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.

Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection has received broad attention over the years, aiming to ensure the reliability and safety of deep neural networks (DNNs) in real-world scenarios by rejecting incorrect predictions. However, we notice a discrepancy between the conventional evaluation vs. the essential purpose of OOD detection. On the one hand, the conventional evaluation exclusively considers risks caused by label-space distribution shifts while ignoring the risks from input-space distribution shifts. On the other hand, the conventional evaluation reward detection methods for not rejecting the misclassified image in the validation dataset. However, the misclassified image can also cause risks and should be rejected. We appeal to rethink OOD detection from a human-centric perspective, that a proper detection method should reject the case that the deep model's prediction mismatches the human expectations and adopt the case that the deep model's prediction meets the human expectations. We propose a human-centric evaluation and conduct extensive experiments on 45 classifiers and 8 test datasets. We find that the simple baseline OOD detection method can achieve comparable and even better performance than the recently proposed methods, which means that the development in OOD detection in the past years may be overestimated. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that model selection is non-trivial for OOD detection and should be considered as an integral of the proposed method, which differs from the claim in existing works that proposed methods are universal across different models.

Video, as a key driver in the global explosion of digital information, can create tremendous benefits for human society. Governments and enterprises are deploying innumerable cameras for a variety of applications, e.g., law enforcement, emergency management, traffic control, and security surveillance, all facilitated by video analytics (VA). This trend is spurred by the rapid advancement of deep learning (DL), which enables more precise models for object classification, detection, and tracking. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of Internet-connected devices, massive amounts of data are generated daily, overwhelming the cloud. Edge computing, an emerging paradigm that moves workloads and services from the network core to the network edge, has been widely recognized as a promising solution. The resulting new intersection, edge video analytics (EVA), begins to attract widespread attention. Nevertheless, only a few loosely-related surveys exist on this topic. A dedicated venue for collecting and summarizing the latest advances of EVA is highly desired by the community. Besides, the basic concepts of EVA (e.g., definition, architectures, etc.) are ambiguous and neglected by these surveys due to the rapid development of this domain. A thorough clarification is needed to facilitate a consensus on these concepts. To fill in these gaps, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the recent efforts on EVA. In this paper, we first review the fundamentals of edge computing, followed by an overview of VA. The EVA system and its enabling techniques are discussed next. In addition, we introduce prevalent frameworks and datasets to aid future researchers in the development of EVA systems. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and foresee future research directions. We believe this survey will help readers comprehend the relationship between VA and edge computing, and spark new ideas on EVA.

The binding problem is one of the fundamental challenges that prevent the artificial neural network (ANNs) from a compositional understanding of the world like human perception, because disentangled and distributed representations of generative factors can interfere and lead to ambiguity when complex data with multiple objects are presented. In this paper, we propose a brain-inspired hybrid neural network (HNN) that introduces temporal binding theory originated from neuroscience into ANNs by integrating spike timing dynamics (via spiking neural networks, SNNs) with reconstructive attention (by ANNs). Spike timing provides an additional dimension for grouping, while reconstructive feedback coordinates the spikes into temporal coherent states. Through iterative interaction of ANN and SNN, the model continuously binds multiple objects at alternative synchronous firing times in the SNN coding space. The effectiveness of the model is evaluated on synthetic datasets of binary images. By visualization and analysis, we demonstrate that the binding is explainable, soft, flexible, and hierarchical. Notably, the model is trained on single object datasets without explicit supervision on grouping, but successfully binds multiple objects on test datasets, showing its compositional generalization capability. Further results show its binding ability in dynamic situations.

Recent works on Lottery Ticket Hypothesis have shown that pre-trained language models (PLMs) contain smaller matching subnetworks(winning tickets) which are capable of reaching accuracy comparable to the original models. However, these tickets are proved to be notrobust to adversarial examples, and even worse than their PLM counterparts. To address this problem, we propose a novel method based on learning binary weight masks to identify robust tickets hidden in the original PLMs. Since the loss is not differentiable for the binary mask, we assign the hard concrete distribution to the masks and encourage their sparsity using a smoothing approximation of L0 regularization.Furthermore, we design an adversarial loss objective to guide the search for robust tickets and ensure that the tickets perform well bothin accuracy and robustness. Experimental results show the significant improvement of the proposed method over previous work on adversarial robustness evaluation.

相位识别在计算机辅助干预中的手术工作流程分析中起着至关重要的作用。最初建议在自然语言处理中进行顺序数据建模的变压器已成功应用于手术期识别。现有基于变压器的作品主要集中于建模注意力依赖性，而无需引入自动回归。在这项工作中，首先提出了一种自动回归手术变压器（称为ARST），用于腹腔镜视频的在线手术阶段识别，通过条件概率分布隐含地模拟了相之间的相关性。为了减少推理偏差并提高阶段的一致性，我们进一步制定了基于自动回归的一致性约束推理策略。我们对众所周知的公共数据集Cholec80进行全面验证。实验结果表明，我们的方法在定量和定性上都优于最新方法，并达到每秒66帧（FPS）的推理率。

不平衡的培训数据是医学图像分类的重大挑战。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个新型的渐进式中心三重态（PCCT）框架，以减轻类不平衡问题，尤其是用于诊断稀有疾病的问题，主要是通过仔细设计三重态采样策略和三重态损失形成。具体而言，PCCT框架包括两个连续的阶段。在第一阶段，PCCT通过类平衡的三重损失训练诊断系统，从而使不同类别的分布分布粗糙。在第二阶段，PCCT框架进一步改善了诊断系统，涉及三胞胎损失，从而导致每个类别的分布更紧凑。对于级别平衡的三重态损失，在每个训练迭代中为每个班级平均采样三重态，从而减轻了不平衡的数据问题。对于涉及三胞胎的集体中心损失，每个三重态中的正和负样本被其相应的类中心取代，该中心强制执行靠近类中心的同一类的数据表示。此外，涉及的三胞胎损失涉及的中心损失将扩展到成对的排名损失和四倍体损失，这证明了所提出的框架的概括。广泛的实验支持PCCT框架有效地用于医疗图像分类，并使用不平衡的训练图像。在两个皮肤图像数据集和一个胸部X射线数据集上，建议的方法分别获得了所有类别的平均F1得分86.2、65.2和90.66，以及81.4、63.87和81.92的稀有班级，即可实现最罕见的班级。性能并超越广泛使用的类不平衡问题的方法。

脑电图（EEG）的准确自动分析将在很大程度上有助于临床医生有效监测和诊断患有各种脑部疾病的患者。与使用标记的疾病脑电图数据进行监督的学习相比，可以训练模型以分析特定疾病但无法监测以前看不见的状态，仅基于正常脑电图的异常检测才能检测到新EEG中的任何潜在异常。与现有的异常检测策略不同，这些检测策略在模型开发过程中不考虑任何不可用的异常数据的财产，这里提出了一种面向任务的自我监督学习方法，它可以利用可用的正常脑电图和有关异常EEG的专业知识来培训更有效的EEG随后开发异常检测器的特征提取器。此外，具有较大核的特定两个分支卷积神经网络被设计为特征提取器，因此它可以更容易地提取较大规模和小规模的特征，这些特征通常出现在不可用的异常脑电图中。如三个EEG数据集所示，有效设计和训练的功能提取器已证明能够根据正常数据和未来的新EEG提取更好的特征表示，以根据正常数据和未来的异常检测来开发异常检测器。该代码可在https://github.com/irining/eeg-ad上找到。

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。

Context-aware decision support in the operating room can foster surgical safety and efficiency by leveraging real-time feedback from surgical workflow analysis. Most existing works recognize surgical activities at a coarse-grained level, such as phases, steps or events, leaving out fine-grained interaction details about the surgical activity; yet those are needed for more helpful AI assistance in the operating room. Recognizing surgical actions as triplets of <instrument, verb, target> combination delivers comprehensive details about the activities taking place in surgical videos. This paper presents CholecTriplet2021: an endoscopic vision challenge organized at MICCAI 2021 for the recognition of surgical action triplets in laparoscopic videos. The challenge granted private access to the large-scale CholecT50 dataset, which is annotated with action triplet information. In this paper, we present the challenge setup and assessment of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods proposed by the participants during the challenge. A total of 4 baseline methods from the challenge organizers and 19 new deep learning algorithms by competing teams are presented to recognize surgical action triplets directly from surgical videos, achieving mean average precision (mAP) ranging from 4.2% to 38.1%. This study also analyzes the significance of the results obtained by the presented approaches, performs a thorough methodological comparison between them, in-depth result analysis, and proposes a novel ensemble method for enhanced recognition. Our analysis shows that surgical workflow analysis is not yet solved, and also highlights interesting directions for future research on fine-grained surgical activity recognition which is of utmost importance for the development of AI in surgery.