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 an interactive editing method that allows humans to help deep neural networks (DNNs) learn a latent space more consistent with human knowledge, thereby improving classification accuracy on indistinguishable ambiguous data. Firstly, we visualize high-dimensional data features through dimensionality reduction methods and design an interactive system \textit{SpaceEditing} to display the visualized data. \textit{SpaceEditing} provides a 2D workspace based on the idea of spatial layout. In this workspace, the user can move the projection data in it according to the system guidance. Then, \textit{SpaceEditing} will find the corresponding high-dimensional features according to the projection data moved by the user, and feed the high-dimensional features back to the network for retraining, therefore achieving the purpose of interactively modifying the high-dimensional latent space for the user. Secondly, to more rationally incorporate human knowledge into the training process of neural networks, we design a new loss function that enables the network to learn user-modified information. Finally, We demonstrate how \textit{SpaceEditing} meets user needs through three case studies while evaluating our proposed new method, and the results confirm the effectiveness of our method.

Although synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) can achieve the seeing-through effect by blurring out off-focus foreground occlusions while recovering in-focus occluded scenes from multi-view images, its performance is often deteriorated by dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions. To address the problem, this paper presents an Event-based SAI (E-SAI) method by relying on the asynchronous events with extremely low latency and high dynamic range acquired by an event camera. Specifically, the collected events are first refocused by a Refocus-Net module to align in-focus events while scattering out off-focus ones. Following that, a hybrid network composed of spiking neural networks (SNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed to encode the spatio-temporal information from the refocused events and reconstruct a visual image of the occluded targets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed E-SAI method can achieve remarkable performance in dealing with very dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions and produce high-quality images from pure events. Codes and datasets are available at https://dvs-whu.cn/projects/esai/.

Blind image super-resolution (Blind-SR) aims to recover a high-resolution (HR) image from its corresponding low-resolution (LR) input image with unknown degradations. Most of the existing works design an explicit degradation estimator for each degradation to guide SR. However, it is infeasible to provide concrete labels of multiple degradation combinations (\eg, blur, noise, jpeg compression) to supervise the degradation estimator training. In addition, these special designs for certain degradation, such as blur, impedes the models from being generalized to handle different degradations. To this end, it is necessary to design an implicit degradation estimator that can extract discriminative degradation representation for all degradations without relying on the supervision of degradation ground-truth. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Distillation based Blind-SR network (KDSR). It consists of a knowledge distillation based implicit degradation estimator network (KD-IDE) and an efficient SR network. To learn the KDSR model, we first train a teacher network: KD-IDE$_{T}$. It takes paired HR and LR patches as inputs and is optimized with the SR network jointly. Then, we further train a student network KD-IDE$_{S}$, which only takes LR images as input and learns to extract the same implicit degradation representation (IDR) as KD-IDE$_{T}$. In addition, to fully use extracted IDR, we design a simple, strong, and efficient IDR based dynamic convolution residual block (IDR-DCRB) to build an SR network. We conduct extensive experiments under classic and real-world degradation settings. The results show that KDSR achieves SOTA performance and can generalize to various degradation processes. The source codes and pre-trained models will be released.

Virtual reality (VR) over wireless is expected to be one of the killer applications in next-generation communication networks. Nevertheless, the huge data volume along with stringent requirements on latency and reliability under limited bandwidth resources makes untethered wireless VR delivery increasingly challenging. Such bottlenecks, therefore, motivate this work to seek the potential of using semantic communication, a new paradigm that promises to significantly ease the resource pressure, for efficient VR delivery. To this end, we propose a novel framework, namely WIreless SEmantic deliveRy for VR (WiserVR), for delivering consecutive 360{\deg} video frames to VR users. Specifically, deep learning-based multiple modules are well-devised for the transceiver in WiserVR to realize high-performance feature extraction and semantic recovery. Among them, we dedicatedly develop a concept of semantic location graph and leverage the joint-semantic-channel-coding method with knowledge sharing to not only substantially reduce communication latency, but also to guarantee adequate transmission reliability and resilience under various channel states. Moreover, implementation of WiserVR is presented, followed by corresponding initial simulations for performance evaluation compared with benchmarks. Finally, we discuss several open issues and offer feasible solutions to unlock the full potential of WiserVR.

流量数据长期遭受缺失和腐败的困扰，从而导致随后的智能运输系统（ITS）应用程序的准确性和效用降低。注意到流量数据的固有低级属性，大量研究将缺少的流量数据恢复为低级张量完成（LRTC）问题。由于LRTC中的秩最小化的非跨性别性和离散性，现有方法要么用凸面替代等级代替等级替代等级函数，要么以涉及许多参数的非convex替代物，或近似等级。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个用于交通数据恢复的无参数的非凸张量完成模型（TC-PFNC），其中设计了基于日志的松弛项以近似张量代数级别。此外，以前的研究通常认为观察结果是可靠的，没有任何异常值。因此，我们通过对潜在的流量数据异常值进行建模，将TC-PFNC扩展到了强大的版本（RTC-PFNC），该数据可以从部分和损坏的观测值中恢复缺失的值并在观测中删除异常。基于交替的方向乘数法（ADMM）详细阐述了TC-PFNC和RTC-PFNC的数值解。在四个现实世界流量数据集上进行的广泛实验结果表明，所提出的方法在缺失和损坏的数据恢复中都优于其他最先进的方法。本文使用的代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/younghe49/t-ITSPFNC。

随着向设备深度学习的转变，确保在各种计算平台上的AI服务的一致行为变得非常重要。我们的工作解决了降低视力倒数的预测不一致的新兴问题：由较不准确的模型正确预测但错误地预测的测试样品。我们介绍了回归约束的神经体系结构搜索（Reg-NAS），以设计一个高度准确的模型家庭，这些模型会导致更少的负面流动。 Reg-NAS由两个组成部分组成：（1）一种新型的体系结构约束，使较大的模型能够包含较小的权重，从而最大化权重共享。这一想法源于我们的观察结果，即网络之间的重量较大会导致相似的样本预测，并导致负面量较少。 （2）一种新颖的搜索奖励，在体系结构搜索指标中同时结合了TOP-1的准确性和负面翻转。我们证明，\ regnas可以在三个流行的架构搜索空间中成功找到具有很少负面额的理想体系结构。与现有的最新方法相比，Reg-NAS可实现33-48％的负面流量相对减少。

尖峰神经网络（SNNS）模仿大脑计算策略，并在时空信息处理中表现出很大的功能。作为人类感知的基本因素，视觉关注是指生物视觉系统中显着区域的动态选择过程。尽管视觉注意力的机制在计算机视觉上取得了巨大成功，但很少会引入SNN中。受到预测注意重新映射的实验观察的启发，我们在这里提出了一种新的时空通道拟合注意力（SCTFA）模块，该模块可以通过使用历史积累的空间通道信息来指导SNN有效地捕获潜在的目标区域。通过在三个事件流数据集（DVS手势，SL-Animals-DVS和MNIST-DVS）上进行系统评估，我们证明了带有SCTFA模块（SCTFA-SNN）的SNN不仅显着超过了基线SNN（BL-SNN）（BL-SNN）（BL-SNN）以及其他两个具有退化注意力模块的SNN模型，但也通过现有最新方法实现了竞争精度。此外，我们的详细分析表明，所提出的SCTFA-SNN模型对噪声和出色的稳定性具有强大的稳健性，同时保持了可接受的复杂性和效率。总体而言，这些发现表明，适当纳入大脑的认知机制可能会提供一种有希望的方法来提高SNN的能力。

在计算机音乐和心理声学中，感知响度与身体属性之间的关系是一个重要的主题。对“相等大通轮廓”的早期研究可以追溯到1920年代，从那以后，对强度和频率进行了测量的响度已被修订了多次。然而，大多数研究仅关注合成的声音，并且很少有合理的自然色调理论。为此，我们通过建模钢琴音调在本文中研究了天然音调感知的理论和应用。该理论部分包含：1）对音高的钢琴相等大小轮廓的准确测量，以及2）一个机器学习模型，能够纯粹基于基于人类主题测量的光谱特征来推断响度。至于应用程序，我们将理论应用于钢琴控制转移，其中我们调整了两个不同玩家钢琴（在不同的声学环境中）上的MIDI速度，以达到相同的感知效果。实验表明，我们的理论响度建模和相应的性能控制转移算法都显着优于其基准。

在本文中，我们介绍了一项新任务，口语视频接地（SVG），旨在将口语描述中所需的视频片段定位。与使用文本相比，使用音频需要模型直接利用与原始语音视频相关的有用音素和音节。此外，我们在语音音频中随机添加环境声音，进一步增加了此任务的困难并更好地模拟真实应用程序。为了纠正歧视性音素并从嘈杂的音频中提取与视频相关的信息，我们在音频预训练过程中开发了一种新颖的视频指导课程学习（VGCL），可以利用重要的视觉感知来帮助理解口语语言并抑制外部噪音。考虑到推理期间，模型无法获得地面真实视频片段，我们设计了一种课程策略，该策略将输入视频从地面真相转移到预训练期间的整个视频内容。最后，该模型可以学习如何从整个视频剪辑中提取关键的视觉信息，以帮助了解口语。此外，我们基于ActivityNet收集了第一个大规模口语视频接地数据集，该数据集称为ActivityNet语音数据集。广泛的实验表明，我们提出的视频指导课程学习可以促进预训练过程以获得相互的音频编码器，从而大大促进了口头视频接地任务的性能。此外，我们证明，在嘈杂的声音的情况下，我们的模型优于将视频与ASR转录本扎根的方法，进一步证明了我们课程策略的有效性。