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.

Harvesting question-answer (QA) pairs from customer service chatlog in the wild is an efficient way to enrich the knowledge base for customer service chatbots in the cold start or continuous integration scenarios. Prior work attempts to obtain 1-to-1 QA pairs from growing customer service chatlog, which fails to integrate the incomplete utterances from the dialog context for composite QA retrieval. In this paper, we propose N-to-N QA extraction task in which the derived questions and corresponding answers might be separated across different utterances. We introduce a suite of generative/discriminative tagging based methods with end-to-end and two-stage variants that perform well on 5 customer service datasets and for the first time setup a benchmark for N-to-N DialogQAE with utterance and session level evaluation metrics. With a deep dive into extracted QA pairs, we find that the relations between and inside the QA pairs can be indicators to analyze the dialogue structure, e.g. information seeking, clarification, barge-in and elaboration. We also show that the proposed models can adapt to different domains and languages, and reduce the labor cost of knowledge accumulation in the real-world product dialogue platform.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have made great success in image inpainting yet still have difficulties tackling large missing regions. In contrast, iterative algorithms, such as autoregressive and denoising diffusion models, have to be deployed with massive computing resources for decent effect. To overcome the respective limitations, we present a novel spatial diffusion model (SDM) that uses a few iterations to gradually deliver informative pixels to the entire image, largely enhancing the inference efficiency. Also, thanks to the proposed decoupled probabilistic modeling and spatial diffusion scheme, our method achieves high-quality large-hole completion. On multiple benchmarks, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance. Code is released at https://github.com/fenglinglwb/SDM.

Recently, segmentation-based methods are quite popular in scene text detection, which mainly contain two steps: text kernel segmentation and expansion. However, the segmentation process only considers each pixel independently, and the expansion process is difficult to achieve a favorable accuracy-speed trade-off. In this paper, we propose a Context-aware and Boundary-guided Network (CBN) to tackle these problems. In CBN, a basic text detector is firstly used to predict initial segmentation results. Then, we propose a context-aware module to enhance text kernel feature representations, which considers both global and local contexts. Finally, we introduce a boundary-guided module to expand enhanced text kernels adaptively with only the pixels on the contours, which not only obtains accurate text boundaries but also keeps high speed, especially on high-resolution output maps. In particular, with a lightweight backbone, the basic detector equipped with our proposed CBN achieves state-of-the-art results on several popular benchmarks, and our proposed CBN can be plugged into several segmentation-based methods. Code will be available on https://github.com/XiiZhao/cbn.pytorch.

Photo-realistic style transfer aims at migrating the artistic style from an exemplar style image to a content image, producing a result image without spatial distortions or unrealistic artifacts. Impressive results have been achieved by recent deep models. However, deep neural network based methods are too expensive to run in real-time. Meanwhile, bilateral grid based methods are much faster but still contain artifacts like overexposure. In this work, we propose the \textbf{Adaptive ColorMLP (AdaCM)}, an effective and efficient framework for universal photo-realistic style transfer. First, we find the complex non-linear color mapping between input and target domain can be efficiently modeled by a small multi-layer perceptron (ColorMLP) model. Then, in \textbf{AdaCM}, we adopt a CNN encoder to adaptively predict all parameters for the ColorMLP conditioned on each input content and style image pair. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaCM can generate vivid and high-quality stylization results. Meanwhile, our AdaCM is ultrafast and can process a 4K resolution image in 6ms on one V100 GPU.

In this paper, we propose a method for selecting the optimal footholds for legged systems. The goal of the proposed method is to find the best foothold for the swing leg on a local elevation map. We apply the Convolutional Neural Network to learn the relationship between the local elevation map and the quality of potential footholds. The proposed network evaluates the geometrical characteristics of each cell on the elevation map, checks kinematic constraints and collisions. During execution time, the controller obtains the qualitative measurement of each potential foothold from the neural model. This method allows to evaluate hundreds of potential footholds and check multiple constraints in a single step which takes 10~ms on a standard computer without GPGPU. The experiments were carried out on a quadruped robot walking over rough terrain in both simulation and real robotic platforms.

With the growth of high-dimensional sparse data in web-scale recommender systems, the computational cost to learn high-order feature interaction in CTR prediction task largely increases, which limits the use of high-order interaction models in real industrial applications. Some recent knowledge distillation based methods transfer knowledge from complex teacher models to shallow student models for accelerating the online model inference. However, they suffer from the degradation of model accuracy in knowledge distillation process. It is challenging to balance the efficiency and effectiveness of the shallow student models. To address this problem, we propose a Directed Acyclic Graph Factorization Machine (KD-DAGFM) to learn the high-order feature interactions from existing complex interaction models for CTR prediction via Knowledge Distillation. The proposed lightweight student model DAGFM can learn arbitrary explicit feature interactions from teacher networks, which achieves approximately lossless performance and is proved by a dynamic programming algorithm. Besides, an improved general model KD-DAGFM+ is shown to be effective in distilling both explicit and implicit feature interactions from any complex teacher model. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets, including a large-scale industrial dataset from WeChat platform with billions of feature dimensions. KD-DAGFM achieves the best performance with less than 21.5% FLOPs of the state-of-the-art method on both online and offline experiments, showing the superiority of DAGFM to deal with the industrial scale data in CTR prediction task. Our implementation code is available at: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DAGFM.

Reference-based image super-resolution (RefSR) is a promising SR branch and has shown great potential in overcoming the limitations of single image super-resolution. While previous state-of-the-art RefSR methods mainly focus on improving the efficacy and robustness of reference feature transfer, it is generally overlooked that a well reconstructed SR image should enable better SR reconstruction for its similar LR images when it is referred to as. Therefore, in this work, we propose a reciprocal learning framework that can appropriately leverage such a fact to reinforce the learning of a RefSR network. Besides, we deliberately design a progressive feature alignment and selection module for further improving the RefSR task. The newly proposed module aligns reference-input images at multi-scale feature spaces and performs reference-aware feature selection in a progressive manner, thus more precise reference features can be transferred into the input features and the network capability is enhanced. Our reciprocal learning paradigm is model-agnostic and it can be applied to arbitrary RefSR models. We empirically show that multiple recent state-of-the-art RefSR models can be consistently improved with our reciprocal learning paradigm. Furthermore, our proposed model together with the reciprocal learning strategy sets new state-of-the-art performances on multiple benchmarks.

在过去的几年中，用于计算机视觉的深度学习技术的快速发展极大地促进了医学图像细分的性能（Mediseg）。但是，最近的梅赛格出版物通常集中于主要贡献的演示（例如，网络体系结构，培训策略和损失功能），同时不知不觉地忽略了一些边缘实施细节（也称为“技巧”），导致了潜在的问题，导致了潜在的问题。不公平的实验结果比较。在本文中，我们为不同的模型实施阶段（即，预培训模型，数据预处理，数据增强，模型实施，模型推断和结果后处理）收集了一系列Mediseg技巧，并在实验中探索了有效性这些技巧在一致的基线模型上。与仅关注分割模型的优点和限制分析的纸驱动调查相比，我们的工作提供了大量的可靠实验，并且在技术上更可操作。通过对代表性2D和3D医疗图像数据集的广泛实验结果，我们明确阐明了这些技巧的效果。此外，根据调查的技巧，我们还开源了一个强大的梅德西格存储库，其每个组件都具有插件的优势。我们认为，这项里程碑的工作不仅完成了对最先进的Mediseg方法的全面和互补的调查，而且还提供了解决未来医学图像处理挑战的实用指南，包括但不限于小型数据集学习，课程不平衡学习，多模式学习和领域适应。该代码已在以下网址发布：https：//github.com/hust-linyi/mediseg

三维（3D）图像（例如CT，MRI和PET）在医学成像应用中很常见，在临床诊断中很重要。语义歧义是许多医学图像标签的典型特征。这可能是由许多因素引起的，例如成像特性，病理解剖学以及二进制面具的弱表示，这给精确的3D分割带来了挑战。在2D医学图像中，使用软面膜代替图像垫形式产生的二进制掩码来表征病变可以提供丰富的语义信息，更全面地描述病变的结构特征，从而使后续诊断和分析受益。在这项工作中，我们将图像垫子介绍到3D场景中，以描述3D医学图像中的病变。 3D模态中图像垫的研究有限，并且没有与3D矩阵相关的高质量注释数据集，因此减慢了基于数据驱动的深度学习方法的发展。为了解决这个问题，我们构建了第一个3D医疗垫数据集，并通过质量控制和下游实验中的肺结节分类中令人信服地验证了数据集的有效性。然后，我们将四个选定的最新2D图像矩阵算法调整为3D场景，并进一步自定义CT图像的方法。此外，我们提出了第一个端到端的深3D垫网络，并实施了可靠的3D医疗图像垫测试基准，该基准将被发布以鼓励进一步的研究。