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.

Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations.

In this paper, we propose a novel primal-dual proximal splitting algorithm (PD-PSA), named BALPA, for the composite optimization problem with equality constraints, where the loss function consists of a smooth term and a nonsmooth term composed with a linear mapping. In BALPA, the dual update is designed as a proximal point for a time-varying quadratic function, which balances the implementation of primal and dual update and retains the proximity-induced feature of classic PD-PSAs. In addition, by this balance, BALPA eliminates the inefficiency of classic PD-PSAs for composite optimization problems in which the Euclidean norm of the linear mapping or the equality constraint mapping is large. Therefore, BALPA not only inherits the advantages of simple structure and easy implementation of classic PD-PSAs but also ensures a fast convergence when these norms are large. Moreover, we propose a stochastic version of BALPA (S-BALPA) and apply the developed BALPA to distributed optimization to devise a new distributed optimization algorithm. Furthermore, a comprehensive convergence analysis for BALPA and S-BALPA is conducted, respectively. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Reinforcement learning often suffer from the sparse reward issue in real-world robotics problems. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an effective way to eliminate this problem, which leverages collected expert data to aid online learning. Prior works often assume that the learning agent and the expert aim to accomplish the same task, which requires collecting new data for every new task. In this paper, we consider the case where the target task is mismatched from but similar with that of the expert. Such setting can be challenging and we found existing LfD methods can not effectively guide learning in mismatched new tasks with sparse rewards. We propose conservative reward shaping from demonstration (CRSfD), which shapes the sparse rewards using estimated expert value function. To accelerate learning processes, CRSfD guides the agent to conservatively explore around demonstrations. Experimental results of robot manipulation tasks show that our approach outperforms baseline LfD methods when transferring demonstrations collected in a single task to other different but similar tasks.

Multispectral photometric stereo(MPS) aims at recovering the surface normal of a scene from a single-shot multispectral image captured under multispectral illuminations. Existing MPS methods adopt the Lambertian reflectance model to make the problem tractable, but it greatly limits their application to real-world surfaces. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network named NeuralMPS to solve the MPS problem under general non-Lambertian spectral reflectances. Specifically, we present a spectral reflectance decomposition(SRD) model to disentangle the spectral reflectance into geometric components and spectral components. With this decomposition, we show that the MPS problem for surfaces with a uniform material is equivalent to the conventional photometric stereo(CPS) with unknown light intensities. In this way, NeuralMPS reduces the difficulty of the non-Lambertian MPS problem by leveraging the well-studied non-Lambertian CPS methods. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Self-supervised learning via masked prediction pre-training (MPPT) has shown impressive performance on a range of speech-processing tasks. This paper proposes a method to bias self-supervised learning towards a specific task. The core idea is to slightly finetune the model that is used to obtain the target sequence. This leads to better performance and a substantial increase in training speed. Furthermore, this paper proposes a variant of MPPT that allows low-footprint streaming models to be trained effectively by computing the MPPT loss on masked and unmasked frames. These approaches are evaluated for automatic speech recognition on the Librispeech corpus, where 100 hours of data served as the labelled data and 860 hours as the unlabelled data. The biased training outperforms the unbiased training by 15.5% after 250k updates and 23.8% after 100k updates on test-other. For the streaming models, the pre-training approach yields a reduction in word error rate of 44.1%.

本文提供了功能线性模型的在线随机梯度下降算法的收敛分析。采用坡度函数规律性，内核空间容量以及采样过程协方差运算符的能力的表征，可以实现收敛速率的显着提高。研究了预测问题和估计问题，我们表明，随着目标函数的规律性的增加，能力假设可以减轻收敛速率的饱和。我们表明，通过正确选择的内核，容量假设可以完全弥补预测问题的规律性假设（但不能用于估计问题）。这表明了功能数据分析中的预测问题与估计问题之间的显着差异。

尖峰神经网络（SNN）是一种具有生物学知识的模型，具有高计算能力和低功耗的优势。虽然对深SNN的培训仍然是一个空旷的问题，但它限制了深SNN的现实应用。在这里，我们提出了一个名为Spiking SiamFC ++的深SNN架构，用于对象跟踪，并通过端到端直接培训。具体而言，Alexnet网络在时间域中扩展以提取该功能，并采用替代梯度功能来实现对深SNN的直接监督培训。为了检查尖峰SiAMFC ++的性能，考虑了几种跟踪基准测试，包括OTB2013，OTB2015，Dot2015，Dot2016和UAV123。发现与原始的siAMFC ++相比，精度损失很小。与现有的基于SNN的目标跟踪器相比，例如暹罗（Siamsnn），提议的Spiking SiamFC ++的精度（连续）达到了85.24％（64.37％），远高于52.78％（44.32％）的精度（64.37％）。 。据我们所知，Spiking SiamFC ++的性能优于基于SNN的对象跟踪中现有的最新方法，该方法为目标跟踪领域中的SNN应用提供了新的路径。这项工作可能会进一步促进SNN算法和神经形态芯片的发展。

本文提出了一种针对分布式凸复合优化问题的新型双重不精确拆分算法（DISA），其中本地损耗函数由$ L $ -SMOOTH的项组成，可能是由线性操作员组成的非平滑项。我们证明，当原始和双重尺寸$ \ tau $，$ \ beta $满足$ 0 <\ tau <{2}/{l} $和$ 0 <\ tau \ beta <1 $时，我们证明了DISA是收敛的。与现有的原始双侧近端分裂算法（PD-PSA）相比，DISA克服了收敛步骤范围对线性操作员欧几里得范围的依赖性。这意味着当欧几里得规范大时，DISA允许更大的步骤尺寸，从而确保其快速收敛。此外，我们分别在一般凸度和度量次级性下分别建立了disa的均值和线性收敛速率。此外，还提供了DISA的近似迭代版本，并证明了该近似版本的全局收敛性和sublinear收敛速率。最后，数值实验不仅证实了理论分析，而且还表明，与现有的PD-PSA相比，DISA达到了显着的加速度。

在本文中，我们考虑了基于系数的正则分布回归，该回归旨在从概率措施中回归到复制的内核希尔伯特空间（RKHS）的实现响应（RKHS），该响应将正则化放在系数上，而内核被假定为无限期的。 。该算法涉及两个采样阶段，第一阶段样本由分布组成，第二阶段样品是从这些分布中获得的。全面研究了回归函数的不同规律性范围内算法的渐近行为，并通过整体操作员技术得出学习率。我们在某些温和条件下获得最佳速率，这与单级采样的最小最佳速率相匹配。与文献中分布回归的内核方法相比，所考虑的算法不需要内核是对称的和阳性的半明确仪，因此为设计不确定的内核方法提供了一个简单的范式，从而丰富了分布回归的主题。据我们所知，这是使用不确定核进行分配回归的第一个结果，我们的算法可以改善饱和效果。