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.

尖峰神经网络（SNN）引起了脑启发的人工智能和计算神经科学的广泛关注。它们可用于在多个尺度上模拟大脑中的生物信息处理。更重要的是，SNN是适当的抽象水平，可以将大脑和认知的灵感带入人工智能。在本文中，我们介绍了脑启发的认知智力引擎（Braincog），用于创建脑启发的AI和脑模拟模型。 Braincog将不同类型的尖峰神经元模型，学习规则，大脑区域等作为平台提供的重要模块。基于这些易于使用的模块，BrainCog支持各种受脑启发的认知功能，包括感知和学习，决策，知识表示和推理，运动控制和社会认知。这些受脑启发的AI模型已在各种受监督，无监督和强化学习任务上有效验证，并且可以用来使AI模型具有多种受脑启发的认知功能。为了进行大脑模拟，Braincog实现了决策，工作记忆，神经回路的结构模拟以及小鼠大脑，猕猴大脑和人脑的整个大脑结构模拟的功能模拟。一个名为BORN的AI引擎是基于Braincog开发的，它演示了如何将Braincog的组件集成并用于构建AI模型和应用。为了使科学追求解码生物智能的性质并创建AI，Braincog旨在提供必要且易于使用的构件，并提供基础设施支持，以开发基于脑部的尖峰神经网络AI，并模拟认知大脑在多个尺度上。可以在https://github.com/braincog-x上找到Braincog的在线存储库。

量子计算机是下一代设备，有望执行超出古典计算机范围的计算。实现这一目标的主要方法是通过量子机学习，尤其是量子生成学习。由于量子力学的固有概率性质，因此可以合理地假设量子生成学习模型（QGLM）可能会超过其经典对应物。因此，QGLM正在从量子物理和计算机科学社区中受到越来越多的关注，在这些QGLM中，可以在近期量子机上有效实施各种QGLM，并提出了潜在的计算优势。在本文中，我们从机器学习的角度回顾了QGLM的当前进度。特别是，我们解释了这些QGLM，涵盖了量子电路出生的机器，量子生成的对抗网络，量子玻尔兹曼机器和量子自动编码器，作为经典生成学习模型的量子扩展。在这种情况下，我们探讨了它们的内在关系及其根本差异。我们进一步总结了QGLM在常规机器学习任务和量子物理学中的潜在应用。最后，我们讨论了QGLM的挑战和进一步研究指示。

在本文中，我们研究了网络多功能增强学习（MARL）的问题，其中许多代理被部署为部分连接的网络，并且每个代理只与附近的代理交互。网络Marl要求所有代理商以分散的方式作出决定，以优化具有网络之间邻居之间的限制通信的全局目标。受到事实的启发，即\ yexit {分享}在人类合作中发挥关键作用，我们提出了一个分层分散的MARL框架，使代理商能够学会与邻居动态共享奖励，以便鼓励代理商在全球合作客观的。对于每个代理，高级策略了解如何与邻居分析奖励以分解全局目标，而低级策略则会学会优化由邻域的高级策略引起的本地目标。两项政策形成双级优化，交替学习。我们经验证明LTOS在社交困境和网络MARL情景中表明现有的现有方法。

Recent studies have shown that using an external Language Model (LM) benefits the end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, predicting tokens that appear less frequently in the training set is still quite challenging. The long-tail prediction problems have been widely studied in many applications, but only been addressed by a few studies for ASR and LMs. In this paper, we propose a new memory augmented lookup dictionary based Transformer architecture for LM. The newly introduced lookup dictionary incorporates rich contextual information in training set, which is vital to correctly predict long-tail tokens. With intensive experiments on Chinese and English data sets, our proposed method is proved to outperform the baseline Transformer LM by a great margin on both word/character error rate and tail tokens error rate. This is achieved without impact on the decoding efficiency. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in boosting the ASR decoding performance, especially for long-tail tokens.

Modern mobile burst photography pipelines capture and merge a short sequence of frames to recover an enhanced image, but often disregard the 3D nature of the scene they capture, treating pixel motion between images as a 2D aggregation problem. We show that in a "long-burst", forty-two 12-megapixel RAW frames captured in a two-second sequence, there is enough parallax information from natural hand tremor alone to recover high-quality scene depth. To this end, we devise a test-time optimization approach that fits a neural RGB-D representation to long-burst data and simultaneously estimates scene depth and camera motion. Our plane plus depth model is trained end-to-end, and performs coarse-to-fine refinement by controlling which multi-resolution volume features the network has access to at what time during training. We validate the method experimentally, and demonstrate geometrically accurate depth reconstructions with no additional hardware or separate data pre-processing and pose-estimation steps.

We propose a new neural network design paradigm Reversible Column Network (RevCol). The main body of RevCol is composed of multiple copies of subnetworks, named columns respectively, between which multi-level reversible connections are employed. Such architectural scheme attributes RevCol very different behavior from conventional networks: during forward propagation, features in RevCol are learned to be gradually disentangled when passing through each column, whose total information is maintained rather than compressed or discarded as other network does. Our experiments suggest that CNN-style RevCol models can achieve very competitive performances on multiple computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, especially with large parameter budget and large dataset. For example, after ImageNet-22K pre-training, RevCol-XL obtains 88.2% ImageNet-1K accuracy. Given more pre-training data, our largest model RevCol-H reaches 90.0% on ImageNet-1K, 63.8% APbox on COCO detection minival set, 61.0% mIoU on ADE20k segmentation. To our knowledge, it is the best COCO detection and ADE20k segmentation result among pure (static) CNN models. Moreover, as a general macro architecture fashion, RevCol can also be introduced into transformers or other neural networks, which is demonstrated to improve the performances in both computer vision and NLP tasks. We release code and models at https://github.com/megvii-research/RevCol

Previous work on controllable text generation has explored the idea of control from the latent space, such as optimizing a representation with attribute-related classifiers or sampling a representation from relevant discrete samples. However, they are not effective enough in modeling both the latent space and the control, leaving controlled text with low quality and diversity. In this work, we propose a novel control framework using probability density estimation in the latent space. Our method utilizes an invertible transformation function, the Normalizing Flow, that maps the complex distributions in the latent space to simple Gaussian distributions in the prior space. Thus, we can perform sophisticated and flexible control in the prior space and feed the control effects back into the latent space owing to the one-one-mapping property of invertible transformations. Experiments on single-attribute controls and multi-attribute control reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis of control strength adjustment demonstrates the flexibility of our control strategy.

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.

Particle dynamics and multi-agent systems provide accurate dynamical models for studying and forecasting the behavior of complex interacting systems. They often take the form of a high-dimensional system of differential equations parameterized by an interaction kernel that models the underlying attractive or repulsive forces between agents. We consider the problem of constructing a data-based approximation of the interacting forces directly from noisy observations of the paths of the agents in time. The learned interaction kernels are then used to predict the agents behavior over a longer time interval. The approximation developed in this work uses a randomized feature algorithm and a sparse randomized feature approach. Sparsity-promoting regression provides a mechanism for pruning the randomly generated features which was observed to be beneficial when one has limited data, in particular, leading to less overfitting than other approaches. In addition, imposing sparsity reduces the kernel evaluation cost which significantly lowers the simulation cost for forecasting the multi-agent systems. Our method is applied to various examples, including first-order systems with homogeneous and heterogeneous interactions, second order homogeneous systems, and a new sheep swarming system.