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.

Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) is a popular problem in the machine learning literature due to its applicability in a wide array of applications, such as recommender systems. In high-dimensional settings, however, MIPS queries can become computationally expensive as most existing solutions do not scale well with data dimensionality. In this work, we present a state-of-the-art algorithm for the MIPS problem in high dimensions, dubbed BanditMIPS. BanditMIPS is a randomized algorithm that borrows techniques from multi-armed bandits to reduce the MIPS problem to a best-arm identification problem. BanditMIPS reduces the complexity of state-of-the-art algorithms from $O(\sqrt{d})$ to $O(\text{log}d)$, where $d$ is the dimension of the problem data vectors. On high-dimensional real-world datasets, BanditMIPS runs approximately 12 times faster than existing approaches and returns the same solution. BanditMIPS requires no preprocessing of the data and includes a hyperparameter that practitioners may use to trade off accuracy and runtime. We also propose a variant of our algorithm, named BanditMIPS-$\alpha$, which employs non-uniform sampling across the data dimensions to provide further speedups.

Random forests are some of the most widely used machine learning models today, especially in domains that necessitate interpretability. We present an algorithm that accelerates the training of random forests and other popular tree-based learning methods. At the core of our algorithm is a novel node-splitting subroutine, dubbed MABSplit, used to efficiently find split points when constructing decision trees. Our algorithm borrows techniques from the multi-armed bandit literature to judiciously determine how to allocate samples and computational power across candidate split points. We provide theoretical guarantees that MABSplit improves the sample complexity of each node split from linear to logarithmic in the number of data points. In some settings, MABSplit leads to 100x faster training (an 99% reduction in training time) without any decrease in generalization performance. We demonstrate similar speedups when MABSplit is used across a variety of forest-based variants, such as Extremely Random Forests and Random Patches. We also show our algorithm can be used in both classification and regression tasks. Finally, we show that MABSplit outperforms existing methods in generalization performance and feature importance calculations under a fixed computational budget. All of our experimental results are reproducible via a one-line script at https://github.com/ThrunGroup/FastForest.

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.

相干显微镜技术提供了跨科学和技术领域的材料的无与伦比的多尺度视图，从结构材料到量子设备，从综合电路到生物细胞。在构造更明亮的来源和高速探测器的驱动下，连贯的X射线显微镜方法（如Ptychography）有望彻底改变纳米级材料的特征。但是，相关的数据和计算需求显着增加意味着，常规方法不再足以从高速相干成像实验实时恢复样品图像。在这里，我们演示了一个工作流程，该工作流利用边缘的人工智能和高性能计算，以实现直接从检测器直接从检测器流出的X射线ptychography数据实时反演。拟议的AI支持的工作流程消除了传统的Ptychography施加的采样约束，从而使用比传统方法所需的数据较少的数据级允许低剂量成像。

通用数据模型解决了标准化电子健康记录（EHR）数据的许多挑战，但无法将其集成深度表型所需的资源。开放的生物学和生物医学本体论（OBO）铸造本体论提供了可用于生物学知识的语义计算表示，并能够整合多种生物医学数据。但是，将EHR数据映射到OBO Foundry本体论需要大量的手动策展和域专业知识。我们介绍了一个框架，用于将观察性医学成果合作伙伴关系（OMOP）标准词汇介绍给OBO铸造本体。使用此框架，我们制作了92,367条条件，8,615种药物成分和10,673个测量结果的映射。域专家验证了映射准确性，并且在24家医院进行检查时，映射覆盖了99％的条件和药物成分和68％的测量结果。最后，我们证明OMOP2OBO映射可以帮助系统地识别可能受益于基因检测的未诊断罕见病患者。

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。

超越地球轨道的人类空间勘探将涉及大量距离和持续时间的任务。为了有效减轻无数空间健康危害，数据和空间健康系统的范式转移是实现地球独立性的，而不是Earth-Reliance所必需的。有希望在生物学和健康的人工智能和机器学习领域的发展可以解决这些需求。我们提出了一个适当的自主和智能精密空间健康系统，可以监控，汇总和评估生物医学状态;分析和预测个性化不良健康结果;适应并响应新累积的数据;并提供对其船员医务人员的个人深度空间机组人员和迭代决策支持的预防性，可操作和及时的见解。在这里，我们介绍了美国国家航空航天局组织的研讨会的建议摘要，以便在太空生物学和健康中未来的人工智能应用。在未来十年，生物监测技术，生物标志科学，航天器硬件，智能软件和简化的数据管理必须成熟，并编织成精确的空间健康系统，以使人类在深空中茁壮成长。

空间生物学研究旨在了解太空飞行对生物的根本影响，制定支持深度空间探索的基础知识，最终生物工程航天器和栖息地稳定植物，农作物，微生物，动物和人类的生态系统，为持续的多行星寿命稳定。要提高这些目标，该领域利用了来自星空和地下模拟研究的实验，平台，数据和模型生物。由于研究扩展到低地球轨道之外，实验和平台必须是最大自主，光，敏捷和智能化，以加快知识发现。在这里，我们介绍了由美国国家航空航天局的人工智能，机器学习和建模应用程序组织的研讨会的建议摘要，这些应用程序为这些空间生物学挑战提供了关键解决方案。在未来十年中，将人工智能融入太空生物学领域将深化天空效应的生物学理解，促进预测性建模和分析，支持最大自主和可重复的实验，并有效地管理星载数据和元数据，所有目标使生活能够在深空中茁壮成长。

对未来观察的预测是一个重要且具有挑战性的问题。分别量化预测不确定性使用预测区域和预测分布的两种主流方法，后者认为更具信息性，因为它可以执行其他与预测相关的任务。有效性的标准概念（我们在这里称为1型有效性）着重于预测区域的覆盖范围，而与预测分布执行的其他与预测相关的任务相关的有效性概念则缺乏。在这里，我们提出了一个新概念，称为2型有效性，与这些其他预测任务有关。我们建立了2型有效性和相干性能之间的联系，并表明为实现它而需要不精确的概率考虑因素。我们继续表明，可以通过将共形预测输出作为辅音合理性度量的轮廓函数来实现两种类型的预测有效性。我们还基于新的非参数推论模型构建提供了保​​形预测的替代表征，其中辅音的出现是自然的，并证明了其有效性。