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.

现代机器学习研究依赖于相对较少的精心策划数据集。即使在这些数据集中，通常在“不整合”或原始数据中，从业人员也面临着重要的数据质量和多样性问题，这些问题可能会非常强烈地解决。应对这些挑战的现有方法往往会对特定问题做出强烈的假设，并且通常需要先验知识或元数据，例如域标签。我们的工作与这些方法是正交的：相反，我们专注于为元数据考古学提供一个统一和有效的框架 - 在数据集中发现和推断示例的元数据。我们使用简单的转换策划了可能存在的数据集（例如，错误标记，非典型或过度分布示例）中可能存在的数据子集，并利用这些探针套件之间的学习动力学差异来推断感兴趣的元数据。我们的方法与跨不同任务的更复杂的缓解方法相提并论：识别和纠正标签错误的示例，对少数民族样本进行分类，优先考虑与培训相关的点并启用相关示例的可扩展人类审核。

本文介绍了由波浪和太阳能运行的低成本无人面车辆（USV）的原型，该车辆可用于最小化海洋数据收集的成本。目前的原型是一个紧凑的USV，长度为1.2米，可以通过两个人部署和恢复。该设计包括电动绞盘，可用于缩回和降低水下单元。设计的几个要素利用添加剂制造和廉价的材料。通过自定义开发的Web应用，可以使用射频（RF）和卫星通信来控制车辆。通过使用先前的研究工作和先进材料的推荐，在拖曳，提升，重量和价格方面进行了优化了表面和水下装置。通过测量几个参数，例如溶解的氧，盐度，温度和pH，USV可用于水状监测。

随着计算机愿景中变压器架构的普及，研究焦点已转向开发计算有效的设计。基于窗口的本地关注是最近作品采用的主要技术之一。这些方法以非常小的贴片尺寸和小的嵌入尺寸开始，然后执行冲击卷积（贴片合并），以减少特征图尺寸并增加嵌入尺寸，因此，形成像设计的金字塔卷积神经网络（CNN）。在这项工作中，我们通过呈现一种新的各向同性架构，调查变压器中的本地和全球信息建模，以便采用当地窗口和特殊令牌，称为超级令牌，以自我关注。具体地，将单个超级令牌分配给每个图像窗口，该窗口捕获该窗口的丰富本地细节。然后使用这些令牌用于跨窗口通信和全局代表学习。因此，大多数学习都独立于较高层次的图像补丁$（n）$，并且仅基于超级令牌$（n / m ^ 2）$何处，从中学习额外的嵌入量窗口大小。在ImageNet-1K上的标准图像分类中，所提出的基于超代币的变压器（STT-S25）实现了83.5 \％的精度，其等同于带有大约一半参数（49M）的Swin变压器（Swin-B）和推断的两倍时间吞吐量。建议的超级令牌变压器为可视识别任务提供轻量级和有前途的骨干。

The performance of the Deep Learning (DL) models depends on the quality of labels. In some areas, the involvement of human annotators may lead to noise in the data. When these corrupted labels are blindly regarded as the ground truth (GT), DL models suffer from performance deficiency. This paper presents a method that aims to learn a confident model in the presence of noisy labels. This is done in conjunction with estimating the uncertainty of multiple annotators. We robustly estimate the predictions given only the noisy labels by adding entropy or information-based regularizer to the classifier network. We conduct our experiments on a noisy version of MNIST, CIFAR-10, and FMNIST datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate the robustness of our method as it outperforms or performs comparably to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In addition, we evaluated the proposed method on the curated dataset, where the noise type and level of various annotators depend on the input image style. We show that our approach performs well and is adept at learning annotators' confusion. Moreover, we demonstrate how our model is more confident in predicting GT than other baselines. Finally, we assess our approach for segmentation problem and showcase its effectiveness with experiments.

Recent advances in upper limb prostheses have led to significant improvements in the number of movements provided by the robotic limb. However, the method for controlling multiple degrees of freedom via user-generated signals remains challenging. To address this issue, various machine learning controllers have been developed to better predict movement intent. As these controllers become more intelligent and take on more autonomy in the system, the traditional approach of representing the human-machine interface as a human controlling a tool becomes limiting. One possible approach to improve the understanding of these interfaces is to model them as collaborative, multi-agent systems through the lens of joint action. The field of joint action has been commonly applied to two human partners who are trying to work jointly together to achieve a task, such as singing or moving a table together, by effecting coordinated change in their shared environment. In this work, we compare different prosthesis controllers (proportional electromyography with sequential switching, pattern recognition, and adaptive switching) in terms of how they present the hallmarks of joint action. The results of the comparison lead to a new perspective for understanding how existing myoelectric systems relate to each other, along with recommendations for how to improve these systems by increasing the collaborative communication between each partner.

Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.

In this work, we introduce a hypergraph representation learning framework called Hypergraph Neural Networks (HNN) that jointly learns hyperedge embeddings along with a set of hyperedge-dependent embeddings for each node in the hypergraph. HNN derives multiple embeddings per node in the hypergraph where each embedding for a node is dependent on a specific hyperedge of that node. Notably, HNN is accurate, data-efficient, flexible with many interchangeable components, and useful for a wide range of hypergraph learning tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of the HNN framework for hyperedge prediction and hypergraph node classification. We find that HNN achieves an overall mean gain of 7.72% and 11.37% across all baseline models and graphs for hyperedge prediction and hypergraph node classification, respectively.

A "heart attack" or myocardial infarction (MI), occurs when an artery supplying blood to the heart is abruptly occluded. The "gold standard" method for imaging MI is Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), with intravenously administered gadolinium-based contrast (late gadolinium enhancement). However, no "gold standard" fully automated method for the quantification of MI exists. In this work, we propose an end-to-end fully automatic system (MyI-Net) for the detection and quantification of MI in MRI images. This has the potential to reduce the uncertainty due to the technical variability across labs and inherent problems of the data and labels. Our system consists of four processing stages designed to maintain the flow of information across scales. First, features from raw MRI images are generated using feature extractors built on ResNet and MoblieNet architectures. This is followed by the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) to produce spatial information at different scales to preserve more image context. High-level features from ASPP and initial low-level features are concatenated at the third stage and then passed to the fourth stage where spatial information is recovered via up-sampling to produce final image segmentation output into: i) background, ii) heart muscle, iii) blood and iv) scar areas. New models were compared with state-of-art models and manual quantification. Our models showed favorable performance in global segmentation and scar tissue detection relative to state-of-the-art work, including a four-fold better performance in matching scar pixels to contours produced by clinicians.

Increasing popularity of deep-learning-powered applications raises the issue of vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial attacks. In other words, hardly perceptible changes in input data lead to the output error in neural network hindering their utilization in applications that involve decisions with security risks. A number of previous works have already thoroughly evaluated the most commonly used configuration - Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) against different types of adversarial attacks. Moreover, recent works demonstrated transferability of the some adversarial examples across different neural network models. This paper studied robustness of the new emerging models such as SpinalNet-based neural networks and Compact Convolutional Transformers (CCT) on image classification problem of CIFAR-10 dataset. Each architecture was tested against four White-box attacks and three Black-box attacks. Unlike VGG and SpinalNet models, attention-based CCT configuration demonstrated large span between strong robustness and vulnerability to adversarial examples. Eventually, the study of transferability between VGG, VGG-inspired SpinalNet and pretrained CCT 7/3x1 models was conducted. It was shown that despite high effectiveness of the attack on the certain individual model, this does not guarantee the transferability to other models.