The increasing privacy concerns on personal private text data promote the development of federated learning (FL) in recent years. However, the existing studies on applying FL in NLP are not suitable to coordinate participants with heterogeneous or private learning objectives. In this study, we further broaden the application scope of FL in NLP by proposing an Assign-Then-Contrast (denoted as ATC) framework, which enables clients with heterogeneous NLP tasks to construct an FL course and learn useful knowledge from each other. Specifically, the clients are suggested to first perform local training with the unified tasks assigned by the server rather than using their own learning objectives, which is called the Assign training stage. After that, in the Contrast training stage, clients train with different local learning objectives and exchange knowledge with other clients who contribute consistent and useful model updates. We conduct extensive experiments on six widely-used datasets covering both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, and the proposed ATC framework achieves significant improvements compared with various baseline methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/master/federatedscope/nlp/hetero_tasks}.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have rapidly become a \textit{de facto} choice for medical image understanding tasks. However, DNNs are notoriously fragile to the class imbalance in image classification. We further point out that such imbalance fragility can be amplified when it comes to more sophisticated tasks such as pathology localization, as imbalances in such problems can have highly complex and often implicit forms of presence. For example, different pathology can have different sizes or colors (w.r.t.the background), different underlying demographic distributions, and in general different difficulty levels to recognize, even in a meticulously curated balanced distribution of training data. In this paper, we propose to use pruning to automatically and adaptively identify \textit{hard-to-learn} (HTL) training samples, and improve pathology localization by attending them explicitly, during training in \textit{supervised, semi-supervised, and weakly-supervised} settings. Our main inspiration is drawn from the recent finding that deep classification models have difficult-to-memorize samples and those may be effectively exposed through network pruning \cite{hooker2019compressed} - and we extend such observation beyond classification for the first time. We also present an interesting demographic analysis which illustrates HTLs ability to capture complex demographic imbalances. Our extensive experiments on the Skin Lesion Localization task in multiple training settings by paying additional attention to HTLs show significant improvement of localization performance by $\sim$2-3\%.

Purpose: Vision-based robot tool segmentation plays a fundamental role in surgical robots and downstream tasks. CaRTS, based on a complementary causal model, has shown promising performance in unseen counterfactual surgical environments in the presence of smoke, blood, etc. However, CaRTS requires over 30 iterations of optimization to converge for a single image due to limited observability. Method: To address the above limitations, we take temporal relation into consideration and propose a temporal causal model for robot tool segmentation on video sequences. We design an architecture named Temporally Constrained CaRTS (TC-CaRTS). TC-CaRTS has three novel modules to complement CaRTS - temporal optimization pipeline, kinematics correction network, and spatial-temporal regularization. Results: Experiment results show that TC-CaRTS requires much fewer iterations to achieve the same or better performance as CaRTS. TC- CaRTS also has the same or better performance in different domains compared to CaRTS. All three modules are proven to be effective. Conclusion: We propose TC-CaRTS, which takes advantage of temporal constraints as additional observability. We show that TC-CaRTS outperforms prior work in the robot tool segmentation task with improved convergence speed on test datasets from different domains.

AI-powered Medical Imaging has recently achieved enormous attention due to its ability to provide fast-paced healthcare diagnoses. However, it usually suffers from a lack of high-quality datasets due to high annotation cost, inter-observer variability, human annotator error, and errors in computer-generated labels. Deep learning models trained on noisy labelled datasets are sensitive to the noise type and lead to less generalization on the unseen samples. To address this challenge, we propose a Robust Stochastic Knowledge Distillation (RoS-KD) framework which mimics the notion of learning a topic from multiple sources to ensure deterrence in learning noisy information. More specifically, RoS-KD learns a smooth, well-informed, and robust student manifold by distilling knowledge from multiple teachers trained on overlapping subsets of training data. Our extensive experiments on popular medical imaging classification tasks (cardiopulmonary disease and lesion classification) using real-world datasets, show the performance benefit of RoS-KD, its ability to distill knowledge from many popular large networks (ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, MobileNet-V2) in a comparatively small network, and its robustness to adversarial attacks (PGD, FSGM). More specifically, RoS-KD achieves >2% and >4% improvement on F1-score for lesion classification and cardiopulmonary disease classification tasks, respectively, when the underlying student is ResNet-18 against recent competitive knowledge distillation baseline. Additionally, on cardiopulmonary disease classification task, RoS-KD outperforms most of the SOTA baselines by ~1% gain in AUC score.

由于经过验证的2D检测技术的适用性，大多数当前点云检测器都广泛采用了鸟类视图（BEV）。但是，现有方法通过简单地沿高度尺寸折叠的体素或点特征来获得BEV特征，从而导致3D空间信息的重丢失。为了减轻信息丢失，我们提出了一个基于多级特征降低降低策略的新颖点云检测网络，称为MDRNET。在MDRNET中，空间感知的维度降低（SDR）旨在在体素至BEV特征转换过程中动态关注对象的宝贵部分。此外，提出了多级空间残差（MSR），以融合BEV特征图中的多级空间信息。关于Nuscenes的广泛实验表明，该提出的方法的表现优于最新方法。该代码将在出版时提供。

视觉模型最近在许多计算机视觉任务上显示出巨大的潜力。同时，与线性探针相比，先前的工作表明，与线性探针相比，这是较少的图像识别的迅速调整，可以在很少的图像识别上获得卓越的性能。在实际应用程序中，相关的几个射击任务是相关的，尤其是在专业领域。但是，以前的工作忽略了此类信息。受到以下事实的启发，即通过多任务学习通常可以提高性能，我们提出了一种新颖的方法softcpt（迅速调整的软上下文共享），以微调多个目标几个目标任务的预训练的视觉模型， 同时。具体来说，我们设计了一个任务共享的元网络，以使用预定义的任务名称以及可学习的元提示为输入为每个任务生成提示向量。因此，所有任务的迅速向量将以软的方式共享。该共享的元网络的参数以及元提示向量都在所有目标任务的联合培训集中调整。在三个多任务少量数据集上进行的广泛实验表明，SoftCpt的表现优于代表性的单任务提示方法Coop [78]，这意味着多任务学习在视觉及时及时调整中的有效性。源代码和数据将公开可用。

本地图像功能匹配，旨在识别图像对的识别和相应的相似区域，是计算机视觉中的重要概念。大多数现有的图像匹配方法遵循一对一的分配原则，并采用共同最近的邻居来确保跨图像之间本地特征之间的独特对应关系。但是，来自不同条件的图像可能会容纳大规模变化或观点多样性，以便一对一的分配可能在密集匹配中导致模棱两可或丢失的表示形式。在本文中，我们介绍了一种新颖的无探测器本地特征匹配方法Adamatcher，该方法首先通过轻巧的特征交互模块与密集的特征相关联，并估算了配对图像的可见面积，然后执行贴片级多到 - 一个分配可以预测匹配建议，并最终根据一对一的完善模块进行完善。广泛的实验表明，Adamatcher的表现优于固体基线，并在许多下游任务上实现最先进的结果。此外，多对一分配和一对一的完善模块可以用作其他匹配方法（例如Superglue）的改进网络，以进一步提高其性能。代码将在出版时提供。

在深度学习方法进行自动医学图像分析的最新成功之前，从业者使用手工制作的放射线特征来定量描述当地的医学图像斑块。但是，提取区分性放射素特征取决于准确的病理定位，这在现实世界中很难获得。尽管疾病分类和胸部X射线的定位方面取得了进步，但许多方法未能纳入临床知名的领域知识。由于这些原因，我们提出了一个放射素引导的变压器（RGT），该变压器（RGT）与\ textit {global}图像信息与\ textit {local}知识引导的放射线信息信息提供准确的心肺病理学定位和分类\ textit {无需任何界限盒{ }。 RGT由图像变压器分支，放射线变压器分支以及聚集图像和放射线信息的融合层组成。 RGT使用对图像分支的自我注意事项，提取了一个边界框来计算放射线特征，该特征由放射线分支进一步处理。然后通过交叉注意层融合学习的图像和放射线特征。因此，RGT利用了一种新型的端到端反馈回路，该回路只能使用图像水平疾病标签引导精确的病理定位。 NIH CHESTXRAR数据集的实验表明，RGT的表现优于弱监督疾病定位的先前作品（在各个相交联合阈值的平均余量为3.6 \％）和分类（在接收器操作方下平均1.1 \％\％\％\％曲线）。接受代码和训练有素的模型将在接受后发布。

旨在用自然语言和谐地与人类交流的智能对话体系对于促进人工智能时代的人机互动的发展非常出色。有了逐渐复杂的人类计算机交互要求（例如，多模式输入，时间敏感性），传统的基于文本的对话系统很难满足对更加生动和方便的交互的需求。因此，视觉背景增强对话系统（VAD）有可能通过感知和理解多模式信息（即图像或视频中的视觉上下文，文本对话历史记录）与人类进行交流，已成为主要的研究范式。 VAD受益于视觉和文本上下文之间的一致性和互补性，具有产生引人入胜和背景感知响应的潜力。为了描述VAD的开发，我们首先表征VAD的概念和独特功能，然后介绍其通用系统体系结构以说明系统工作流程。随后，对一些研究挑战和代表性作品进行了详细研究，然后进行了权威基准摘要。我们通过提出一些开放问题和有前途的VAD研究趋势来结束本文，例如，在跨模式对话环境下，人机对话的认知机制以及知识增强的跨模式语义互动。

Pruning large neural networks to create highquality, independently trainable sparse masks, which can maintain similar performance to their dense counterparts, is very desirable due to the reduced space and time complexity. As research effort is focused on increasingly sophisticated pruning methods that leads to sparse subnetworks trainable from the scratch, we argue for an orthogonal, under-explored theme: improving training techniques for pruned sub-networks, i.e. sparse training. Apart from the popular belief that only the quality of sparse masks matters for sparse training, in this paper we demonstrate an alternative opportunity: one can carefully customize the sparse training techniques to deviate from the default dense network training protocols, consisting of introducing "ghost" neurons and skip connections at the early stage of training, and strategically modifying the initialization as well as labels. Our new sparse training recipe is generally applicable to improving training from scratch with various sparse masks. By adopting our newly curated techniques, we demonstrate significant performance gains across various popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyIma-geNet), architectures (ResNet-18/32/104, Vgg16, MobileNet), and sparse mask options (lottery ticket, SNIP/GRASP, SynFlow, or even randomly pruning), compared to the default training protocols, especially at high sparsity levels. Code is at https://github.com/VITA-Group/ToST.