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.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

Recently, spoken dialogue systems have been widely deployed in a variety of applications, serving a huge number of end-users. A common issue is that the errors resulting from noisy utterances, semantic misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge make it hard for a real system to respond properly, possibly leading to an unsatisfactory user experience. To avoid such a case, we consider a proactive interaction mechanism where the system predicts the user satisfaction with the candidate response before giving it to the user. If the user is not likely to be satisfied according to the prediction, the system will ask the user a suitable question to determine the real intent of the user instead of providing the response directly. With such an interaction with the user, the system can give a better response to the user. Previous models that predict the user satisfaction are not applicable to DuerOS which is a large-scale commercial dialogue system. They are based on hand-crafted features and thus can hardly learn the complex patterns lying behind millions of conversations and temporal dependency in multiple turns of the conversation. Moreover, they are trained and evaluated on the benchmark datasets with adequate labels, which are expensive to obtain in a commercial dialogue system. To face these challenges, we propose a pipeline to predict the user satisfaction to help DuerOS decide whether to ask for clarification in each turn. Specifically, we propose to first generate a large number of weak labels and then train a transformer-based model to predict the user satisfaction with these weak labels. Empirically, we deploy and evaluate our model on DuerOS, and observe a 19% relative improvement on the accuracy of user satisfaction prediction and 2.3% relative improvement on user experience.

Data augmentation is a widely used technique for enhancing the generalization ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks. Occlusion is a critical factor that affects on the generalization ability of image classification models. In order to generate new samples, existing data augmentation methods based on information deletion simulate occluded samples by randomly removing some areas in the images. However, those methods cannot delete areas of the images according to their structural features of the images. To solve those problems, we propose a novel data augmentation method, AdvMask, for image classification tasks. Instead of randomly removing areas in the images, AdvMask obtains the key points that have the greatest influence on the classification results via an end-to-end sparse adversarial attack module. Therefore, we can find the most sensitive points of the classification results without considering the diversity of various image appearance and shapes of the object of interest. In addition, a data augmentation module is employed to generate structured masks based on the key points, thus forcing the CNN classification models to seek other relevant content when the most discriminative content is hidden. AdvMask can effectively improve the performance of classification models in the testing process. The experimental results on various datasets and CNN models verify that the proposed method outperforms other previous data augmentation methods in image classification tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

在本文中，我们提出了基于抑制增强面膜的注意力和交互式通道转换（Semicon），以学习处理大规模细粒图像检索任务的二进制哈希码。在半号中，我们首先开发出基于抑制增强的面膜（SEM）的注意力，以动态定位判别图像区域。更重要的是，与现有的注意机制不同，我们的SEM是为了限制此类区域而开发的，然后通过考虑以阶段的方式考虑激活区域之间的关系来限制其他互补区域。在每个阶段，交互式通道变换（ICON）模块之后旨在利用跨参与激活张量的通道之间的相关性。由于通道通常可以与细粒对象的部分相对应，因此也可以相应地建模该部分相关性，从而进一步提高细粒的检索精度。此外，要作为计算经济，图标是通过有效的两步过程实现的。最后，对我们的分号的哈希学习由全球和本地级分支组成，以更好地表示细粒对象，然后生成与多个级别相对应的二进制哈希码。五个基准细粒数据集的实验显示了我们优于竞争方法。

从点云中检测3D对象是一项实用但充满挑战的任务，最近引起了越来越多的关注。在本文中，我们提出了针对3D对象检测的标签引导辅助训练方法（LG3D），该方法是增强现有3D对象检测器的功能学习的辅助网络。具体而言，我们提出了两个新型模块：一个标签 - 通道诱导器，该模块诱导器将框架中的注释和点云映射到特定于任务的表示形式和一个标签 - 知识式插曲器，该标签知识映射器有助于获得原始特征以获得检测临界表示。提出的辅助网络被推理丢弃，因此在测试时间没有额外的计算成本。我们对室内和室外数据集进行了广泛的实验，以验证我们的方法的有效性。例如，我们拟议的LG3D分别在SUN RGB-D和SCANNETV2数据集上将投票人员分别提高了2.5％和3.1％的地图。

我们提出了一种惩罚的非参数方法，以使用整流器二次单元（REEND）激活了深层神经网络，以估计不可分割的模型中的分位数回归过程（QRP），并引入了新的惩罚函数，以实施对瓦解回归曲线的非交叉。我们为估计的QRP建立了非反应过量的风险界限，并在轻度平滑度和规律性条件下得出估计的QRP的平均综合平方误差。为了建立这些非反应风险和估计误差范围，我们还使用$ s> 0 $及其衍生物及其衍生物使用所需的激活的神经网络开发了一个新的错误，用于近似$ c^s $平滑功能。这是必需网络的新近似结果，并且具有独立的兴趣，并且可能在其他问题中有用。我们的数值实验表明，所提出的方法具有竞争性或胜过两种现有方法，包括使用再现核和随机森林的方法，用于非参数分位数回归。

深度神经网络具有强大的功能，但它们也有缺点，例如它们对对抗性例子，噪音，模糊，遮挡等的敏感性。先前提出了许多以前的工作来提高特定的鲁棒性。但是，我们发现，在神经网络模型的额外鲁棒性或概括能力的牺牲下，通常会提高特定的鲁棒性。特别是，在改善对抗性鲁棒性时，对抗性训练方法在不受干扰的数据上严重损害了对不受干扰数据的概括性能。在本文中，我们提出了一种称为AugRmixat的新数据处理和培训方法，该方法可以同时提高神经网络模型的概括能力和多重鲁棒性。最后，我们验证了AUGRMIXAT对CIFAR-10/100和Tiny-Imagenet数据集的有效性。实验表明，Augrmixat可以改善模型的概括性能，同时增强白色框的鲁棒性，黑盒鲁棒性，常见的损坏鲁棒性和部分遮挡鲁棒性。

深神经网络（DNN）的记忆效应在最近的标签噪声学习方法中起关键作用。为了利用这种效果，已经广泛采用了基于模型预测的方法，该方法旨在利用DNN在学习的早期阶段以纠正嘈杂标签的效果。但是，我们观察到该模型在标签预测期间会犯错误，从而导致性能不令人满意。相比之下，在学习早期阶段产生的特征表现出更好的鲁棒性。受到这一观察的启发，在本文中，我们提出了一种基于特征嵌入的新方法，用于用标签噪声，称为标签NoissiLution（Lend）。要具体而言，我们首先根据当前的嵌入式特征计算一个相似性矩阵，以捕获训练数据的局部结构。然后，附近标记的数据（\ textIt {i.e。}，标签噪声稀释）使错误标记的数据携带的嘈杂的监督信号淹没了，其有效性是由特征嵌入的固有鲁棒性保证的。最后，带有稀释标签的培训数据进一步用于培训强大的分类器。从经验上讲，我们通过将我们的贷款与几种代表性的强大学习方法进行比较，对合成和现实世界嘈杂数据集进行了广泛的实验。结果验证了我们贷款的有效性。