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.

机器学习的进展使得可以预测免疫系统对预防性和治疗疫苗的反应。但是，设计疫苗的工程任务仍然是一个挑战。特别是，人类免疫系统的遗传变异性使设计肽疫苗很难在接种疫苗的种群中提供广泛的免疫力。我们介绍了一个用于评估和设计使用概率机器学习模型的肽疫苗的框架，并展示了其为SARS-COV-2疫苗生产设计的能力，该疫苗的表现优于先前的设计。我们提供了框架的近似性，可扩展性和复杂性的理论分析。

图像分类器对输入中的小扰动的敏感性通常被视为其结构的缺陷。我们表明这种敏感性是分类器的基本属性。对于AL的$ N $-$ N $ Images的任何任意分类器，我们向所有级别显示出来，可以在那个类中更改除了一个微小的修改中的那个类中的所有图像的分类与任何$ P $ -Norm测量时的图像空间的直径相比，包括汉明距离。然后，我们研究这种现象在人类视觉感知中的表现如何，并讨论其对计算机视觉系统设计考虑的影响。

背景：12个引线ECG是心血管疾病的核心诊断工具。在这里，我们描述并分析了一个集成的深度神经网络架构，从12个引导eCG分类了24个心脏异常。方法：我们提出了挤压和激发reset，以自动学习来自12个引主ECG的深度特征，以识别24个心脏病。在最终完全连接的层中，随着年龄和性别特征增强了深度特征。使用约束网格搜索设置每个类的输出阈值。为了确定为什么该模型的预测不正确，两个专家诊所人员独立地解释了一组关于左轴偏差的一次无序的ECG。结果：采用定制加权精度度量，我们达到了0.684的5倍交叉验证得分，灵敏度和特异性分别为0.758和0.969。我们在完整的测试数据中得分0.520，并在官方挑战排名中排名第21中。在一系列被错误分类的心电图中，两个临床医生和训练标签之间的协议差（临床医生1：Kappa = -0.057，临床医生2：Kappa = -0.159）。相比之下，临床医生之间的协议非常高（Kappa = 0.92）。讨论：与在相同数据上培训的模型相比，所提出的预测模型很好地对验证和隐藏的测试数据进行了良好。我们还发现培训标签的相当不一致，这可能会阻碍更准确的模型的开发。

图像分类器通常在其测试设置精度上进行评分，但高精度可以屏蔽微妙类型的模型故障。我们发现高分卷积神经网络（CNNS）在流行的基准上表现出令人不安的病理，即使在没有语义突出特征的情况下，即使在没有语义突出特征的情况下也能够显示高精度。当模型提供没有突出的输入功能而无突出的频率决定时，我们说分类器已经过度解释了它的输入，找到了太多的课程 - 以对人类荒谬的模式。在这里，我们展示了在CiFar-10和Imagenet上培训的神经网络患有过度诠释，我们发现CIFAR-10上的模型即使在屏蔽95％的输入图像中，人类不能在剩余像素子集中辨别出突出的特征。我们介绍了批量梯度SIS，一种用于发现复杂数据集的足够输入子集的新方法，并使用此方法显示故事中的边界像素的充分性以进行培训和测试。虽然这些模式在现实世界部署中移植了潜在的模型脆弱性，但它们实际上是基准的有效统计模式，单独就足以实现高测试精度。与对手示例不同，过度解释依赖于未修改的图像像素。我们发现合奏和输入辍学可以帮助缓解过度诠释。

In this paper, we propose a novel technique, namely INVALIDATOR, to automatically assess the correctness of APR-generated patches via semantic and syntactic reasoning. INVALIDATOR reasons about program semantic via program invariants while it also captures program syntax via language semantic learned from large code corpus using the pre-trained language model. Given a buggy program and the developer-patched program, INVALIDATOR infers likely invariants on both programs. Then, INVALIDATOR determines that a APR-generated patch overfits if: (1) it violates correct specifications or (2) maintains errors behaviors of the original buggy program. In case our approach fails to determine an overfitting patch based on invariants, INVALIDATOR utilizes a trained model from labeled patches to assess patch correctness based on program syntax. The benefit of INVALIDATOR is three-fold. First, INVALIDATOR is able to leverage both semantic and syntactic reasoning to enhance its discriminant capability. Second, INVALIDATOR does not require new test cases to be generated but instead only relies on the current test suite and uses invariant inference to generalize the behaviors of a program. Third, INVALIDATOR is fully automated. We have conducted our experiments on a dataset of 885 patches generated on real-world programs in Defects4J. Experiment results show that INVALIDATOR correctly classified 79% overfitting patches, accounting for 23% more overfitting patches being detected by the best baseline. INVALIDATOR also substantially outperforms the best baselines by 14% and 19% in terms of Accuracy and F-Measure, respectively.

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior collapse as a problem of latent variable non-identifiability. We prove that the posterior collapses if and only if the latent variables are non-identifiable in the generative model. This fact implies that posterior collapse is not a phenomenon specific to the use of flexible distributions or approximate inference. Rather, it can occur in classical probabilistic models even with exact inference, which we also demonstrate. Based on these results, we propose a class of latent-identifiable variational autoencoders, deep generative models which enforce identifiability without sacrificing flexibility. This model class resolves the problem of latent variable non-identifiability by leveraging bijective Brenier maps and parameterizing them with input convex neural networks, without special variational inference objectives or optimization tricks. Across synthetic and real datasets, latent-identifiable variational autoencoders outperform existing methods in mitigating posterior collapse and providing meaningful representations of the data.

Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) provides information on the presence, extent, and severity of obstructive coronary artery disease. Large-scale clinical studies analyzing CCTA-derived metrics typically require ground-truth validation in the form of high-fidelity 3D intravascular imaging. However, manual rigid alignment of intravascular images to corresponding CCTA images is both time consuming and user-dependent. Moreover, intravascular modalities suffer from several non-rigid motion-induced distortions arising from distortions in the imaging catheter path. To address these issues, we here present a semi-automatic segmentation-based framework for both rigid and non-rigid matching of intravascular images to CCTA images. We formulate the problem in terms of finding the optimal \emph{virtual catheter path} that samples the CCTA data to recapitulate the coronary artery morphology found in the intravascular image. We validate our co-registration framework on a cohort of $n=40$ patients using bifurcation landmarks as ground truth for longitudinal and rotational registration. Our results indicate that our non-rigid registration significantly outperforms other co-registration approaches for luminal bifurcation alignment in both longitudinal (mean mismatch: 3.3 frames) and rotational directions (mean mismatch: 28.6 degrees). By providing a differentiable framework for automatic multi-modal intravascular data fusion, our developed co-registration modules significantly reduces the manual effort required to conduct large-scale multi-modal clinical studies while also providing a solid foundation for the development of machine learning-based co-registration approaches.