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.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Deep Reinforcement Learning has been successfully applied to learn robotic control. However, the corresponding algorithms struggle when applied to problems where the agent is only rewarded after achieving a complex task. In this context, using demonstrations can significantly speed up the learning process, but demonstrations can be costly to acquire. In this paper, we propose to leverage a sequential bias to learn control policies for complex robotic tasks using a single demonstration. To do so, our method learns a goal-conditioned policy to control a system between successive low-dimensional goals. This sequential goal-reaching approach raises a problem of compatibility between successive goals: we need to ensure that the state resulting from reaching a goal is compatible with the achievement of the following goals. To tackle this problem, we present a new algorithm called DCIL-II. We show that DCIL-II can solve with unprecedented sample efficiency some challenging simulated tasks such as humanoid locomotion and stand-up as well as fast running with a simulated Cassie robot. Our method leveraging sequentiality is a step towards the resolution of complex robotic tasks under minimal specification effort, a key feature for the next generation of autonomous robots.

在本文中，我们提出了一个新的低级矩阵分解模型，称为有界的单纯形成矩阵分解（BSSMF）。给定输入矩阵$ x $和一个分解等级$ r $，BSSMF寻找带有$ r $ lum $ $ columns的矩阵$ w $和a矩阵$ h $，带有$ r $行，以便$ x \ lot在$ w $的每一列中，都有边界，也就是说，它们属于给定的间隔，$ h $的列属于概率单纯词，即，$ h $是列随机。 BSSMF概括了非负矩阵分解（NMF）和单纯结构的矩阵分解（SSMF）。当输入矩阵$ x $的条目属于给定间隔时，BSSMF特别适合。例如，当$ x $的行代表图像时，或$ x $是一个额定矩阵，例如在Netflix和Movielens数据集中，其中$ x $的条目属于Interval $ [1,5] $。单纯结构的矩阵$ h $不仅导致易于理解的分解，从而提供了$ x $的列的软聚类，而且暗示着$ wh $的每个列的条目属于与$的列的相同间隔W $。在本文中，我们首先提出了BSSMF的快速算法，即使在$ x $中缺少数据的情况下。然后，我们为BSSMF提供可识别性条件，也就是说，我们提供了BSSMF承认独特分解的条件，直到微不足道的歧义。最后，我们说明了BSSMF对两个应用程序的有效性：在一组图像中提取特征，以及推荐系统的矩阵完成问题。

多进球的增强学习最近吸引了大量的研究兴趣。通过允许在相关培训任务之间共享经验，只要在被考虑的目标空间中存在某些平滑度时，这种设置有利于测试时间的新任务的概括。但是，在州或目标空间不连续的环境（例如迷宫中的墙壁）中，由于缺乏专家知识的稀疏性，大多数目标都难以实现。这意味着必须发现一些艰苦的探索，必须发现一些目标课程，以通过使培训任务适应其当前功能来帮助代理商学习。我们以最新的自动课程学习技术为目标政策，我们提出了一种新颖的方法：Stein变化目标生成（SVGG），该方法通过利用一种学识渊博的模型来寻求在代理的近端开发区域中的新目标，以寻求新的目标它的能力和目标分布在勘探空间中以颗粒为模型。我们的方法依靠Stein变分梯度下降来动态吸引适当难度领域的目标采样分布。与最近最新的RL方法相比，我们证明了该方法的性能，即目标领域的成功覆盖范围。

卷积神经网络（CNN）已经证明了它们对2D心脏超声图像进行分割的能力。然而，尽管近期取得了成功的成功，但是已经达到了端舒张和终结图像的观测器内变异性，CNNS仍然难以利用时间信息来在整个周期中提供准确和时间一致的分割图。需要这种持续性来准确描述心功能，这是诊断许多心血管疾病的必要步骤。在本文中，我们提出了一种学习2D +时间长轴心形形状的框架，使得分段序列可以受益于时间和解剖的一致性约束。我们的方法是一种后处理，其作为输入分段的超声心动图序列，其由任何最先进的方法产生，并以两个步骤来处理（i）根据心脏序列的整体动态识别时空不一致。 （ii）纠正不一致。心脏不一致的识别和纠正依赖于受约束的AutoEncoder培训，以学习生理学上可解释的心形状嵌入，在那里我们都可以检测和修复异常。我们在98个来自Camus DataSet的全循环序列上测试了我们的框架，这将与本文一起播放。我们的时间正则化方法不仅可以提高整个序列的分割的准确性，而且还强制执行时间和解剖常量。

在本文中，我们展示了Facetunegan，一种新的3D面部模型表示分解和编码面部身份和面部表情。我们提出了对图像到图像翻译网络的第一次适应，该图像已经成功地用于2D域，到3D面几何。利用最近释放的大面扫描数据库，神经网络已经过培训，以便与面部更好的了解，使面部表情转移和中和富有效应面的变异因素。具体而言，我们设计了一种适应基础架构的对抗架构，并使用Spiralnet ++进行卷积和采样操作。使用两个公共数据集（FACESCAPE和COMA），Facetunegan具有比最先进的技术更好的身份分解和面部中和。它还通过预测较近地面真实数据的闪烁形状并且由于源极和目标之间的面部形态过于不同的面部形态而越来越多的不期望的伪像来优异。

常见的策略梯度方法依赖于代理函数序列的最大化。近年来，已经提出了许多这样的代理功能，大多数没有强烈的理论担保，导致TRPO，PPO或MPO等算法。我们而不是设计另一个代理函数，而是根据功能镜中的函数提出一般框架（FMA-PG），这导致了整个代理功能。我们构建了使策略改进保证能够担保的代理功能，这是由最现有的代理职能共享的属性。至关重要，无论政策参数化的选择如何，这些保证都会持有。此外，FMA-PG的特定实例化恢复了重要的实施启发式（例如，使用前向VS反向KL发散），导致TRPO的变体具有额外的理想性质。通过对简单强盗问题的实验，我们评估FMA-PG实例化的算法。拟议的框架还提出了一种改进的PPO变体，其鲁棒性和效率我们在Mujoco套件上证明。

大自然的一个迷人方面在于它能够产生大型和多样化的生物体，这些生物都在他们的利基中都很高兴。相比之下，大多数AI算法专注于向给定问题找到一个有效的解决方案。除了表现外，旨在实现多样性是处理勘探开发权衡的便捷方式，在学习中发挥着核心作用。当返回的集合包含对所考虑的问题的几个工作解决方案时，它还允许增加鲁棒性，使其适用于机器人等真实应用。质量 - 多样性（QD）方法是为此目的设计的进化算法。本文提出了一种新颖的QD - PG，它结合了政策梯度算法的强度和质量多样性方法，在连续控制环境中产生了各种和高性能的神经政策的集合。这项工作的主要贡献是引入多样性政策梯度（DPG），该梯度（DPG）利用时刻级别的信息以采样有效的方式培养更多样化的策略。具体而言，QD-PG从地图 - E LITES网格中选择神经控制器，并使用两个基于梯度的突变运算符来提高质量和多样性，从而产生稳定的人口更新。我们的结果表明，QD - PG产生了各种解决方案的集合，解决了具有挑战性的勘探和控制问题，同时是比其进化竞争对手更高的样本效率的两个数量级。

This article formulates a generic representation of a path-following controller operating under contained motion, which was developed in the context of surgical robotics. It reports two types of constrained motion: i) Bilateral Constrained Motion, also called Remote Center Motion (RCM), and ii) Unilaterally Constrained Motion (UCM). In the first case, the incision hole has almost the same diameter as the robotic tool. In contrast, in the second state, the diameter of the incision orifice is larger than the tool diameter. The second case offers more space where the surgical instrument moves freely without constraints before touching the incision wall. The proposed method combines two tasks that must operate hierarchically: i) respect the RCM or UCM constraints formulated by equality or inequality, respectively, and ii) perform a surgical assignment, e.g., scanning or ablation expressed as a 3D path-following task. The proposed methods and materials were tested first on our simulator that mimics realistic conditions of middle ear surgery, and then on an experimental platform. Different validation scenarios were carried out experimentally to assess quantitatively and qualitatively each developed approach. Although ultimate precision was not the goal of this work, our concept is validated with enough accuracy (inferior to 100 micrometres) for ear surgery.