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.

Autonomous cars are indispensable when humans go further down the hands-free route. Although existing literature highlights that the acceptance of the autonomous car will increase if it drives in a human-like manner, sparse research offers the naturalistic experience from a passenger's seat perspective to examine the human likeness of current autonomous cars. The present study tested whether the AI driver could create a human-like ride experience for passengers based on 69 participants' feedback in a real-road scenario. We designed a ride experience-based version of the non-verbal Turing test for automated driving. Participants rode in autonomous cars (driven by either human or AI drivers) as a passenger and judged whether the driver was human or AI. The AI driver failed to pass our test because passengers detected the AI driver above chance. In contrast, when the human driver drove the car, the passengers' judgement was around chance. We further investigated how human passengers ascribe humanness in our test. Based on Lewin's field theory, we advanced a computational model combining signal detection theory with pre-trained language models to predict passengers' humanness rating behaviour. We employed affective transition between pre-study baseline emotions and corresponding post-stage emotions as the signal strength of our model. Results showed that the passengers' ascription of humanness would increase with the greater affective transition. Our study suggested an important role of affective transition in passengers' ascription of humanness, which might become a future direction for autonomous driving.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based image super-resolution (SR) has exhibited impressive success on known degraded low-resolution (LR) images. However, this type of approach is hard to hold its performance in practical scenarios when the degradation process is unknown. Despite existing blind SR methods proposed to solve this problem using blur kernel estimation, the perceptual quality and reconstruction accuracy are still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we analyze the degradation of a high-resolution (HR) image from image intrinsic components according to a degradation-based formulation model. We propose a components decomposition and co-optimization network (CDCN) for blind SR. Firstly, CDCN decomposes the input LR image into structure and detail components in feature space. Then, the mutual collaboration block (MCB) is presented to exploit the relationship between both two components. In this way, the detail component can provide informative features to enrich the structural context and the structure component can carry structural context for better detail revealing via a mutual complementary manner. After that, we present a degradation-driven learning strategy to jointly supervise the HR image detail and structure restoration process. Finally, a multi-scale fusion module followed by an upsampling layer is designed to fuse the structure and detail features and perform SR reconstruction. Empowered by such degradation-based components decomposition, collaboration, and mutual optimization, we can bridge the correlation between component learning and degradation modelling for blind SR, thereby producing SR results with more accurate textures. Extensive experiments on both synthetic SR datasets and real-world images show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.

Existing convolutional neural networks (CNN) based image super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved impressive performance on bicubic kernel, which is not valid to handle unknown degradations in real-world applications. Recent blind SR methods suggest to reconstruct SR images relying on blur kernel estimation. However, their results still remain visible artifacts and detail distortion due to the estimation errors. To alleviate these problems, in this paper, we propose an effective and kernel-free network, namely DSSR, which enables recurrent detail-structure alternative optimization without blur kernel prior incorporation for blind SR. Specifically, in our DSSR, a detail-structure modulation module (DSMM) is built to exploit the interaction and collaboration of image details and structures. The DSMM consists of two components: a detail restoration unit (DRU) and a structure modulation unit (SMU). The former aims at regressing the intermediate HR detail reconstruction from LR structural contexts, and the latter performs structural contexts modulation conditioned on the learned detail maps at both HR and LR spaces. Besides, we use the output of DSMM as the hidden state and design our DSSR architecture from a recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN) view. In this way, the network can alternatively optimize the image details and structural contexts, achieving co-optimization across time. Moreover, equipped with the recurrent connection, our DSSR allows low- and high-level feature representations complementary by observing previous HR details and contexts at every unrolling time. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and real-world images demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art against existing methods. The source code can be found at https://github.com/Arcananana/DSSR.

Recent development of deep neural networks (DNNs) for tabular learning has largely benefited from the capability of DNNs for automatic feature interaction. However, the heterogeneity nature of tabular features makes such features relatively independent, and developing effective methods to promote tabular feature interaction still remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Estimator, which automatically estimates the relations among tabular features and builds graphs by assigning edges between related features. Such relation graphs organize independent tabular features into a kind of graph data such that interaction of nodes (tabular features) can be conducted in an orderly fashion. Based on our proposed Graph Estimator, we present a bespoke Transformer network tailored for tabular learning, called T2G-Former, which processes tabular data by performing tabular feature interaction guided by the relation graphs. A specific Cross-level Readout collects salient features predicted by the layers in T2G-Former across different levels, and attains global semantics for final prediction. Comprehensive experiments show that our T2G-Former achieves superior performance among DNNs and is competitive with non-deep Gradient Boosted Decision Tree models.

计算机辅助医学图像分割已广泛应用于诊断和治疗，以获得靶器官和组织的形状和体积的临床有用信息。在过去的几年中，基于卷积神经网络（CNN）的方法（例如，U-Net）占主导地位，但仍遭受了不足的远程信息捕获。因此，最近的工作提出了用于医学图像分割任务的计算机视觉变压器变体，并获得了有希望的表现。这种变压器通过计算配对贴片关系来模拟远程依赖性。然而，它们促进了禁止的计算成本，尤其是在3D医学图像（例如，CT和MRI）上。在本文中，我们提出了一种称为扩张变压器的新方法，该方法在本地和全球范围内交替捕获的配对贴片关系进行自我关注。灵感来自扩张卷积核，我们以扩张的方式进行全球自我关注，扩大接收领域而不增加所涉及的斑块，从而降低计算成本。基于这种扩展变压器的设计，我们构造了一个用于3D医学图像分割的U形编码器解码器分层体系结构。 Synapse和ACDC数据集的实验表明，我们的D-Ager Model从头开始培训，以低计算成本从划痕训练，优于各种竞争力的CNN或基于变压器的分段模型，而不耗时的每训练过程。

通过整合人类的知识和经验，人在循环旨在以最低成本培训准确的预测模型。人类可以为机器学习应用提供培训数据，并直接完成在基于机器的方法中对管道中计算机中的难以实现的任务。在本文中，我们从数据的角度调查了人类循环的现有工作，并将它们分为三类具有渐进关系：（1）从数据处理中提高模型性能的工作，（2）通过介入模型培训提高模型性能，（3）系统的设计独立于循环的设计。使用上述分类，我们总结了该领域的主要方法;随着他们的技术优势/弱点以及自然语言处理，计算机愿景等的简单分类和讨论。此外，我们提供了一些开放的挑战和机遇。本调查打算为人类循环提供高级别的摘要，并激励有兴趣的读者，以考虑设计有效的循环解决方案的方法。

Exploiting rich linguistic information in raw text is crucial for expressive text-to-speech (TTS). As large scale pre-trained text representation develops, bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) has been proven to embody semantic information and employed to TTS recently. However, original or simply fine-tuned BERT embeddings still cannot provide sufficient semantic knowledge that expressive TTS models should take into account. In this paper, we propose a word-level semantic representation enhancing method based on dependency structure and pre-trained BERT embedding. The BERT embedding of each word is reprocessed considering its specific dependencies and related words in the sentence, to generate more effective semantic representation for TTS. To better utilize the dependency structure, relational gated graph network (RGGN) is introduced to make semantic information flow and aggregate through the dependency structure. The experimental results show that the proposed method can further improve the naturalness and expressiveness of synthesized speeches on both Mandarin and English datasets.

检测分配（OOD）输入对于安全部署现实世界的深度学习模型至关重要。在评估良性分布和OOD样品时，检测OOD示例的现有方法很好。然而，在本文中，我们表明，当在分发的分布和OOD输入时，现有的检测机制可以极其脆弱，其具有最小的对抗扰动，这不会改变其语义。正式地，我们广泛地研究了对共同的检测方法的强大分布检测问题，并表明最先进的OOD探测器可以通过对分布和ood投入增加小扰动来容易地欺骗。为了抵消这些威胁，我们提出了一种称为芦荟的有效算法，它通过将模型暴露于对抗性inlier和异常值示例来执行鲁棒训练。我们的方法可以灵活地结合使用，并使现有方法稳健。在共同的基准数据集上，我们表明芦荟大大提高了最新的ood检测的稳健性，对CiFar-10和46.59％的CiFar-100改善了58.4％的Auroc改善。

An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked clinical impact on assessing anatomical structures. However, each of the datasets is small, partially labeled, and rarely investigates severe tumor subjects. Moreover, current models are limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors, which can not be extended to novel domains and classes. To tackle these limitations, we introduce embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models, dubbed the CLIP-Driven Universal Model. The Universal Model can better segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors by exploiting the semantic relationship between abdominal structures. The model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets with 3,410 CT scans and evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 datasets. We rank first on the public leaderboard of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) and achieve the state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Compared with dataset-specific models, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster), generalizes better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks. The design of CLIP embedding enables the Universal Model to be easily extended to new classes without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned classes.