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.

Humans constantly interact with objects in daily life tasks. Capturing such processes and subsequently conducting visual inferences from a fixed viewpoint suffers from occlusions, shape and texture ambiguities, motions, etc. To mitigate the problem, it is essential to build a training dataset that captures free-viewpoint interactions. We construct a dense multi-view dome to acquire a complex human object interaction dataset, named HODome, that consists of $\sim$75M frames on 10 subjects interacting with 23 objects. To process the HODome dataset, we develop NeuralDome, a layer-wise neural processing pipeline tailored for multi-view video inputs to conduct accurate tracking, geometry reconstruction and free-view rendering, for both human subjects and objects. Extensive experiments on the HODome dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of NeuralDome on a variety of inference, modeling, and rendering tasks. Both the dataset and the NeuralDome tools will be disseminated to the community for further development.

This paper studies the stochastic optimization for decentralized nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax problem. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm, called Decentralized Recursive gradient descEnt Ascent Method (DREAM), which requires $\mathcal{O}(\kappa^3\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) calls and $\mathcal{O}\big(\kappa^2\epsilon^{-2}/\sqrt{1-\lambda_2(W)}\,\big)$ communication rounds to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point, where $\kappa$ is the condition number and $\lambda_2(W)$ is the second-largest eigenvalue of the gossip matrix $W$. To the best our knowledge, DREAM is the first algorithm whose SFO and communication complexities simultaneously achieve the optimal dependency on $\epsilon$ and $\lambda_2(W)$ for this problem.

We examine the problem of learning a single occurrence regular expression with interleaving (SOIRE) from a set of text strings with noise. SOIRE has unrestricted support for interleaving and covers most of the regular expressions in practice. Learning SOIREs is challenging because it needs heavy computation and text strings usually contains noise in practice. Most of the previous work only learns restricted SOIREs and is not robust on noisy data. To tackle these issues, we proposea noise-tolerant differentiable learning approach SOIREDL for SOIRE. We design a neural network to simulate SOIRE matching of given text strings and theoretically prove that a class of the set of parameters learnt by the neural network, called faithful encoding, is one-to-one corresponding to SOIRE for a bounded size. Based on this correspondence, we interpret the target SOIRE from the set of parameters of the neural network by exploring nearest faithful encodings. Experimental results show that SOIREDL outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches especially on noisy data.

An undirected weighted graph (UWG) is frequently adopted to describe the interactions among a solo set of nodes from real applications, such as the user contact frequency from a social network services system. A graph convolutional network (GCN) is widely adopted to perform representation learning to a UWG for subsequent pattern analysis tasks such as clustering or missing data estimation. However, existing GCNs mostly neglects the latent collaborative information hidden in its connected node pairs. To address this issue, this study proposes to model the node collaborations via a symmetric latent factor analysis model, and then regards it as a node-collaboration module for supplementing the collaboration loss in a GCN. Based on this idea, a Node-collaboration-informed Graph Convolutional Network (NGCN) is proposed with three-fold ideas: a) Learning latent collaborative information from the interaction of node pairs via a node-collaboration module; b) Building the residual connection and weighted representation propagation to obtain high representation capacity; and c) Implementing the model optimization in an end-to-end fashion to achieve precise representation to the target UWG. Empirical studies on UWGs emerging from real applications demonstrate that owing to its efficient incorporation of node-collaborations, the proposed NGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GCNs in addressing the task of missing weight estimation. Meanwhile, its good scalability ensures its compatibility with more advanced GCN extensions, which will be further investigated in our future studies.

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。

从医用试剂染色图像中分割牙齿斑块为诊断和确定随访治疗计划提供了宝贵的信息。但是，准确的牙菌斑分割是一项具有挑战性的任务，需要识别牙齿和牙齿斑块受到语义腔区域的影响（即，在牙齿和牙齿斑块之间的边界区域中存在困惑的边界）以及实例形状的复杂变化，这些变化均未完全解决。现有方法。因此，我们提出了一个语义分解网络（SDNET），该网络介绍了两个单任务分支，以分别解决牙齿和牙齿斑块的分割，并设计了其他约束，以学习每个分支的特定类别特征，从而促进语义分解并改善该类别的特征牙齿分割的性能。具体而言，SDNET以分裂方式学习了两个单独的分割分支和牙齿的牙齿，以解除它们之间的纠缠关系。指定类别的每个分支都倾向于产生准确的分割。为了帮助这两个分支更好地关注特定类别的特征，进一步提出了两个约束模块：1）通过最大化不同类别表示之间的距离来学习判别特征表示，以了解判别特征表示形式，以减少减少负面影响关于特征提取的语义腔区域； 2）结构约束模块（SCM）通过监督边界感知的几何约束提供完整的结构信息，以提供各种形状的牙菌斑。此外，我们构建了一个大规模的开源染色牙菌斑分割数据集（SDPSEG），该数据集为牙齿和牙齿提供高质量的注释。 SDPSEG数据集的实验结果显示SDNET达到了最新的性能。

回归学习是经典的，是医学图像分析的基础。它为许多关键应用程序提供了连续的映射，例如属性估计，对象检测，分割和非刚性注册。但是，先前的研究主要以案例标准（如均方误差）为优化目标。他们忽略了非常重要的人口相关标准，这正是许多任务中的最终评估指标。在这项工作中，我们建议通过有关直接优化细粒相关损失的新型研究来重新审视经典回归任务。我们主要探索两个互补相关索引作为可学习的损失：Pearson线性相关（PLC）和Spearman等级相关性（SRC）。本文的贡献是两个折叠。首先，对于全球层面的PLC，我们提出了一项策略，以使其对异常值进行强大的态度并规范关键分布因素。这些努力显着稳定学习并扩大了PLC的功效。其次，对于本地级别的SRC，我们提出了一种粗到精细的方案，以减轻样品之间确切排名顺序的学习。具体而言，我们将样本排名的学习转换为样本之间相似关系的学习。我们在两个典型的超声图像回归任务上广泛验证了我们的方法，包括图像质量评估和生物措施测量。实验证明，通过直接优化相关性的细粒度指导，回归性能得到显着提高。我们提出的相关性损失是一般的，可以扩展到更重要的应用程序。

盲人面部修复（BFR）旨在从低品质的图像中恢复高质量的面部图像，并通常求助于面部先验，以改善恢复性能。但是，当前的方法仍然遇到两个主要困难：1）如何在不进行大规模调整的情况下得出强大的网络体系结构； 2）如何从一个网络中的多个面部先验捕获互补信息以提高恢复性能。为此，我们提出了一个面部修复搜索网络（FRSNET），以适应我们指定的搜索空间内的合适特征提取体系结构，这可以直接有助于恢复质量。在FRSNET的基础上，我们通过多个学习方案进一步设计了多个面部先验搜索网络（MFPSNET）。 MFPSNET最佳地从不同的面部先验中提取信息，并将信息融合到图像特征中，以确保保留外部指导和内部特征。通过这种方式，MFPSNet充分利用了语义级别（解析图），几何级别（面部热图），参考级别（面部词典）和像素级（降级图像）信息，从而产生忠实且逼真的图像。定量和定性实验表明，MFPSNET在合成和现实世界数据集上对最先进的BFR方法表现出色。这些代码可公开可用：https：//github.com/yyj1ang/mfpsnet。

自动设计虚拟人和类人动物在帮助游戏，电影和机器人中的角色创作过程中具有巨大的潜力。在某些情况下，角色创建者可能希望设计针对某些动作（例如空手道踢和跑酷跳跃）定制的类人体身体。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个人形设计框架，以自动生成以预先指定的人体运动为条件的身体有效的人形体。首先，我们学习了一个广义的类人动物控制器，该控制器在大型人体运动数据集上进行了训练，该数据集具有多样化的人体运动和身体形状。其次，我们使用设计与控制框架来优化类人动物的物理属性，以找到可以更好地模仿预先指定的人类运动序列的身体设计。我们的方法利用预先训练的类人动物控制器和物理模拟作为指导，能够发现经过定制以执行预先指定的人类运动的新类型类人体设计。