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.

In this paper, hypernetworks are trained to generate behaviors across a range of unseen task conditions, via a novel TD-based training objective and data from a set of near-optimal RL solutions for training tasks. This work relates to meta RL, contextual RL, and transfer learning, with a particular focus on zero-shot performance at test time, enabled by knowledge of the task parameters (also known as context). Our technical approach is based upon viewing each RL algorithm as a mapping from the MDP specifics to the near-optimal value function and policy and seek to approximate it with a hypernetwork that can generate near-optimal value functions and policies, given the parameters of the MDP. We show that, under certain conditions, this mapping can be considered as a supervised learning problem. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our method for zero-shot transfer to new reward and transition dynamics on a series of continuous control tasks from DeepMind Control Suite. Our method demonstrates significant improvements over baselines from multitask and meta RL approaches.

We explore unifying a neural segmenter with two-pass cascaded encoder ASR into a single model. A key challenge is allowing the segmenter (which runs in real-time, synchronously with the decoder) to finalize the 2nd pass (which runs 900 ms behind real-time) without introducing user-perceived latency or deletion errors during inference. We propose a design where the neural segmenter is integrated with the causal 1st pass decoder to emit a end-of-segment (EOS) signal in real-time. The EOS signal is then used to finalize the non-causal 2nd pass. We experiment with different ways to finalize the 2nd pass, and find that a novel dummy frame injection strategy allows for simultaneous high quality 2nd pass results and low finalization latency. On a real-world long-form captioning task (YouTube), we achieve 2.4% relative WER and 140 ms EOS latency gains over a baseline VAD-based segmenter with the same cascaded encoder.

Bayesian Optimization is a useful tool for experiment design. Unfortunately, the classical, sequential setting of Bayesian Optimization does not translate well into laboratory experiments, for instance battery design, where measurements may come from different sources and their evaluations may require significant waiting times. Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization addresses the setting with measurements from different sources. Asynchronous batch Bayesian Optimization provides a framework to select new experiments before the results of the prior experiments are revealed. This paper proposes an algorithm combining multi-fidelity and asynchronous batch methods. We empirically study the algorithm behavior, and show it can outperform single-fidelity batch methods and multi-fidelity sequential methods. As an application, we consider designing electrode materials for optimal performance in pouch cells using experiments with coin cells to approximate battery performance.

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.

用于机器人操纵的多进球政策学习具有挑战性。先前的成功使用了对象的基于状态的表示或提供了演示数据来促进学习。在本文中，通过对域的高级离散表示形式进行手工编码，我们表明，可以使用来自像素的Q学习来学习达到数十个目标的策略。代理商将学习重点放在更简单的本地政策上，这些政策是通过在抽象空间中进行计划来对其进行测序的。我们将我们的方法与标准的多目标RL基线以及在具有挑战性的块构造域上利用离散表示的其他方法进行了比较。我们发现我们的方法可以构建一百多个不同的块结构，并证明具有新物体的结构向前转移。最后，我们将所学的政策部署在真正的机器人上的模拟中。

基于2D图像的3D对象的推理由于从不同方向查看对象引起的外观差异很大，因此具有挑战性。理想情况下，我们的模型将是对物体姿势变化的不变或等效的。不幸的是，对于2D图像输入，这通常是不可能的，因为我们没有一个先验模型，即在平面外对象旋转下如何改变图像。唯一的$ \ mathrm {so}（3）$ - 当前存在的模型需要点云输入而不是2D图像。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于Icosahedral群卷积的新型模型体系结构，即通过将输入图像投影到iCosahedron上，以$ \ mathrm {so（3）} $中的理由。由于此投影，该模型大致与$ \ mathrm {so}（3）$中的旋转大致相当。我们将此模型应用于对象构成估计任务，并发现它的表现优于合理的基准。

本文研究了“探索性”机器学习分类问题的置信后的事后校准。这些问题的困难源于持续的愿望，即在策划数据集时具有足够的例子来推广哪些类别的界限以及对这些类别的有效性的混乱。我们认为，对于此类问题，必须使用“单一的所有”方法（顶级标签校准），而不是文献中其他地方提倡的“校准 - 满足 - 响应 - 摩托克质”方法。我们介绍并测试了四种旨在处理特定置信度估计的特质的新算法。这些方法中的主要主要是将内核密度比用于置信度校准，包括用于选择带宽的新颖的防弹算法。我们测试了我们的主张，并探讨了生物信息学应用程序（Phanns）1以及经典的MNIST基准2。最后，我们的分析认为，事后校准应始终执行，应仅基于测试数据集，并且应在视觉上进行理智检查。

Tree Ensembles可以非常适合黑盒优化任务，例如算法调整和神经体系结构搜索，因为它们在几乎没有手动调整的情况下实现了良好的预测性能，自然可以处理离散的功能空间，并且对培训中的异常值相对不敏感数据。在使用树的组合进行黑盒优化方面面临的两个众所周知的挑战是（i）有效地量化模型的不确定性，以进行探索，以及（ii）优化在零件的恒定采集函数上。为了同时解决这两个点，我们建议在获得模型方差估计之前使用树的内核解释为高斯过程，并为采集函数开发兼容的优化公式。后者进一步使我们能够通过考虑工程设置中的域知识和建模搜索空间对称性，例如神经体系结构搜索中的层次结构关系，从而无缝整合已知约束，以提高采样效率。我们的框架以及最先进的方法以及对连续/离散功能的不受限制的黑框优化，并且优于结合混合变量特征空间和已知输入约束的问题的竞争方法。

培训和评估语言模型越来越多地要求构建元数据 - 多样化的策划数据收集，并具有清晰的出处。自然语言提示最近通过将现有的，有监督的数据集转换为多种新颖的预处理任务，突出了元数据策划的好处，从而改善了零击的概括。尽管将这些以数据为中心的方法转化为生物医学语言建模的通用域文本成功，但由于标记的生物医学数据集在流行的数据中心中的代表性大大不足，因此仍然具有挑战性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了BigBio一个由126个以上的生物医学NLP数据集的社区库，目前涵盖12个任务类别和10多种语言。 BigBio通过对数据集及其元数据进行程序化访问来促进可再现的元数据策划，并与当前的平台兼容，以及时工程和端到端的几个/零射击语言模型评估。我们讨论了我们的任务架构协调，数据审核，贡献指南的过程，并概述了两个说明性用例：生物医学提示和大规模，多任务学习的零射门评估。 BigBio是一项持续的社区努力，可在https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical上获得。