Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.

Unsupervised pre-training on millions of digital-born or scanned documents has shown promising advances in visual document understanding~(VDU). While various vision-language pre-training objectives are studied in existing solutions, the document textline, as an intrinsic granularity in VDU, has seldom been explored so far. A document textline usually contains words that are spatially and semantically correlated, which can be easily obtained from OCR engines. In this paper, we propose Wukong-Reader, trained with new pre-training objectives to leverage the structural knowledge nested in document textlines. We introduce textline-region contrastive learning to achieve fine-grained alignment between the visual regions and texts of document textlines. Furthermore, masked region modeling and textline-grid matching are also designed to enhance the visual and layout representations of textlines. Experiments show that our Wukong-Reader has superior performance on various VDU tasks such as information extraction. The fine-grained alignment over textlines also empowers Wukong-Reader with promising localization ability.

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.

Federated embodied agent learning protects the data privacy of individual visual environments by keeping data locally at each client (the individual environment) during training. However, since the local data is inaccessible to the server under federated learning, attackers may easily poison the training data of the local client to build a backdoor in the agent without notice. Deploying such an agent raises the risk of potential harm to humans, as the attackers may easily navigate and control the agent as they wish via the backdoor. Towards Byzantine-robust federated embodied agent learning, in this paper, we study the attack and defense for the task of vision-and-language navigation (VLN), where the agent is required to follow natural language instructions to navigate indoor environments. First, we introduce a simple but effective attack strategy, Navigation as Wish (NAW), in which the malicious client manipulates local trajectory data to implant a backdoor into the global model. Results on two VLN datasets (R2R and RxR) show that NAW can easily navigate the deployed VLN agent regardless of the language instruction, without affecting its performance on normal test sets. Then, we propose a new Prompt-Based Aggregation (PBA) to defend against the NAW attack in federated VLN, which provides the server with a ''prompt'' of the vision-and-language alignment variance between the benign and malicious clients so that they can be distinguished during training. We validate the effectiveness of the PBA method on protecting the global model from the NAW attack, which outperforms other state-of-the-art defense methods by a large margin in the defense metrics on R2R and RxR.

In this paper, we present Pangu-Weather, a deep learning based system for fast and accurate global weather forecast. For this purpose, we establish a data-driven environment by downloading $43$ years of hourly global weather data from the 5th generation of ECMWF reanalysis (ERA5) data and train a few deep neural networks with about $256$ million parameters in total. The spatial resolution of forecast is $0.25^\circ\times0.25^\circ$, comparable to the ECMWF Integrated Forecast Systems (IFS). More importantly, for the first time, an AI-based method outperforms state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods in terms of accuracy (latitude-weighted RMSE and ACC) of all factors (e.g., geopotential, specific humidity, wind speed, temperature, etc.) and in all time ranges (from one hour to one week). There are two key strategies to improve the prediction accuracy: (i) designing a 3D Earth Specific Transformer (3DEST) architecture that formulates the height (pressure level) information into cubic data, and (ii) applying a hierarchical temporal aggregation algorithm to alleviate cumulative forecast errors. In deterministic forecast, Pangu-Weather shows great advantages for short to medium-range forecast (i.e., forecast time ranges from one hour to one week). Pangu-Weather supports a wide range of downstream forecast scenarios, including extreme weather forecast (e.g., tropical cyclone tracking) and large-member ensemble forecast in real-time. Pangu-Weather not only ends the debate on whether AI-based methods can surpass conventional NWP methods, but also reveals novel directions for improving deep learning weather forecast systems.

弱监督的点云语义分割方法需要1 \％或更少的标签，希望实现与完全监督的方法几乎相同的性能，这些方法最近引起了广泛的研究关注。该框架中的一个典型解决方案是使用自我训练或伪标记来从点云本身挖掘监督，但忽略了图像中的关键信息。实际上，在激光雷达场景中广泛存在相机，而这种互补信息对于3D应用似乎非常重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于3D分割的新型交叉模式弱监督的方法，并结合了来自未标记图像的互补信息。基本上，我们设计了一个配备有效标签策略的双分支网络，以最大程度地发挥标签的力量，并直接实现2D到3D知识转移。之后，我们以期望最大（EM）的视角建立了一个跨模式的自我训练框架，该框架在伪标签估计和更新参数之间进行了迭代。在M-Step中，我们提出了一个跨模式关联学习，通过增强3D点和2D超级像素之间的周期矛盾性，从图像中挖掘互补的监督。在E-Step中，伪标签的自我校准机制被得出过滤噪声标签，从而为网络提供了更准确的标签，以进行全面训练。广泛的实验结果表明，我们的方法甚至优于最先进的竞争对手，而少于1 \％的主动选择注释。

夜间场景解析（NTSP）对于许多视觉应用是必不可少的，尤其是对于自动驾驶。大多数现有方法都是为了解析白天的现有方法。他们依靠在照明下建模基于像素强度的空间上下文线索。因此，这些方法在夜间场景中表现不佳，因为这种空间上下文提示被埋葬在夜间场景中的过度/暴露区域中。在本文中，我们首先进行了基于图像频率的统计实验来解释白天和夜间场景差异。我们发现，在白天和夜间场景之间，图像频率分布有很大差异，并且了解此类频率分布对于NTSP问题至关重要。基于此，我们建议利用图像频率分布来解析夜间场景。首先，我们提出了一个可学习的频率编码器（LFE），以模拟不同频率系数之间的关系，以动态测量所有频率组件。其次，我们提出了一个空间频率融合模块（SFF），该模块融合了空间和频率信息，以指导空间上下文特征的提取。广泛的实验表明，我们的方法对夜总会，夜城+和BDD100K晚数据集的最先进方法表现出色。此外，我们证明我们的方法可以应用于现有的白天场景解析方法，并在夜间场景中提高其性能。

成功的基于机器学习的命名实体识别模型可能会因某些特殊领域的文本而失败，例如中文地址和电子商务标题，需要足够的背景知识。对于人类注释者来说，此类文本也很难。实际上，我们可以从具有一些共同实体的相关文本中获得一些潜在的有用信息，以帮助文本理解。然后，人们可以通过引用相关样本来轻松地提出正确的答案。在本文中，我们建议使用相关样品增强NER模型。我们通过大规模内域未标记的数据从稀疏的BM25检索器中绘制相关样品。为了明确模拟人类推理过程，我们执行了通过多数投票校准的无培训实体类型。为了捕获训练阶段的相关特征，我们建议通过基于变压器的多构度跨编码器对相关样品进行建模。上述两个域数据集的经验结果显示了我们方法的功效。

Federated学习（FL）最近作为一种增强隐私的工具而受到了极大的关注，可以由多个参与者共同培训机器学习模型。FL的先前工作主要研究了如何在模型培训期间保护标签隐私。但是，FL中的模型评估也可能导致私人标签信息的潜在泄漏。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种评估算法，该算法可以准确计算使用FL中的标签差异隐私（DP）时，可以准确计算广泛使用的AUC（曲线下）度量。通过广泛的实验，我们显示我们的算法可以计算与地面真相相比的准确AUC。

图神经网络（GNN）在图形分类和多样化的下游现实世界应用方面取得了巨大成功。尽管他们成功了，但现有的方法要么仅限于结构攻击，要么仅限于本地信息。这要求在图形分类上建立更一般的攻击框架，由于使用全球图表级信息生成本地节点级的对抗示例的复杂性，因此面临重大挑战。为了解决这个“全局到本地”问题，我们提出了一个通用框架CAMA，以通过层次样式操纵图形结构和节点特征来生成对抗性示例。具体而言，我们利用Graph类激活映射及其变体来产​​生与图形分类任务相对应的节点级的重要性。然后，通过算法的启发式设计，我们可以借助节点级别和子图级的重要性在不明显的扰动预算下执行功能和结构攻击。在六个现实世界基准上攻击四个最先进的图形分类模型的实验验证了我们框架的灵活性和有效性。