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 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 airway extraction from computed tomography (CT) images is a critical step for planning navigation bronchoscopy and quantitative assessment of airway-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The existing methods are challenging to sufficiently segment the airway, especially the high-generation airway, with the constraint of the limited label and cannot meet the clinical use in COPD. We propose a novel two-stage 3D contextual transformer-based U-Net for airway segmentation using CT images. The method consists of two stages, performing initial and refined airway segmentation. The two-stage model shares the same subnetwork with different airway masks as input. Contextual transformer block is performed both in the encoder and decoder path of the subnetwork to finish high-quality airway segmentation effectively. In the first stage, the total airway mask and CT images are provided to the subnetwork, and the intrapulmonary airway mask and corresponding CT scans to the subnetwork in the second stage. Then the predictions of the two-stage method are merged as the final prediction. Extensive experiments were performed on in-house and multiple public datasets. Quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate that our proposed method extracted much more branches and lengths of the tree while accomplishing state-of-the-art airway segmentation performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaozsq/airway_segmentation.

Entity Alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities between two Knowledge Graphs (KGs). While numerous neural EA models have been devised, they are mainly learned using labelled data only. In this work, we argue that different entities within one KG should have compatible counterparts in the other KG due to the potential dependencies among the entities. Making compatible predictions thus should be one of the goals of training an EA model along with fitting the labelled data: this aspect however is neglected in current methods. To power neural EA models with compatibility, we devise a training framework by addressing three problems: (1) how to measure the compatibility of an EA model; (2) how to inject the property of being compatible into an EA model; (3) how to optimise parameters of the compatibility model. Extensive experiments on widely-used datasets demonstrate the advantages of integrating compatibility within EA models. In fact, state-of-the-art neural EA models trained within our framework using just 5\% of the labelled data can achieve comparable effectiveness with supervised training using 20\% of the labelled data.

Despite high global prevalence of hepatic steatosis, no automated diagnostics demonstrated generalizability in detecting steatosis on multiple international datasets. Traditionally, hepatic steatosis detection relies on clinicians selecting the region of interest (ROI) on computed tomography (CT) to measure liver attenuation. ROI selection demands time and expertise, and therefore is not routinely performed in populations. To automate the process, we validated an existing artificial intelligence (AI) system for 3D liver segmentation and used it to purpose a novel method: AI-ROI, which could automatically select the ROI for attenuation measurements. AI segmentation and AI-ROI method were evaluated on 1,014 non-contrast enhanced chest CT images from eight international datasets: LIDC-IDRI, NSCLC-Lung1, RIDER, VESSEL12, RICORD-1A, RICORD-1B, COVID-19-Italy, and COVID-19-China. AI segmentation achieved a mean dice coefficient of 0.957. Attenuations measured by AI-ROI showed no significant differences (p = 0.545) and a reduction of 71% time compared to expert measurements. The area under the curve (AUC) of the steatosis classification of AI-ROI is 0.921 (95% CI: 0.883 - 0.959). If performed as a routine screening method, our AI protocol could potentially allow early non-invasive, non-pharmacological preventative interventions for hepatic steatosis. 1,014 expert-annotated liver segmentations of patients with hepatic steatosis annotations can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-g_zJeAaZXYXGqL1OeF6pUjr6KB0igJX.

Recent years have witnessed great success in handling graph-related tasks with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their great academic success, Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) remain the primary workhorse for practical industrial applications. One reason for this academic-industrial gap is the neighborhood-fetching latency incurred by data dependency in GNNs, which make it hard to deploy for latency-sensitive applications that require fast inference. Conversely, without involving any feature aggregation, MLPs have no data dependency and infer much faster than GNNs, but their performance is less competitive. Motivated by these complementary strengths and weaknesses, we propose a Graph Self-Distillation on Neighborhood (GSDN) framework to reduce the gap between GNNs and MLPs. Specifically, the GSDN framework is based purely on MLPs, where structural information is only implicitly used as prior to guide knowledge self-distillation between the neighborhood and the target, substituting the explicit neighborhood information propagation as in GNNs. As a result, GSDN enjoys the benefits of graph topology-awareness in training but has no data dependency in inference. Extensive experiments have shown that the performance of vanilla MLPs can be greatly improved with self-distillation, e.g., GSDN improves over stand-alone MLPs by 15.54\% on average and outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs on six datasets. Regarding inference speed, GSDN infers 75X-89X faster than existing GNNs and 16X-25X faster than other inference acceleration methods.

这项研究旨在实现两个目标：第一个目标是策划一个大型且信息丰富的数据集，其中包含有关球员的行动和位置的关键和简洁的摘要，以及在专业和NCAA中排球的来回旅行模式Div-i室内排球游戏。尽管几项先前的研究旨在为其他运动创建类似的数据集（例如羽毛球和足球），但尚未实现为室内排球创建这样的数据集。第二个目标是引入排球描述性语言，以充分描述游戏中的集会过程并将语言应用于我们的数据集。基于精选的数据集和我们的描述性运动语言，我们使用我们的数据集介绍了三项用于自动化排球行动和战术分析的任务：（1）排球拉力赛预测，旨在预测集会的结果，并帮助球员和教练改善决策制定决策在实践中，（2）设置类型和命中类型预测，以帮助教练和球员更有效地为游戏做准备，以及（3）排球策略和进攻区统计，以提供高级排球统计数据，并帮助教练了解游戏和对手的策略更好的。我们进行了案例研究，以展示实验结果如何为排球分析社区提供见解。此外，基于现实世界数据的实验评估为我们的数据集和语言的未来研究和应用建立了基准。这项研究弥合了室内排球场与计算机科学之间的差距。

部分标签学习（PLL）是一项奇特的弱监督学习任务，其中训练样本通常与一组候选标签而不是单个地面真理相关联。尽管在该域中提出了各种标签歧义方法，但他们通常假设在许多现实世界应用中可能不存在类平衡的方案。从经验上讲，我们在面对长尾分布和部分标记的组合挑战时观察到了先前方法的退化性能。在这项工作中，我们首先确定先前工作失败的主要原因。随后，我们提出了一种新型的基于最佳运输的框架太阳能，它允许完善被歧义的标签，以匹配边缘级别的先验分布。太阳能还结合了一种新的系统机制，用于估计PLL设置下的长尾类先验分布。通过广泛的实验，与先前的最先进的PLL方法相比，太阳能在标准化基准方面表现出基本优势。代码和数据可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/hbzju/solar。

古本（Guzheng）是一种具有多种演奏技巧的传统中国乐器。乐器演奏技术（IPT）在音乐表演中起着重要作用。但是，大多数现有的IPT检测作品显示出可变长度音频的效率低下，并且在概括方面没有保证，因为它们依靠单个声音库进行训练和测试。在这项研究中，我们建议使用可应用于可变长度音频的完全卷积网络提出了一个端到端的古兴游戏检测系统。由于每种古季的演奏技术都应用于音符，因此对专用的发作探测器进行了训练，可以将音频分为几个音符，并将其预测与框架IPT的预测融合在一起。在融合过程中，我们在每个音符内部添加IPT预测框架，并在每个音符中获得最高概率的IPT作为该注释的最终输出。我们创建了一个来自多个声音银行的名为GZ_ISOTECH的新数据集，并创建了Guzheng性能分析的现实世界录制。我们的方法在框架级准确性和80.76％的笔记级F1得分方面达到了87.97％，超过了现有的作品，这表明我们提出的方法在IPT检测中的有效性。

在阻碍强化学习（RL）到现实世界中的问题的原因之一，两个因素至关重要：与培训相比，数据有限和测试环境的不匹配。在本文中，我们试图通过分配强大的离线RL的问题同时解决这些问题。特别是，我们学习了一个从源环境中获得的历史数据，并优化了RL代理，并在扰动的环境中表现良好。此外，我们考虑将算法应用于大规模问题的线性函数近似。我们证明我们的算法可以实现$ O（1/\ sqrt {k}）$的次级临时性，具体取决于线性函数尺寸$ d $，这似乎是在此设置中使用样品复杂性保证的第一个结果。进行了不同的实验以证明我们的理论发现，显示了我们算法与非持bust算法的优越性。