Background and Purpose: Colorectal cancer is a common fatal malignancy, the fourth most common cancer in men, and the third most common cancer in women worldwide. Timely detection of cancer in its early stages is essential for treating the disease. Currently, there is a lack of datasets for histopathological image segmentation of rectal cancer, which often hampers the assessment accuracy when computer technology is used to aid in diagnosis. Methods: This present study provided a new publicly available Enteroscope Biopsy Histopathological Hematoxylin and Eosin Image Dataset for Image Segmentation Tasks (EBHI-Seg). To demonstrate the validity and extensiveness of EBHI-Seg, the experimental results for EBHI-Seg are evaluated using classical machine learning methods and deep learning methods. Results: The experimental results showed that deep learning methods had a better image segmentation performance when utilizing EBHI-Seg. The maximum accuracy of the Dice evaluation metric for the classical machine learning method is 0.948, while the Dice evaluation metric for the deep learning method is 0.965. Conclusion: This publicly available dataset contained 5,170 images of six types of tumor differentiation stages and the corresponding ground truth images. The dataset can provide researchers with new segmentation algorithms for medical diagnosis of colorectal cancer, which can be used in the clinical setting to help doctors and patients.

尽管在各种应用中取得了突出的性能，但点云识别模型经常遭受自然腐败和对抗性扰动的困扰。在本文中，我们深入研究了点云识别模型的一般鲁棒性，并提出了点云对比对抗训练（PointCat）。 PointCat的主要直觉是鼓励目标识别模型缩小清洁点云和损坏点云之间的决策差距。具体而言，我们利用有监督的对比损失来促进识别模型提取的超晶体特征的对齐和均匀性，并设计一对带有动态原型指南的集中式损失，以避免这些特征与其属于其属于其归属类别群的偏离。为了提供更具挑战性的损坏点云，我们对噪声生成器以及从头开始的识别模型进行了对手训练，而不是将基于梯度的攻击用作内部循环，例如以前的对手训练方法。全面的实验表明，在包括各种损坏的情况下，所提出的PointCat优于基线方法，并显着提高不同点云识别模型的稳健性，包括各向同性点噪声，LIDAR模拟的噪声，随机点掉落和对抗性扰动。

最近的研究表明，深层神经网络容易受到不同类型的攻击，例如对抗性攻击，数据中毒攻击和后门攻击。其中，后门攻击是最狡猾的攻击，几乎可以在深度学习管道的每个阶段发生。因此，后门攻击吸引了学术界和行业的许多兴趣。但是，大多数现有的后门攻击方法对于某些轻松的预处理（例如常见数据转换）都是可见的或脆弱的。为了解决这些限制，我们提出了一种强大而无形的后门攻击，称为“毒药”。具体而言，我们首先利用图像结构作为目标中毒区域，并用毒药（信息）填充它们以生成触发图案。由于图像结构可以在数据转换期间保持其语义含义，因此这种触发模式对数据转换本质上是强大的。然后，我们利用深度注射网络将这种触发模式嵌入封面图像中，以达到隐身性。与现有流行的后门攻击方法相比，毒药的墨水在隐形和健壮性方面都优于表现。通过广泛的实验，我们证明了毒药不仅是不同数据集和网络体系结构的一般性，而且对于不同的攻击场景也很灵活。此外，它对许多最先进的防御技术也具有非常强烈的抵抗力。

This paper presents a practical global optimization algorithm for the K-center clustering problem, which aims to select K samples as the cluster centers to minimize the maximum within-cluster distance. This algorithm is based on a reduced-space branch and bound scheme and guarantees convergence to the global optimum in a finite number of steps by only branching on the regions of centers. To improve efficiency, we have designed a two-stage decomposable lower bound, the solution of which can be derived in a closed form. In addition, we also propose several acceleration techniques to narrow down the region of centers, including bounds tightening, sample reduction, and parallelization. Extensive studies on synthetic and real-world datasets have demonstrated that our algorithm can solve the K-center problems to global optimal within 4 hours for ten million samples in the serial mode and one billion samples in the parallel mode. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art heuristic methods, the global optimum obtained by our algorithm can averagely reduce the objective function by 25.8% on all the synthetic and real-world datasets.

Previous work has shown the potential of deep learning to predict renal obstruction using kidney ultrasound images. However, these image-based classifiers have been trained with the goal of single-visit inference in mind. We compare methods from video action recognition (i.e. convolutional pooling, LSTM, TSM) to adapt single-visit convolutional models to handle multiple visit inference. We demonstrate that incorporating images from a patient's past hospital visits provides only a small benefit for the prediction of obstructive hydronephrosis. Therefore, inclusion of prior ultrasounds is beneficial, but prediction based on the latest ultrasound is sufficient for patient risk stratification.

Complex knowledge base question answering can be achieved by converting questions into sequences of predefined actions. However, there is a significant semantic and structural gap between natural language and action sequences, which makes this conversion difficult. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-enhanced complex question answering framework, called ALCQA, which mitigates this gap through question-to-action alignment and question-to-question alignment. We train a question rewriting model to align the question and each action, and utilize a pretrained language model to implicitly align the question and KG artifacts. Moreover, considering that similar questions correspond to similar action sequences, we retrieve top-k similar question-answer pairs at the inference stage through question-to-question alignment and propose a novel reward-guided action sequence selection strategy to select from candidate action sequences. We conduct experiments on CQA and WQSP datasets, and the results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains a 9.88\% improvements in the F1 metric on CQA dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/TTTTTTTTy/ALCQA.

The core operation of current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is the aggregation enabled by the graph Laplacian or message passing, which filters the neighborhood information of nodes. Though effective for various tasks, in this paper, we show that they are potentially a problematic factor underlying all GNN models for learning on certain datasets, as they force the node representations similar, making the nodes gradually lose their identity and become indistinguishable. Hence, we augment the aggregation operations with their dual, i.e. diversification operators that make the node more distinct and preserve the identity. Such augmentation replaces the aggregation with a two-channel filtering process that, in theory, is beneficial for enriching the node representations. In practice, the proposed two-channel filters can be easily patched on existing GNN methods with diverse training strategies, including spectral and spatial (message passing) methods. In the experiments, we observe desired characteristics of the models and significant performance boost upon the baselines on 9 node classification tasks.

Ramp merging is a typical application of cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS). Vehicle trajectories perceived by roadside sensors are importation complement to the limited visual field of on-board perception. Vehicle tracking and trajectory denoising algorithm is proposed in this paper to take full advantage of roadside cameras for vehicle trajectory and speed profile estimation. Dynamic speed guidance algorithm is proposed to help on-ramp vehicles to merge into mainline smoothly, even in non-cooperative environment where mainline vehicles are not expected to slow down to accommodate on-ramp vehicles. On-site experiments were taken out in a merging area of Hangzhou Belt Highway to testify our prototype system, and simulation analysis shows our proposed algorithm can achieve significant fuel savings during the ramp merging process.

The quality of knowledge retrieval is crucial in knowledge-intensive conversations. Two common strategies to improve the retrieval quality are finetuning the retriever or generating a self-contained query, while they encounter heavy burdens on expensive computation and elaborate annotations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations, namely QKConv. There are three modules in QKConv: a query generator, an off-the-shelf knowledge selector, and a response generator. Without extra supervision, the end-to-end joint training of QKConv explores multiple candidate queries and utilizes corresponding selected knowledge to yield the target response. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on conversational question-answering, task-oriented dialogue, and knowledge-grounded conversation. Experimental results demonstrate that QKConv achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to unsupervised methods and competitive performance compared to supervised methods.

Negotiation is one of the crucial abilities in human communication, and there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems recently, which goal is to empower intelligent agents with such ability that can efficiently help humans resolve conflicts or reach beneficial agreements. Although there have been many explorations in negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has to date remained notably absent. To this end, we aim to fill this gap by reviewing contemporary studies in the emerging field of negotiation dialogue systems, covering benchmarks, evaluations, and methodologies. Furthermore, we also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party, and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.