最近对具有正式隐私保证的分布式计算的研究，例如联合学习的差异私有（DP），利用每回合中客户的随机抽样（通过亚采样进行的隐私放大）来达到令人满意的隐私水平。然而，实现这一目标需要强大的假设，这些假设可能无法实践，包括对客户的精确和统一的亚采样，以及高度信任的聚合器来处理客户的数据。在本文中，我们探讨了一个更实用的协议，改组了办理登机手续，以解决上述问题。该协议依靠客户端做出独立和随机的决定来参与计算，释放服务器发射的亚采样要求，并启用客户端辍学的强大建模。此外，采用了称为洗牌模型的较弱的信任模型，而不是使用受信任的聚合器。为此，我们介绍了新工具来表征洗牌的r \'enyi差异隐私（RDP）。我们表明，我们的新技术在隐私保证中至少提高了三次，而在各种参数制度下使用近似DP的强大组成的人进行了三倍。此外，我们提供了一种数值方法来跟踪通用洗牌机构的隐私，包括具有高斯机制的分布式随机梯度下降（SGD）。据我们所知，这也是文献中分布式设置下本地/洗牌模型中高斯机制的首次评估，这可能具有独立的兴趣。

Vision-based tactile sensors have gained extensive attention in the robotics community. The sensors are highly expected to be capable of extracting contact information i.e. haptic information during in-hand manipulation. This nature of tactile sensors makes them a perfect match for haptic feedback applications. In this paper, we propose a contact force estimation method using the vision-based tactile sensor DIGIT, and apply it to a position-force teleoperation architecture for force feedback. The force estimation is done by building a depth map for DIGIT gel surface deformation measurement and applying a regression algorithm on estimated depth data and ground truth force data to get the depth-force relationship. The experiment is performed by constructing a grasping force feedback system with a haptic device as a leader robot and a parallel robot gripper as a follower robot, where the DIGIT sensor is attached to the tip of the robot gripper to estimate the contact force. The preliminary results show the capability of using the low-cost vision-based sensor for force feedback applications.

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.

Timely and effective feedback within surgical training plays a critical role in developing the skills required to perform safe and efficient surgery. Feedback from expert surgeons, while especially valuable in this regard, is challenging to acquire due to their typically busy schedules, and may be subject to biases. Formal assessment procedures like OSATS and GEARS attempt to provide objective measures of skill, but remain time-consuming. With advances in machine learning there is an opportunity for fast and objective automated feedback on technical skills. The SimSurgSkill 2021 challenge (hosted as a sub-challenge of EndoVis at MICCAI 2021) aimed to promote and foster work in this endeavor. Using virtual reality (VR) surgical tasks, competitors were tasked with localizing instruments and predicting surgical skill. Here we summarize the winning approaches and how they performed. Using this publicly available dataset and results as a springboard, future work may enable more efficient training of surgeons with advances in surgical data science. The dataset can be accessed from https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-simsurgskill-2021.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful tools for learning latent representations of data used in a wide range of applications. In practice, VAEs usually require multiple training rounds to choose the amount of information the latent variable should retain. This trade-off between the reconstruction error (distortion) and the KL divergence (rate) is typically parameterized by a hyperparameter $\beta$. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Rate VAE (MR-VAE), a computationally efficient framework for learning optimal parameters corresponding to various $\beta$ in a single training run. The key idea is to explicitly formulate a response function that maps $\beta$ to the optimal parameters using hypernetworks. MR-VAEs construct a compact response hypernetwork where the pre-activations are conditionally gated based on $\beta$. We justify the proposed architecture by analyzing linear VAEs and showing that it can represent response functions exactly for linear VAEs. With the learned hypernetwork, MR-VAEs can construct the rate-distortion curve without additional training and can be deployed with significantly less hyperparameter tuning. Empirically, our approach is competitive and often exceeds the performance of multiple $\beta$-VAEs training with minimal computation and memory overheads.

In recent years, the performance of novel view synthesis using perspective images has dramatically improved with the advent of neural radiance fields (NeRF). This study proposes two novel techniques that effectively build NeRF for 360{\textdegree} omnidirectional images. Due to the characteristics of a 360{\textdegree} image of ERP format that has spatial distortion in their high latitude regions and a 360{\textdegree} wide viewing angle, NeRF's general ray sampling strategy is ineffective. Hence, the view synthesis accuracy of NeRF is limited and learning is not efficient. We propose two non-uniform ray sampling schemes for NeRF to suit 360{\textdegree} images - distortion-aware ray sampling and content-aware ray sampling. We created an evaluation dataset Synth360 using Replica and SceneCity models of indoor and outdoor scenes, respectively. In experiments, we show that our proposal successfully builds 360{\textdegree} image NeRF in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. The proposal is widely applicable to advanced variants of NeRF. DietNeRF, AugNeRF, and NeRF++ combined with the proposed techniques further improve the performance. Moreover, we show that our proposed method enhances the quality of real-world scenes in 360{\textdegree} images. Synth360: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1suL9B7DO2no21ggiIHkH3JF3OecasQLb.

We present a lightweight post-processing method to refine the semantic segmentation results of point cloud sequences. Most existing methods usually segment frame by frame and encounter the inherent ambiguity of the problem: based on a measurement in a single frame, labels are sometimes difficult to predict even for humans. To remedy this problem, we propose to explicitly train a network to refine these results predicted by an existing segmentation method. The network, which we call the P2Net, learns the consistency constraints between coincident points from consecutive frames after registration. We evaluate the proposed post-processing method both qualitatively and quantitatively on the SemanticKITTI dataset that consists of real outdoor scenes. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by comparing the results predicted by two representative networks with and without the refinement by the post-processing network. Specifically, qualitative visualization validates the key idea that labels of the points that are difficult to predict can be corrected with P2Net. Quantitatively, overall mIoU is improved from 10.5% to 11.7% for PointNet [1] and from 10.8% to 15.9% for PointNet++ [2].

Although sketch-to-photo retrieval has a wide range of applications, it is costly to obtain paired and rich-labeled ground truth. Differently, photo retrieval data is easier to acquire. Therefore, previous works pre-train their models on rich-labeled photo retrieval data (i.e., source domain) and then fine-tune them on the limited-labeled sketch-to-photo retrieval data (i.e., target domain). However, without co-training source and target data, source domain knowledge might be forgotten during the fine-tuning process, while simply co-training them may cause negative transfer due to domain gaps. Moreover, identity label spaces of source data and target data are generally disjoint and therefore conventional category-level Domain Adaptation (DA) is not directly applicable. To address these issues, we propose an Instance-level Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation (IHDA) framework. We apply the fine-tuning strategy for identity label learning, aiming to transfer the instance-level knowledge in an inductive transfer manner. Meanwhile, labeled attributes from the source data are selected to form a shared label space for source and target domains. Guided by shared attributes, DA is utilized to bridge cross-dataset domain gaps and heterogeneous domain gaps, which transfers instance-level knowledge in a transductive transfer manner. Experiments show that our method has set a new state of the art on three sketch-to-photo image retrieval benchmarks without extra annotations, which opens the door to train more effective models on limited-labeled heterogeneous image retrieval tasks. Related codes are available at https://github.com/fandulu/IHDA.

超级解决全球气候模拟的粗略产出，称为缩减，对于需要长期气候变化预测的系统做出政治和社会决策至关重要。但是，现有的快速超分辨率技术尚未保留气候数据的空间相关性，这在我们以空间扩展（例如运输基础设施的开发）处理系统时尤其重要。本文中，我们展示了基于对抗性的网络的机器学习，使我们能够在降尺度中正确重建区域间空间相关性，并高达五十，同时保持像素统计的一致性。与测量的温度和降水分布的气象数据的直接比较表明，整合气候上重要的物理信息对于准确的缩减至关重要，这促使我们称我们的方法称为$ \ pi $ srgan（物理学知情的超级分辨率生成生成的对手网络）。本方法对气候变化影响的区域间一致评估具有潜在的应用。

360 {\ deg}图像是有益的 - 它包含相机周围的全向视觉信息。但是，覆盖360 {\ deg}图像的区域比人类的视野大得多，因此在不同视图方向上的重要信息很容易被忽略。为了解决此问题，我们提出了一种使用视觉显着性作为线索来预测单个360 {\ deg}图像中最佳区域（ROI）集合的方法。为了处理现有的单个360 {\ deg}图像显着性预测数据集的稀缺，有偏见的训练数据，我们还提出了基于球形随机数据旋转的数据增强方法。从预测的显着图和冗余候选区域，我们获得了最佳的ROI集合，考虑到区域内的显着性和区域之间的相互作用（IOU）。我们进行主观评估，以表明所提出的方法可以选择正确汇总输入360 {\ deg}图像的区域。