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.

Explainability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is critical to various GNN applications but remains an open challenge. A convincing explanation should be both necessary and sufficient simultaneously. However, existing GNN explaining approaches focus on only one of the two aspects, necessity or sufficiency, or a trade-off between the two. To search for the most necessary and sufficient explanation, the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS) can be applied since it can mathematically quantify the necessity and sufficiency of an explanation. Nevertheless, the difficulty of obtaining PNS due to non-monotonicity and the challenge of counterfactual estimation limits its wide use. To address the non-identifiability of PNS, we resort to a lower bound of PNS that can be optimized via counterfactual estimation, and propose Necessary and Sufficient Explanation for GNN (NSEG) via optimizing that lower bound. Specifically, we employ nearest neighbor matching to generate counterfactual samples for the features, which is different from the random perturbation. In particular, NSEG combines the edges and node features to generate an explanation, where the common edge explanation is a special case of the combined explanation. Empirical study shows that NSEG achieves excellent performance in generating the most necessary and sufficient explanations among a series of state-of-the-art methods.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach to enable the future Internet of vehicles consisting of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) with powerful sensing, computing and communication capabilities. We consider a base station (BS) coordinating nearby ICVs to train a neural network in a collaborative yet distributed manner, in order to limit data traffic and privacy leakage. However, due to the mobility of vehicles, the connections between the BS and ICVs are short-lived, which affects the resource utilization of ICVs, and thus, the convergence speed of the training process. In this paper, we propose an accelerated FL-ICV framework, by optimizing the duration of each training round and the number of local iterations, for better convergence performance of FL. We propose a mobility-aware optimization algorithm called MOB-FL, which aims at maximizing the resource utilization of ICVs under short-lived wireless connections, so as to increase the convergence speed. Simulation results based on the beam selection and the trajectory prediction tasks verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Visual localization is the task of estimating camera pose in a known scene, which is an essential problem in robotics and computer vision. However, long-term visual localization is still a challenge due to the environmental appearance changes caused by lighting and seasons. While techniques exist to address appearance changes using neural networks, these methods typically require ground-truth pose information to generate accurate image correspondences or act as a supervisory signal during training. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised feature learning framework for metric visual localization. We use a sequence-based image matching algorithm across different sequences of images (i.e., experiences) to generate image correspondences without ground-truth labels. We can then sample image pairs to train a deep neural network that learns sparse features with associated descriptors and scores without ground-truth pose supervision. The learned features can be used together with a classical pose estimator for visual stereo localization. We validate the learned features by integrating with an existing Visual Teach & Repeat pipeline to perform closed-loop localization experiments under different lighting conditions for a total of 22.4 km.

在本文中，我们证明了基于深度学习的方法可用于融合多对象密度。给定一个带有几个传感器可能不同视野的传感器的方案，跟踪器在每个传感器中在本地执行跟踪，该跟踪器会产生随机有限的集合多对象密度。为了融合来自不同跟踪器的输出，我们调整了最近提出的基于变压器的多对象跟踪器，其中融合结果是一个全局的多对象密度，描述了当前时间的所有活物体。我们将基于变压器的融合方法与基于模型的贝叶斯融合方法的性能进行比较，在几种模拟方案中，使用合成数据进行了不同的参数设置。仿真结果表明，基于变压器的融合方法在我们的实验场景中优于基于模型的贝叶斯方法。

基于步态阶段的控制是步行AID机器人的热门研究主题，尤其是机器人下限假体。步态阶段估计是基于步态阶段控制的挑战。先前的研究使用了人类大腿角的整合或差异来估计步态阶段，但是累积的测量误差和噪声可能会影响估计结果。在本文中，提出了一种更健壮的步态相估计方法，使用各种运动模式的分段单调步态相位大角模型的统一形式。步态相仅根据大腿角度估算，这是一个稳定的变量，避免了相位漂移。基于卡尔曼滤波器的平滑液旨在进一步抑制估计步态阶段的突变。基于提出的步态相估计方法，基于步态阶段的关节角跟踪控制器是为跨股骨假体设计的。提出的步态估计方法，步态相和控制器通过在各种运动模式下的步行数据进行离线分析来评估。基于步态阶段的控制器的实时性能在经际假体的实验中得到了验证。

事件摄像机最近在高动力或具有挑战性的照明情况下具有强大的常规摄像头的潜力，因此摄影机最近变得越来越受欢迎。通过同时定位和映射（SLAM）给出了可能受益于事件摄像机的重要问题。但是，为了确保在包含事件的多传感器大满贯上进展，需要新颖的基准序列。我们的贡献是使用包含基于事件的立体声摄像机，常规立体声摄像机，多个深度传感器和惯性测量单元的多传感器设置捕获的第一组基准数据集。该设置是完全硬件同步的，并且经过了准确的外部校准。所有序列都均均均均由高度准确的外部参考设备（例如运动捕获系统）捕获的地面真相数据。各个序列都包括小型和大型环境，并涵盖动态视觉传感器针对的特定挑战。

自我监督的方法已通过端到端监督学习的图像分类显着缩小了差距。但是，在人类动作视频的情况下，外观和运动都是变化的重要因素，因此该差距仍然很大。这样做的关键原因之一是，采样对类似的视频剪辑，这是许多自我监督的对比学习方法所需的步骤，目前是保守的，以避免误报。一个典型的假设是，类似剪辑仅在单个视频中暂时关闭，从而导致运动相似性的示例不足。为了减轻这种情况，我们提出了SLIC，这是一种基于聚类的自我监督的对比度学习方法，用于人类动作视频。我们的关键贡献是，我们通过使用迭代聚类来分组类似的视频实例来改善传统的视频内积极采样。这使我们的方法能够利用集群分配中的伪标签来取样更艰难的阳性和负面因素。在UCF101上，SLIC的表现优于最先进的视频检索基线 +15.4％，而直接转移到HMDB51时，SLIC检索基线的率高为15.4％， +5.7％。通过用于动作分类的端到端登录，SLIC在UCF101上获得了83.2％的TOP-1准确性（+0.8％），而HMDB51（+1.6％）上的fric fineTuns in top-1 finetuning。在动力学预处理后，SLIC还与最先进的行动分类竞争。

Context-aware decision support in the operating room can foster surgical safety and efficiency by leveraging real-time feedback from surgical workflow analysis. Most existing works recognize surgical activities at a coarse-grained level, such as phases, steps or events, leaving out fine-grained interaction details about the surgical activity; yet those are needed for more helpful AI assistance in the operating room. Recognizing surgical actions as triplets of <instrument, verb, target> combination delivers comprehensive details about the activities taking place in surgical videos. This paper presents CholecTriplet2021: an endoscopic vision challenge organized at MICCAI 2021 for the recognition of surgical action triplets in laparoscopic videos. The challenge granted private access to the large-scale CholecT50 dataset, which is annotated with action triplet information. In this paper, we present the challenge setup and assessment of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods proposed by the participants during the challenge. A total of 4 baseline methods from the challenge organizers and 19 new deep learning algorithms by competing teams are presented to recognize surgical action triplets directly from surgical videos, achieving mean average precision (mAP) ranging from 4.2% to 38.1%. This study also analyzes the significance of the results obtained by the presented approaches, performs a thorough methodological comparison between them, in-depth result analysis, and proposes a novel ensemble method for enhanced recognition. Our analysis shows that surgical workflow analysis is not yet solved, and also highlights interesting directions for future research on fine-grained surgical activity recognition which is of utmost importance for the development of AI in surgery.

表示标签分布作为一个热量矢量是培训节点分类模型中的常见做法。然而，单热表示可能无法充分反映不同类别中节点的语义特征，因为某些节点可以在其他类中的邻居语义上靠近其邻居。由于鼓励在对每个节点进行分类时，鼓励模型分配完全概率，因此会导致过度自信。虽然具有标签平滑的培训模型可以在某种程度上缓解此问题，但它仍然无法捕获图形结构隐含的节点的语义特征。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的SAL（\ Textit {Security-Aware标签平滑}）方法作为流行节点分类模型的增强组件。 SAL利用图形结构来捕获连接节点之间的语义相关性并生成结构感知标签分配以替换原始的单热标签向量，从而改善节点分类性能而不推广成本。七节点分类基准数据集的广泛实验揭示了我们对改进转膜和归纳节点分类的含量的有效性。经验结果表明，SALS优于标签平滑方法，增强节点分类模型以优于基线方法。