The 2021 Vision and Learning Seminar (VALSE) was successfully held in Hangzhou from October 8th to 10th. This conference is sponsored by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Chinese Society of Image and Graphics, co-organized by Zhijiang Laboratory, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Xiaoshan District People's Government, Hangzhou Xiaoshan Qianjiang Century City Management Committee, and China Society of Image and Graphics Co-organized by the Youth Work Committee. The chairman of the conference was jointly held by Professor Bao Hujun, Professor Pan Gang, and Professor Bai Xiang. The chairman of the conference program committee is co-chaired by Professor Zhang Guofeng, Professor Peng Xi, Professor Cheng Mingming, and Professor Tang Jin.

The (actual) number of attendees at this VALSE conference was about 3850. After careful preparation, the conference had brilliant content with 106 academic reports, including: 2 keynote reports, 6 specially invited reports, 10 annual progress reports, 14 special workshops, 80 reports, and 4 Tutorial workshops 8 reports. In addition, there are 185 Top Conference Top Journal Papers for poster display and exchange. 41 sponsors also presented wonderful products and technologies. The first VALSE conference started in Hangzhou and finally returned to Hangzhou in 10 years. The VALSE Organizing Committee held a special event for the tenth anniversary at the conference.

At the opening ceremony, Zhu Shiqiang, Director of Zhijiang Laboratory and Deputy Secretary of Party Committee of Zhejiang University, delivered a speech on behalf of the organizer, Qin Jianyun, Secretary of Party Working Committee of Hangzhou Xiaoshan Qianjiang Century City, delivered a speech on behalf of the co-organizer, and Prof. Pan Gang, member of the Steering Committee of VALSE and chairman of the conference, introduced the development history of VALSE and the preparation of this conference. Prof. Bao Hujun, chairman of the conference and deputy director of Zhijiang Laboratory, introduced the development of Zhijiang Laboratory, the host organization.

VALSE 2021 continued the main program of previous conferences, and the related reports and presentations covered most of the hot research directions in the fields of computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition and machine learning, and discussed the frontier progress at home and abroad in the above research fields. Prof. Xu Zongben, Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong University, and Prof. Liu Chenglin, Vice President of Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence and Director of State Key Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, were invited to give keynote presentations. The topic of the presentation by Academician Xu Zongben is: How to break through the a priori assumptions of machine learning? Researcher Chenglin Liu's presentation was entitled: Pattern Recognition: From Classification to Understanding.

VALSE 2021 also invited 6 specially invited speakers to give keynote presentations: Prof. Tang Huajin from Zhejiang University, Assistant Prof. Huang Gao from Tsinghua University, Prof. Wu Ying Ying from Zhejiang University, Prof. Han Junwei from Northwestern Polytechnic University, Prof. Yu Yang from Nanjing University, and Associate Researcher Su Hang from Tsinghua University.

In the "Annual Progress Review (APR)" session, 10 experts from different directions were invited to give an overview of the important progress in the relevant research subfields in the past year, namely: Professor Bai Xiang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Researcher Cheng Jian from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Researcher Zhou Xiaowei from Zhejiang University, Professor Deng Weihong from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Professor Zhang Shanshan from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Researcher Su Hang from Tsinghua University. Professor Shanshan Zhang from Nanjing University of Technology, Professor Yi Yang from Zhejiang University, Associate Professor Peng Cui from Tsinghua University, Associate Professor Yixing Liu from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor Mingkui Tan from South China University of Technology, and Professor Lei Zhang from Chongqing University.

In the special event of the 10th anniversary of VALSE, the retrospective video of the past 10 conferences of VALSE was shown first, followed by the video of blessings from some members of the Steering Committee of VALSE who could not attend the conference and some organizers of previous conferences. After that, under the auspices of Researcher Shiguang Shan, a member of the Steering Committee of VALSE, some of the participating members of the Steering Committee of VALSE and some of the organizers of previous conferences gathered together and recalled the development of VALSE and the outlook on the future of VALSE, they were Professor Kun Zhou of Zhejiang University, Professor Qingshan Liu of Nanjing University of Information Engineering, Professor Jian Yang of Nanjing University of Technology, Dr. Kai Yu, the founder and CEO of Horizon Dr. Kai Yu, founder and CEO of the company, Prof. Hua Huang of Beijing Normal University, Prof. Jingyi Yu of Shanghai University of Science and Technology, Prof. Gang Pan of Zhejiang University, Prof. Xiang Bai of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Prof. Xin Geng of Southeast University and Prof. Junyu Dong of Ocean University of China.

The 14 Workshops and 4 Tutorials at VALSE 2021 were full of information and most of the venues were full. The topics of the 14 Workshops included: Target Detection and Recognition, Collaborative Learning and Applications of Vision and Language, 3D Vision Technologies, Underlying Vision and Image Processing, Medical Image Analysis, Deep Model Architectures, Machine Learning Frontiers The topics of the four workshops are: Explainable Learning, Graph Neural Network, Unsupervised Learning, Transformer and Attention for Vision, Visual Synthesis and Forensics, Knowledge and Semantic Driven Visual Understanding, Embodied Intelligent Vision.

The Poster presentation, consisting of 185 top journal and conference papers published or accepted in the last two years, was also extremely well received by the attendees, and the communication atmosphere was very enthusiastic, with interested participants continuing to study in front of the Posters after the session ended. In order to provide more communication opportunities for Poster authors (especially young students), 80 papers were selected from these Poster exchange papers and shared in the form of short oral presentations in Workshops on related topics respectively.

In 2022, VALSE will move to Tianjin, let's look forward to VALSE 2022, meeting in Tianjin!