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.

Harvesting question-answer (QA) pairs from customer service chatlog in the wild is an efficient way to enrich the knowledge base for customer service chatbots in the cold start or continuous integration scenarios. Prior work attempts to obtain 1-to-1 QA pairs from growing customer service chatlog, which fails to integrate the incomplete utterances from the dialog context for composite QA retrieval. In this paper, we propose N-to-N QA extraction task in which the derived questions and corresponding answers might be separated across different utterances. We introduce a suite of generative/discriminative tagging based methods with end-to-end and two-stage variants that perform well on 5 customer service datasets and for the first time setup a benchmark for N-to-N DialogQAE with utterance and session level evaluation metrics. With a deep dive into extracted QA pairs, we find that the relations between and inside the QA pairs can be indicators to analyze the dialogue structure, e.g. information seeking, clarification, barge-in and elaboration. We also show that the proposed models can adapt to different domains and languages, and reduce the labor cost of knowledge accumulation in the real-world product dialogue platform.

Dry Eye Disease (DED) is one of the most common ocular diseases: over five percent of US adults suffer from DED. Tear film instability is a known factor for DED, and is thought to be regulated in large part by the thin lipid layer that covers and stabilizes the tear film. In order to aid eye related disease diagnosis, this work proposes a novel paradigm in using computer vision techniques to numerically analyze the tear film lipid layer (TFLL) spread. Eleven videos of the tear film lipid layer spread are collected with a micro-interferometer and a subset are annotated. A tracking algorithm relying on various pillar computer vision techniques is developed. Our method can be found at https://easytear-dev.github.io/.

Generating molecules that bind to specific proteins is an important but challenging task in drug discovery. Previous works usually generate atoms in an auto-regressive way, where element types and 3D coordinates of atoms are generated one by one. However, in real-world molecular systems, the interactions among atoms in an entire molecule are global, leading to the energy function pair-coupled among atoms. With such energy-based consideration, the modeling of probability should be based on joint distributions, rather than sequentially conditional ones. Thus, the unnatural sequentially auto-regressive modeling of molecule generation is likely to violate the physical rules, thus resulting in poor properties of the generated molecules. In this work, a generative diffusion model for molecular 3D structures based on target proteins as contextual constraints is established, at a full-atom level in a non-autoregressive way. Given a designated 3D protein binding site, our model learns the generative process that denoises both element types and 3D coordinates of an entire molecule, with an equivariant network. Experimentally, the proposed method shows competitive performance compared with prevailing works in terms of high affinity with proteins and appropriate molecule sizes as well as other drug properties such as drug-likeness of the generated molecules.

Faced with the threat of identity leakage during voice data publishing, users are engaged in a privacy-utility dilemma when enjoying convenient voice services. Existing studies employ direct modification or text-based re-synthesis to de-identify users' voices, but resulting in inconsistent audibility in the presence of human participants. In this paper, we propose a voice de-identification system, which uses adversarial examples to balance the privacy and utility of voice services. Instead of typical additive examples inducing perceivable distortions, we design a novel convolutional adversarial example that modulates perturbations into real-world room impulse responses. Benefit from this, our system could preserve user identity from exposure by Automatic Speaker Identification (ASI) while remaining the voice perceptual quality for non-intrusive de-identification. Moreover, our system learns a compact speaker distribution through a conditional variational auto-encoder to sample diverse target embeddings on demand. Combining diverse target generation and input-specific perturbation construction, our system enables any-to-any identify transformation for adaptive de-identification. Experimental results show that our system could achieve 98% and 79% successful de-identification on mainstream ASIs and commercial systems with an objective Mel cepstral distortion of 4.31dB and a subjective mean opinion score of 4.48.

During image editing, existing deep generative models tend to re-synthesize the entire output from scratch, including the unedited regions. This leads to a significant waste of computation, especially for minor editing operations. In this work, we present Spatially Sparse Inference (SSI), a general-purpose technique that selectively performs computation for edited regions and accelerates various generative models, including both conditional GANs and diffusion models. Our key observation is that users tend to make gradual changes to the input image. This motivates us to cache and reuse the feature maps of the original image. Given an edited image, we sparsely apply the convolutional filters to the edited regions while reusing the cached features for the unedited regions. Based on our algorithm, we further propose Sparse Incremental Generative Engine (SIGE) to convert the computation reduction to latency reduction on off-the-shelf hardware. With 1.2%-area edited regions, our method reduces the computation of DDIM by 7.5$\times$ and GauGAN by 18$\times$ while preserving the visual fidelity. With SIGE, we accelerate the speed of DDIM by 3.0x on RTX 3090 and 6.6$\times$ on Apple M1 Pro CPU, and GauGAN by 4.2$\times$ on RTX 3090 and 14$\times$ on Apple M1 Pro CPU.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising brain-inspired energy-efficient models. Recent progress in training methods has enabled successful deep SNNs on large-scale tasks with low latency. Particularly, backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) is popularly used to achieve high performance in a very small number of time steps. However, it is at the cost of large memory consumption for training, lack of theoretical clarity for optimization, and inconsistency with the online property of biological learning and rules on neuromorphic hardware. Other works connect spike representations of SNNs with equivalent artificial neural network formulation and train SNNs by gradients from equivalent mappings to ensure descent directions. But they fail to achieve low latency and are also not online. In this work, we propose online training through time (OTTT) for SNNs, which is derived from BPTT to enable forward-in-time learning by tracking presynaptic activities and leveraging instantaneous loss and gradients. Meanwhile, we theoretically analyze and prove that gradients of OTTT can provide a similar descent direction for optimization as gradients based on spike representations under both feedforward and recurrent conditions. OTTT only requires constant training memory costs agnostic to time steps, avoiding the significant memory costs of BPTT for GPU training. Furthermore, the update rule of OTTT is in the form of three-factor Hebbian learning, which could pave a path for online on-chip learning. With OTTT, it is the first time that two mainstream supervised SNN training methods, BPTT with SG and spike representation-based training, are connected, and meanwhile in a biologically plausible form. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and CIFAR10-DVS demonstrate the superior performance of our method on large-scale static and neuromorphic datasets in small time steps.

本文开发了一个深图运算符网络（DeepGraphonet）框架，该框架学会了近似具有基础子图形结构的复杂系统（例如电网或流量）的动力学。我们通过融合（i）图形神经网络（GNN）来利用空间相关的图形信息和（ii）深操作符网络〜（deeponet）近似动态系统的解决方案操作员的能力来构建深图载体。然后，所得的深图载体可以通过观察图形状态信息的有限历史来预测给定的短/中期时间范围内的动力学。此外，我们将深图载体设计为独立于解决方案。也就是说，我们不需要以精确/相同的分辨率收集有限的历史记录。此外，为了传播训练有素的Deepgraphonet的结果，我们设计了一种零摄像的学习策略，可以在不同的子图上使用它。最后，对（i）瞬态稳定性预测电网和（ii）车辆系统的交通流量预测问题的经验结果说明了拟议的Deepgraphonet的有效性。

多模式实体对齐旨在确定两个不同的多模式知识图之间的等效实体，这些实体由与实体相关的结构三元组和图像组成。大多数先前的作品都集中在如何利用和编码不同模式中的信息，而由于模态异质性，因此在实体对齐中利用多模式知识并不是微不足道的。在本文中，我们提出了基于多模式对比度学习的实体比对模型McLea，以获得多模式实体对准的有效联合表示。与以前的工作不同，麦克莱尔（McLea）考虑了面向任务的模式，并为每个实体表示形式建模模式间关系。特别是，麦克莱（McLea）首先从多种模式中学习多个单独的表示，然后进行对比学习以共同对模式内和模式间相互作用进行建模。广泛的实验结果表明，在受监督和无监督的设置下，MCLEA在公共数据集上优于公共数据集的最先进的基线。

密集的段落检索旨在根据查询和段落的密集表示（即矢量）从大型语料库中检索查询的相关段落。最近的研究探索了改善预训练的语言模型，以提高密集的检索性能。本文提出了COT-MAE（上下文掩盖自动编码器），这是一种简单而有效的生成性预训练方法，可用于密集通道检索。 COT-MAE采用了不对称的编码器架构，该体系结构学会通过自我监督和上下文监督的掩盖自动编码来将句子语义压缩到密集的矢量中。精确，自我监督的掩盖自动编码学会学会为文本跨度内的令牌的语义建模，并学习上下文监督的蒙版自动编码学学习以建模文本跨度之间的语义相关性。我们对大规模通道检索基准进行实验，并显示出对强基础的大量改进，证明了COT-MAE的效率很高。