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.

在强化学习中，蒙特卡洛算法通过平均偶发回报来更新Q功能。在Monte Carlo UCB（MC-UCB）算法中，在每个状态下采取的动作是最大化Q函数加上UCB勘探项的动作，该术语偏向于选择频率较低的动作的选择。尽管在为MC-UCB建立遗憾界限方面已经进行了重要的工作，但大多数工作都集中在该问题的有限培训版本上，每个情节都在不断数量的步骤后终止。对于此类有限的Horizo​​n问题，最佳策略既取决于当前状态和情节中的时间。但是，对于许多自然的情节问题，例如GO，CHESS和机器人任务等游戏，该情节是随机的，最佳政策是静止的。对于此类环境，MC-UCB中的Q功能是否会收敛到最佳Q函数，这是一个空旷的问题。我们猜想，与Q学习不同，它并不是所有MDP的收敛。尽管如此，我们表明，对于大型MDP，其中包括二十一点和确定性MDP等随机MDP，例如GO，MC-UCB中的Q功能几乎可以肯定地收敛到最佳Q函数。该结果的直接推论是，它几乎肯定会为所有有限的Horizo​​n MDP收敛。我们还提供了数值实验，为MC-UCB提供了进一步的见解。

由于其效率，一声神经架构搜索（NAS）已被广泛用于发现架构。但是，先前的研究表明，由于架构之间的操作参数过度共享（即大共享范围），架构的一声绩效估计可能与他们在独立培训中的表现没有很好的相关性。因此，最近的方法构建了更高参数化的超级链，以降低共享程度。但是这些改进的方法引入了大量额外的参数，因此在培训成本和排名质量之间导致不良的权衡。为了减轻上述问题，我们建议将课程学习应用于共享范围（接近），以有效地训练超级网。具体而言，我们在一开始就以很大的共享范围（简单的课程）训练超网，并逐渐降低了超级网的共享程度（更难的课程）。为了支持这种培训策略，我们设计了一个新颖的超级网（闭合性），该超级网（CLESENET）将参数从操作中解耦，以实现灵活的共享方案和可调节的共享范围。广泛的实验表明，与其他一击的超级网络相比，Close可以在不同的计算预算限制中获得更好的排名质量，并且在与各种搜索策略结合使用时能够发现出色的体系结构。代码可从https://github.com/walkerning/aw_nas获得。

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably, the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility.

Despite significant progress in object categorization, in recent years, a number of important challenges remain; mainly, the ability to learn from limited labeled data and to recognize object classes within large, potentially open, set of labels. Zero-shot learning is one way of addressing these challenges, but it has only been shown to work with limited sized class vocabularies and typically requires separation between supervised and unsupervised classes, allowing former to inform the latter but not vice versa. We propose the notion of vocabulary-informed learning to alleviate the above mentioned challenges and address problems of supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and open set recognition using a unified framework. Specifically, we propose a weighted maximum margin framework for semantic manifold-based recognition that incorporates distance constraints from (both supervised and unsupervised) vocabulary atoms. Distance constraints ensure that labeled samples are projected closer to their correct prototypes, in the embedding space, than to others. We illustrate that resulting model shows improvements in supervised, zero-shot, generalized zero-shot, and large open set recognition, with up to 310K class vocabulary on Animal with Attributes and ImageNet datasets.

Advances in computer vision and machine learning techniques have led to significant development in 2D and 3D human pose estimation from RGB cameras, LiDAR, and radars. However, human pose estimation from images is adversely affected by occlusion and lighting, which are common in many scenarios of interest. Radar and LiDAR technologies, on the other hand, need specialized hardware that is expensive and power-intensive. Furthermore, placing these sensors in non-public areas raises significant privacy concerns. To address these limitations, recent research has explored the use of WiFi antennas (1D sensors) for body segmentation and key-point body detection. This paper further expands on the use of the WiFi signal in combination with deep learning architectures, commonly used in computer vision, to estimate dense human pose correspondence. We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input. This paves the way for low-cost, broadly accessible, and privacy-preserving algorithms for human sensing.

With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has become a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions only based on contexts augmented with a few training examples. It has been a new trend exploring ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress, challenges, and future work in ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques of ICL, including training strategies, prompting strategies, and so on. Finally, we present the challenges of ICL and provide potential directions for further research. We hope our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL in future work.

Designing better deep networks and better reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are both important for deep RL. This work focuses on the former. Previous methods build the network with several modules like CNN, LSTM and Attention. Recent methods combine the Transformer with these modules for better performance. However, it requires tedious optimization skills to train a network composed of mixed modules, making these methods inconvenient to be used in practice. In this paper, we propose to design \emph{pure Transformer-based networks} for deep RL, aiming at providing off-the-shelf backbones for both the online and offline settings. Specifically, the Transformer in Transformer (TIT) backbone is proposed, which cascades two Transformers in a very natural way: the inner one is used to process a single observation, while the outer one is responsible for processing the observation history; combining both is expected to extract spatial-temporal representations for good decision-making. Experiments show that TIT can achieve satisfactory performance in different settings, consistently.

Recently the deep learning has shown its advantage in representation learning and clustering for time series data. Despite the considerable progress, the existing deep time series clustering approaches mostly seek to train the deep neural network by some instance reconstruction based or cluster distribution based objective, which, however, lack the ability to exploit the sample-wise (or augmentation-wise) contrastive information or even the higher-level (e.g., cluster-level) contrastiveness for learning discriminative and clustering-friendly representations. In light of this, this paper presents a deep temporal contrastive clustering (DTCC) approach, which for the first time, to our knowledge, incorporates the contrastive learning paradigm into the deep time series clustering research. Specifically, with two parallel views generated from the original time series and their augmentations, we utilize two identical auto-encoders to learn the corresponding representations, and in the meantime perform the cluster distribution learning by incorporating a k-means objective. Further, two levels of contrastive learning are simultaneously enforced to capture the instance-level and cluster-level contrastive information, respectively. With the reconstruction loss of the auto-encoder, the cluster distribution loss, and the two levels of contrastive losses jointly optimized, the network architecture is trained in a self-supervised manner and the clustering result can thereby be obtained. Experiments on a variety of time series datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DTCC approach over the state-of-the-art.

Active tracking of space noncooperative object that merely relies on vision camera is greatly significant for autonomous rendezvous and debris removal. Considering its Partial Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) property, this paper proposes a novel tracker based on deep recurrent reinforcement learning, named as RAMAVT which drives the chasing spacecraft to follow arbitrary space noncooperative object with high-frequency and near-optimal velocity control commands. To further improve the active tracking performance, we introduce Multi-Head Attention (MHA) module and Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) layer into RAMAVT, which remarkably improve the representative ability of neural network with almost no extra computational cost. Extensive experiments and ablation study implemented on SNCOAT benchmark show the effectiveness and robustness of our method compared with other state-of-the-art algorithm. The source codes are available on https://github.com/Dongzhou-1996/RAMAVT.