Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Observing and braiding topological Majorana modes on programmable quantum simulators

Electrons are indivisible elementary particles, yet paradoxically a collection of them can act as a fraction of a single electron, exhibiting exotic and useful properties. One such collective excitation, known as a topological Majorana mode, is naturally stable against perturbations, such as unwanted local noise, and can thereby robustly store quantum information. As such, Majorana modes serve as the basic primitive of topological quantum computing, providing resilience to errors. However, their demonstration on quantum hardware has remained elusive. Here, we demonstrate a verifiable identification and braiding of topological Majorana modes using a superconducting quantum processor as a quantum simulator. By simulating fermions on a one-dimensional lattice subject to a periodic drive, we confirm the existence of Majorana modes localized at the edges, and distinguish them from other trivial modes. To simulate a basic logical operation of topological quantum computing known as braiding, we propose a non-adiabatic technique, whose implementation reveals correct braiding statistics in our experiments. This work could further be used to study topological models of matter using circuit-based simulations, and shows that long-sought quantum phenomena can be realized by anyone in cloud-run quantum simulations, whereby accelerating fundamental discoveries in quantum science and technology.
Semi-Supervised Super-Resolution

Super-Resolution is the technique to improve the quality of a low-resolution photo by boosting its plausible resolution. The computer vision community has extensively explored the area of Super-Resolution. However, previous Super-Resolution methods require vast amounts of data for training which becomes problematic in domains where very few low-resolution, high-resolution pairs might be available. One such area is statistical downscaling, where super-resolution is increasingly being used to obtain high-resolution climate information from low-resolution data. Acquiring high-resolution climate data is extremely expensive and challenging. To reduce the cost of generating high-resolution climate information, Super-Resolution algorithms should be able to train with a limited number of low-resolution, high-resolution pairs. This paper tries to solve the aforementioned problem by introducing a semi-supervised way to perform super-resolution that can generate sharp, high-resolution images with as few as 500 paired examples. The proposed semi-supervised technique can be used as a plug-and-play module with any supervised GAN-based Super-Resolution method to enhance its performance. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the performance of the proposed model and compare it with completely supervised methods as well as other unsupervised techniques. Comprehensive evaluations show the superiority of our method over other methods on different metrics. We also offer the applicability of our approach in statistical downscaling to obtain high-resolution climate images.
Error propagation in NISQ devices for solving classical optimization problems

We propose a random circuit model to analyze the impact of noise on the performance of variational quantum circuits for classical optimization problems. Our model accounts for the propagation of arbitrary single qubit errors through the circuit. We find that even with a small noise rate, the quality of the obtained classical optima is low on average and a single-qubit error rate of $1 / nD$, where $n$ is the number of qubits and $D$ is the circuit depth, is needed for the possibility of a quantum advantage. We estimate that this translates to an error rate lower than $10^{-6}$ using QAOA for classical optimization problems with 2D circuits.
Independence Testing for Bounded Degree Bayesian Network

We study the following independence testing problem: given access to samples from a distribution $P$ over $\{0,1\}^n$, decide whether $P$ is a product distribution or whether it is $\varepsilon$-far in total variation distance from any product distribution. For arbitrary distributions, this problem requires $\exp(n)$ samples. We show in this work that if $P$ has a sparse structure, then in fact only linearly many samples are required. Specifically, if $P$ is Markov with respect to a Bayesian network whose underlying DAG has in-degree bounded by $d$, then $\tilde{\Theta}(2^{d/2}\cdot n/\varepsilon^2)$ samples are necessary and sufficient for independence testing.
A Barzilai-Borwein Descent Method for Multiobjective Optimization Problems

The steepest descent method proposed by Fliege et al. motivates the research on descent methods for multiobjective optimization, which has received increasing attention in recent years. However, empirical results show that the Armijo line search often gives a very small stepsize along the steepest direction, which decelerates the convergence seriously. This paper points out that the issue is mainly due to the imbalances among objective functions. To address this issue, we propose a Barzilai-Borwein descent method for multiobjective optimization (BBDMO) that dynamically tunes gradient magnitudes using Barzilai-Borwein's rule in direction-finding subproblem. With monotone and nonmonotone line search techniques, it is proved that accumulation points generated by BBDMO are Pareto critical points, respectively. Furthermore, theoretical results indicate the Armijo line search can achieve a better stepsize in BBDMO. Finally, comparative results of numerical experiments are reported to illustrate the efficiency of BBDMO and verify the theoretical results.
Enhancing wellbeing: designing to enable desired narratives

Recent research has looked at how products and services can enable positive narratives about those who use them and at the beneficial impact that this has on wellbeing. To date this work has focused on how users’ desired life-narratives can be identified from the products and services they most cherish and which add the greatest value to their lives. This paper reports an exploratory study aimed at taking the work to the next stage - starting with a desired set of narratives and designing a product or service that enables them. A user (n = 1) worked with the research team, using an autoethnographic approach, to identify his desired life narratives. He then designed an experience – in this case a motorcycle rally – to enable a selection of these narratives. It was concluded that the outcomes suggest that it is possible to design for a set of desired narratives. However, challenges remain in terms of making the approach scalable. A multistage approach to meeting these is outlined.
A Tour of Visualization Techniques for Computer Vision Datasets

We survey a number of data visualization techniques for analyzing Computer Vision (CV) datasets. These techniques help us understand properties and latent patterns in such data, by applying dataset-level analysis. We present various examples of how such analysis helps predict the potential impact of the dataset properties on CV models and informs appropriate mitigation of their shortcomings. Finally, we explore avenues for further visualization techniques of different modalities of CV datasets as well as ones that are tailored to support specific CV tasks and analysis needs.
Improving Students’ Narrative Text Writing through Narrative Endings and Story Mountain

Writing skills are an essential part of communication. Good writing skills enable people to deliver their message clearly and efficiently. However, writing in a foreign language is considered the most difficult skill among other skills. Thus, the students face many challenges in writing. Hence, this study aims to investigate narrative ending and story mountain templates in improving students' ability to write narrative text. The study was conducted in SMA Islam Nurul Fikri Boarding School Serang. The participants were grade X Science 4 consists of 27 female students. The method used was classroom action research. The data was gained from observation, the writing tests, and the questionnaires given to the students. The study results based on the observation showed that the students showed more enthusiasm when the teacher applied narrative ending and story mountain template in teaching narrative text. The scores of the students' writing improved from the pre-test, which was 77, cycle 1 was 82, and cycle 2 was 86. The questionnaires revealed that the students enjoyed the writing class using narrative ending and story mountain template. They believed that both techniques were good to improve their writing skills of narrative text. Thus, it can be concluded that narrative ending and story mountain can improve students' writing of the narrative text.
"Flux+Mutability": A Conditional Generative Approach to One-Class Classification and Anomaly Detection

Anomaly Detection is becoming increasingly popular within the experimental physics community. At experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, anomaly detection is at the forefront of finding new physics beyond the Standard Model. This paper details the implementation of a novel Machine Learning architecture, called Flux+Mutability, which combines cutting-edge conditional generative models with clustering algorithms. In the `flux' stage we learn the distribution of a reference class. The `mutability' stage at inference addresses if data significantly deviates from the reference class. We demonstrate the validity of our approach and its connection to multiple problems spanning from one-class classification to anomaly detection. In particular, we apply our method to the isolation of neutral showers in an electromagnetic calorimeter and show its performance in detecting anomalous dijets events from standard QCD background. This approach limits assumptions on the reference sample and remains agnostic to the complementary class of objects of a given problem. We describe the possibility of dynamically generating a reference population and defining selection criteria via quantile cuts. Remarkably this flexible architecture can be deployed for a wide range of problems, and applications like multi-class classification or data quality control are left for further exploration.
Unsupervised Deep Learning Meets Chan-Vese Model

The Chan-Vese (CV) model is a classic region-based method in image segmentation. However, its piecewise constant assumption does not always hold for practical applications. Many improvements have been proposed but the issue is still far from well solved. In this work, we propose an unsupervised image segmentation approach that integrates the CV model with deep neural networks, which significantly improves the original CV model's segmentation accuracy. Our basic idea is to apply a deep neural network that maps the image into a latent space to alleviate the violation of the piecewise constant assumption in image space. We formulate this idea under the classic Bayesian framework by approximating the likelihood with an evidence lower bound (ELBO) term while keeping the prior term in the CV model. Thus, our model only needs the input image itself and does not require pre-training from external datasets. Moreover, we extend the idea to multi-phase case and dataset based unsupervised image segmentation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model and show that the proposed method is noticeably better than other unsupervised segmentation approaches.
How Gender Debiasing Affects Internal Model Representations, and Why It Matters

Common studies of gender bias in NLP focus either on extrinsic bias measured by model performance on a downstream task or on intrinsic bias found in models' internal representations. However, the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic bias is relatively unknown. In this work, we illuminate this relationship by measuring both quantities together: we debias a model during downstream fine-tuning, which reduces extrinsic bias, and measure the effect on intrinsic bias, which is operationalized as bias extractability with information-theoretic probing. Through experiments on two tasks and multiple bias metrics, we show that our intrinsic bias metric is a better indicator of debiasing than (a contextual adaptation of) the standard WEAT metric, and can also expose cases of superficial debiasing. Our framework provides a comprehensive perspective on bias in NLP models, which can be applied to deploy NLP systems in a more informed manner. Our code and model checkpoints are publicly available.
Character-focused Video Thumbnail Retrieval

We explore retrieving character-focused video frames as candidates for being video thumbnails. To evaluate each frame of the video based on the character(s) present in it, characters (faces) are evaluated in two aspects: Facial-expression: We train a CNN model to measure whether a face has an acceptable facial expression for being in a video thumbnail. This model is trained to distinguish faces extracted from artworks/thumbnails, from faces extracted from random frames of videos. Prominence and interactions: Character(s) in the thumbnail should be important character(s) in the video, to prevent the algorithm from suggesting non-representative frames as candidates. We use face clustering to identify the characters in the video, and form a graph in which the prominence (frequency of appearance) of the character(s), and their interactions (co-occurrence) are captured. We use this graph to infer the relevance of the characters present in each candidate frame. Once every face is scored based on the two criteria above, we infer frame level scores by combining the scores for all the faces within a frame.
Imbalanced Classification via a Tabular Translation GAN

When presented with a binary classification problem where the data exhibits severe class imbalance, most standard predictive methods may fail to accurately model the minority class. We present a model based on Generative Adversarial Networks which uses additional regularization losses to map majority samples to corresponding synthetic minority samples. This translation mechanism encourages the synthesized samples to be close to the class boundary. Furthermore, we explore a selection criterion to retain the most useful of the synthesized samples. Experimental results using several downstream classifiers on a variety of tabular class-imbalanced datasets show that the proposed method improves average precision when compared to alternative re-weighting and oversampling techniques.
Bi-PPT channels are entanglement breaking

In a recent paper, Hirche and Leditzky introduced the notion of bi-PPT channels which are quantum channels that stay completely positive under composition with a transposition and such that the same property holds for one of their complementary channels. They asked whether there are examples of such channels that are not antidegradable. We show that this is not the case, since bi-PPT channels are always entanglement breaking. We also show that degradable quantum channels staying completely positive under composition with a transposition are entanglement breaking.
Structure and Semantics Preserving Document Representations

Retrieving relevant documents from a corpus is typically based on the semantic similarity between the document content and query text. The inclusion of structural relationship between documents can benefit the retrieval mechanism by addressing semantic gaps. However, incorporating these relationships requires tractable mechanisms that balance structure with semantics and take advantage of the prevalent pre-train/fine-tune paradigm. We propose here a holistic approach to learning document representations by integrating intra-document content with inter-document relations. Our deep metric learning solution analyzes the complex neighborhood structure in the relationship network to efficiently sample similar/dissimilar document pairs and defines a novel quintuplet loss function that simultaneously encourages document pairs that are semantically relevant to be closer and structurally unrelated to be far apart in the representation space. Furthermore, the separation margins between the documents are varied flexibly to encode the heterogeneity in relationship strengths. The model is fully fine-tunable and natively supports query projection during inference. We demonstrate that it outperforms competing methods on multiple datasets for document retrieval tasks.
Testing robustness of predictions of trained classifiers against naturally occurring perturbations

Correctly quantifying the robustness of machine learning models is a central aspect in judging their suitability for specific tasks, and ultimately, for generating trust in them. We address the problem of finding the robustness of individual predictions. We show both theoretically and with empirical examples that a method based on counterfactuals that was previously proposed for this is insufficient, as it is not a valid metric for determining the robustness against perturbations that occur ``naturally'', outside specific adversarial attack scenarios. We propose a flexible approach that models possible perturbations in input data individually for each application. This is then combined with a probabilistic approach that computes the likelihood that a ``real-world'' perturbation will change a prediction, thus giving quantitative information of the robustness of individual predictions of the trained machine learning model. The method does not require access to the internals of the classifier and thus in principle works for any black-box model. It is, however, based on Monte-Carlo sampling and thus only suited for input spaces with small dimensions. We illustrate our approach on the Iris and the Ionosphere datasets, on an application predicting fog at an airport, and on analytically solvable cases.
BatchFormerV2: Exploring Sample Relationships for Dense Representation Learning

Attention mechanisms have been very popular in deep neural networks, where the Transformer architecture has achieved great success in not only natural language processing but also visual recognition applications. Recently, a new Transformer module, applying on batch dimension rather than spatial/channel dimension, i.e., BatchFormer [18], has been introduced to explore sample relationships for overcoming data scarcity challenges. However, it only works with image-level representations for classification. In this paper, we devise a more general batch Transformer module, BatchFormerV2, which further enables exploring sample relationships for dense representation learning. Specifically, when applying the proposed module, it employs a two-stream pipeline during training, i.e., either with or without a BatchFormerV2 module, where the batchformer stream can be removed for testing. Therefore, the proposed method is a plug-and-play module and can be easily integrated into different vision Transformers without any extra inference cost. Without bells and whistles, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method for a variety of popular visual recognition tasks, including image classification and two important dense prediction tasks: object detection and panoptic segmentation. Particularly, BatchFormerV2 consistently improves current DETR-based detection methods (e.g., DETR, Deformable-DETR, Conditional DETR, and SMCA) by over 1.3%. Code will be made publicly available.
Linear Hashing with $\ell_\infty$ guarantees and two-sided Kakeya bounds

We show that a randomly chosen linear map over a finite field gives a good hash function in the $\ell_\infty$ sense. More concretely, consider a set $S \subset \mathbb{F}_q^n$ and a randomly chosen linear map $L : \mathbb{F}_q^n \to \mathbb{F}_q^t$ with $q^t$ taken to be sufficiently smaller than $ |S|$. Let $U_S$ denote a random variable distributed uniformly on $S$. Our main theorem shows that, with high probability over the choice of $L$, the random variable $L(U_S)$ is close to uniform in the $\ell_\infty$ norm. In other words, {\em every} element in the range $\mathbb{F}_q^t$ has about the same number of elements in $S$ mapped to it. This complements the widely-used Leftover Hash Lemma (LHL) which proves the analog statement under the statistical, or $\ell_1$, distance (for a richer class of functions) as well as prior work on the expected largest 'bucket size' in linear hash functions [ADMPT99]. By known bounds from the load balancing literature [RS98], our results are tight and show that linear functions hash as well as trully random function up to a constant factor in the entropy loss. Our proof leverages a connection between linear hashing and the finite field Kakeya problem and extends some of the tools developed in this area, in particular the polynomial method.
Corner Affinity: A Robust Grouping Algorithm to Make Corner-guided Detector Great Again

Corner-guided detector enjoys potential ability to yield precise bounding boxes. However, unreliable corner pairs, generated by heuristic grouping guidance, hinder the development of this detector. In this paper, we propose a novel corner grouping algorithm, termed as Corner Affinity, to significantly boost the reliability and robustness of corner grouping. The proposed Corner Affinity is a couple of two interactional factors, namely, 1) the structure affinity (SA), applying to generate preliminary corner pairs through the corresponding object's shallow construction information. 2) the contexts affinity (CA), running as optimizing corner pairs via embedding deeper semantic features of affiliated instances. Equipped with the Corner Affinity, a detector can produce high-quality bounding boxes upon preferable paired corner keypoints. Experimental results show the superiority of our design on multiple benchmark datasets. Specifically, for CornerNet baseline, the proposed Corner Affinity brings AP boostings of 5.8% on COCO, 35.8% on Citypersons, and 17.2% on UCAS-AOD without bells and whistles.
Random Fully Connected Neural Networks as Perturbatively Solvable Hierarchies

This article considers fully connected neural networks with Gaussian random weights and biases as well as $L$ hidden layers, each of width proportional to a large parameter $n$. For polynomially bounded non-linearities we give sharp estimates in powers of $1/n$ for the joint cumulants of the network output and its derivatives. Moreover, we show that network cumulants form a perturbatively solvable hierarchy in powers of $1/n$ in that $k$-th order cumulants in one layer have recursions that depend to leading order in $1/n$ only on $j$-th order cumulants at the previous layer with $j\leq k$. By solving a variety of such recursions, however, we find that the depth-to-width ratio $L/n$ plays the role of an effective network depth, controlling both the scale of fluctuations at individual neurons and the size of inter-neuron correlations. Thus, while the cumulant recursions we derive form a hierarchy in powers of $1/n$, contributions of order $1/n^k$ often grow like $L^k$ and are hence non-negligible at positive $L/n$. We use this to study a somewhat simplified version of the exploding and vanishing gradient problem, proving that this particular variant occurs if and only if $L/n$ is large. Several key ideas in this article were first developed at a physics level of rigor in a recent monograph of Daniel A. Roberts, Sho Yaida, and the author. This article not only makes these ideas mathematically precise but also significantly extends them, opening the way to obtaining corrections to all orders in $1/n$.