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.

在回答问题时，人类会利用跨不同模式可用的信息来综合一致，完整的思想链（COT）。在深度学习模型（例如大规模语言模型）的情况下，这个过程通常是黑匣子。最近，科学问题基准已用于诊断AI系统的多跳推理能力和解释性。但是，现有数据集无法为答案提供注释，或仅限于仅文本模式，小尺度和有限的域多样性。为此，我们介绍了科学问题答案（SQA），这是一个新的基准，由〜21k的多模式多种选择问题组成，其中包含各种科学主题和答案的注释，并提供相应的讲座和解释。我们进一步设计语言模型，以学习将讲座和解释作为思想链（COT），以模仿回答SQA问题时的多跳上推理过程。 SQA在语言模型中展示了COT的实用性，因为COT将问题的答案绩效提高了1.20％的GPT-3和3.99％的unifiedqa。我们还探索了模型的上限，以通过喂食输入中的那些来利用解释；我们观察到它将GPT-3的少量性能提高了18.96％。我们的分析进一步表明，与人类类似的语言模型受益于解释，从较少的数据中学习并仅使用40％的数据实现相同的性能。

目前的视觉问题应答（VQA）任务主要考虑回答自然图像的人为注释问题。然而，除了自然图像之外，在视觉理解和推理研究中仍然可以解读具有语义丰富性的抽象图。在这项工作中，我们介绍了ICON问题的新挑战（ICONQA），其目标是在图标图像上下文中回答问题。我们发布了ICONQA，这是一个由107,439个问题和三个子任务组成的大型数据集：多图像选择，多文本选择和填充空白。 ICONQA数据集是由真实世界图中的启发，突出了抽象图理解和综合认知推理的重要性。因此，ICONQA不仅需要对象识别和文本理解等感知技能，而且还需要多种认知推理技能，例如几何推理，致辞推理和算术推理。为了促进潜在的iconqa模型来学习图标图像的语义表示，我们进一步发布了一个图标数据集图标645，其中包含377级上的645,687个彩色图标。我们进行广泛的用户研究和盲目实验，并重现各种先进的VQA方法来基准iconQA任务。此外，我们开发了一个强大的ICONQA基线Patch-TRM，它应用金字塔跨模型变压器，其中包含在图标数据集上预先培训的输入图嵌入式。 iconqa和图标645可在https://iconqa.github.io提供。

In this work, we focus on instance-level open vocabulary segmentation, intending to expand a segmenter for instance-wise novel categories without mask annotations. We investigate a simple yet effective framework with the help of image captions, focusing on exploiting thousands of object nouns in captions to discover instances of novel classes. Rather than adopting pretrained caption models or using massive caption datasets with complex pipelines, we propose an end-to-end solution from two aspects: caption grounding and caption generation. In particular, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework based on a Mask Transformer baseline. The framework has a novel grounding loss that performs explicit and implicit multi-modal feature alignments. We further design a lightweight caption generation head to allow for additional caption supervision. We find that grounding and generation complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel categories. We conduct extensive experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS). The results demonstrate the superiority of our CGG framework over previous OVIS methods, achieving a large improvement of 6.8% mAP on novel classes without extra caption data. Our method also achieves over 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark under various settings.

We present Second Thought, a new learning paradigm that enables language models (LMs) to re-align with human values. By modeling the chain-of-edits between value-unaligned and value-aligned text, with LM fine-tuning and additional refinement through reinforcement learning, Second Thought not only achieves superior performance in three value alignment benchmark datasets but also shows strong human-value transfer learning ability in few-shot scenarios. The generated editing steps also offer better interpretability and ease for interactive error correction. Extensive human evaluations further confirm its effectiveness.

Recent studies have shown that using an external Language Model (LM) benefits the end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, predicting tokens that appear less frequently in the training set is still quite challenging. The long-tail prediction problems have been widely studied in many applications, but only been addressed by a few studies for ASR and LMs. In this paper, we propose a new memory augmented lookup dictionary based Transformer architecture for LM. The newly introduced lookup dictionary incorporates rich contextual information in training set, which is vital to correctly predict long-tail tokens. With intensive experiments on Chinese and English data sets, our proposed method is proved to outperform the baseline Transformer LM by a great margin on both word/character error rate and tail tokens error rate. This is achieved without impact on the decoding efficiency. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in boosting the ASR decoding performance, especially for long-tail tokens.

It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

The ability to distinguish between different movie scenes is critical for understanding the storyline of a movie. However, accurately detecting movie scenes is often challenging as it requires the ability to reason over very long movie segments. This is in contrast to most existing video recognition models, which are typically designed for short-range video analysis. This work proposes a State-Space Transformer model that can efficiently capture dependencies in long movie videos for accurate movie scene detection. Our model, dubbed TranS4mer, is built using a novel S4A building block, which combines the strengths of structured state-space sequence (S4) and self-attention (A) layers. Given a sequence of frames divided into movie shots (uninterrupted periods where the camera position does not change), the S4A block first applies self-attention to capture short-range intra-shot dependencies. Afterward, the state-space operation in the S4A block is used to aggregate long-range inter-shot cues. The final TranS4mer model, which can be trained end-to-end, is obtained by stacking the S4A blocks one after the other multiple times. Our proposed TranS4mer outperforms all prior methods in three movie scene detection datasets, including MovieNet, BBC, and OVSD, while also being $2\times$ faster and requiring $3\times$ less GPU memory than standard Transformer models. We will release our code and models.

Generalizability to unseen forgery types is crucial for face forgery detectors. Recent works have made significant progress in terms of generalization by synthetic forgery data augmentation. In this work, we explore another path for improving the generalization. Our goal is to reduce the features that are easy to learn in the training phase, so as to reduce the risk of overfitting on specific forgery types. Specifically, in our method, a teacher network takes as input the face images and generates an attention map of the deep features by a diverse multihead attention ViT. The attention map is used to guide a student network to focus on the low-attended features by reducing the highly-attended deep features. A deep feature mixup strategy is also proposed to synthesize forgeries in the feature domain. Experiments demonstrate that, without data augmentation, our method is able to achieve promising performances on unseen forgeries and highly compressed data.

This paper presents a novel framework for planning in unknown and occluded urban spaces. We specifically focus on turns and intersections where occlusions significantly impact navigability. Our approach uses an inpainting model to fill in a sparse, occluded, semantic lidar point cloud and plans dynamically feasible paths for a vehicle to traverse through the open and inpainted spaces. We demonstrate our approach using a car's lidar data with real-time occlusions, and show that by inpainting occluded areas, we can plan longer paths, with more turn options compared to without inpainting; in addition, our approach more closely follows paths derived from a planner with no occlusions (called the ground truth) compared to other state of the art approaches.