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.

We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural document editing and content customization. Our method sets the state-of-the-art on 9 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA, across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding Benchmark (DUE).

The diverse demands of different summarization tasks and their high annotation costs are driving a need for few-shot summarization. However, despite the emergence of many summarization tasks and datasets, the current training paradigm for few-shot summarization systems ignores potentially shareable knowledge in heterogeneous datasets. To this end, we propose \textsc{UniSumm}, a unified few-shot summarization model pre-trained with multiple summarization tasks and can be prefix-tuned to excel at any few-shot summarization datasets. Meanwhile, to better evaluate few-shot summarization systems, under the principles of diversity and robustness, we assemble and publicize a new benchmark \textsc{SummZoo}. It consists of $8$ diverse summarization tasks with multiple sets of few-shot samples for each task, covering both monologue and dialogue domains. Experimental results and ablation studies show that \textsc{UniSumm} outperforms strong baseline systems by a large margin across all tasks in \textsc{SummZoo} under both automatic and human evaluations. We release our code and benchmark at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/UniSumm}.

Controllable summarization allows users to generate customized summaries with specified attributes. However, due to the lack of designated annotations of controlled summaries, existing works have to craft pseudo datasets by adapting generic summarization benchmarks. Furthermore, most research focuses on controlling single attributes individually (e.g., a short summary or a highly abstractive summary) rather than controlling a mix of attributes together (e.g., a short and highly abstractive summary). In this paper, we propose MACSum, the first human-annotated summarization dataset for controlling mixed attributes. It contains source texts from two domains, news articles and dialogues, with human-annotated summaries controlled by five designed attributes (Length, Extractiveness, Specificity, Topic, and Speaker). We propose two simple and effective parameter-efficient approaches for the new task of mixed controllable summarization based on hard prompt tuning and soft prefix tuning. Results and analysis demonstrate that hard prompt models yield the best performance on all metrics and human evaluations. However, mixed-attribute control is still challenging for summarization tasks. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/MACSum.

知识密集型任务，例如开放域问题答案（QA），需要访问大量的世界知识或领域知识。知识密集型任务的一种常见方法是采用检索到阅读的管道，该管道首先从诸如Wikipedia之类的外部语料库中检索少数相关的上下文文档，然后预测在检索文档的条件下得到答案。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的观点，可以通过用大型语言模型生成器代替文档检索器来解决知识密集型任务。我们称我们的方法生成-Read Read（GenRead），该方法首先提示大型语言模型根据给定问题生成上下文文档，然后读取生成的文档以产生最终答案。此外，我们提出了一种基于聚类的提示方法，该方法选择了不同的提示，从而产生了涵盖不同观点的生成文档，从而更好地回忆了可接受的答案。我们对三个不同的知识密集任务进行了广泛的实验，包括开放域质量检查，事实检查和对话系统。值得注意的是，GenRead在Triviaqa和WebQ上实现了71.6和54.4的精确匹配分数，显着超过了最先进的检索到+4.0和+3.9的最先进的dpr-fid，而无需从任何外部知识源中检索任何文档。最后，我们证明可以通过结合检索和生成来进一步提高模型性能。

通用数据模型解决了标准化电子健康记录（EHR）数据的许多挑战，但无法将其集成深度表型所需的资源。开放的生物学和生物医学本体论（OBO）铸造本体论提供了可用于生物学知识的语义计算表示，并能够整合多种生物医学数据。但是，将EHR数据映射到OBO Foundry本体论需要大量的手动策展和域专业知识。我们介绍了一个框架，用于将观察性医学成果合作伙伴关系（OMOP）标准词汇介绍给OBO铸造本体。使用此框架，我们制作了92,367条条件，8,615种药物成分和10,673个测量结果的映射。域专家验证了映射准确性，并且在24家医院进行检查时，映射覆盖了99％的条件和药物成分和68％的测量结果。最后，我们证明OMOP2OBO映射可以帮助系统地识别可能受益于基因检测的未诊断罕见病患者。

本文介绍了Z-Code ++，这是一种针对抽象文本摘要优化的新的预训练的语言模型。该模型使用三种技术扩展了艺术编码器模型的状态。首先，我们使用两阶段的预训练过程来改善模型在低资源摘要任务上的性能。该模型首先是使用文本语料库进行语言理解的预先培训的，然后在汇总语料库中不断预先培训，以进行基础文本生成。其次，我们用分离的注意力层代替编码器中的自我发项层，其中每个单词都使用两个向量分别代表其内容和位置。第三，我们使用融合编码器，这是一种以层次方式编码长序列的简单而有效的方法。 Z-Code ++在13个文本摘要任务中的9个跨5种语言中创建了新的艺术状态。我们的模型的参数有效，因为它的表现优于XSUM上600倍较大的Palm-540b，并且在Samsum上的易经的200倍GPT3-175B较大。在零射击和少量设置中，我们的模型大大优于竞争模型。

无需进行任何架构更改的微调审计语言模型（LMS）已成为学习下游任务各种语言的规范。但是，对于非语言下游任务，一种常见的做法是使用特定于任务的设计来进行输入，输出层和损失功能。例如，可以通过用图像补丁嵌入层替换单词嵌入层，带有10向输出层的单词图表输出层以及单词预测丢失，将LM微调为MNIST分类器。 - 分别分类损失。出现一个自然的问题：LM微调可以在不更改模型架构或损失功能的情况下解决非语言的下游任务吗？为了回答这一点，我们提出了语言交织的微调（LIFT），并通过对非语言分类和回归任务的套件进行广泛的经验研究来研究其功效和局限性。 Lift不会对模型体系结构或损失功能进行任何更改，它仅依赖于自然语言界面，从而使“使用LMS进行无代码机”学习。我们发现，在各种低维分类和回归任务中，LIFT的性能相对较好，在许多情况下匹配了最佳基线的性能，尤其是对于分类任务。我们报告了有关升力的基本特性的实验结果，包括其电感偏差，样品效率，推断出外推能力，对异常值的鲁棒性和标签噪声以及概括。我们还分析了一些特定于提升的属性/技术，例如，通过适当提示，预测不确定性量化和两阶段微调，上下文感知学习。我们的代码可从https://github.com/uw-madison-lee-lab/languageinterfacefacefacefinetuning获得。

人们说：“一张照片值一千字”。那么，我们如何从图像中获取丰富的信息？我们认为，通过使用视觉线索来桥接大型的识别视觉基础模型和语言模型，我们可以无需任何额外的跨模式训练。得益于基础模型的强大零拍功能，我们首先构建图像的丰富语义表示（例如，图像标签，对象属性 /位置，字幕）作为结构化的文本提示，称为视觉线索，使用视觉基础模型。基于视觉线索，我们使用大型语言模型为视觉内容生成一系列综合描述，然后再次通过视觉模型验证，以选择与图像最合适的候选人。我们通过定量和定性测量评估生成的描述的质量。结果证明了这种结构化语义表示的有效性。

大型语言模型可以编码有关世界的大量语义知识。这种知识对于旨在采取自然语言表达的高级，时间扩展的指示的机器人可能非常有用。但是，语言模型的一个重大弱点是，它们缺乏现实世界的经验，这使得很难利用它们在给定的体现中进行决策。例如，要求语言模型描述如何清洁溢出物可能会导致合理的叙述，但是它可能不适用于需要在特定环境中执行此任务的特定代理商（例如机器人）。我们建议通过预处理的技能来提供现实世界的基础，这些技能用于限制模型以提出可行且在上下文上适当的自然语言动作。机器人可以充当语​​言模型的“手和眼睛”，而语言模型可以提供有关任务的高级语义知识。我们展示了如何将低级技能与大语言模型结合在一起，以便语言模型提供有关执行复杂和时间扩展说明的过程的高级知识，而与这些技能相关的价值功能则提供了连接必要的基础了解特定的物理环境。我们在许多现实世界的机器人任务上评估了我们的方法，我们表明了对现实世界接地的需求，并且这种方法能够在移动操纵器上完成长远，抽象的自然语言指令。该项目的网站和视频可以在https://say-can.github.io/上找到。