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.

Insufficient image spatial resolution is a serious limitation in many practical scenarios, especially when acquiring images at a finer scale is infeasible or brings higher costs. This is inherent to remote sensing, including Sentinel-2 satellite images that are available free of charge at a high revisit frequency, but whose spatial resolution is limited to 10 m ground sampling distance. The resolution can be increased with super-resolution algorithms, in particular when performed from multiple images captured at subsequent revisits of a satellite, taking advantage of information fusion that leads to enhanced reconstruction accuracy. One of the obstacles in multi-image super-resolution consists in the scarcity of real-world benchmarks - commonly, simulated data are exploited which do not fully reflect the operating conditions. In this paper, we introduce a new MuS2 benchmark for super-resolving multiple Sentinel-2 images, with WorldView-2 imagery used as the high-resolution reference. Within MuS2, we publish the first end-to-end evaluation procedure for this problem which we expect to help the researchers in advancing the state of the art in multi-image super-resolution.

通过磁共振成像（MRI）评估肿瘤负担对于评估胶质母细胞瘤的治疗反应至关重要。由于疾病的高异质性和复杂性，该评估的性能很复杂，并且与高变异性相关。在这项工作中，我们解决了这个问题，并提出了一条深度学习管道，用于对胶质母细胞瘤患者进行全自动的端到端分析。我们的方法同时确定了肿瘤的子区域，包括第一步的肿瘤，周围肿瘤和手术腔，然后计算出遵循神经符号学（RANO）标准的当前响应评估的体积和双相测量。此外，我们引入了严格的手动注释过程，其随后是人类专家描绘肿瘤子区域的，并捕获其分割的信心，后来在训练深度学习模型时被使用。我们广泛的实验研究的结果超过了760次术前和504例从公共数据库获得的神经胶质瘤后患者（2021 - 2020年在19个地点获得）和临床治疗试验（47和69个地点，可用于公共数据库（在19个地点获得）（47和69个地点）术前/术后患者，2009-2011）并以彻底的定量，定性和统计分析进行了备份，表明我们的管道在手动描述时间的一部分中对术前和术后MRI进行了准确的分割（最高20比人更快。二维和体积测量与专家放射科医生非常吻合，我们表明RANO测量并不总是足以量化肿瘤负担。

在分析此类数据中，高光谱脉冲仍然是最具挑战性的任务之一。深度学习一直在田野上盛开，并被证明超过了其他经典的不混合技术，并且可以有效地部署在配备高光谱成像器的地球观察卫星上。在这封信中，我们遵循这一研究途径，并提出了一个多分支卷积神经网络，该网络受益于融合过程中的光谱，空间和光谱空间特征。我们的实验结果得到了消融研究的支持，表明我们的技术从文献中优于其他人，而导致了更高质量的分数丰度估计。此外，我们研究了减少训练集对所有算法及其对噪音的稳健性的影响的影响，因为捕获大型且代表性的地面真相集是耗时且在实践中成本高昂的，尤其是在新兴的地球观察方案中。

通过优化农业管理实践来维持农场的可持续性有助于建立更适合星球的环境。新兴的卫星任务可以获取多光谱图像，从而捕获有关扫描区域的更详细的光谱信息，因此，在农业应用中的分析过程中，我们可以从细微的光谱特征中受益。我们介绍了一种从10 m Sentinel-2多光谱图像系列中提取2.5 m栽培地图的方法，该图像受益于紧凑型卷积神经网络。实验表明，与U-NET相比，我们的模型不仅通过提供更高质量的分割图来超过经典和深度的机器学习技术，而且还可以大大减少内存足迹（我们的模型的几乎可训练的参数，最多具有31m参数的参数U-nets）。在任务中，这种记忆节俭是关键的，这使我们能够在轨道进入轨道后将模型链接到AI驱动的卫星，因为由于时间限制，不可能发送大型网。

几十年来，多维数据集中的模式发现是研究的主题。存在可用于此目的的广泛的聚类算法。但是，它们的实际应用共有普遍的聚类阶段，涉及基于专家的解释和对获得的结果分析。我们认为这可以是该过程的瓶颈，特别是在聚类之前存在域知识的情况下。这种情况不仅需要对自动发现的集群进行适当的分析，而且还需要与现有知识的一致性检查。在这项工作中，我们展示了知识增强聚类（KNAC），主要目标是通过自动聚类来协调基于专家的标签，以便更新和精炼前者。我们的解决方案不依赖于任何准备好的聚类算法，也不介绍一个。相反，KNAC可以用作任意聚类算法的增强，使得该方法具有鲁棒和模型不可知。我们展示了我们在人工，可重复的例子和真实用途案例场景中的方法的可行性。

We study the problem of graph clustering under a broad class of objectives in which the quality of a cluster is defined based on the ratio between the number of edges in the cluster, and the total weight of vertices in the cluster. We show that our definition is closely related to popular clustering measures, namely normalized associations, which is a dual of the normalized cut objective, and normalized modularity. We give a linear time constant-approximate algorithm for our objective, which implies the first constant-factor approximation algorithms for normalized modularity and normalized associations.

We study the problem of combining neural networks with symbolic reasoning. Recently introduced frameworks for Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning (PNL), such as DeepProbLog, perform exponential-time exact inference, limiting the scalability of PNL solutions. We introduce Approximate Neurosymbolic Inference (A-NeSI): a new framework for PNL that uses neural networks for scalable approximate inference. A-NeSI 1) performs approximate inference in polynomial time without changing the semantics of probabilistic logics; 2) is trained using data generated by the background knowledge; 3) can generate symbolic explanations of predictions; and 4) can guarantee the satisfaction of logical constraints at test time, which is vital in safety-critical applications. Our experiments show that A-NeSI is the first end-to-end method to scale the Multi-digit MNISTAdd benchmark to sums of 15 MNIST digits, up from 4 in competing systems. Finally, our experiments show that A-NeSI achieves explainability and safety without a penalty in performance.

This paper presents a conversational AI platform called Flowstorm. Flowstorm is an open-source SaaS project suitable for creating, running, and analyzing conversational applications. Thanks to the fast and fully automated build process, the dialogues created within the platform can be executed in seconds. Furthermore, we propose a novel dialogue architecture that uses a combination of tree structures with generative models. The tree structures are also used for training NLU models suitable for specific dialogue scenarios. However, the generative models are globally used across applications and extend the functionality of the dialogue trees. Moreover, the platform functionality benefits from out-of-the-box components, such as the one responsible for extracting data from utterances or working with crawled data. Additionally, it can be extended using a custom code directly in the platform. One of the essential features of the platform is the possibility to reuse the created assets across applications. There is a library of prepared assets where each developer can contribute. All of the features are available through a user-friendly visual editor.

Chain of thought prompting successfully improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, achieving state of the art results on a range of datasets. However, these reasoning capabilities only appear to emerge in models with a size of over 100 billion parameters. In this paper, we explore the transfer of such reasoning capabilities to models with less than 100 billion parameters via knowledge distillation. Specifically, we finetune a student model on the chain of thought outputs generated by a larger teacher model. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves task performance across arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning datasets. For example, the accuracy of T5 XXL on GSM8K improves from 8.11% to 21.99% when finetuned on PaLM-540B generated chains of thought.