Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Randomized Linear Gate-Set Tomography

Characterizing the noise in the set of gate operations that form the building blocks of a quantum computational device is a necessity for assessing the quality of the device. Here, we introduce randomized linear gate set tomography, an easy-to-implement gate set tomography procedure that combines the idea of state-preparation-and-measurement-error-free characterization of standard gate set tomography with no-design randomized tomographic circuits and computational ease brought about by an appropriate linear approximation. We demonstrate the performance of our scheme through simulated examples as well as experiments done on the IBM Quantum Experience Platform. In each case, we see that the performance of our procedure is comparable with that of standard gateset tomography, while requiring no complicated tomographic circuit design and taking much less computational time in deducing the estimate of the noise parameters. This allows for straightforward on-the-fly characterization of the gate operations in an experiment.
Learning Waveform-Based Acoustic Models Using Deep Variational Convolutional Neural Networks

We investigate the potential of stochastic neural networks for learning effective waveform-based acoustic models. The waveform-based setting, inherent to fully end-to-end speech recognition systems, is motivated by several comparative studies of automatic and human speech recognition that associate standard non-adaptive feature extraction techniques with information loss, which can adversely affect robustness. Stochastic neural networks, on the other hand, are a class of models capable of incorporating rich regularization mechanisms into the learning process. We consider a deep convolutional neural network that first decomposes speech into frequency sub-bands via an adaptive parametric convolutional block where filters are specified by cosine modulations of compactly supported windows. The network then employs standard non-parametric 1D convolutions to extract relevant spectro-temporal patterns while gradually compressing the structured high dimensional representation generated by the parametric block. We rely on a probabilistic parametrization of the proposed neural architecture and learn the model using stochastic variational inference. This requires evaluation of an analytically intractable integral defining the Kullback-Leibler divergence term responsible for regularization, for which we propose an effective approximation based on the Gauss-Hermite quadrature. Our empirical results demonstrate a superior performance of the proposed approach over comparable waveform-based baselines and indicate that it could lead to robustness. Moreover, the approach outperforms a recently proposed deep convolutional neural network for learning of robust acoustic models with standard FBANK features.
Cross-Verification of Independent Quantum Devices

Quantum computers are on the brink of surpassing the capabilities of even the most powerful classical computers. This naturally raises the question of how one can trust the results of a quantum computer when they cannot be compared to classical simulation. Here we present a verification technique that exploits the principles of measurement-based quantum computation to link quantum circuits of different input size, depth, and structure. Our approach enables consistency checks of quantum computations within a device, as well as between independent devices. We showcase our protocol by applying it to five state-of-the-art quantum processors, based on four distinct physical architectures: nuclear magnetic resonance, superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and photonics, with up to 6 qubits and 200 distinct circuits.
Copy-move image forgery detection based on evolving circular domains coverage

The aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy of copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) in image forensics by proposing a novel scheme and the main contribution is evolving circular domains coverage (ECDC) algorithm. The proposed scheme integrates both block-based and keypoint-based forgery detection methods. Firstly, the speed-up robust feature (SURF) in log-polar space and the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) are extracted from an entire image. Secondly, generalized 2 nearest neighbor (g2NN) is employed to get massive matched pairs. Then, random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is employed to filter out mismatched pairs, thus allowing rough localization of counterfeit areas. To present these forgery areas more accurately, we propose the efficient and accurate ECDC algorithm to present them. This algorithm can find satisfactory threshold areas by extracting block features from jointly evolving circular domains, which are centered on matched pairs. Finally, morphological operation is applied to refine the detected forgery areas. Experimental results indicate that the proposed CMFD scheme can achieve better detection performance under various attacks compared with other state-of-the-art CMFD schemes.
Toward new multi-wavelets: associated filters and algorithms. Part I: theoretical framework and investigation of biomedical signals, ECG, and coronavirus cases

Biosignals are nowadays important subjects for scientific researches from both theory, and applications, especially, with the appearance of new pandemics threatening the humanity such as the new coronavirus. One aim in the present work is to prove that wavelets may be a successful machinery to understand such phenomena by applying a step forward extension of wavelets to multi-wavelets. We proposed in a first step to improve multi-wavelet notion by constructing more general families using independent components for multi-scaling and multi-wavelet mother functions. A special multi-wavelet is then introduced, continuous, and discrete multi-wavelet transforms are associated, as well as new filters, and algorithms of decomposition, and reconstruction. Applied breakthroughs of the paper may be summarized in three aims. In a first direction, an approximation (reconstruction) of a classical (stationary, periodic) example dealing with Fourier modes has been conducted in order to confirm the efficiency of the HSch multi-wavelets in approximating such signals and in providing fast algorithms. The second experimentation is concerned with the decomposition and reconstruction application of the HSch multi-wavelet on an ECG signal. The last experimentation is concerned with a de-noising application on a strain of coronavirus signal permitting to localize approximately the transmembrane segments of such a series as neighborhoods of the local maxima of an numerized version of the strain. Accuracy of the method has been evaluated by means of error estimates and statistical tests.
Local transformations of multiple multipartite states

Understanding multipartite entanglement is vital, as it underpins a wide range of phenomena across physics. The study of transformations of states via Local Operations assisted by Classical Communication (LOCC) allows one to quantitatively analyse entanglement, as it induces a partial order in the Hilbert space. However, it has been shown that, for systems with fixed local dimensions, this order is generically trivial, which prevents relating multipartite states to each other with respect to any entanglement measure. In order to obtain a non-trivial partial ordering, we study a physically motivated extension of LOCC: multi-state LOCC. Here, one considers simultaneous LOCC transformations acting on a finite number of entangled pure states. We study both multipartite and bipartite multi-state transformations. In the multipartite case, we demonstrate that one can change the stochastic LOCC (SLOCC) class of the individual initial states by only applying Local Unitaries (LUs). We show that, by transferring entanglement from one state to the other, one can perform state conversions not possible in the single copy case; provide examples of multipartite entanglement catalysis; and demonstrate improved probabilistic protocols. In the bipartite case, we identify numerous non-trivial LU transformations and show that the source entanglement is not additive. These results demonstrate that multi-state LOCC has a much richer landscape than single-state LOCC.
Extraction of long k-mers using spaced seeds

The extraction of k-mers from sequencing reads is an important task in many bioinformatics applications, such as all DNA sequence analysis methods based on de Bruijn graphs. These methods tend to be more accurate when the used k-mers are unique in the analyzed DNA, and thus the use of longer k-mers is preferred. When the read lengths of short read sequencing technologies increase, the error rate will become the determining factor for the largest possible value of k. Here we propose LoMeX which uses spaced seeds to extract long k-mers accurately even in the presence of sequencing errors. Our experiments show that LoMeX can extract long k-mers from current Illumina reads with a higher recall than a standard k-mer counting tool. Furthermore, our experiments on simulated data show that when the read length further increases, the performance of standard k-mer counters declines, whereas LoMeX still extracts long k-mers successfully.
Industry and workplace characteristics associated with the downloading of a COVID-19 contact tracing app in Japan: a nation-wide cross-sectional study

To combat coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many countries have used contact tracing apps, including Japan's voluntary-use contact-confirming application (COCOA). The current study aimed to identify industry and workplace characteristics associated with the downloading of this COVID-19 contact tracing app.This cross-sectional study of full-time workers used an online survey. Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate the associations of industry and workplace characteristics with contact tracing app use.Of the 27,036 participants, 25.1% had downloaded the COCOA. Workers in the public service (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 1.29, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.14-1.45) and information technology (aOR = 1.38, 95% CI 1.20-1.58) industries were more likely to use the app than were those in the manufacturing industry. In contrast, app usage was less common among workers in the retail and wholesale (aOR = 0.87, 95% CI 0.76-0.99) and food/beverage (aOR = 0.81, 95% CI 0.70-0.94) industries, but further adjustment for company size attenuated these associations. Workers at larger companies were more likely to use the app. Compared with permanent employees, the odds of using the app were higher for managers and civil servants but lower for those who were self-employed.Downloading of COCOA among Japanese workers was insufficient; thus, the mitigating effect of COCOA on the COVID-19 pandemic is considered to be limited. One possible reason for the under-implementation of the contact tracing app in the retail and wholesale and food/beverage industries is small company size, as suggested by the fully adjusted model results. An awareness campaign should be conducted to promote the widespread use of the contact tracing app in these industries.
Supervised sequential pattern mining of event sequences in sport to identify important patterns of play: An application to rugby union

Given a set of sequences comprised of time-ordered events, sequential pattern mining is useful to identify frequent subsequences from different sequences or within the same sequence. However, in sport, these techniques cannot determine the importance of particular patterns of play to good or bad outcomes, which is often of greater interest to coaches and performance analysts. In this study, we apply a recently proposed supervised sequential pattern mining algorithm called safe pattern pruning (SPP) to 490 labelled event sequences representing passages of play from one rugby team’s matches in the 2018 Japan Top League season. We obtain patterns that are the most discriminative between scoring and non-scoring outcomes from both the team’s and opposition teams’ perspectives using SPP, and compare these with the most frequent patterns obtained with well-known unsupervised sequential pattern mining algorithms when applied to subsets of the original dataset, split on the label. From our obtained results, line breaks, successful line-outs, regained kicks in play, repeated phase-breakdown play, and failed exit plays by the opposition team were found to be the patterns that discriminated most between the team scoring and not scoring. Opposition team line breaks, errors made by the team, opposition team line-outs, and repeated phase-breakdown play by the opposition team were found to be the patterns that discriminated most between the opposition team scoring and not scoring. It was also found that, probably because of the supervised nature and pruning/safe-screening mechanisms of SPP, compared to the patterns obtained by the unsupervised methods, those obtained by SPP were more sophisticated in terms of containing a greater variety of events, and when interpreted, the SPP-obtained patterns would also be more useful for coaches and performance analysts.
A Novel Medical Image Denoising Method Based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Medical image quality is highly relative to clinical diagnosis and treatment, leading to a popular research topic of medical image denoising. Image denoising based on deep learning methods has attracted considerable attention owing to its excellent ability of automatic feature extraction. Most existing methods for medical image denoising adapted to certain types of noise have difficulties in handling spatially varying noise; meanwhile, image detail losses and structure changes occurred in the denoised image. Considering image context perception and structure preserving, this paper firstly introduces a medical image denoising method based on conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) for various unknown noises. In the proposed architecture, noise image with the corresponding gradient image is merged as network conditional information, which enhances the contrast between the original signal and noise according to the structural specificity. A novel generator with residual dense blocks makes full use of the relationship among convolutional layers to explore image context. Furthermore, the reconstruction loss and WGAN loss are combined as the objective loss function to ensure the consistency of denoised image and real image. A series of experiments for medical image denoising are conducted with the denoising results of <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"> <mtext>PSNR</mtext> <mo>=</mo> <mn>33.2642</mn> </math> and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M2"> <mtext>SSIM</mtext> <mo>=</mo> <mn>0.9206</mn> </math> on JSRT datasets and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M3"> <mtext>PSNR</mtext> <mo>=</mo> <mn>35.1086</mn> </math> and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M4"> <mtext>SSIM</mtext> <mo>=</mo> <mn>0.9328</mn> </math> on LIDC datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the superior performance of the proposed method is outstanding.
Efficient Certification of Endpoint Control on Blockchain

In many applications, identity management (IdM) is used to associate a subject public key with an endpoint at which the subject can be contacted (telephone number, email, etc.). In decentralized applications based on distributed ledger technologies (DLTes), it is desirable for the IdM to be decentralized as well. Currently, endpoints are either verified by who needs it, which is impractical in DLT-based applications, or by a centralized authority, which contrasts with the spirit of DLTes. In this paper, we show two DLT-based protocols to prove the association between a subject and an endpoint in a decentralized manner, contributing in filling the gap of the current IdM approaches with respect to decentralization. Our protocols are compatible with a wide variety of endpoints. We analyze the security of our protocols and evaluate their performance and cost against the common approaches.
Fast-forwarding with NISQ processors without feedback loop

Simulating quantum dynamics is expected to be performed more easily on a quantum computer than on a classical computer. However, the currently available quantum devices lack the capability to implement fault-tolerant quantum algorithms for quantum simulation. Hybrid classical quantum algorithms such as the variational quantum algorithms have been proposed to effectively use current term quantum devices. One promising approach to quantum simulation in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era is the diagonalisation based approach, with some of the promising examples being the subspace Variational Quantum Simulator (SVQS), Variational Fast Forwarding (VFF), fixed-state Variational Fast Forwarding (fs-VFF), and the Variational Hamiltonian Diagonalisation (VHD) algorithms. However, these algorithms require a feedback loop between the classical and quantum computers, which can be a crucial bottleneck in practical application. Here, we present the Classical Quantum Fast Forwarding (CQFF) as an alternative diagonalisation based algorithm for quantum simulation. CQFF shares some similarities with SVQS, VFF, fs-VFF and VHD but removes the need for a classical-quantum feedback loop and controlled multi-qubit unitaries. The CQFF algorithm does not suffer from the barren plateau problem and the accuracy can be systematically increased. Furthermore, if the Hamiltonian to be simulated is expressed as a linear combination of tensored-Pauli matrices, the CQFF algorithm reduces to the task of sampling some many-body quantum state in a set of Pauli-rotated bases, which is easy to do in the NISQ era. We run the CQFF algorithm on existing quantum processors and demonstrate the promise of the CQFF algorithm for current-term quantum hardware. Our work provides a $10^4$ improvement over the previous record.
Lowering the Helstrom bound with non-standard coherent states

In quantum information processing, {using a receiver device to differentiate between two nonorthogonal states leads to a quantum error probability. The minimum possible error is} known as the Helstrom bound. In this work we study and compare quantum limits for states which generalize the Glauber-Sudarshan coherent states, like non-linear, Perelomov, Barut-Girardello, and (modified) Susskind-Glogower coherent states. For some of these, we show that the Helstrom bound can be significantly lowered and even vanish in specific regimes.
MW-GAN: Multi-Warping GAN for Caricature Generation With Multi-Style Geometric Exaggeration

Given an input face photo, the goal of caricature generation is to produce stylized, exaggerated caricatures that share the same identity as the photo. It requires simultaneous style transfer and shape exaggeration with rich diversity, and meanwhile preserving the identity of the input. To address this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Warping GAN (MW-GAN), including a style network and a geometric network that are designed to conduct style transfer and geometric exaggeration respectively. We bridge the gap between the style/landmark space and their corresponding latent code spaces by a dual way design, so as to generate caricatures with arbitrary styles and geometric exaggeration, which can be specified either through random sampling of latent code or from a given caricature sample. Besides, we apply identity preserving loss to both image space and landmark space, leading to a great improvement in quality of generated caricatures. Experiments show that caricatures generated by MW-GAN have better quality than existing methods.
Simultaneous neural machine translation with a reinforced attention mechanism

To translate in real time, a simultaneous translation system should determine when to stop reading source tokens and generate target tokens corresponding to a partial source sentence read up to that point. However, conventional attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) models cannot produce translations with adequate latency in online scenarios because they wait until a source sentence is completed to compute alignment between the source and target tokens. To address this issue, we propose a reinforced learning (RL)-based attention mechanism, the reinforced attention mechanism, which allows a neural translation model to jointly train the stopping criterion and a partial translation model. The proposed attention mechanism comprises two modules, one to ensure translation quality and the other to address latency. Different from previous RL-based simultaneous translation systems, which learn the stopping criterion from a fixed NMT model, the modules can be trained jointly with a novel reward function. In our experiments, the proposed model has better translation quality and comparable latency compared to previous models.
Electron shelving of a superconducting artificial atom

Interfacing long-lived qubits with propagating photons is a fundamental challenge in quantum technology. Cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architectures rely on an off-resonant cavity, which blocks the qubit emission and enables a quantum non-demolition (QND) dispersive readout. However, no such buffer mode is necessary for controlling a large class of three-level systems that combine a metastable qubit transition with a bright cycling transition, using the electron shelving effect. Here we demonstrate shelving of a circuit atom, fluxonium, placed inside a microwave waveguide. With no cavity modes in the setup, the qubit coherence time exceeds 50 μs, and the cycling transition's radiative lifetime is under 100 ns. By detecting a homodyne fluorescence signal from the cycling transition, we implement a QND readout of the qubit and account for readout errors using a minimal optical pumping model. Our result establishes a resource-efficient (cavityless) alternative to cQED for controlling superconducting qubits.
Fuzzy-Based, Noise-Resilient, Explainable Algorithm for Regression

The main properties of the presented algorithm are noise resilience and explainability in regression problems. This function approximator has two parts. First, it utilizes a hierarchical clustering approach to initialize its parameters. The information of the clusters is merged with a fuzzy based Takagi-Sugeno-Kang methodology. Second, the model is fine-tuned with gradient descent learning. The last section of the paper is a benchmark with different neural network architectures. The results show an improvement in performance that encourages further use of this technique.