During X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning, metallic implants carrying with patients often lead to adverse artifacts in the captured CT images and then impair the clinical treatment. Against this metal artifact reduction (MAR) task, the existing deep-learning-based methods have gained promising reconstruction performance. Nevertheless, there is still some room for further improvement of MAR performance and generalization ability, since some important prior knowledge underlying this specific task has not been fully exploited. Hereby, in this paper, we carefully analyze the characteristics of metal artifacts and propose an orientation-shared convolution representation strategy to adapt the physical prior structures of artifacts, i.e., rotationally symmetrical streaking patterns. The proposed method rationally adopts Fourier-series-expansion-based filter parametrization in artifact modeling, which can better separate artifacts from anatomical tissues and boost the model generalizability. Comprehensive experiments executed on synthesized and clinical datasets show the superiority of our method in detail preservation beyond the current representative MAR methods. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/hongwang01/OSCNet}

Multivariate time series forecasting constitutes important functionality in cyber-physical systems, whose prediction accuracy can be improved significantly by capturing temporal and multivariate correlations among multiple time series. State-of-the-art deep learning methods fail to construct models for full time series because model complexity grows exponentially with time series length. Rather, these methods construct local temporal and multivariate correlations within subsequences, but fail to capture correlations among subsequences, which significantly affect their forecasting accuracy. To capture the temporal and multivariate correlations among subsequences, we design a pattern discovery model, that constructs correlations via diverse pattern functions. While the traditional pattern discovery method uses shared and fixed pattern functions that ignore the diversity across time series. We propose a novel pattern discovery method that can automatically capture diverse and complex time series patterns. We also propose a learnable correlation matrix, that enables the model to capture distinct correlations among multiple time series. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy.

Unsupervised pre-training on millions of digital-born or scanned documents has shown promising advances in visual document understanding~(VDU). While various vision-language pre-training objectives are studied in existing solutions, the document textline, as an intrinsic granularity in VDU, has seldom been explored so far. A document textline usually contains words that are spatially and semantically correlated, which can be easily obtained from OCR engines. In this paper, we propose Wukong-Reader, trained with new pre-training objectives to leverage the structural knowledge nested in document textlines. We introduce textline-region contrastive learning to achieve fine-grained alignment between the visual regions and texts of document textlines. Furthermore, masked region modeling and textline-grid matching are also designed to enhance the visual and layout representations of textlines. Experiments show that our Wukong-Reader has superior performance on various VDU tasks such as information extraction. The fine-grained alignment over textlines also empowers Wukong-Reader with promising localization ability.

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.

Stochastic gradients closely relate to both optimization and generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs). Some works attempted to explain the success of stochastic optimization for deep learning by the arguably heavy-tail properties of gradient noise, while other works presented theoretical and empirical evidence against the heavy-tail hypothesis on gradient noise. Unfortunately, formal statistical tests for analyzing the structure and heavy tails of stochastic gradients in deep learning are still under-explored. In this paper, we mainly make two contributions. First, we conduct formal statistical tests on the distribution of stochastic gradients and gradient noise across both parameters and iterations. Our statistical tests reveal that dimension-wise gradients usually exhibit power-law heavy tails, while iteration-wise gradients and stochastic gradient noise caused by minibatch training usually do not exhibit power-law heavy tails. Second, we further discover that the covariance spectra of stochastic gradients have the power-law structures in deep learning. While previous papers believed that the anisotropic structure of stochastic gradients matters to deep learning, they did not expect the gradient covariance can have such an elegant mathematical structure. Our work challenges the existing belief and provides novel insights on the structure of stochastic gradients in deep learning.

Mode collapse is still a major unsolved problem in generative adversarial networks. In this work, we analyze the causes of mode collapse from a new perspective. Due to the nonuniform sampling in the training process, some sub-distributions can be missed while sampling data. Therefore, the GAN objective can reach the minimum when the generated distribution is not the same as the real one. To alleviate the problem, we propose a global distribution fitting (GDF) method by a penalty term to constrain generated data distribution. On the basis of not changing the global minimum of the GAN objective, GDF will make it harder to reach the minimum value when the generated distribution is not the same as the real one. Furthermore, we also propose a local distribution fitting (LDF) method to cope with the situation that the real distribution is unknown. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of GDF and LDF.

Metric-based meta-learning is one of the de facto standards in few-shot learning. It composes of representation learning and metrics calculation designs. Previous works construct class representations in different ways, varying from mean output embedding to covariance and distributions. However, using embeddings in space lacks expressivity and cannot capture class information robustly, while statistical complex modeling poses difficulty to metric designs. In this work, we use tensor fields (``areas'') to model classes from the geometrical perspective for few-shot learning. We present a simple and effective method, dubbed hypersphere prototypes (HyperProto), where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere's center and the radius. Extending from points to areas, hyperspheres are much more expressive than embeddings. Moreover, it is more convenient to perform metric-based classification with hypersphere prototypes than statistical modeling, as we only need to calculate the distance from a data point to the surface of the hypersphere. Following this idea, we also develop two variants of prototypes under other measurements. Extensive experiments and analysis on few-shot learning tasks across NLP and CV and comparison with 20+ competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Recent breakthroughs in semi-supervised semantic segmentation have been developed through contrastive learning. In prevalent pixel-wise contrastive learning solutions, the model maps pixels to deterministic representations and regularizes them in the latent space. However, there exist inaccurate pseudo-labels which map the ambiguous representations of pixels to the wrong classes due to the limited cognitive ability of the model. In this paper, we define pixel-wise representations from a new perspective of probability theory and propose a Probabilistic Representation Contrastive Learning (PRCL) framework that improves representation quality by taking its probability into consideration. Through modelling the mapping from pixels to representations as the probability via multivariate Gaussian distributions, we can tune the contribution of the ambiguous representations to tolerate the risk of inaccurate pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we define prototypes in the form of distributions, which indicates the confidence of a class, while the point prototype cannot. Moreover, we propose to regularize the distribution variance to enhance the reliability of representations. Taking advantage of these benefits, high-quality feature representations can be derived in the latent space, thereby the performance of semantic segmentation can be further improved. We conduct sufficient experiment to evaluate PRCL on Pascal VOC and CityScapes to demonstrate its superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/Haoyu-Xie/PRCL.

变压器验证引起了机器学习研究和行业的越来越多的关注。它正式验证了变压器对对抗性攻击的鲁棒性，例如用同义词交换单词。但是，由于以中线为中心的计算，变压器验证的性能仍然不令人满意，这与标准神经网络有显着差异。在本文中，我们提出了信仰，这是用于GPU的变压器验证的有效框架。我们首先提出一个语义意识的计算图转换，以识别语义信息，例如变压器验证中的结合计算。我们利用此类语义信息，以在计算图级别启用有效的内核融合。其次，我们提出了一个验证专门的内核手工艺品，以有效地将变压器验证映射到现代GPU。该手工艺者利用了一组GPU硬件支持，以加速通常是内存密集型的验证专业操作。第三，我们提出了一个专家指导的自动调整，以纳入有关GPU后端的专家知识，以促进大型搜索空间探索。广泛的评估表明，Faith在最先进的框架上实现了$ 2.1 \ times $至$ 3.4 \ times $（$ 2.6 \ times $）的加速。

在域移位下，跨域几个射击对象检测旨在通过一些注释的目标数据适应目标域中的对象检测器。存在两个重大挑战：（1）高度不足的目标域数据； （2）潜在的过度适应和误导性是由不当放大的目标样本而没有任何限制引起的。为了应对这些挑战，我们提出了一种由两个部分组成的自适应方法。首先，我们提出了一种自适应优化策略，以选择类似于目标样本的增强数据，而不是盲目增加数量。具体而言，我们过滤了增强的候选者，这些候选者在一开始就显着偏离了目标特征分布。其次，为了进一步释放数据限制，我们提出了多级域感知数据增强，以增加增强数据的多样性和合理性，从而利用了跨图像前景 - 背景混合物。实验表明，所提出的方法在多个基准测试中实现了最先进的性能。