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.

Transformers are widely used in NLP tasks. However, current approaches to leveraging transformers to understand language expose one weak spot: Number understanding. In some scenarios, numbers frequently occur, especially in semi-structured data like tables. But current approaches to rich-number tasks with transformer-based language models abandon or lose some of the numeracy information - e.g., breaking numbers into sub-word tokens - which leads to many number-related errors. In this paper, we propose the LUNA framework which improves the numerical reasoning and calculation capabilities of transformer-based language models. With the number plugin of NumTok and NumBed, LUNA represents each number as a whole to model input. With number pre-training, including regression loss and model distillation, LUNA bridges the gap between number and vocabulary embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly injects numeracy capability into language models using Number Plugins. Besides evaluating toy models on toy tasks, we evaluate LUNA on three large-scale transformer models (RoBERTa, BERT, TabBERT) over three different downstream tasks (TATQA, TabFact, CrediTrans), and observe the performances of language models are constantly improved by LUNA. The augmented models also improve the official baseline of TAT-QA (EM: 50.15 -> 59.58) and achieve SOTA performance on CrediTrans (F1 = 86.17).

Online forms are widely used to collect data from human and have a multi-billion market. Many software products provide online services for creating semi-structured forms where questions and descriptions are organized by pre-defined structures. However, the design and creation process of forms is still tedious and requires expert knowledge. To assist form designers, in this work we present FormLM to model online forms (by enhancing pre-trained language model with form structural information) and recommend form creation ideas (including question / options recommendations and block type suggestion). For model training and evaluation, we collect the first public online form dataset with 62K online forms. Experiment results show that FormLM significantly outperforms general-purpose language models on all tasks, with an improvement by 4.71 on Question Recommendation and 10.6 on Block Type Suggestion in terms of ROUGE-1 and Macro-F1, respectively.

在本文中，我们研究了神经视频压缩（NVC）中位分配的问题。首先，我们揭示了最近声称是最佳的位分配方法实际上是由于其实施而是最佳的。具体而言，我们发现其亚典型性在于半损坏的变异推理（SAVI）对潜在的不正确的应用，具有非物质变异后验。然后，我们表明，在非因素潜伏期上校正的SAVI校正版本需要递归地通过梯度上升应用后传播，这是我们得出校正后的最佳位分配算法的。由于校正位分配的计算不可行性，我们设计了有效的近似值以使其实用。经验结果表明，我们提出的校正显着改善了R-D性能和比特率误差的错误分配，并且比所有其他位分配方法都大大提高了。源代码在补充材料中提供。

本文考虑了有损神经图像压缩（NIC）的问题。当前的最新方法（SOTA）方法采用近似量化噪声的后部均匀的后方，单样本估计量近似于证据下限（ELBO）的梯度。在本文中，我们建议用多个样本重要性加权自动编码器（IWAE）目标训练NIC，该目标比Elbo更紧，并随着样本量的增加而收敛至对数的可能性。首先，我们确定NIC的均匀后验具有特殊的特性，这会影响IWAE目标的Pathiswise和得分函数估计器的方差和偏差。此外，从梯度差异的角度来看，我们提供了有关NIC中通常采用的技巧的见解。基于这些分析，我们进一步提出了多样本NIC（MS-NIC），这是NIC的IWAE靶标。实验结果表明，它改善了SOTA NIC方法。我们的MS-NIC是插件，可以轻松扩展到其他神经压缩任务。

在本文中，我们考虑了神经视频压缩（NVC）中位分配的问题。由于帧参考结构，使用相同的R-D（速率）权衡参数$ \ lambda $的当前NVC方法是次优的，这带来了位分配的需求。与以前基于启发式和经验R-D模型的方法不同，我们建议通过基于梯度的优化解决此问题。具体而言，我们首先提出了一种基于半损坏的变异推理（SAVI）的连续位实现方法。然后，我们通过更改SAVI目标，使用迭代优化提出了一个像素级隐式分配方法。此外，我们基于NVC的可区分特征得出了精确的R-D模型。我们通过使用精确的R-D模型证明其等效性与位分配的等效性来展示我们的方法的最佳性。实验结果表明，我们的方法显着改善了NVC方法，并且胜过现有的位分配方法。我们的方法是所有可区分NVC方法的插件，并且可以直接在现有的预训练模型上采用。

Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

Few Shot Instance Segmentation (FSIS) requires models to detect and segment novel classes with limited several support examples. In this work, we explore a simple yet unified solution for FSIS as well as its incremental variants, and introduce a new framework named Reference Twice (RefT) to fully explore the relationship between support/query features based on a Transformer-like framework. Our key insights are two folds: Firstly, with the aid of support masks, we can generate dynamic class centers more appropriately to re-weight query features. Secondly, we find that support object queries have already encoded key factors after base training. In this way, the query features can be enhanced twice from two aspects, i.e., feature-level and instance-level. In particular, we firstly design a mask-based dynamic weighting module to enhance support features and then propose to link object queries for better calibration via cross-attention. After the above steps, the novel classes can be improved significantly over our strong baseline. Additionally, our new framework can be easily extended to incremental FSIS with minor modification. When benchmarking results on the COCO dataset for FSIS, gFSIS, and iFSIS settings, our method achieves a competitive performance compared to existing approaches across different shots, e.g., we boost nAP by noticeable +8.2/+9.4 over the current state-of-the-art FSIS method for 10/30-shot. We further demonstrate the superiority of our approach on Few Shot Object Detection. Code and model will be available.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

Learning the underlying distribution of molecular graphs and generating high-fidelity samples is a fundamental research problem in drug discovery and material science. However, accurately modeling distribution and rapidly generating novel molecular graphs remain crucial and challenging goals. To accomplish these goals, we propose a novel Conditional Diffusion model based on discrete Graph Structures (CDGS) for molecular graph generation. Specifically, we construct a forward graph diffusion process on both graph structures and inherent features through stochastic differential equations (SDE) and derive discrete graph structures as the condition for reverse generative processes. We present a specialized hybrid graph noise prediction model that extracts the global context and the local node-edge dependency from intermediate graph states. We further utilize ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers for efficient graph sampling, based on the semi-linear structure of the probability flow ODE. Experiments on diverse datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework. Particularly, the proposed method still generates high-quality molecular graphs in a limited number of steps.