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.

生成模型生成的合成数据可以增强医学成像中渴望数据深度学习模型的性能和能力。但是，（1）（合成）数据集的可用性有限，并且（2）生成模型训练很复杂，这阻碍了它们在研究和临床应用中的采用。为了减少此入口障碍，我们提出了Medigan，Medigan是一站式商店，用于验证的生成型号，该型号是开源框架 - 不合骨python图书馆。 Medigan允许研究人员和开发人员仅在几行代码中创建，增加和域名。在基于收集的最终用户需求的设计决策的指导下，我们基于生成模型的模块化组件（i）执行，（ii）可视化，（iii）搜索和排名以及（iv）贡献。图书馆的可伸缩性和设计是通过其越来越多的综合且易于使用的验证生成模型来证明的，该模型由21种模型组成，利用9种不同的生成对抗网络体系结构在4个域中在11个数据集中训练，即乳腺摄影，内窥镜检查，X射线和X射线和X射线镜头，X射线和X型。 MRI。此外，在这项工作中分析了Medigan的3个应用，其中包括（a）启用社区范围内的限制数据共享，（b）研究生成模型评估指标以及（c）改进临床下游任务。在（b）中，扩展了公共医学图像综合评估和报告标准，我们根据图像归一化和特定于放射学特征提取了Fr \'Echet Inception距离变异性。

域适应（DA）最近在医学影像社区提出了强烈的兴趣。虽然已经提出了大量DA技术进行了用于图像分割，但大多数这些技术已经在私有数据集或小公共可用数据集上验证。此外，这些数据集主要解决了单级问题。为了解决这些限制，与第24届医学图像计算和计算机辅助干预（Miccai 2021）结合第24届国际会议组织交叉模态域适应（Crossmoda）挑战。 Crossmoda是无监督跨型号DA的第一个大型和多级基准。挑战的目标是分割参与前庭施瓦新瘤（VS）的后续和治疗规划的两个关键脑结构：VS和Cochleas。目前，使用对比度增强的T1（CET1）MRI进行VS患者的诊断和监测。然而，使用诸如高分辨率T2（HRT2）MRI的非对比度序列越来越感兴趣。因此，我们创建了一个无人监督的跨模型分段基准。训练集提供注释CET1（n = 105）和未配对的非注释的HRT2（n = 105）。目的是在测试集中提供的HRT2上自动对HRT2进行单侧VS和双侧耳蜗分割（n = 137）。共有16支球队提交了评估阶段的算法。顶级履行团队达成的表现水平非常高（最佳中位数骰子 - vs：88.4％; Cochleas：85.7％）并接近完全监督（中位数骰子 - vs：92.5％;耳蜗：87.7％）。所有顶级执行方法都使用图像到图像转换方法将源域图像转换为伪目标域图像。然后使用这些生成的图像和为源图像提供的手动注释进行培训分割网络。

The United States coastline spans 95,471 miles; a distance that cannot be effectively patrolled or secured by manual human effort alone. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with infrared cameras and deep-learning based algorithms represent a more efficient alternative for identifying and segmenting objects of interest - namely, ships. However, standard approaches to training these algorithms require large-scale datasets of densely labeled infrared maritime images. Such datasets are not publicly available and manually annotating every pixel in a large-scale dataset would have an extreme labor cost. In this work we demonstrate that, in the context of segmenting ships in infrared imagery, weakly-supervising an algorithm with sparsely labeled data can drastically reduce data labeling costs with minimal impact on system performance. We apply weakly-supervised learning to an unlabeled dataset of 7055 infrared images sourced from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD). We find that by sparsely labeling only 32 points per image, weakly-supervised segmentation models can still effectively detect and segment ships, with a Jaccard score of up to 0.756.

The paper presents a cross-domain review analysis on four popular review datasets: Amazon, Yelp, Steam, IMDb. The analysis is performed using Hadoop and Spark, which allows for efficient and scalable processing of large datasets. By examining close to 12 million reviews from these four online forums, we hope to uncover interesting trends in sales and customer sentiment over the years. Our analysis will include a study of the number of reviews and their distribution over time, as well as an examination of the relationship between various review attributes such as upvotes, creation time, rating, and sentiment. By comparing the reviews across different domains, we hope to gain insight into the factors that drive customer satisfaction and engagement in different product categories.

Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.

Automated offensive language detection is essential in combating the spread of hate speech, particularly in social media. This paper describes our work on Offensive Language Identification in low resource Indic language Marathi. The problem is formulated as a text classification task to identify a tweet as offensive or non-offensive. We evaluate different mono-lingual and multi-lingual BERT models on this classification task, focusing on BERT models pre-trained with social media datasets. We compare the performance of MuRIL, MahaTweetBERT, MahaTweetBERT-Hateful, and MahaBERT on the HASOC 2022 test set. We also explore external data augmentation from other existing Marathi hate speech corpus HASOC 2021 and L3Cube-MahaHate. The MahaTweetBERT, a BERT model, pre-trained on Marathi tweets when fine-tuned on the combined dataset (HASOC 2021 + HASOC 2022 + MahaHate), outperforms all models with an F1 score of 98.43 on the HASOC 2022 test set. With this, we also provide a new state-of-the-art result on HASOC 2022 / MOLD v2 test set.

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose MatCha (Math reasoning and Chart derendering pretraining) to enhance visual language models' capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. Specifically, we propose several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are the key capabilities in visual language modeling. We perform the MatCha pretraining starting from Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, the MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as nearly 20%. We also examine how well MatCha pretraining transfers to domains such as screenshots, textbook diagrams, and document figures and observe overall improvement, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.

Despite the remarkable success achieved by graph convolutional networks for functional brain activity analysis, the heterogeneity of functional patterns and the scarcity of imaging data still pose challenges in many tasks. Transferring knowledge from a source domain with abundant training data to a target domain is effective for improving representation learning on scarce training data. However, traditional transfer learning methods often fail to generalize the pre-trained knowledge to the target task due to domain discrepancy. Self-supervised learning on graphs can increase the generalizability of graph features since self-supervision concentrates on inherent graph properties that are not limited to a particular supervised task. We propose a novel knowledge transfer strategy by integrating meta-learning with self-supervised learning to deal with the heterogeneity and scarcity of fMRI data. Specifically, we perform a self-supervised task on the source domain and apply meta-learning, which strongly improves the generalizability of the model using the bi-level optimization, to transfer the self-supervised knowledge to the target domain. Through experiments on a neurological disorder classification task, we demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly improves target task performance by increasing the generalizability and transferability of graph-based knowledge.