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.

最近，随着重建规范3D表示的发展，类别级别的6D对象姿态估计已经取得了显着的改进。然而，现有方法的重建质量仍远非优秀。在本文中，我们提出了一种名为ACR-POSE的新型对抗性规范代表性重建网络。 ACR-POSE由重建器和鉴别器组成。重建器主要由两种新型子模块组成：姿势 - 无关模块（PIM）和关系重建模块（RRM）。 PIM倾向于学习Canonical相关的功能，使重建者对旋转和翻译不敏感，而RRM探讨不同输入模态之间的基本关系信息以产生高质量功能。随后，采用鉴别器来指导重建器以产生现实的规范表示。重构和鉴别者学会通过对抗性培训进行优化。普遍的NOCS相机和NOCS实际数据集的实验结果表明，我们的方法实现了最先进的性能。

在语义分段中广泛采用知识蒸馏以降低计算成本。先前的知识蒸馏方法的语义分割方法的重点是像素的特征特征对齐和阶级内特征变化蒸馏，从特征空间，这对于语义分割很重要。为了解决此问题，我们提出了一种类间距离蒸馏（IDD）方法，以将特征空间中的类间距离从教师网络转移到学生网络。此外，语义分割是一项依赖位置的任务，因此我们利用位置信息蒸馏模块来帮助学生网络编码更多的位置信息。在三个受欢迎的数据集上进行了广泛的实验：CityScapes，Pascal VOC和ADE20K表明，我们的方法有助于提高语义细分模型的准确性并实现最先进的性能。例如。它在CityScapes数据集上的准确性将基准模型（“ PSPNET+RESNET18”）提高了7.50％。

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Human parsing aims to partition humans in image or video into multiple pixel-level semantic parts. In the last decade, it has gained significantly increased interest in the computer vision community and has been utilized in a broad range of practical applications, from security monitoring, to social media, to visual special effects, just to name a few. Although deep learning-based human parsing solutions have made remarkable achievements, many important concepts, existing challenges, and potential research directions are still confusing. In this survey, we comprehensively review three core sub-tasks: single human parsing, multiple human parsing, and video human parsing, by introducing their respective task settings, background concepts, relevant problems and applications, representative literature, and datasets. We also present quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on benchmark datasets. Additionally, to promote sustainable development of the community, we put forward a transformer-based human parsing framework, providing a high-performance baseline for follow-up research through universal, concise, and extensible solutions. Finally, we point out a set of under-investigated open issues in this field and suggest new directions for future study. We also provide a regularly updated project page, to continuously track recent developments in this fast-advancing field: https://github.com/soeaver/awesome-human-parsing.

A storyboard is a roadmap for video creation which consists of shot-by-shot images to visualize key plots in a text synopsis. Creating video storyboards however remains challenging which not only requires association between high-level texts and images, but also demands for long-term reasoning to make transitions smooth across shots. In this paper, we propose a new task called Text synopsis to Video Storyboard (TeViS) which aims to retrieve an ordered sequence of images to visualize the text synopsis. We construct a MovieNet-TeViS benchmark based on the public MovieNet dataset. It contains 10K text synopses each paired with keyframes that are manually selected from corresponding movies by considering both relevance and cinematic coherence. We also present an encoder-decoder baseline for the task. The model uses a pretrained vision-and-language model to improve high-level text-image matching. To improve coherence in long-term shots, we further propose to pre-train the decoder on large-scale movie frames without text. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms other models to create text-relevant and coherent storyboards. Nevertheless, there is still a large gap compared to human performance suggesting room for promising future work.

In the new era of personalization, learning the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) becomes an inevitable trend with numerous applications. Yet, most existing HTE estimation methods focus on independently and identically distributed observations and cannot handle the non-stationarity and temporal dependency in the common panel data setting. The treatment evaluators developed for panel data, on the other hand, typically ignore the individualized information. To fill the gap, in this paper, we initialize the study of HTE estimation in panel data. Under different assumptions for HTE identifiability, we propose the corresponding heterogeneous one-side and two-side synthetic learner, namely H1SL and H2SL, by leveraging the state-of-the-art HTE estimator for non-panel data and generalizing the synthetic control method that allows flexible data generating process. We establish the convergence rates of the proposed estimators. The superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones is demonstrated by extensive numerical studies.