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.

我们介绍了一种方法，例如针对3D点云的提案生成。现有技术通常直接在单个进料前进的步骤中回归建议，从而导致估计不准确。我们表明，这是一个关键的瓶颈，并提出了一种基于迭代双边滤波的方法。遵循双边滤波的精神，我们考虑了每个点的深度嵌入以及它们在3D空间中的位置。我们通过合成实验表明，在为给定的兴趣点生成实例建议时，我们的方法会带来巨大的改进。我们进一步验证了我们在挑战性扫描基准测试中的方法，从而在自上而下的方法的子类别中实现了最佳实例分割性能。

在恶劣天气下降雪场景的图像恢复是一项艰巨的任务。雪图像具有复杂的降解，并在干净的图像上混乱，改变了干净的图像的分布。以前基于CNN的方法由于缺乏特定的全球建模能力，因此在恢复雪场景中完全恢复了雪场的挑战。在本文中，我们将视觉变压器应用于从单个图像中去除积雪的任务。具体而言，我们建议沿通道拆分的并行网络体系结构分别执行本地功能改进和全局信息建模。我们利用频道洗牌操作来结合其各自的优势以增强网络性能。其次，我们提出了MSP模块，该模块利用多规模的AVGPOOL来汇总不同大小的信息，并同时对多头自我注意力进行多尺度投影自我注意，以提高模型在不同规模下降下的表示能力。最后，我们设计了一个轻巧，简单的本地捕获模块，可以完善模型的本地捕获能力。在实验部分，我们进行了广泛的实验以证明我们方法的优越性。我们比较了三个雪场数据集上的先前清除方法。实验结果表明，我们的方法超过了更少的参数和计算的最新方法。在CSD测试数据集上，我们实现了1.99dB和SSIM 0.03的实质增长。在SRR和SNOW100K数据集上，与Transweather方法相比，我们还增加了2.47dB和1.62dB，在SSIM中提高了0.03。在视觉比较部分中，我们的MSP形式比现有方法获得了更好的视觉效果，证明了我们方法的可用性。

我们研究大规模网络嵌入问题，旨在学习网络挖掘应用的低维潜在表示。网络嵌入领域的最新研究导致了大型进展，如深散，线，NetMF，NetSMF。然而，许多真实网络的巨大尺寸使得从整个网络学习网络嵌入的网络昂贵。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新的网络嵌入方法，称为“NES”，其学习来自小型代表性子图的网络嵌入。 NES利用图表采样的理论，以有效地构建具有较小尺寸的代表性子图，该子图尺寸可用于对完整网络进行推断，使得能够显着提高嵌入学习的效率。然后，NES有效地计算从该代表子图嵌入的网络。与众所周知的方法相比，对各种规模和类型网络的广泛实验表明NES实现了可比性和显着的效率优势。

本文回顾了关于压缩视频质量增强质量的第一个NTIRE挑战，重点是拟议的方法和结果。在此挑战中，采用了新的大型不同视频（LDV）数据集。挑战有三个曲目。Track 1和2的目标是增强HEVC在固定QP上压缩的视频，而Track 3旨在增强X265压缩的视频，以固定的位速率压缩。此外，轨道1和3的质量提高了提高保真度（PSNR）的目标，以及提高感知质量的2个目标。这三个曲目完全吸引了482个注册。在测试阶段，分别提交了12个团队，8支球队和11支球队，分别提交了轨道1、2和3的最终结果。拟议的方法和解决方案衡量视频质量增强的最先进。挑战的首页：https：//github.com/renyang-home/ntire21_venh

训练有素的语言模型在各种自然语言理解（NLU）任务中取得了巨大的成功，因为它通过在大型语料库上进行预培训来捕获文本中的深层语境化信息。在本技术报告中，我们介绍了我们在中国语料库和中国NLU任务的中国语料库和Fineetuning的培训前培训语言模型的实践。 Nezha的当前版本基于BERT，具有经过验证的改进的集合，包括功能相对位置编码，作为有效的位置编码方案，整个单词掩蔽策略，混合精密训练和羔羊优化器在训练模型中。实验结果表明，尼扎在若干代表性的中国任务上实现了最先进的表演，包括命名实体识别（人民每日NER），句子匹配（LCQMC），中国情绪分类（CHNSENTI）和自然语言推断（xnli）。

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is beneficial for dealing with dynamic scenes due to the continuous property of the real-world environment. On the one hand, some methods alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem between continuous frames. On the other hand, other methods employ the previous frame as the prior information to assist in segmenting the current frame. Although the previous methods achieve superior performances on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, they can not generalize well on other unseen domains. Thus, we explore a new task, the video generalizable semantic segmentation (VGSS) task that considers both continuous frames and domain generalization. In this paper, we propose a class-wise non-salient region generalized (CNSG) framework for the VGSS task. Concretely, we first define the class-wise non-salient feature, which describes features of the class-wise non-salient region that carry more generalizable information. Then, we propose a class-wise non-salient feature reasoning strategy to select and enhance the most generalized channels adaptively. Finally, we propose an inter-frame non-salient centroid alignment loss to alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem in the VGSS task. We also extend our video-based framework to the image-based generalizable semantic segmentation (IGSS) task. Experiments demonstrate that our CNSG framework yields significant improvement in the VGSS and IGSS tasks.