Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How to fault-tolerantly realize any quantum circuit with local operations

We show how to realize a general quantum circuit involving gates between arbitrary pairs of qubits by means of geometrically local quantum operations and efficient classical computation. We prove that circuit-level local stochastic noise modeling an imperfect implementation of our derived schemes is equivalent to local stochastic noise in the original circuit. Our constructions incur a constant-factor increase in the quantum circuit depth and a polynomial overhead in the number of qubits: To execute an arbitrary quantum circuit on $n$ qubits, we give a 3D quantum fault-tolerance architecture involving $O(n^{3/2} \log^3 n)$ qubits, and a quasi-2D architecture using $O(n^2 \log^3 n)$ qubits. Applied to recent fault-tolerance constructions, this gives a fault-tolerance threshold theorem for universal quantum computations with local operations, a polynomial qubit overhead and a quasi-polylogarithmic depth overhead. More generally, our transformation dispenses with the need for considering the locality of operations when designing schemes for fault-tolerant quantum information processing.
FlexHB: a More Efficient and Flexible Framework for Hyperparameter Optimization

Given a Hyperparameter Optimization(HPO) problem, how to design an algorithm to find optimal configurations efficiently? Bayesian Optimization(BO) and the multi-fidelity BO methods employ surrogate models to sample configurations based on history evaluations. More recent studies obtain better performance by integrating BO with HyperBand(HB), which accelerates evaluation by early stopping mechanism. However, these methods ignore the advantage of a suitable evaluation scheme over the default HyperBand, and the capability of BO is still constrained by skewed evaluation results. In this paper, we propose FlexHB, a new method pushing multi-fidelity BO to the limit as well as re-designing a framework for early stopping with Successive Halving(SH). Comprehensive study on FlexHB shows that (1) our fine-grained fidelity method considerably enhances the efficiency of searching optimal configurations, (2) our FlexBand framework (self-adaptive allocation of SH brackets, and global ranking of configurations in both current and past SH procedures) grants the algorithm with more flexibility and improves the anytime performance. Our method achieves superior efficiency and outperforms other methods on various HPO tasks. Empirical results demonstrate that FlexHB can achieve up to 6.9X and 11.1X speedups over the state-of-the-art MFES-HB and BOHB respectively.
Transformer tricks: Precomputing the first layer

This micro-paper describes a trick to speed up inference of transformers with RoPE (such as LLaMA, Mistral, PaLM, and Gemma). For these models, a large portion of the first transformer layer can be precomputed, which results in slightly lower latency and lower cost-per-token. Because this trick optimizes only one layer, the relative savings depend on the total number of layers. For example, the maximum savings for a model with only 4 layers (such as Whisper tiny) is limited to 25%, while a 32-layer model is limited to 3% savings. See https://github.com/OpenMachine-ai/transformer-tricks for code and more transformer tricks.
CMNER: A Chinese Multimodal NER Dataset based on Social Media

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) is a pivotal task designed to extract named entities from text with the support of pertinent images. Nonetheless, a notable paucity of data for Chinese MNER has considerably impeded the progress of this natural language processing task within the Chinese domain. Consequently, in this study, we compile a Chinese Multimodal NER dataset (CMNER) utilizing data sourced from Weibo, China's largest social media platform. Our dataset encompasses 5,000 Weibo posts paired with 18,326 corresponding images. The entities are classified into four distinct categories: person, location, organization, and miscellaneous. We perform baseline experiments on CMNER, and the outcomes underscore the effectiveness of incorporating images for NER. Furthermore, we conduct cross-lingual experiments on the publicly available English MNER dataset (Twitter2015), and the results substantiate our hypothesis that Chinese and English multimodal NER data can mutually enhance the performance of the NER model.
Unsupervised Text Style Transfer via LLMs and Attention Masking with Multi-way Interactions

Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (UTST) has emerged as a critical task within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), aiming to transfer one stylistic aspect of a sentence into another style without changing its semantics, syntax, or other attributes. This task is especially challenging given the intrinsic lack of parallel text pairings. Among existing methods for UTST tasks, attention masking approach and Large Language Models (LLMs) are deemed as two pioneering methods. However, they have shortcomings in generating unsmooth sentences and changing the original contents, respectively. In this paper, we investigate if we can combine these two methods effectively. We propose four ways of interactions, that are pipeline framework with tuned orders; knowledge distillation from LLMs to attention masking model; in-context learning with constructed parallel examples. We empirically show these multi-way interactions can improve the baselines in certain perspective of style strength, content preservation and text fluency. Experiments also demonstrate that simply conducting prompting followed by attention masking-based revision can consistently surpass the other systems, including supervised text style transfer systems. On Yelp-clean and Amazon-clean datasets, it improves the previously best mean metric by 0.5 and 3.0 absolute percentages respectively, and achieves new SOTA results.
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models

Activation sparsity refers to the existence of considerable weakly-contributed elements among activation outputs. As a prevalent property of the models using the ReLU activation function, it has been proven a promising paradigm to boost model inference efficiency. Nevertheless, most large language models (LLMs) adopt activation functions without intrinsic activation sparsity (e.g., GELU and Swish). Some recent efforts have explored introducing ReLU or its variants as the substitutive activation function to help LLMs achieve activation sparsity and inference acceleration, but few can simultaneously obtain high sparsity and comparable model performance. This paper introduces an effective sparsification method named"ProSparse"to push LLMs for higher activation sparsity without decreasing model performance. Specifically, after substituting the activation function of LLMs with ReLU, ProSparse adopts progressive sparsity regularization with a factor smoothly increasing along sine curves in multiple stages. This can enhance activation sparsity and alleviate performance degradation by avoiding radical shifts in activation distribution. With ProSparse, we obtain high sparsity of 89.32% and 88.80% for LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA2-13B, respectively, achieving comparable performance to their original Swish-activated versions. Our inference acceleration experiments further demonstrate the practical acceleration brought by higher activation sparsity.
Gorenstein D-branes of type B

Let (S; n) be a commutative noetherian local ring and w in n be non-zerodivisor. We propose a natural definition of the category of Gorenstein pairs of w, by replacing projectives with finitely generated Gorenstein projective S-modules in the category of pairs. It is shown that the category of Gorenstein pairs of w is a Frobeius category, and in particular, its projective objects are the same as the category of pairs. The stable category of Gorenstein pairs, which admits a natural structure of a triangulated category, is called Gorenstein D-branes of type B. It is proved that the singularity category of the factor ring R = S=(w) as well as the category of D-branes of type B, can be realized as triangulated subcategories of Gorenstein D-branes of type B. In studying the category of Gorenstein D-branes of type B, the submodule category of Gorenstein projective S-modules has been used appropriately.
Variational Umbrella Seeding for Calculating Nucleation Barriers

In this work, we introduce Variational Umbrella Seeding, a novel technique for computing nucleation barriers. This new method, a refinement of the original seeding approach, is independent on the choice of order parameter for measuring the size of a nucleus. Consequently, it surpasses seeding in accuracy, and Umbrella Sampling in computational speed. We test the method extensively and demonstrate excellent accuracy for crystal nucleation of nearly hard spheres and of two distinct models of water: mW and TIP4P/ICE. This method can easily be extended to calculate nucleation barriers for homogeneous melting, condensation, and cavitation.
Training Table Question Answering via SQL Query Decomposition

Table Question-Answering involves both understanding the natural language query and grounding it in the context of the input table to extract the relevant information. In this context, many methods have highlighted the benefits of intermediate pre-training from SQL queries. However, while most approaches aim at generating final answers from inputs directly, we claim that there is better to do with SQL queries during training. By learning to imitate a restricted portion of SQL-like algebraic operations, we show that their execution flow provides intermediate supervision steps that allow increased generalization and structural reasoning compared with classical approaches of the field. Our study bridges the gap between semantic parsing and direct answering methods and provides useful insights regarding what types of operations should be predicted by a generative architecture or be preferably executed by an external algorithm.
Explaining Relationships Among Research Papers

Due to the rapid pace of research publications, keeping up to date with all the latest related papers is very time-consuming, even with daily feed tools. There is a need for automatically generated, short, customized literature reviews of sets of papers to help researchers decide what to read. While several works in the last decade have addressed the task of explaining a single research paper, usually in the context of another paper citing it, the relationship among multiple papers has been ignored; prior works have focused on generating a single citation sentence in isolation, without addressing the expository and transition sentences needed to connect multiple papers in a coherent story. In this work, we explore a feature-based, LLM-prompting approach to generate richer citation texts, as well as generating multiple citations at once to capture the complex relationships among research papers. We perform an expert evaluation to investigate the impact of our proposed features on the quality of the generated paragraphs and find a strong correlation between human preference and integrative writing style, suggesting that humans prefer high-level, abstract citations, with transition sentences between them to provide an overall story.
Structured Tree Alignment for Evaluation of (Speech) Constituency Parsing

We present the structured average intersection-over-union ratio (STRUCT-IOU), a similarity metric between constituency parse trees motivated by the problem of evaluating speech parsers. STRUCT-IOU enables comparison between a constituency parse tree (over automatically recognized spoken word boundaries) with the ground-truth parse (over written words). To compute the metric, we project the ground-truth parse tree to the speech domain by forced alignment, align the projected ground-truth constituents with the predicted ones under certain structured constraints, and calculate the average IOU score across all aligned constituent pairs. STRUCT-IOU takes word boundaries into account and overcomes the challenge that the predicted words and ground truth may not have perfect one-to-one correspondence. Extending to the evaluation of text constituency parsing, we demonstrate that STRUCT-IOU shows higher tolerance to syntactically plausible parses than PARSEVAL (Black et al., 1991).
Statistical Analyses of Solar Prominences and Active Region Features in 304 \AA{} Filtergrams detected via Deep Learning

Solar active regions (ARs) are areas on the Sun with very strong magnetic fields where various activities take place. Prominences are one of the typical solar features in the solar atmosphere, whose eruptions often lead to solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Therefore, studying their morphological features and their relationship with solar activity is useful in predicting eruptive events and in understanding the long-term evolution of solar activities. A huge amount of data have been collected from various ground-based telescopes and satellites. The massive data make human inspection difficult. For this purpose, we developed an automated detection method for prominences and ARs above the solar limb based on deep learning techniques. We applied it to process the 304 \AA data obtained by SDO/AIA from 2010 May 13 to 2020 December 31. Besides the butterfly diagrams and latitudinal migrations of the prominences and ARs during solar cycle 24, the variations of their morphological features (such as the locations, areas, heights, and widths) with the calendar years and the latitude bands were analyzed. Most of these statistical results based on our new method are in agreement with previous studies, which also guarantees the validity of our method. The N-S asymmetry indices of the prominences and ARs show that the northern hemisphere dominates in solar cycle 24, except for 2012--2015, and 2020 for ARs. The high-latitude prominences show much stronger N-S asymmetry that the northern hemisphere is dominant in $\sim$2011 and $\sim$2015 and the southern hemisphere is dominant during 2016--2019.
The Effectiveness of Graph Contrastive Learning on Mathematical Information Retrieval

This paper details an empirical investigation into using Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) to generate mathematical equation representations, a critical aspect of Mathematical Information Retrieval (MIR). Our findings reveal that this simple approach consistently exceeds the performance of the current leading formula retrieval model, TangentCFT. To support ongoing research and development in this field, we have made our source code accessible to the public at https://github.com/WangPeiSyuan/GCL-Formula-Retrieval/.
Synthesis of Hierarchical Controllers Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies

We propose a novel approach to the problem of controller design for environments modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we consider a hierarchical MDP a graph with each vertex populated by an MDP called a"room". We first apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to obtain low-level policies for each room, scaling to large rooms of unknown structure. We then apply reactive synthesis to obtain a high-level planner that chooses which low-level policy to execute in each room. The central challenge in synthesizing the planner is the need for modeling rooms. We address this challenge by developing a DRL procedure to train concise"latent"policies together with PAC guarantees on their performance. Unlike previous approaches, ours circumvents a model distillation step. Our approach combats sparse rewards in DRL and enables reusability of low-level policies. We demonstrate feasibility in a case study involving agent navigation amid moving obstacles.
The Dimension of Self-Directed Learning

Understanding the self-directed learning complexity has been an important problem that has captured the attention of the online learning theory community since the early 1990s. Within this framework, the learner is allowed to adaptively choose its next data point in making predictions unlike the setting in adversarial online learning. In this paper, we study the self-directed learning complexity in both the binary and multi-class settings, and we develop a dimension, namely $SDdim$, that exactly characterizes the self-directed learning mistake-bound for any concept class. The intuition behind $SDdim$ can be understood as a two-player game called the"labelling game". Armed with this two-player game, we calculate $SDdim$ on a whole host of examples with notable results on axis-aligned rectangles, VC dimension $1$ classes, and linear separators. We demonstrate several learnability gaps with a central focus on self-directed learning and offline sequence learning models that include either the best or worst ordering. Finally, we extend our analysis to the self-directed binary agnostic setting where we derive upper and lower bounds.
Higher-order singular perturbation models for phase transitions

Variational models of phase transitions take into account double-well energies singularly perturbed by gradient terms, such as the Cahn-Hilliard free energy. The derivation by $\Gamma$-convergence of a sharp-interface limit for such energy is a classical result by Modica and Mortola. We consider a singular perturbation of a double-well energy by derivatives of order $k$, and show that we still can describe the limit as in the case $k=1$ with a suitable interfacial energy density, in accord with the case $k=1$ and with the case $k=2$ previously analyzed by Fonseca and Mantegazza. The main isssue is the derivation of an optimal-profile problem on the real line describing the interfacial energy density, which must be conveniently approximated by minimum problems on finite intervals with homogeneous condition on the derivatives at the endpoints up to order $k-1$. To that end a careful study must be carried on of sets where sequences of functions with equibounded energy are ``close to the wells'' and have ``small derivatives'', in terms of interpolation inequalities and energy estimates.
Spontaneous Theory of Mind for Artificial Intelligence

Existing approaches to Theory of Mind (ToM) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) overemphasize prompted, or cue-based, ToM, which may limit our collective ability to develop Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI). Drawing from research in computer science, cognitive science, and related disciplines, we contrast prompted ToM with what we call spontaneous ToM -- reasoning about others' mental states that is grounded in unintentional, possibly uncontrollable cognitive functions. We argue for a principled approach to studying and developing AI ToM and suggest that a robust, or general, ASI will respond to prompts \textit{and} spontaneously engage in social reasoning.
Deep Hedging with Market Impact

Dynamic hedging is the practice of periodically transacting financial instruments to offset the risk caused by an investment or a liability. Dynamic hedging optimization can be framed as a sequential decision problem; thus, Reinforcement Learning (RL) models were recently proposed to tackle this task. However, existing RL works for hedging do not consider market impact caused by the finite liquidity of traded instruments. Integrating such feature can be crucial to achieve optimal performance when hedging options on stocks with limited liquidity. In this paper, we propose a novel general market impact dynamic hedging model based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that considers several realistic features such as convex market impacts, and impact persistence through time. The optimal policy obtained from the DRL model is analysed using several option hedging simulations and compared to commonly used procedures such as delta hedging. Results show our DRL model behaves better in contexts of low liquidity by, among others: 1) learning the extent to which portfolio rebalancing actions should be dampened or delayed to avoid high costs, 2) factoring in the impact of features not considered by conventional approaches, such as previous hedging errors through the portfolio value, and the underlying asset's drift (i.e. the magnitude of its expected return).
An Empirical Study on Oculus Virtual Reality Applications: Security and Privacy Perspectives

Although Virtual Reality (VR) has accelerated its prevalent adoption in emerging metaverse applications, it is not a fundamentally new technology. On one hand, most VR operating systems (OS) are based on off-the-shelf mobile OS. As a result, VR apps also inherit privacy and security deficiencies from conventional mobile apps. On the other hand, in contrast to conventional mobile apps, VR apps can achieve immersive experience via diverse VR devices, such as head-mounted displays, body sensors, and controllers though achieving this requires the extensive collection of privacy-sensitive human biometrics. Moreover, VR apps have been typically implemented by 3D gaming engines (e.g., Unity), which also contain intrinsic security vulnerabilities. Inappropriate use of these technologies may incur privacy leaks and security vulnerabilities although these issues have not received significant attention compared to the proliferation of diverse VR apps. In this paper, we develop a security and privacy assessment tool, namely the VR-SP detector for VR apps. The VR-SP detector has integrated program static analysis tools and privacy-policy analysis methods. Using the VR-SP detector, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on 500 popular VR apps. We obtain the original apps from the popular Oculus and SideQuest app stores and extract APK files via the Meta Oculus Quest 2 device. We evaluate security vulnerabilities and privacy data leaks of these VR apps by VR app analysis, taint analysis, and privacy-policy analysis. We find that a number of security vulnerabilities and privacy leaks widely exist in VR apps. Moreover, our results also reveal conflicting representations in the privacy policies of these apps and inconsistencies of the actual data collection with the privacy-policy statements of the apps. Based on these findings, we make suggestions for the future development of VR apps.
Combining unsupervised and supervised learning in microscopy enables defect analysis of a full 4H-SiC wafer

Detecting and analyzing various defect types in semiconductor materials is an important prerequisite for understanding the underlying mechanisms as well as tailoring the production processes. Analysis of microscopy images that reveal defects typically requires image analysis tasks such as segmentation and object detection. With the permanently increasing amount of data that is produced by experiments, handling these tasks manually becomes more and more impossible. In this work, we combine various image analysis and data mining techniques for creating a robust and accurate, automated image analysis pipeline. This allows for extracting the type and position of all defects in a microscopy image of a KOH-etched 4H-SiC wafer that was stitched together from approximately 40,000 individual images.