行对齐。XOR-TYDI基准测试的评估表明，所提出的模型比具有交叉语言标记的IR数据的微调现有方法更有效，精度为25.4召回@ 5kt。

GitHub Copilot，由大规模语言模型Codex提供支持的Visual Studio代码开发环境的扩展，为软件开发人员提供自动程序合成。该模型在深度学习领域中已经广泛研究，然而，与遗传编程的比较尚未以自动编程合成的性能所知。在本文中，我们在标准程序综合基准问题上评估GitHub CopIlot，并将与遗传编程文献中的结果进行比较。此外，我们讨论了两种方法的性能。我们发现，在基准问题上的两种方法的性能非常相似，但与GitHub Copilot相比，基于遗传编程的程序合成方法尚未成熟，以支持实际软件开发中的程序员。遗传编程通常需要大量昂贵的手工标记训练箱，并且需要太多时间来产生解决方案。此外，由遗传编程方法产生的源代码通常是膨胀和难以理解的。对于未来的遗传编程综合的工作，我们建议研究人员，专注于提高执行时间，可读性和可用性。

过度参数化的模型可以完美地学习各种类型的数据分布，但是，与人工数据相比，实际数据的概括误差通常较低。这表明数据分布的属性对概括能力有影响。这项工作的重点是由输入数据定义的搜索空间，并假设相邻输入值的标签之间的相关性影响概括。如果相关性较低，则输入数据空间的随机性很高，导致高概括误差。我们建议使用Maurer的Universal测量输入数据空间的随机性。合成分类任务和常见图像分类基准的结果（MNIST，CIFAR10和Microsoft的猫与狗数据集）在输入数据空间的随机性与二进制分类问题的深神经网络的一般性误差之间找到了很高的相关性。

The performance of the Deep Learning (DL) models depends on the quality of labels. In some areas, the involvement of human annotators may lead to noise in the data. When these corrupted labels are blindly regarded as the ground truth (GT), DL models suffer from performance deficiency. This paper presents a method that aims to learn a confident model in the presence of noisy labels. This is done in conjunction with estimating the uncertainty of multiple annotators. We robustly estimate the predictions given only the noisy labels by adding entropy or information-based regularizer to the classifier network. We conduct our experiments on a noisy version of MNIST, CIFAR-10, and FMNIST datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate the robustness of our method as it outperforms or performs comparably to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In addition, we evaluated the proposed method on the curated dataset, where the noise type and level of various annotators depend on the input image style. We show that our approach performs well and is adept at learning annotators' confusion. Moreover, we demonstrate how our model is more confident in predicting GT than other baselines. Finally, we assess our approach for segmentation problem and showcase its effectiveness with experiments.

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of the USV during touchdown. To tackle this, we propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) approach enabling a UAV to land autonomously on a USV in these harsh conditions. The MPC employs a novel objective function and an online decomposition of the oscillatory motion of the vessel to predict, attempt, and accomplish the landing during near-zero tilt of the landing platform. The nonlinear prediction of the motion of the vessel is performed using visual data from an onboard camera. Therefore, the system does not require any communication with the USV or a control station. The proposed method was analyzed in numerous robotics simulations in harsh and extreme conditions and further validated in various real-world scenarios.

We develop theory and methods that use the graph Laplacian to analyze the geometry of the underlying manifold of point clouds. Our theory provides theoretical guarantees and explicit bounds on the functional form of the graph Laplacian, in the case when it acts on functions defined close to singularities of the underlying manifold. We also propose methods that can be used to estimate these geometric properties of the point cloud, which are based on the theoretical guarantees.

Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as "the Bar Exam," as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school. In addition, most test-takers also undergo weeks to months of further, exam-specific preparation. Despite this significant investment of time and capital, approximately one in five test-takers still score under the rate required to pass the exam on their first try. In the face of a complex task that requires such depth of knowledge, what, then, should we expect of the state of the art in "AI?" In this research, we document our experimental evaluation of the performance of OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` model, often-referred to as GPT-3.5, on the multistate multiple choice (MBE) section of the exam. While we find no benefit in fine-tuning over GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance at the scale of our training data, we do find that hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering positively impacted GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance. For best prompt and parameters, GPT-3.5 achieves a headline correct rate of 50.3% on a complete NCBE MBE practice exam, significantly in excess of the 25% baseline guessing rate, and performs at a passing rate for both Evidence and Torts. GPT-3.5's ranking of responses is also highly-correlated with correctness; its top two and top three choices are correct 71% and 88% of the time, respectively, indicating very strong non-entailment performance. While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.

The future of population-based breast cancer screening is likely personalized strategies based on clinically relevant risk models. Mammography-based risk models should remain robust to domain shifts caused by different populations and mammographic devices. Modern risk models do not ensure adaptation across vendor-domains and are often conflated to unintentionally rely on both precursors of cancer and systemic/global mammographic information associated with short- and long-term risk, respectively, which might limit performance. We developed a robust, cross-vendor model for long-term risk assessment. An augmentation-based domain adaption technique, based on flavorization of mammographic views, ensured generalization to an unseen vendor-domain. We trained on samples without diagnosed/potential malignant findings to learn systemic/global breast tissue features, called mammographic texture, indicative of future breast cancer. However, training so may cause erratic convergence. By excluding noise-inducing samples and designing a case-control dataset, a robust ensemble texture model was trained. This model was validated in two independent datasets. In 66,607 Danish women with flavorized Siemens views, the AUC was 0.71 and 0.65 for prediction of interval cancers within two years (ICs) and from two years after screening (LTCs), respectively. In a combination with established risk factors, the model's AUC increased to 0.68 for LTCs. In 25,706 Dutch women with Hologic-processed views, the AUCs were not different from the AUCs in Danish women with flavorized views. The results suggested that the model robustly estimated long-term risk while adapting to an unseen processed vendor-domain. The model identified 8.1% of Danish women accounting for 20.9% of ICs and 14.2% of LTCs.