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.

Different video understanding tasks are typically treated in isolation, and even with distinct types of curated data (e.g., classifying sports in one dataset, tracking animals in another). However, in wearable cameras, the immersive egocentric perspective of a person engaging with the world around them presents an interconnected web of video understanding tasks -- hand-object manipulations, navigation in the space, or human-human interactions -- that unfold continuously, driven by the person's goals. We argue that this calls for a much more unified approach. We propose EgoTask Translation (EgoT2), which takes a collection of models optimized on separate tasks and learns to translate their outputs for improved performance on any or all of them at once. Unlike traditional transfer or multi-task learning, EgoT2's flipped design entails separate task-specific backbones and a task translator shared across all tasks, which captures synergies between even heterogeneous tasks and mitigates task competition. Demonstrating our model on a wide array of video tasks from Ego4D, we show its advantages over existing transfer paradigms and achieve top-ranked results on four of the Ego4D 2022 benchmark challenges.

ProtoPNet and its follow-up variants (ProtoPNets) have attracted broad research interest for their intrinsic interpretability from prototypes and comparable accuracy to non-interpretable counterparts. However, it has been recently found that the interpretability of prototypes can be corrupted due to the semantic gap between similarity in latent space and that in input space. In this work, we make the first attempt to quantitatively evaluate the interpretability of prototype-based explanations, rather than solely qualitative evaluations by some visualization examples, which can be easily misled by cherry picks. To this end, we propose two evaluation metrics, termed consistency score and stability score, to evaluate the explanation consistency cross images and the explanation robustness against perturbations, both of which are essential for explanations taken into practice. Furthermore, we propose a shallow-deep feature alignment (SDFA) module and a score aggregation (SA) module to improve the interpretability of prototypes. We conduct systematical evaluation experiments and substantial discussions to uncover the interpretability of existing ProtoPNets. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significantly superior performance to the state-of-the-arts, under both the conventional qualitative evaluations and the proposed quantitative evaluations, in both accuracy and interpretability. Codes are available at https://github.com/hqhQAQ/EvalProtoPNet.

A key challenge in federated learning (FL) is the statistical heterogeneity that impairs the generalization of the global model on each client. To address this, we propose a method Federated learning with Adaptive Local Aggregation (FedALA) by capturing the desired information in the global model for client models in personalized FL. The key component of FedALA is an Adaptive Local Aggregation (ALA) module, which can adaptively aggregate the downloaded global model and local model towards the local objective on each client to initialize the local model before training in each iteration. To evaluate the effectiveness of FedALA, we conduct extensive experiments with five benchmark datasets in computer vision and natural language processing domains. FedALA outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines by up to 3.27% in test accuracy. Furthermore, we also apply ALA module to other federated learning methods and achieve up to 24.19% improvement in test accuracy.

Open-vocabulary scene understanding aims to localize and recognize unseen categories beyond the annotated label space. The recent breakthrough of 2D open-vocabulary perception is largely driven by Internet-scale paired image-text data with rich vocabulary concepts. However, this success cannot be directly transferred to 3D scenarios due to the inaccessibility of large-scale 3D-text pairs. To this end, we propose to distill knowledge encoded in pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models through captioning multi-view images from 3D, which allows explicitly associating 3D and semantic-rich captions. Further, to facilitate coarse-to-fine visual-semantic representation learning from captions, we design hierarchical 3D-caption pairs, leveraging geometric constraints between 3D scenes and multi-view images. Finally, by employing contrastive learning, the model learns language-aware embeddings that connect 3D and text for open-vocabulary tasks. Our method not only remarkably outperforms baseline methods by 25.8% $\sim$ 44.7% hIoU and 14.5% $\sim$ 50.4% hAP$_{50}$ on open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, but also shows robust transferability on challenging zero-shot domain transfer tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/PLA.

Robust Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is usually adopted to train a meta-model which may fast adapt to novel classes with only a few exemplars and meanwhile remain robust to adversarial attacks. The conventional solution for robust MAML is to introduce robustness-promoting regularization during meta-training stage. With such a regularization, previous robust MAML methods simply follow the typical MAML practice that the number of training shots should match with the number of test shots to achieve an optimal adaptation performance. However, although the robustness can be largely improved, previous methods sacrifice clean accuracy a lot. In this paper, we observe that introducing robustness-promoting regularization into MAML reduces the intrinsic dimension of clean sample features, which results in a lower capacity of clean representations. This may explain why the clean accuracy of previous robust MAML methods drops severely. Based on this observation, we propose a simple strategy, i.e., increasing the number of training shots, to mitigate the loss of intrinsic dimension caused by robustness-promoting regularization. Though simple, our method remarkably improves the clean accuracy of MAML without much loss of robustness, producing a robust yet accurate model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior arts in achieving a better trade-off between accuracy and robustness. Besides, we observe that our method is less sensitive to the number of fine-tuning steps during meta-training, which allows for a reduced number of fine-tuning steps to improve training efficiency.

预先训练的图像文本模型（如剪辑）已经证明了从大规模的Web收集的图像文本数据中学到的视觉表示的强大力量。鉴于学习良好的视觉特征，一些现有的作品将图像表示转移到视频域并取得良好的结果。但是，如何利用图像语言预训练的模型（例如，剪辑）进行视频培训（后培训）仍在探索。在本文中，我们研究了两个问题：1）阻碍后期剪辑的因素是什么因素，以进一步提高视频语言任务的性能？ 2）如何减轻这些因素的影响？通过一系列比较实验和分析，我们发现语言源之间的数据量表和域间隙具有很大的影响。由这些动机，我们提出了一种配备了视频代理机制的Omnisource跨模式学习方法，即剪辑，即剪辑VIP。广泛的结果表明，我们的方法可以提高视频检索的剪辑的性能。我们的模型还可以在包括MSR-VTT，DIDEMO，LSMDC和ActivityNet在内的各种数据集上实现SOTA结果。我们在https://github.com/microsoft/xpretrain/tree/main/main/main/clip-vip上发布了代码和预训练的剪辑模型。

近年来，商业上可用和负担得起的四足动物机器人激增，其中许多平台在研究和行业中都被积极使用。随着腿部机器人的可用性的增长，对这些机器人能够执行有用技能的控制器的需求也是如此。但是，大多数用于控制器开发的基于学习的框架都集中在培训机器人特定的控制器上，该过程需要为每个新机器人重复。在这项工作中，我们引入了一个用于训练四足机器人的广义运动（Genloco）控制器的框架。我们的框架合成了可以部署在具有相似形态的各种四足动物的机器人上的通用运动控制器。我们提出了一种简单但有效的形态随机化方法，该方法在程序上生成了一组训练的模拟机器人。我们表明，通过对这套模拟机器人进行训练，我们的模型获得了更多的通用控制策略，这些策略可以直接转移到具有多种形态的新型模拟和真实世界机器人中，在训练过程中未观察到。

神经网络（NNS）和决策树（DTS）都是机器学习的流行模型，但具有相互排斥的优势和局限性。为了带来两个世界中的最好，提出了各种方法来明确或隐式地集成NN和DTS。在这项调查中，这些方法是在我们称为神经树（NTS）的学校中组织的。这项调查旨在对NTS进行全面审查，并尝试确定它们如何增强模型的解释性。我们首先提出了NTS的彻底分类学，该分类法表达了NNS和DTS的逐步整合和共同进化。之后，我们根据NTS的解释性和绩效分析，并建议解决其余挑战的可能解决方案。最后，这项调查以讨论有条件计算和向该领域的有希望的方向进行讨论结束。该调查中审查的论文列表及其相应的代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/zju-vipa/awesome-neural-trees

由于其在多语言翻译，自动驾驶等方面的广泛应用，因此场景文本识别引起了近年来的兴趣。在本报告中，我们描述了我们对词汇表场上的解决方案的解决方案，该解决方案是词汇表场上的文本理解（OOV-ST）挑战，旨在从自然场景图像中提取胶卷外（OOV）单词。我们基于OCLIP的模型在H-Mean中获得28.59 \％，在ECCV2022 TIE Workshop中对OOV挑战的端到端OOV单词识别曲目排名第一。