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.

As the societal impact of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) grows, the goals for advancing DNNs become more complex and diverse, ranging from improving a conventional model accuracy metric to infusing advanced human virtues such as fairness, accountability, transparency (FaccT), and unbiasedness. Recently, techniques in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are attracting considerable attention, and have tremendously helped Machine Learning (ML) engineers in understanding AI models. However, at the same time, we started to witness the emerging need beyond XAI among AI communities; based on the insights learned from XAI, how can we better empower ML engineers in steering their DNNs so that the model's reasonableness and performance can be improved as intended? This article provides a timely and extensive literature overview of the field Explanation-Guided Learning (EGL), a domain of techniques that steer the DNNs' reasoning process by adding regularization, supervision, or intervention on model explanations. In doing so, we first provide a formal definition of EGL and its general learning paradigm. Secondly, an overview of the key factors for EGL evaluation, as well as summarization and categorization of existing evaluation procedures and metrics for EGL are provided. Finally, the current and potential future application areas and directions of EGL are discussed, and an extensive experimental study is presented aiming at providing comprehensive comparative studies among existing EGL models in various popular application domains, such as Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) domains.

Stereo images, containing left and right view images with disparity, are utilized in solving low-vision tasks recently, e.g., rain removal and super-resolution. Stereo image restoration methods usually obtain better performance than monocular methods by learning the disparity between dual views either implicitly or explicitly. However, existing stereo rain removal methods still cannot make full use of the complementary information between two views, and we find it is because: 1) the rain streaks have more complex distributions in directions and densities, which severely damage the complementary information and pose greater challenges; 2) the disparity estimation is not accurate enough due to the imperfect fusion mechanism for the features between two views. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new \underline{Stereo} \underline{I}mage \underline{R}ain \underline{R}emoval method (StereoIRR) via sufficient interaction between two views, which incorporates: 1) a new Dual-view Mutual Attention (DMA) mechanism which generates mutual attention maps by taking left and right views as key information for each other to facilitate cross-view feature fusion; 2) a long-range and cross-view interaction, which is constructed with basic blocks and dual-view mutual attention, can alleviate the adverse effect of rain on complementary information to help the features of stereo images to get long-range and cross-view interaction and fusion. Notably, StereoIRR outperforms other related monocular and stereo image rain removal methods on several datasets. Our codes and datasets will be released.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Low-light stereo image enhancement (LLSIE) is a relatively new task to enhance the quality of visually unpleasant stereo images captured in dark conditions. So far, very few studies on deep LLSIE have been explored due to certain challenging issues, i.e., the task has not been well addressed, and current methods clearly suffer from two shortages: 1) insufficient cross-view interaction; 2) lacking long-range dependency for intra-view learning. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel LLSIE model, termed \underline{Suf}ficient C\underline{r}oss-View \underline{In}teraction Network (SufrinNet). To be specific, we present sufficient inter-view interaction module (SIIM) to enhance the information exchange across views. SIIM not only discovers the cross-view correlations at different scales, but also explores the cross-scale information interaction. Besides, we present a spatial-channel information mining block (SIMB) for intra-view feature extraction, and the benefits are twofold. One is the long-range dependency capture to build spatial long-range relationship, and the other is expanded channel information refinement that enhances information flow in channel dimension. Extensive experiments on Flickr1024, KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and Middlebury datasets show that our method obtains better illumination adjustment and detail recovery, and achieves SOTA performance compared to other related methods. Our codes, datasets and models will be publicly available.

尽管目前基于深度学习的方法在盲目的单图像超分辨率（SISR）任务中已获得了有希望的表现，但其中大多数主要集中在启发式上构建多样化的网络体系结构，并更少强调对Blur之间的物理发电机制的明确嵌入内核和高分辨率（HR）图像。为了减轻这个问题，我们提出了一个模型驱动的深神经网络，称为blind SISR。具体而言，为了解决经典的SISR模型，我们提出了一种简单的效果迭代算法。然后，通过将所涉及的迭代步骤展开到相应的网络模块中，我们自然构建了KXNET。所提出的KXNET的主要特异性是整个学习过程与此SISR任务的固有物理机制完全合理地集成在一起。因此，学习的模糊内核具有清晰的物理模式，并且模糊内核和HR图像之间的相互迭代过程可以很好地指导KXNET沿正确的方向发展。关于合成和真实数据的广泛实验很好地证明了我们方法的卓越准确性和一般性超出了当前代表性的最先进的盲目SISR方法。代码可在：\ url {https://github.com/jiahong-fu/kxnet}中获得。

模块化设计是未来大型空间设施的On On On构造技术的基础。标准界面是未来空间机器人系统和空间设施模块化设计的关键技术。本文介绍了Petlock的设计和测试，标准和测试无性别界面可以在未来的模块化空间机器人操纵器和航天器之间传递机械载荷，功率和数据。Petlock采用完全无性别的设计，包括连接面，锁定机制，数据和功率接口。连接表面提供了较大的翻译和旋转错位耐受性，由于其120度对称和3D形状的设计。锁定机制具有三个锁定引脚撤回结构设计，这是简单可靠的。高锁定力，高容忍度，高可靠性和低成本的优势，Petloc K在未来的轨道施工任务中具有很大的应用潜力。

向前和向后触及逆运动学（FABRIK）是一种启发式逆运动求解器，逐渐应用于具有快速收敛和生成更真实配置的优势的操纵器。但是，在高误差限制下，Fabrik表现出不稳定的收敛行为，这对于操纵器的实时运动计划是不满意的。在本文中，提出了一种结合Fabrik和顺序二次编程（SQP）算法的新型逆运动学算法，其中Fabrik推迟的关节角度将被视为SQP算法的初始种子，以避免粘在局部最小值中。通过实验评估合并的算法，在高误差约束下，我们的算法比FabRik获得更高的成功率和更快的解决方案时间。此外，联合算法可以在路径跟踪中为UR5和KUKA LBR IIWA 14 R820操纵器生成连续轨迹，而无姿势误差和最终效应器的允许位置误差。

最近，分布（OOD）的概括引起了人们对基于深度学习模型的鲁棒性和概括能力的关注，因此，已经制定了许多策略来解决与此问题相关的不同方面。但是，大多数现有的OOD概括算法都是复杂的，并且专门为某些数据集设计。为了减轻此问题，Nicochallenge-2022提供了Nico ++，这是一个具有不同上下文信息的大型数据集。在本文中，基于对NICO ++数据集的不同方案的系统分析，我们通过偶联的技巧提出了一个简单但有效的学习框架，包括多目标框架设计，数据增强，培训，培训和推理策略。我们的算法是记忆效率且易于安装的，没有复杂的模块，并且不需要大型预训练模型。它在公共测试集中获得了88.16％的前1位精度，在私人测试集中获得了75.65％的表现，并在域Nicochallenge-2022的域概括任务中排名第1。

现实世界图像Denoising是一个实用的图像恢复问题，旨在从野外嘈杂的输入中获取干净的图像。最近，Vision Transformer（VIT）表现出强大的捕获远程依赖性的能力，许多研究人员试图将VIT应用于图像DeNosing任务。但是，现实世界的图像是一个孤立的框架，它使VIT构建了内部贴片的远程依赖性，该依赖性将图像分为贴片并混乱噪声模式和梯度连续性。在本文中，我们建议通过使用连续的小波滑动转换器来解决此问题，该小波滑动转换器在现实世界中构建频率对应关系，称为dnswin。具体而言，我们首先使用CNN编码器从嘈杂的输入图像中提取底部功能。 DNSWIN的关键是将高频和低频信息与功能和构建频率依赖性分开。为此，我们提出了小波滑动窗口变压器，该变压器利用离散的小波变换，自我注意力和逆离散小波变换来提取深度特征。最后，我们使用CNN解码器将深度特征重建为DeNo的图像。对现实世界的基准测试的定量和定性评估都表明，拟议的DNSWIN对最新方法的表现良好。