Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Policy-focused Stance Detection in Parliamentary Debate Speeches

Legislative debate transcripts provide citizens with information about the activities of their elected representatives, but are difficult for people to process. We propose the novel task of policy-focused stance detection, in which both the policy proposals under debate and the position of the speakers towards those proposals are identified. We adapt a previously existing dataset to include manual annotations of policy preferences, an established schema from political science. We evaluate a range of approaches to the automatic classification of policy preferences and speech sentiment polarity, including transformer-based text representations and a multi-task learning paradigm. We find that it is possible to identify the policies under discussion using features derived from the speeches, and that incorporating motion-dependent debate modelling, previously used to classify speech sentiment, also improves performance in the classification of policy preferences. We analyse the output of the best performing system, finding that discriminating features for the task are highly domain-specific, and that speeches that address policy preferences proposed by members of the same party can be among the most difficult to predict.
Hierarchical Integration of Model Predictive and Fuzzy Logic Control for Combined Coverage and Target-Oriented Search-and-Rescue via Robots with Imperfect Sensors

Search-and-rescue (SaR) in unknown environments requires precise, optimal, and fast decisions. Robots are promising candidates for autonomously performing SaR tasks in unknown environments. While humans use their heuristics to effectively deal with uncertainties, optimisation of multiple objectives in the presence of physical and control constraints is a mathematical challenge that requires machine computations. Thus having both human-inspired and mathematical control capabilities is desired for SaR robots. Moreover, coordinating the decisions of robots with little computation cost in large-scale SaR missions is an open challenge. Finally, in real-life data perceived by SaR robots may be prone to uncertainties. We introduce a hierarchical multi-agent control architecture that exploits non-homogeneous and imperfect perception capabilities of SaR robots, as well as the computational efficiency and robustness to failure of decentralised control methods and global performance improvement of centralised control methods. The integrated structure of the proposed control framework allows to combine human-inspired and mathematical decision making methods in a coordinated and computationally efficient way. The results of various computer-based simulations show that while the area coverage of the proposed approach is comparable to existing heuristic methods that are particularly developed for coverage-oriented SaR, the efficiency of the introduced approach in locating the trapped victims is significantly higher. Furthermore, with comparable computation times, the proposed control approach successfully avoids potential conflicts that exist in non-cooperative methods. These results confirm that the proposed multi-agent control system is capable of combining coverage-oriented and target-oriented SaR in a balanced and coordinated way.
Parameterized Quantum Circuits with Quantum Kernels for Machine Learning: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach

Quantum machine learning (QML) is the use of quantum computing for the computation of machine learning algorithms. With the prevalence and importance of classical data, a hybrid quantum-classical approach to QML is called for. Parameterized Quantum Circuits (PQCs), and particularly Quantum Kernel PQCs, are generally used in the hybrid approach to QML. In this paper we discuss some important aspects of PQCs with quantum kernels including PQCs, quantum kernels, quantum kernels with quantum advantage, and the trainability of quantum kernels. We conclude that quantum kernels with hybrid kernel methods, a.k.a. quantum kernel methods, offer distinct advantages as a hybrid approach to QML. Not only do they apply to Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, but they also can be used to solve all types of machine learning problems including regression, classification, clustering, and dimension reduction. Furthermore, beyond quantum utility, quantum advantage can be attained if the quantum kernels, i.e., the quantum feature encodings, are classically intractable.
Lazy Probabilistic Roadmaps Revisited

This paper describes a revision of the classic Lazy Probabilistic Roadmaps algorithm (Lazy PRM), that results from pairing PRM and a novel Branch-and-Cut (BC) algorithm. Cuts are dynamically generated constraints that are imposed on minimum cost paths over the geometric graphs selected by PRM. Cuts eliminate paths that cannot be mapped into smooth plans that satisfy suitably defined kinematic constraints. We generate candidate smooth plans by fitting splines to vertices in minimum-cost path. Plans are validated with a recently proposed algorithm that maps them into finite traces, without need to choose a fixed discretization step. Trace elements exactly describe when plans cross constraint boundaries modulo arithmetic precision. We evaluate several planners using our methods over the recently proposed BARN benchmark, and we report evidence of the scalability of our approach.
Teaching Where to Look: Attention Similarity Knowledge Distillation for Low Resolution Face Recognition

Deep learning has achieved outstanding performance for face recognition benchmarks, but performance reduces significantly for low resolution (LR) images. We propose an attention similarity knowledge distillation approach, which transfers attention maps obtained from a high resolution (HR) network as a teacher into an LR network as a student to boost LR recognition performance. Inspired by humans being able to approximate an object's region from an LR image based on prior knowledge obtained from HR images, we designed the knowledge distillation loss using the cosine similarity to make the student network's attention resemble the teacher network's attention. Experiments on various LR face related benchmarks confirmed the proposed method generally improved recognition performances on LR settings, outperforming state-of-the-art results by simply transferring well-constructed attention maps. The code and pretrained models are publicly available in the https://github.com/gist-ailab/teaching-where-to-look.
Low-Stabilizer-Complexity Quantum States Are Not Pseudorandom

We show that quantum states with "low stabilizer complexity" can be efficiently distinguished from Haar-random. Specifically, given an $n$-qubit pure state $|ψ\rangle$, we give an efficient algorithm that distinguishes whether $|ψ\rangle$ is (i) Haar-random or (ii) a state with stabilizer fidelity at least $\frac{1}{k}$ (i.e., has fidelity at least $\frac{1}{k}$ with some stabilizer state), promised that one of these is the case. With black-box access to $|ψ\rangle$, our algorithm uses $O\!\left( k^{12} \log(1/δ)\right)$ copies of $|ψ\rangle$ and $O\!\left(n k^{12} \log(1/δ)\right)$ time to succeed with probability at least $1-δ$, and, with access to a state preparation unitary for $|ψ\rangle$ (and its inverse), $O\!\left( k^{3} \log(1/δ)\right)$ queries and $O\!\left(n k^{3} \log(1/δ)\right)$ time suffice. As a corollary, we prove that $ω(\log(n))$ $T$-gates are necessary for any Clifford+$T$ circuit to prepare computationally pseudorandom quantum states, a first-of-its-kind lower bound.
Denoising MCMC for Accelerating Diffusion-Based Generative Models

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that simulate the reverse of diffusion processes using score functions to synthesize data from noise. The sampling process of diffusion models can be interpreted as solving the reverse stochastic differential equation (SDE) or the ordinary differential equation (ODE) of the diffusion process, which often requires up to thousands of discretization steps to generate a single image. This has sparked a great interest in developing efficient integration techniques for reverse-S/ODEs. Here, we propose an orthogonal approach to accelerating score-based sampling: Denoising MCMC (DMCMC). DMCMC first uses MCMC to produce samples in the product space of data and variance (or diffusion time). Then, a reverse-S/ODE integrator is used to denoise the MCMC samples. Since MCMC traverses close to the data manifold, the computation cost of producing a clean sample for DMCMC is much less than that of producing a clean sample from noise. To verify the proposed concept, we show that Denoising Langevin Gibbs (DLG), an instance of DMCMC, successfully accelerates all six reverse-S/ODE integrators considered in this work on the tasks of CIFAR10 and CelebA-HQ-256 image generation. Notably, combined with integrators of Karras et al. (2022) and pre-trained score models of Song et al. (2021b), DLG achieves SOTA results. In the limited number of score function evaluation (NFE) settings on CIFAR10, we have $3.86$ FID with $\approx 10$ NFE and $2.63$ FID with $\approx 20$ NFE. On CelebA-HQ-256, we have $6.99$ FID with $\approx 160$ NFE, which beats the current best record of Kim et al. (2022) among score-based models, $7.16$ FID with $4000$ NFE. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/DMCMC
Hard thresholding hyperinterpolation over general regions

This paper proposes a novel variant of hyperinterpolation, called hard thresholding hyperinterpolation. This approximation scheme of degree $n$ leverages a hard thresholding operator to filter all hyperinterpolation coefficients which approximate the Fourier coefficients of a continuous function by a quadrature rule with algebraic exactness $2n$. We prove that hard thresholding hyperinterpolation is the unique solution to an $\ell_0$-regularized weighted discrete least squares approximation problem. Hard thresholding hyperinterpolation is not only idempotent and commutative with hyperinterpolation, but also satisfies the Pythagorean theorem. By estimating the reciprocal of the Christoffel function, we demonstrate that the upper bound of the uniform norm of hard thresholding hyperinterpolation operator is not greater than that of hyperinterpolation operator. Hard thresholding hyperinterpolation possesses denoising and basis selection abilities as Lasso hyperinterpolation. To judge the denoising effects of hard thresholding and Lasso hyperinterpolations, this paper yields a criterion that combines the regularization parameter and the product of noise coefficients and signs of hyperinterpolation coefficients. Numerical examples on the spherical triangle and the cube demonstrate the denoising performance of hard thresholding hyperinterpolation.
An Inductive Construction for Many-Valued Coalgebraic Modal Logic

In this paper, we present an abstract framework of many-valued modal logic with the interpretation of atomic propositions and modal operators as predicate lifting over coalgebras for an endofunctor on the category of sets. It generalizes Pattinson's stratification method for colagebraic modal logic to the many-valued setting. In contrast to standard techniques of canonical model construction and filtration, this method employs an induction principle to prove the soundness, completeness, and finite model property of the logics. As a consequence, we can lift a restriction on the previous approach~ \cite{Lin2022} that requires the underlying language must have the expressive power to internalize the meta-level truth valuation operations.
Sentiment Analysis on Inflation after Covid-19

We implement traditional machine learning and deep learning methods for global tweets from 2017-2022 to build a high-frequency measure of the public's sentiment index on inflation and analyze its correlation with other online data sources such as google trend and market-oriented inflation index. We use manually labeled trigrams to test the prediction performance of several machine learning models(logistic regression,random forest etc.) and choose Bert model for final demonstration. Later, we sum daily tweets' sentiment scores gained from Bert model to obtain the predicted inflation sentiment index, and we further analyze the regional and pre/post covid patterns of these inflation indexes. Lastly, we take other empirical inflation-related data as references and prove that twitter-based inflation sentiment analysis method has an outstanding capability to predict inflation. The results suggest that Twitter combined with deep learning methods can be a novel and timely method to utilize existing abundant data sources on inflation expectations and provide daily indicators of consumers' perception on inflation.
RECALL: Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Object Classification

Convolutional neural networks show remarkable results in classification but struggle with learning new things on the fly. We present a novel rehearsal-free approach, where a deep neural network is continually learning new unseen object categories without saving any data of prior sequences. Our approach is called RECALL, as the network recalls categories by calculating logits for old categories before training new ones. These are then used during training to avoid changing the old categories. For each new sequence, a new head is added to accommodate the new categories. To mitigate forgetting, we present a regularization strategy where we replace the classification with a regression. Moreover, for the known categories, we propose a Mahalanobis loss that includes the variances to account for the changing densities between known and unknown categories. Finally, we present a novel dataset for continual learning, especially suited for object recognition on a mobile robot (HOWS-CL-25), including 150,795 synthetic images of 25 household object categories. Our approach RECALL outperforms the current state of the art on CORe50 and iCIFAR-100 and reaches the best performance on HOWS-CL-25.
Speeding Up Action Recognition Using Dynamic Accumulation of Residuals in Compressed Domain

With the widespread use of installed cameras, video-based monitoring approaches have seized considerable attention for different purposes like assisted living. Temporal redundancy and the sheer size of raw videos are the two most common problematic issues related to video processing algorithms. Most of the existing methods mainly focused on increasing accuracy by exploring consecutive frames, which is laborious and cannot be considered for real-time applications. Since videos are mostly stored and transmitted in compressed format, these kinds of videos are available on many devices. Compressed videos contain a multitude of beneficial information, such as motion vectors and quantized coefficients. Proper use of this available information can greatly improve the video understanding methods' performance. This paper presents an approach for using residual data, available in compressed videos directly, which can be obtained by a light partially decoding procedure. In addition, a method for accumulating similar residuals is proposed, which dramatically reduces the number of processed frames for action recognition. Applying neural networks exclusively for accumulated residuals in the compressed domain accelerates performance, while the classification results are highly competitive with raw video approaches.
Perturbations and Subpopulations for Testing Robustness in Token-Based Argument Unit Recognition

Argument Unit Recognition and Classification aims at identifying argument units from text and classifying them as pro or against. One of the design choices that need to be made when developing systems for this task is what the unit of classification should be: segments of tokens or full sentences. Previous research suggests that fine-tuning language models on the token-level yields more robust results for classifying sentences compared to training on sentences directly. We reproduce the study that originally made this claim and further investigate what exactly token-based systems learned better compared to sentence-based ones. We develop systematic tests for analysing the behavioural differences between the token-based and the sentence-based system. Our results show that token-based models are generally more robust than sentence-based models both on manually perturbed examples and on specific subpopulations of the data.
On Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Quantum Computers

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) emerged as a powerful tool for solving scientific computing problems, ranging from the solution of Partial Differential Equations to data assimilation tasks. One of the advantages of using PINN is to leverage the usage of Machine Learning computational frameworks relying on the combined usage of CPUs and co-processors, such as accelerators, to achieve maximum performance. This work investigates the design, implementation, and performance of PINNs, using the Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) co-processor. We design a simple Quantum PINN to solve the one-dimensional Poisson problem using a Continuous Variable (CV) quantum computing framework. We discuss the impact of different optimizers, PINN residual formulation, and quantum neural network depth on the quantum PINN accuracy. We show that the optimizer exploration of the training landscape in the case of quantum PINN is not as effective as in classical PINN, and basic Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) optimizers outperform adaptive and high-order optimizers. Finally, we highlight the difference in methods and algorithms between quantum and classical PINNs and outline future research challenges for quantum PINN development.
Towards Lightweight Black-Box Attacks against Deep Neural Networks

Black-box attacks can generate adversarial examples without accessing the parameters of target model, largely exacerbating the threats of deployed deep neural networks (DNNs). However, previous works state that black-box attacks fail to mislead target models when their training data and outputs are inaccessible. In this work, we argue that black-box attacks can pose practical attacks in this extremely restrictive scenario where only several test samples are available. Specifically, we find that attacking the shallow layers of DNNs trained on a few test samples can generate powerful adversarial examples. As only a few samples are required, we refer to these attacks as lightweight black-box attacks. The main challenge to promoting lightweight attacks is to mitigate the adverse impact caused by the approximation error of shallow layers. As it is hard to mitigate the approximation error with few available samples, we propose Error TransFormer (ETF) for lightweight attacks. Namely, ETF transforms the approximation error in the parameter space into a perturbation in the feature space and alleviates the error by disturbing features. In experiments, lightweight black-box attacks with the proposed ETF achieve surprising results. For example, even if only 1 sample per category available, the attack success rate in lightweight black-box attacks is only about 3% lower than that of the black-box attacks with complete training data.
Virtual excitations and entanglement dynamics and polygamy in three ultra-strongly coupled systems

The Milburn dynamics of three nonresonant ultra-strongly coupled oscillators are resolved by using symplectic geometry. We look at the Milburn dynamics of virtual excitations and how they affect pairwise entanglement. It is found that the dynamics of excitations and entanglement experience similar profiles against time, physical parameters, and decoherence rate. Furthermore, we show that the extinction of excitations entails separability, which demonstrates the hierarchy between entanglement and virtual excitations. Additionally, we analyze the effects of physical parameters on the redistribution of virtual excitations among the three bi-partitions. As a result, we show the violation of the monogamy of excitations as in quantum discord. This implies that excitations can be considered as signatures of quantum correlations beyond entanglement. Besides, we emphasize that our treatment can be used to model coupled quantum circuits in real situations (with decoherence).
Joint Embedding Self-Supervised Learning in the Kernel Regime

The fundamental goal of self-supervised learning (SSL) is to produce useful representations of data without access to any labels for classifying the data. Modern methods in SSL, which form representations based on known or constructed relationships between samples, have been particularly effective at this task. Here, we aim to extend this framework to incorporate algorithms based on kernel methods where embeddings are constructed by linear maps acting on the feature space of a kernel. In this kernel regime, we derive methods to find the optimal form of the output representations for contrastive and non-contrastive loss functions. This procedure produces a new representation space with an inner product denoted as the induced kernel which generally correlates points which are related by an augmentation in kernel space and de-correlates points otherwise. We analyze our kernel model on small datasets to identify common features of self-supervised learning algorithms and gain theoretical insights into their performance on downstream tasks.
GDIP: Gated Differentiable Image Processing for Object-Detection in Adverse Conditions

Detecting objects under adverse weather and lighting conditions is crucial for the safe and continuous operation of an autonomous vehicle, and remains an unsolved problem. We present a Gated Differentiable Image Processing (GDIP) block, a domain-agnostic network architecture, which can be plugged into existing object detection networks (e.g., Yolo) and trained end-to-end with adverse condition images such as those captured under fog and low lighting. Our proposed GDIP block learns to enhance images directly through the downstream object detection loss. This is achieved by learning parameters of multiple image pre-processing (IP) techniques that operate concurrently, with their outputs combined using weights learned through a novel gating mechanism. We further improve GDIP through a multi-stage guidance procedure for progressive image enhancement. Finally, trading off accuracy for speed, we propose a variant of GDIP that can be used as a regularizer for training Yolo, which eliminates the need for GDIP-based image enhancement during inference, resulting in higher throughput and plausible real-world deployment. We demonstrate significant improvement in detection performance over several state-of-the-art methods through quantitative and qualitative studies on synthetic datasets such as PascalVOC, and real-world foggy (RTTS) and low-lighting (ExDark) datasets.
EiHi Net: Out-of-Distribution Generalization Paradigm

This paper develops a new EiHi net to solve the out-of-distribution (OoD) generalization problem in deep learning. EiHi net is a model learning paradigm that can be blessed on any visual backbone. This paradigm can change the previous learning method of the deep model, namely find out correlations between inductive sample features and corresponding categories, which suffers from pseudo correlations between indecisive features and labels. We fuse SimCLR and VIC-Reg via explicitly and dynamically establishing the original - positive - negative sample pair as a minimal learning element, the deep model iteratively establishes a relationship close to the causal one between features and labels, while suppressing pseudo correlations. To further validate the proposed model, and strengthen the established causal relationships, we develop a human-in-the-loop strategy, with few guidance samples, to prune the representation space directly. Finally, it is shown that the developed EiHi net makes significant improvements in the most difficult and typical OoD dataset Nico, compared with the current SOTA results, without any domain ($e.g.$ background, irrelevant features) information.