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.

Accurate PhotoVoltaic (PV) power generation forecasting is vital for the efficient operation of Smart Grids. The automated design of such accurate forecasting models for individual PV plants includes two challenges: First, information about the PV mounting configuration (i.e. inclination and azimuth angles) is often missing. Second, for new PV plants, the amount of historical data available to train a forecasting model is limited (cold-start problem). We address these two challenges by proposing a new method for day-ahead PV power generation forecasts called AutoPV. AutoPV is a weighted ensemble of forecasting models that represent different PV mounting configurations. This representation is achieved by pre-training each forecasting model on a separate PV plant and by scaling the model's output with the peak power rating of the corresponding PV plant. To tackle the cold-start problem, we initially weight each forecasting model in the ensemble equally. To tackle the problem of missing information about the PV mounting configuration, we use new data that become available during operation to adapt the ensemble weights to minimize the forecasting error. AutoPV is advantageous as the unknown PV mounting configuration is implicitly reflected in the ensemble weights, and only the PV plant's peak power rating is required to re-scale the ensemble's output. AutoPV also allows to represent PV plants with panels distributed on different roofs with varying alignments, as these mounting configurations can be reflected proportionally in the weighting. Additionally, the required computing memory is decoupled when scaling AutoPV to hundreds of PV plants, which is beneficial in Smart Grids with limited computing capabilities. For a real-world data set with 11 PV plants, the accuracy of AutoPV is comparable to a model trained on two years of data and outperforms an incrementally trained model.

The ability to effectively reuse prior knowledge is a key requirement when building general and flexible Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Skill reuse is one of the most common approaches, but current methods have considerable limitations.For example, fine-tuning an existing policy frequently fails, as the policy can degrade rapidly early in training. In a similar vein, distillation of expert behavior can lead to poor results when given sub-optimal experts. We compare several common approaches for skill transfer on multiple domains including changes in task and system dynamics. We identify how existing methods can fail and introduce an alternative approach to mitigate these problems. Our approach learns to sequence existing temporally-extended skills for exploration but learns the final policy directly from the raw experience. This conceptual split enables rapid adaptation and thus efficient data collection but without constraining the final solution.It significantly outperforms many classical methods across a suite of evaluation tasks and we use a broad set of ablations to highlight the importance of differentc omponents of our method.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

社会机器人的快速发展刺激了人类运动建模，解释和预测，主动碰撞，人类机器人相互作用和共享空间中共同损害的积极研究。现代方法的目标需要高质量的数据集进行培训和评估。但是，大多数可用数据集都遭受了不准确的跟踪数据或跟踪人员的不自然的脚本行为。本文试图通过在语义丰富的环境中提供运动捕获，眼睛凝视跟踪器和板载机器人传感器的高质量跟踪信息来填补这一空白。为了诱导记录参与者的自然行为，我们利用了松散的脚本化任务分配，这使参与者以自然而有目的的方式导航到动态的实验室环境。本文介绍的运动数据集设置了高质量的标准，因为使用语义信息可以增强现实和准确的数据，从而使新算法的开发不仅依赖于跟踪信息，而且还依赖于移动代理的上下文提示，还依赖于跟踪信息。静态和动态环境。

荆棘冠的海星（婴儿床）爆发是珊瑚损失的主要原因是巨大的障碍礁（GBR），并且正在进行大量监测和控制计划，以试图管理生态可持续水平的COTS群体。我们释放了GBR上的COTS爆发区域的大规模注释的水下图像数据集，以鼓励机器学习和AI驱动技术的研究，以改善珊瑚礁秤上的COTS群体的检测，监测和管理。该数据集发布并托管在一次竞争中，挑战国际机器学习界，并从这些水下图像中的COTS检测的任务挑战。

语义图像分割是手术中的背景知识和自治机器人的重要前提。本领域的状态专注于在微创手术期间获得的传统RGB视频数据，但基于光谱成像数据的全景语义分割并在开放手术期间获得几乎没有注意到日期。为了解决文献中的这种差距，我们正在研究基于在开放手术环境中获得的猪的高光谱成像（HSI）数据的以下研究问题：（1）基于神经网络的HSI数据的充分表示是完全自动化的器官分割，尤其是关于数据的空间粒度（像素与Superpixels与Patches与完整图像）的空间粒度？ （2）在执行语义器官分割时，是否有利用HSI数据使用HSI数据，即RGB数据和处理的HSI数据（例如氧合等组织参数）？根据基于20猪的506个HSI图像的全面验证研究，共注释了19个类，基于深度的学习的分割性能 - 贯穿模态 - 与输入数据的空间上下文一致。未处理的HSI数据提供优于RGB数据或来自摄像机提供商的处理数据，其中优势随着输入到神经网络的输入的尺寸而增加。最大性能（应用于整个图像的HSI）产生了0.89（标准偏差（SD）0.04）的平均骰子相似度系数（DSC），其在帧间间变异性（DSC为0.89（SD 0.07）的范围内。我们得出结论，HSI可以成为全自动手术场景理解的强大的图像模型，其具有传统成像的许多优点，包括恢复额外功能组织信息的能力。

连续控制的强化学习（RL）通常采用其支持涵盖整个动作空间的分布。在这项工作中，我们调查了培训的代理经常更喜欢在该空间的界限中普遍采取行动的俗称已知的现象。我们在最佳控制中汲取理论联系，以发出Bang-Bang行为的出现，并在各种最近的RL算法中提供广泛的实证评估。我们通过伯努利分布替换正常高斯，该分布仅考虑沿着每个动作维度的极端 - Bang-Bang控制器。令人惊讶的是，这在几种连续控制基准测试中实现了最先进的性能 - 与机器人硬件相比，能量和维护成本影响控制器选择。由于勘探，学习和最终解决方案纠缠在RL中，我们提供了额外的模仿学习实验，以减少探索对我们分析的影响。最后，我们表明我们的观察结果概括了旨在模拟现实世界挑战和评估因素来减轻Bang-Bang解决方案的因素的环境。我们的调查结果强调了对基准测试连续控制算法的挑战，特别是在潜在的现实世界应用中。

时间序列数据的生成和分析与许多从经济学到流体力学的定量字段相关。在物理科学中，诸如亚稳态和连贯的组的结构，慢松弛过程，集体变量显性过渡途径或歧管流动流动的概率流动可能非常重视理解和表征系统的动力动力学和机械性质。 Deeptime是一种通用Python库，提供各种工具来估计基于时间序列数据的动态模型，包括传统的线性学习方法，例如马尔可夫状态模型（MSM），隐藏的马尔可夫模型和Koopman模型，以及内核和深度学习方法如vampnets和深msms。该库主要兼容Scikit-Searn，为这些不同的模型提供一系列估计器类，但与Scikit-Ge劳说相比，还提供了深度模型类，例如，在MSM的情况下，提供了多种分析方法来计算有趣的热力学，动力学和动态量，例如自由能，松弛时间和过渡路径。图书馆专为易于使用而设计，而且易于维护和可扩展的代码。在本文中，我们介绍了Deeptime软件的主要特征和结构。

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.