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.

量子系统的许多基本属性都被其哈密顿和基态捕获。尽管基态制备（GSP）具有重要意义，但对于大规模的哈密顿人来说，这项任务在经典上是棘手的。发挥现代量子机的力量的量子神经网络（QNN）已成为征服此问题的领先协议。因此，如何增强QNN的性能成为GSP中的关键主题。经验证据表明，具有手工对称的Ansatzes的QNN通常比不对称Ansatzes的QNN具有更好的训练性，而理论解释却没有被探索。为了填补这一知识差距，我们在这里提出了有效的量子神经切线核（EQNTK），并将这一概念与过度参数化理论联系起来，以量化QNNS趋向全球最佳OPTA的融合。我们发现，对称Ansatzes的进步归因于其较大的EQNTK值，其有效尺寸很小，这要求很少的参数和量子电路深度达到过度参数化的制度，允许良性损失景观和快速收敛。在EQNTK的指导下，我们进一步设计了一种对称修剪（SP）方案，可以自动从过度参数化和不对称的对称的ANSATZ量身定制对称的ANSATZ，以极大地提高QNN的性能，而汉密尔顿的显式对称信息是不可用的。进行了广泛的数值模拟，以验证EQNTK的分析结果和SP的有效性。

Web搜索是人类获取信息的重要方法，但是对于了解网页内容的机器仍然是一个巨大的挑战。在本文中，我们介绍了对网上结构阅读理解（SRC）的任务。鉴于网页和关于它的问题，任务是从网页找到答案。此任务要求系统不仅要了解文本的语义，还需要了解文本的语义，还需要网页的结构。此外，我们提出了一种新的基于Web的结构阅读理解数据集。 WebSRC由400K问答对组成，从6.4K网页收集。与QA对一起，我们的数据集还提供了相应的HTML源代码，屏幕截图和元数据。 WebSRC中的每个问题都需要对网页的某种结构理解来回答，并且答案是网页或是/否的文本跨度。我们评估我们数据集的各种基线，以显示我们的任务难度。我们还研究了结构信息和视觉功能的有用性。我们的数据集和基线已在HTTPS://x-lance.github.io/websrc/上公开提供。

广义零射击学习（GZSL）旨在培训一个模型，以在某些输出类别在监督学习过程中未知的情况下对数据样本进行分类。为了解决这一具有挑战性的任务，GZSL利用可见的（源）和看不见的（目标）类的语义信息来弥合所见类和看不见的类之间的差距。自引入以来，已经制定了许多GZSL模型。在这篇评论论文中，我们介绍了有关GZSL的全面评论。首先，我们提供了GZSL的概述，包括问题和挑战。然后，我们为GZSL方法介绍了分层分类，并讨论了每个类别中的代表性方法。此外，我们讨论了GZSL的可用基准数据集和应用程序，以及有关研究差距和未来研究方向的讨论。

Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.

In this paper, a semantic communication framework for image transmission is developed. In the investigated framework, a set of servers cooperatively transmit images to a set of users utilizing semantic communication techniques. To evaluate the performance of studied semantic communication system, a multimodal metric is proposed to measure the correlation between the extracted semantic information and the original image. To meet the ISS requirement of each user, each server must jointly determine the semantic information to be transmitted and the resource blocks (RBs) used for semantic information transmission. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem aiming to minimize each server's transmission latency while reaching the ISS requirement. To solve this problem, a value decomposition based entropy-maximized multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed, which enables servers to coordinate for training and execute RB allocation in a distributed manner to approach to a globally optimal performance with less training iterations. Compared to traditional multi-agent RL, the proposed RL improves the valuable action exploration of servers and the probability of finding a globally optimal RB allocation policy based on local observation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the transmission delay by up to 16.1% compared to traditional multi-agent RL.

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.

With the development of technology and sharing economy, Airbnb as a famous short-term rental platform, has become the first choice for many young people to select. The issue of Airbnb's pricing has always been a problem worth studying. While the previous studies achieve promising results, there are exists deficiencies to solve. Such as, (1) the feature attributes of rental are not rich enough; (2) the research on rental text information is not deep enough; (3) there are few studies on predicting the rental price combined with the point of interest(POI) around the house. To address the above challenges, we proposes a multi-source information embedding(MSIE) model to predict the rental price of Airbnb. Specifically, we first selects the statistical feature to embed the original rental data. Secondly, we generates the word feature vector and emotional score combination of three different text information to form the text feature embedding. Thirdly, we uses the points of interest(POI) around the rental house information generates a variety of spatial network graphs, and learns the embedding of the network to obtain the spatial feature embedding. Finally, this paper combines the three modules into multi source rental representations, and uses the constructed fully connected neural network to predict the price. The analysis of the experimental results shows the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Domain adaptive detection aims to improve the generalization of detectors on target domain. To reduce discrepancy in feature distributions between two domains, recent approaches achieve domain adaption through feature alignment in different granularities via adversarial learning. However, they neglect the relationship between multiple granularities and different features in alignment, degrading detection. Addressing this, we introduce a unified multi-granularity alignment (MGA)-based detection framework for domain-invariant feature learning. The key is to encode the dependencies across different granularities including pixel-, instance-, and category-levels simultaneously to align two domains. Specifically, based on pixel-level features, we first develop an omni-scale gated fusion (OSGF) module to aggregate discriminative representations of instances with scale-aware convolutions, leading to robust multi-scale detection. Besides, we introduce multi-granularity discriminators to identify where, either source or target domains, different granularities of samples come from. Note that, MGA not only leverages instance discriminability in different categories but also exploits category consistency between two domains for detection. Furthermore, we present an adaptive exponential moving average (AEMA) strategy that explores model assessments for model update to improve pseudo labels and alleviate local misalignment problem, boosting detection robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple domain adaption scenarios validate the superiority of MGA over other approaches on FCOS and Faster R-CNN detectors. Code will be released at https://github.com/tiankongzhang/MGA.

Although deep learning has made remarkable progress in processing various types of data such as images, text and speech, they are known to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations: perturbations specifically designed and added to the input to make the target model produce erroneous output. Most of the existing studies on generating adversarial perturbations attempt to perturb the entire input indiscriminately. In this paper, we propose ExploreADV, a general and flexible adversarial attack system that is capable of modeling regional and imperceptible attacks, allowing users to explore various kinds of adversarial examples as needed. We adapt and combine two existing boundary attack methods, DeepFool and Brendel\&Bethge Attack, and propose a mask-constrained adversarial attack system, which generates minimal adversarial perturbations under the pixel-level constraints, namely ``mask-constraints''. We study different ways of generating such mask-constraints considering the variance and importance of the input features, and show that our adversarial attack system offers users good flexibility to focus on sub-regions of inputs, explore imperceptible perturbations and understand the vulnerability of pixels/regions to adversarial attacks. We demonstrate our system to be effective based on extensive experiments and user study.