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.

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.

Fabric manipulation is a long-standing challenge in robotics due to the enormous state space and complex dynamics. Learning approaches stand out as promising for this domain as they allow us to learn behaviours directly from data. Most prior methods however rely heavily on simulation, which is still limited by the large sim-to-real gap of deformable objects or rely on large datasets. A promising alternative is to learn fabric manipulation directly from watching humans perform the task. In this work, we explore how demonstrations for fabric manipulation tasks can be collected directly by human hands, providing an extremely natural and fast data collection pipeline. Then, using only a handful of such demonstrations, we show how a sample-efficient pick-and-place policy can be learned and deployed on a real robot, without any robot data collection at all. We demonstrate our approach on a fabric folding task, showing that our policy can reliably reach folded states from crumpled initial configurations.

The use of needles to access sites within organs is fundamental to many interventional medical procedures both for diagnosis and treatment. Safe and accurate navigation of a needle through living tissue to an intra-tissue target is currently often challenging or infeasible due to the presence of anatomical obstacles in the tissue, high levels of uncertainty, and natural tissue motion (e.g., due to breathing). Medical robots capable of automating needle-based procedures in vivo have the potential to overcome these challenges and enable an enhanced level of patient care and safety. In this paper, we show the first medical robot that autonomously navigates a needle inside living tissue around anatomical obstacles to an intra-tissue target. Our system leverages an aiming device and a laser-patterned highly flexible steerable needle, a type of needle capable of maneuvering along curvilinear trajectories to avoid obstacles. The autonomous robot accounts for anatomical obstacles and uncertainty in living tissue/needle interaction with replanning and control and accounts for respiratory motion by defining safe insertion time windows during the breathing cycle. We apply the system to lung biopsy, which is critical in the diagnosis of lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. We demonstrate successful performance of our system in multiple in vivo porcine studies and also demonstrate that our approach leveraging autonomous needle steering outperforms a standard manual clinical technique for lung nodule access.

本文提出了一种实时模型预测控制（MPC）方案，以使用有限时间范围内的机器人执行多个任务。在工业机器人应用中，我们必须仔细考虑避免关节位置，速度和扭矩极限的多个限制。此外，无奇异性和平稳的动作需要连续，安全地执行任务。我们没有制定非线性MPC问题，而是使用沿层次控制器生成的名义轨迹线性线性的运动和动态模型来设计线性MPC问题。这些线性MPC问题可通过使用二次编程来解决；因此，我们大大减少了提出的MPC框架的计算时间，因此所得更新频率高于1 kHz。与基于操作空间控制（OSC）的基线相比，我们提出的MPC框架在减少任务跟踪错误方面更有效。我们在数值模拟和使用工业操纵器的实际实验中验证方法。更具体地说，我们将方法部署在两个实用方案中用于机器人物流：1）控制携带重载的机器人，同时考虑扭矩限制，以及2）控制最终效果，同时避免奇异性。

我们挑战AI模型，以“展示”对《纽约客》标题比赛的复杂多模式幽默的理解。具体而言，我们开发了三个精心限制的任务，以掌握图像和标题之间的潜在复杂和意外的关系，并且对人类经验的广泛品种产生了复杂和意外的寓意；这些是纽约口径卡通的标志。我们调查了直接将卡通像素和字幕输入的视觉和语言模型，以及仅通过提供图像的文本描述来规避图像处理的仅限语言模型。即使我们为卡通图像提供了丰富的多方面注释，我们也可以确定高质量的机器学习模型（例如，微调，175b参数语言模型）和人类之间的性能差距。我们公开发布我们的语料库，包括描述图像的位置/实体的注释，场景的不寻常以及对笑话的解释。

工业机器人操纵器（例如柯机）的应用可能需要在具有静态和非静态障碍物组合的环境中有效的在线运动计划。当可用的计算时间受到限制或无法完全产生解决方案时，现有的通用计划方法通常会产生较差的质量解决方案。我们提出了一个新的运动计划框架，旨在在用户定义的任务空间中运行，而不是机器人的工作空间，该框架有意将工作空间一般性交易，以计划和执行时间效率。我们的框架自动构建在线查询的轨迹库，类似于利用离线计算的以前方法。重要的是，我们的方法还提供了轨迹长度上有限的次级优势保证。关键的想法是建立称为$ \ epsilon $ -Gromov-Hausdorff近似值的近似异构体，以便在任务空间附近的点也很接近配置空间。这些边界关系进一步意味着可以平稳地串联轨迹，这使我们的框架能够解决批次查询方案，目的是找到最小长度的轨迹顺序，这些轨迹访问一组无序的目标。我们通过几种运动型配置评估了模拟框架，包括安装在移动基础上的操纵器。结果表明，我们的方法可实现可行的实时应用，并为扩展其功能提供了有趣的机会。

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。

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。