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.

DCOP algorithms usually rely on interaction graphs to operate. In open and dynamic environments, such methods need to address how this interaction graph is generated and maintained among agents. Existing methods require reconstructing the entire graph upon detecting changes in the environment or assuming that new agents know potential neighbors to facilitate connection. We propose a novel distributed interaction graph construction algorithm to address this problem. The proposed method does not assume a predefined constraint graph and stabilizes after disruptive changes in the environment. We evaluate our approach by pairing it with existing DCOP algorithms to solve several generated dynamic problems. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm effectively constructs and maintains a stable multi-agent interaction graph for open and dynamic environments.

Both goal-agnostic and goal-oriented tasks have practical value for robotic grasping: goal-agnostic tasks target all objects in the workspace, while goal-oriented tasks aim at grasping pre-assigned goal objects. However, most current grasping methods are only better at coping with one task. In this work, we propose a bifunctional push-grasping synergistic strategy for goal-agnostic and goal-oriented grasping tasks. Our method integrates pushing along with grasping to pick up all objects or pre-assigned goal objects with high action efficiency depending on the task requirement. We introduce a bifunctional network, which takes in visual observations and outputs dense pixel-wise maps of Q values for pushing and grasping primitive actions, to increase the available samples in the action space. Then we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework to coordinate the two tasks by considering the goal-agnostic task as a combination of multiple goal-oriented tasks. To reduce the training difficulty of the hierarchical framework, we design a two-stage training method to train the two types of tasks separately. We perform pre-training of the model in simulation, and then transfer the learned model to the real world without any additional real-world fine-tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods in task completion rate and grasp success rate with less motion number. Supplementary material is available at https: //github.com/DafaRen/Learning_Bifunctional_Push-grasping_Synergistic_Strategy_for_Goal-agnostic_and_Goal-oriented_Tasks

磁共振成像（MRI）图像中的小病变对于多种疾病的临床诊断至关重要。但是，MRI质量很容易被各种噪声降解，这可以极大地影响小病变的诊断准确性。尽管已经提出了一些用于降级MR图像的方法，但缺乏提高特定于任务的降级方法来提高小病变的诊断信心。在这项工作中，我们建议通过体素杂种残留MLP-CNN模型来降低具有小病变的三维（3D）MR图像。我们结合了基本的深度学习体系结构MLP和CNN，以获得适当的固有偏差，以通过添加残差连接来利用远距离信息，以使图像降低并整合MLP和CNN中的每个输出层。我们在720 T2-Flair脑图像上评估了所提出的方法，其在不同的噪声水平下具有较小的病变。结果表明，与最先进的方法相比，在定量和视觉评估中，我们的方法在测试数据集上具有优势。此外，两名经验丰富的放射科医生同意，在中等和高噪声水平下，我们的方法在恢复小病变和整体图像质量方面优于其他方法。我们的方法的实现可在https://github.com/laowangbobo/Residual_MLP_CNN_MIXER上获得。

对具有代理商初始位置未知的有限3D环境的多代理探索是一个具有挑战性的问题。它需要快速探索环境，并坚定合并代理商构建的子图。我们认为现有方法是侵略性或保守的：在检测到重叠时，积极的策略合并了两种由不同代理构建的子图，这可能导致由于对重叠的错误阳性检测而导致不正确的合并，因此是如此。不健全。保守策略指导一个代理人在合并之前重新审视另一个代理商的过量验证历史轨迹，这可以降低由于对同一空间的反复探索而引起的勘探效率。为了巧妙地平衡子图合并和勘探效率的鲁棒性，我们为基于激光雷达的多代理探索开发了一种新方法，该方法可以指导一个代理商以\ emph {自适应}方式重复另一个代理商的轨迹子图合并过程的指标。此外，我们的方法通过计划合并子图的代理人共同计划，以进一步提高勘探效率，以\ emph {Cooperative}方式将最近的单格分层勘探策略扩展到多个代理。我们的实验表明，我们的方法平均比基线高出50 \％，同时稳固地合并子映射。

在本文中，我们介绍了一项新任务，口语视频接地（SVG），旨在将口语描述中所需的视频片段定位。与使用文本相比，使用音频需要模型直接利用与原始语音视频相关的有用音素和音节。此外，我们在语音音频中随机添加环境声音，进一步增加了此任务的困难并更好地模拟真实应用程序。为了纠正歧视性音素并从嘈杂的音频中提取与视频相关的信息，我们在音频预训练过程中开发了一种新颖的视频指导课程学习（VGCL），可以利用重要的视觉感知来帮助理解口语语言并抑制外部噪音。考虑到推理期间，模型无法获得地面真实视频片段，我们设计了一种课程策略，该策略将输入视频从地面真相转移到预训练期间的整个视频内容。最后，该模型可以学习如何从整个视频剪辑中提取关键的视觉信息，以帮助了解口语。此外，我们基于ActivityNet收集了第一个大规模口语视频接地数据集，该数据集称为ActivityNet语音数据集。广泛的实验表明，我们提出的视频指导课程学习可以促进预训练过程以获得相互的音频编码器，从而大大促进了口头视频接地任务的性能。此外，我们证明，在嘈杂的声音的情况下，我们的模型优于将视频与ASR转录本扎根的方法，进一步证明了我们课程策略的有效性。

本文回顾了AIM 2022上压缩图像和视频超级分辨率的挑战。这项挑战包括两条曲目。轨道1的目标是压缩图像的超分辨率，轨迹〜2靶向压缩视频的超分辨率。在轨道1中，我们使用流行的数据集DIV2K作为培训，验证和测试集。在轨道2中，我们提出了LDV 3.0数据集，其中包含365个视频，包括LDV 2.0数据集（335个视频）和30个其他视频。在这一挑战中，有12支球队和2支球队分别提交了赛道1和赛道2的最终结果。所提出的方法和解决方案衡量了压缩图像和视频上超分辨率的最先进。提出的LDV 3.0数据集可在https://github.com/renyang-home/ldv_dataset上找到。此挑战的首页是在https://github.com/renyang-home/aim22_compresssr。

测量金属粉的纯度对于保留添加剂制造产品的质量至关重要。污染是最头痛的问题之一，可能是由于多种原因引起的，并导致造成的成分破裂和故障。冶金条件评估的现有方法主要是耗时的，主要集中于结构的物理完整性，而不是材料组成。通过捕获广泛频率范围的光谱数据以及空间信息，高光谱成像（HSI）可以检测到温度，水分和化学成分方面的较小差异。因此，HSI可以提供一种应对这一挑战的独特方法。在本文中，通过使用近红外HSI相机，引入了HSI用于非破坏性检查金属粉末的应用。详细介绍了三个分步案例研究的技术假设和解决方案，包括粉末表征，污染检测和带选择分析。实验结果已经完全证明了HSI和相关的AI技术对粉末冶金的NDT的潜力，尤其是满足工业制造环境的潜力。

因果推论在电子商务和精确医学等各个领域都有广泛的应用，其性能在很大程度上取决于对个体治疗效果（ITE）的准确估计。通常，通过在其各个样品空间中分别对处理和控制响应函数进行建模来预测ITE。但是，这种方法通常会在实践中遇到两个问题，即治疗偏见引起的治疗组和对照组之间的分布分布以及其人口规模的显着样本失衡。本文提出了深层的整个空间跨网络（DESCN），以从端到端的角度进行建模治疗效果。 DESCN通过多任务学习方式捕获了治疗倾向，反应和隐藏治疗效果的综合信息。我们的方法共同学习了整个样品空间中的治疗和反应功能，以避免治疗偏见，并采用中间伪治疗效应预测网络来减轻样品失衡。从电子商务凭证分销业务的合成数据集和大规模生产数据集进行了广泛的实验。结果表明，DESCN可以成功提高ITE估计的准确性并提高提升排名的性能。发布生产数据集和源代码的样本是为了促进社区的未来研究，据我们所知，这是首个大型公共偏见的因果推理数据集。

点云的语义分割，旨在为每个点分配语义类别，对3D场景的理解至关重要。尽管近年来取得了重大进展，但大多数现有方法仍然遭受对象级别的错误分类或边界级别的歧义。在本文中，我们通过深入探索被称为Geosegnet的点云的几何形状来提出一个强大的语义分割网络。我们的Geosegnet由一个基于多几何的编码器和边界引导的解码器组成。在编码器中，我们从多几何的角度开发了一个新的残差几何模块，以提取对象级特征。在解码器中，我们引入了一个对比边界学习模块，以增强边界点的几何表示。从几何编码器模型中受益，我们的GEOSEGNET可以在使两个或多个对象的相交（边界）清晰地确定对象的分割。从总体分割精度和对象边界清除方面，实验显示了我们方法对竞争对手的明显改善。代码可在https://github.com/chen-yuiyui/geosegnet上找到。