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.

Existing deep learning based HDRTV reconstruction methods assume one kind of tone mapping operators (TMOs) as the degradation procedure to synthesize SDRTV-HDRTV pairs for supervised training. In this paper, we argue that, although traditional TMOs exploit efficient dynamic range compression priors, they have several drawbacks on modeling the realistic degradation: information over-preservation, color bias and possible artifacts, making the trained reconstruction networks hard to generalize well to real-world cases. To solve this problem, we propose a learning-based data synthesis approach to learn the properties of real-world SDRTVs by integrating several tone mapping priors into both network structures and loss functions. In specific, we design a conditioned two-stream network with prior tone mapping results as a guidance to synthesize SDRTVs by both global and local transformations. To train the data synthesis network, we form a novel self-supervised content loss to constraint different aspects of the synthesized SDRTVs at regions with different brightness distributions and an adversarial loss to emphasize the details to be more realistic. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we synthesize SDRTV-HDRTV pairs with our method and use them to train several HDRTV reconstruction networks. Then we collect two inference datasets containing both labeled and unlabeled real-world SDRTVs, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that, the networks trained with our synthesized data generalize significantly better to these two real-world datasets than existing solutions.

荧光镜检查是一种使用X射线来获得3D对象内部的实时2D视频，帮助外科医生观察病理结构和组织功能，尤其是在干预过程中。然而，它主要是由于低剂量X射线的临床使用而产生的，因此需要荧光镜检查技术。这种脱牙受到了成像对象与X射线成像系统之间的相对运动的挑战。我们通过提出一个自制的三阶段框架来应对这一挑战，从而利用荧光镜检查的领域知识。 （i）稳定：我们首先基于光流计算构建动态全景，以稳定X射线检测器的运动引起的非平稳背景。 （ii）分解：然后，我们提出了一种新型的基于掩模的鲁棒原理分析（RPCA）分解方法，以将探测器运动的视频分离为低级别背景和稀疏前景。这样的分解可容纳专家的阅读习惯。 （iii）denoise：我们终于通过自我监督的学习策略分别降低了背景和前景，并通过双侧时空滤波器将deno的部分融合到最终输出中。为了评估我们工作的有效性，我们策划了27个视频（1,568帧）和相应的地面真相的专用荧光镜数据集。我们的实验表明，与标准方法相比，它在降解和增强效果方面取得了重大改进。最后，专家评级确认了这种功效。

弱监督的对象本地化是一项具有挑战性的任务，旨在将对象定位具有粗糙注释（例如图像类别）。现有的深网方法主要基于类激活图，该图的重点是突出显示歧视性局部区域，同时忽略了整个对象。此外，基于变压器的技术不断地重点放在阻碍识别完整对象的能力的背景上。为了解决这些问题，我们提出了一种称为令牌改进变压器（TRT）的重新注意事项机制，该机制捕获了对象级语义，以很好地指导本地化。具体而言，TRT引入了一个名为令牌优先级评分模块（TPSM）的新型模块，以抑制背景噪声的效果，同时重点放在目标对象上。然后，我们将类激活图作为语义意识的输入合并，以将注意力图限制为目标对象。在两个基准测试上进行的广泛实验展示了我们提出的方法与现有方法的优势，该方法具有带有图像类别注释的现有方法。源代码可在\ url {https://github.com/su-hui-zz/reattentiontransformer}中获得。

In recent years, interest has arisen in using machine learning to improve the efficiency of automatic medical consultation and enhance patient experience. In this article, we propose two frameworks to support automatic medical consultation, namely doctor-patient dialogue understanding and task-oriented interaction. We create a new large medical dialogue dataset with multi-level finegrained annotations and establish five independent tasks, including named entity recognition, dialogue act classification, symptom label inference, medical report generation and diagnosis-oriented dialogue policy. We report a set of benchmark results for each task, which shows the usability of the dataset and sets a baseline for future studies. Both code and data is available from https://github.com/lemuria-wchen/imcs21.

谣言在社交媒体的时代猖獗。谈话结构提供有价值的线索，以区分真实和假声明。然而，现有的谣言检测方法限制为用户响应的严格关系或过度简化对话结构。在这项研究中，为了减轻不相关的帖子施加的负面影响，基本上加强了用户意见的相互作用，首先将谈话线作为无向相互作用图。然后，我们提出了一种用于谣言分类的主导分层图注意网络，其提高了考虑整个社会环境的响应帖子的表示学习，并参加可以在语义上推断目标索赔的帖子。三个Twitter数据集的广泛实验表明，我们的谣言检测方法比最先进的方法实现了更好的性能，并且展示了在早期阶段检测谣言的优异容量。

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.

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.

In this work, we focus on instance-level open vocabulary segmentation, intending to expand a segmenter for instance-wise novel categories without mask annotations. We investigate a simple yet effective framework with the help of image captions, focusing on exploiting thousands of object nouns in captions to discover instances of novel classes. Rather than adopting pretrained caption models or using massive caption datasets with complex pipelines, we propose an end-to-end solution from two aspects: caption grounding and caption generation. In particular, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework based on a Mask Transformer baseline. The framework has a novel grounding loss that performs explicit and implicit multi-modal feature alignments. We further design a lightweight caption generation head to allow for additional caption supervision. We find that grounding and generation complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel categories. We conduct extensive experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS). The results demonstrate the superiority of our CGG framework over previous OVIS methods, achieving a large improvement of 6.8% mAP on novel classes without extra caption data. Our method also achieves over 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark under various settings.

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.