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.

With the advanced request to employ a team of robots to perform a task collaboratively, the research community has become increasingly interested in collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping. Unfortunately, existing datasets are limited in the scale and variation of the collaborative trajectories, even though generalization between inter-trajectories among different agents is crucial to the overall viability of collaborative tasks. To help align the research community's contributions with realistic multiagent ordinated SLAM problems, we propose S3E, a large-scale multimodal dataset captured by a fleet of unmanned ground vehicles along four designed collaborative trajectory paradigms. S3E consists of 7 outdoor and 5 indoor sequences that each exceed 200 seconds, consisting of well temporal synchronized and spatial calibrated high-frequency IMU, high-quality stereo camera, and 360 degree LiDAR data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts regarding dataset size, scene variability, and complexity. It has 4x as much average recording time as the pioneering EuRoC dataset. We also provide careful dataset analysis as well as baselines for collaborative SLAM and single counterparts. Data and more up-to-date details are found at https://github.com/PengYu-Team/S3E.

高光谱成像技术（HSI）在远程分布光谱波长上记录了视觉信息。代表性的高光谱图像采集程序通过编码的光圈快照光谱成像器（CASSI）进行了3D到2D的编码，并且需要用于3D信号重建的软件解码器。基于此编码程序，两个主要挑战妨碍了高保真重建的方式：（i）获得2D测量值，CASSI通过分散器触觉并将其挤压到同一空间区域，从。 （ii）物理编码的光圈（掩码）将通过选择性阻止像素的光曝光来导致掩盖数据丢失。为了应对这些挑战，我们提出了具有面膜感知的学习策略的空间光谱（S2-）变压器体系结构。首先，我们同时利用空间和光谱注意模型来沿两个维度划分2D测量中的混合信息。空间和光谱线索跨的一系列变压器结构是系统设计的，它考虑了两倍提示之间的信息相互依赖性。其次，蒙面的像素将引起更高的预测难度，应与未掩盖的像素不同。因此，我们通过推断出对蒙版意识预测的难度级别来适应归因于面具结构的损失惩罚。我们提出的方法不仅定量设置了新的最新方法，而且在结构化区域中产生了更好的感知质量。

最近，高光谱成像（HSI）引起了越来越多的研究关注，特别是对于基于编码光圈快照谱成像（CASSI）系统的研究。现有的深度HSI重建模型通常接受对数据进行配对数据，以在CASSI中的特定光学硬件掩模给出的2D压缩测量时检索原始信号，在此期间，掩码很大程度上影响了重建性能，并且可以作为数据上的“模型超参数”。增强。此屏蔽特定的培训风格将导致硬件错误稳定问题，从而为在不同硬件和嘈杂环境中部署深度HSI模型的障碍。为了解决这一挑战，我们为HSI引入了具有完整变分的贝叶斯学习处理的掩码不确定性，并通过真实硬件的启发的掩模分解显式模拟它。具体而言，我们提出了一种基于图形的自我调整（GST）网络，以推理适应不同硬件之间的掩模的不同空间结构的不确定性。此外，我们开发了一个Bilevel优化框架，以平衡HSI重建和不确定性估计，占MASK的HyperParameter属性。广泛的实验结果和模型讨论验证了两个错误频繁场景下提出的GST方法的有效性（超过33/30 dB），与最先进的校正方法相比，竞争性能很大。我们的代码和预先接受的模型可在https://github.com/jiamian wang / mask_unctainty_spectral_sci获得

行动预测旨在通过部分观察视频推断即将举行的人类行动，这是由于早期观察结果有限的信息有限。现有方法主要采用重建策略来处理此任务，期望从部分观察到完整视频来学习单个映射函数，以便于预测过程。在这项研究中，我们提出了来自两个新方面的部分视频查询生成“完整视频”功能调节的对抗性记忆网络（AMEMNet）。首先，键值结构化存储器发生器旨在将不同的部分视频存储为键存储器，并在具有门控机制和查询关注的值存储器中动态地写入完整视频。其次，我们开发了一个类感知判别者，以指导内存发生器在对抗训练时不仅提供现实，而且还提供鉴别的完整视频特征。通过RGB和光学流量的晚期融合给出了AMEMNET的最终预测结果。提供两个基准视频数据集，UCF-101和HMDB51的广泛实验结果，以证明所提出的AMEMNET模型在最先进的方法的有效性。

As one of the most important psychic stress reactions, micro-expressions (MEs), are spontaneous and transient facial expressions that can reveal the genuine emotions of human beings. Thus, recognizing MEs (MER) automatically is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of affective computing, and provides essential technical support in lie detection, psychological analysis and other areas. However, the lack of abundant ME data seriously restricts the development of cutting-edge data-driven MER models. Despite the recent efforts of several spontaneous ME datasets to alleviate this problem, it is still a tiny amount of work. To solve the problem of ME data hunger, we construct a dynamic spontaneous ME dataset with the largest current ME data scale, called DFME (Dynamic Facial Micro-expressions), which includes 7,526 well-labeled ME videos induced by 671 participants and annotated by more than 20 annotators throughout three years. Afterwards, we adopt four classical spatiotemporal feature learning models on DFME to perform MER experiments to objectively verify the validity of DFME dataset. In addition, we explore different solutions to the class imbalance and key-frame sequence sampling problems in dynamic MER respectively on DFME, so as to provide a valuable reference for future research. The comprehensive experimental results show that our DFME dataset can facilitate the research of automatic MER, and provide a new benchmark for MER. DFME will be published via https://mea-lab-421.github.io.

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.

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

In contrast to the control-theoretic methods, the lack of stability guarantee remains a significant problem for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Jointly learning a policy and a Lyapunov function has recently become a promising approach to ensuring the whole system with a stability guarantee. However, the classical Lyapunov constraints researchers introduced cannot stabilize the system during the sampling-based optimization. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Stability Certification (ASC), making the system reach sampling-based stability. Because the ASC condition can search for the optimal policy heuristically, we design the Adaptive Lyapunov-based Actor-Critic (ALAC) algorithm based on the ASC condition. Meanwhile, our algorithm avoids the optimization problem that a variety of constraints are coupled into the objective in current approaches. When evaluated on ten robotic tasks, our method achieves lower accumulated cost and fewer stability constraint violations than previous studies.

Surgical robot automation has attracted increasing research interest over the past decade, expecting its huge potential to benefit surgeons, nurses and patients. Recently, the learning paradigm of embodied AI has demonstrated promising ability to learn good control policies for various complex tasks, where embodied AI simulators play an essential role to facilitate relevant researchers. However, existing open-sourced simulators for surgical robot are still not sufficiently supporting human interactions through physical input devices, which further limits effective investigations on how human demonstrations would affect policy learning. In this paper, we study human-in-the-loop embodied intelligence with a new interactive simulation platform for surgical robot learning. Specifically, we establish our platform based on our previously released SurRoL simulator with several new features co-developed to allow high-quality human interaction via an input device. With these, we further propose to collect human demonstrations and imitate the action patterns to achieve more effective policy learning. We showcase the improvement of our simulation environment with the designed new features and tasks, and validate state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms using the interactive environment. Promising results are obtained, with which we hope to pave the way for future research on surgical embodied intelligence. Our platform is released and will be continuously updated in the website: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL/