United States

In the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, using variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) to solve optimization problems has become a key application. However, these algorithms face significant challenges, such as choosing an effective initial set of parameters and the limited quantum processing time that restricts the number of optimization iterations.
In this study, we introduce a new framework for optimizing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) that employs a classical optimizer, inspired by Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) technique. This approach aim to achieve better parameter initialization that ensures fast convergence.
Our framework features a classical neural network, called ${Learner}$, which interacts with a PQC using the output of ${Learner}$ as an initial parameter. During the pre-training phase, ${Learner}$ is trained with the meta objective function. In the adaptation phase, the framework requires only a few PQC updates to converge to a more accurate value, while the learner remains unchanged. 
This method is highly adaptable and is effectively extended to various Hamiltonian optimization problems. We validate our approach through experiments, including distribution function mapping and optimization of the Heisenberg XYZ Hamiltonian. 
The result implies that the ${Learner}$ successfully estimates initial parameters that generalize across the problem space, enabling fast adaptation.

AAAI 2025

Q-MAML: Quantum Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Variational Quantum Algorithms

quantum machine learning

The Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing, in partnership with the Chinese Physical Society (CPS) and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) are proud to have brought together the international quantum science community online for this inaugural conference.


Early career and leading researchers from universities, industry and government worldwide came together to share, learn and collaborate on the latest research and emerging areas of high interest across quantum science and technology. The broad themes covered by Quantum 2020 included:

Quantum communication;
Quantum computing and quantum simulation;
Quantum sensing, metrology and imaging;
Quantum information theory, software and algorithms;
Quantum foundations;
Quantum technology in industry.
The four-day event featured talks from world-renowned scientists, interactive poster sessions and two exciting panel discussions on the themes of Quantum Technology in Industry and Quantum Technology Programmes Around the World.


You will need to [register](https://www.iopconferences.org/iop/frontend/reg/tRegisterEmailNew.csp?pageID=978403&eventID=1552&tempPersonID=536224) to obtain a ticket. . If you have already registered you should have been sent an email from Underline (to the email address that you registered with) with the subject line ‘Welcome to Quantum 2020’. This email includes your ticket for the event. 

If you have a ticket and are experiencing problems in accessing the event, please contact us. 

Quantum 2020

The Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing, in partnership with the Chinese Physical Society (CPS) and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) are proud to have brought together the international quantum science community online for this inaugural conference.

Early career and leading researchers from universities, industry and government worldwide came together to share, learn and collaborate on the latest research and emerging areas of high interest across quantum science and technology. 

poster

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Post-processing networks (PPNs) are components that modify the outputs of arbitrary modules in task-oriented dialogue systems and are optimized using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve the overall task completion capability of the system. However, previous PPN-based approaches have been limited to handling only a subset of modules within a system, posing a significant limitation on improving system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel joint optimization method for post-processing the outputs of all modules using universal post-processing networks (UniPPNs), which are language model-based networks capable of modifying the outputs of arbitrary modules in the system as a sequence transformation task. Moreover, our RL algorithm, which employs a module-level Markov decision process, enables fine-grained value and advantage estimation for each module, stabilizing the joint learning for post-processing the outputs of all modules. Through both simulation-based and human evaluation experiments using the MultiWOZ dataset, we demonstrate that UniPPN outperforms conventional PPNs in the task completion capability of task-oriented dialogue systems.

Universal Post-Processing Networks for Joint Optimization of Modules in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Abstract—Industrial anomaly detection achieves progress thanks to datasets such as MVTec AD and VISA. However, they suffer from limitations in terms of the number of defect samples, types of defects, and availability of real-world scenes. These constraints inhibit researchers from further exploring the performance of industrial detection with higher accuracy. To this end, we propose a new large-scale anomaly detection dataset called 3CAD, which is derived from real 3C production lines. Specifically, the proposed 3CAD includes eight different types of manufactured parts, totaling 26,775 high-resolution images labeled with pixel-level anomalies. The key features of 3CAD are that it covers anomalous regions of different sizes, multiple anomaly types, and the possibility of multiple anomalous regions and multiple anomaly types per anomaly image. This is the largest and first anomaly detection dataset dedicated to 3C product quality control for community exploration and development. Meanwhile, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for unsupervised anomaly detection: a Coarse-to-Fine detection paradigm with Recovery Guidance (CFRG). To detect small defect anomalies, the proposed CFRG utilizes a coarse-to-fine detection paradigm. Specifically, we utilize a heterogeneous distillation model for coarse localization and then fine localization through a segmentation model. In addition, to better capture normal patterns, we introduce recovery features as guidance. Finally,  we report the results of our CFRG framework and popular anomaly detection methods on the 3CAD dataset, demonstrating strong competitiveness and providing a highly challenging benchmark to promote the development of the anomaly detection field.

3CAD: A Large-Scale Real-World 3C Product Dataset for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have already seen widespread applications.
Researchers actively engage in further fine-tuning VLMs in safety-critical domains. 
In these domains, prediction rationality is crucial: the prediction should be correct and based on valid evidence.
Yet, for VLMs, the impact of fine-tuning on prediction rationality is seldomly investigated. 
To study this problem, we proposed two new metrics called Prediction Trustworthiness and Inference Reliability.
We conducted extensive experiments on various settings and observed some interesting phenomena.
On the one hand, we found that the well-adopted fine-tuning methods led to more correct predictions based on invalid evidence.
This potentially undermines the trustworthiness of correct predictions from fine-tuned VLMs.
On the other hand, having identified valid evidence of target objects, fine-tuned VLMs were more likely to make correct predictions.
Moreover, the findings are also consistent under distributional shifts and across various experimental settings.
We hope our research offer fresh insights to VLM fine-tuning.
We will release the source code upon acceptance.

Beyond Accuracy: On the Effects of Fine-Tuning Towards Vision-Language Model’s Prediction Rationality

Large language models (LLMs) excel in language tasks, especially with supervised fine-tuning after pre-training. However, their substantial memory and computational requirements hinder practical applications. Structural pruning, which reduces less significant weight dimensions, is one solution. Yet, traditional post-hoc pruning often leads to significant performance loss, with limited recovery from further fine-tuning due to reduced capacity. Since the model fine-tuning refines the general and chaotic knowledge in pre-trained models, we aim to incorporate structural pruning with the fine-tuning, and propose the Pruning-Aware Tuning (PAT) paradigm to eliminate model redundancy while preserving the model performance to the maximum extend.
Specifically, we insert the innovative Hybrid Sparsification Modules (HSMs) between the Attention and FFN components to accordingly sparsify the upstream and downstream linear modules. The HSM comprises a lightweight operator and a globally shared trainable mask. The lightweight operator maintains a training overhead comparable to that of LoRA, while the trainable mask unifies the channels to be sparsified, ensuring structural pruning.
Additionally, we propose the Identity Loss which decouples the transformation and scaling properties of the HSMs to enhance training robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAT excels in both performance and efficiency. For example, our Llama2-7b model with a 25\% pruning ratio achieves 1.33$\times$ speedup while outperforming the LoRA-finetuned model by up to 1.26\% in accuracy with a similar training cost.

PAT: Pruning-Aware Tuning for Large Language Models

As a potential application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, multi-agent collaborative perception has achieved significant success in 3D object detection. While these methods have demonstrated impressive results on standard benchmarks, the robustness of such approaches in the face of complex real-world environments requires additional verification. 
To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of collaborative perception methods in the presence of natural corruptions typical of real-world environments.
Furthermore, we propose DSRC, a robustness-enhanced collaborative perception method aiming to learn Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware collaborative Representation against Corruptions. DSRC consists of two key designs: i) a semantic-guided sparse-to-dense distillation framework, which constructs multi-view dense objects painted by ground truth bounding boxes to effectively learn density-insensitive and semantic-aware collaborative representation; ii) a feature-to-point cloud reconstruction approach to better fuse critical collaborative representation across agents. To thoroughly evaluate DSRC, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world and simulated datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art collaborative perception methods in both clean and corrupted conditions. The code and reproducibility checklist are available in  the supplementary materials.

DSRC: Learning Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware Collaborative Representation against Corruptions

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has achieved excellent performance over a wide range of tasks. However, the effectiveness of CLIP heavily relies on a substantial corpus of pretraining data, resulting in notable consumption of computational resources. Although knowledge distillation has been widely applied in single modality models, how to efficiently expand knowledge distillation to vision-language foundation models with extensive data remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CLIP-CID, a novel distillation mechanism that effectively transfers knowledge from a large vision-language foundation model to a smaller model. We initially propose a simple but efficient image semantic balance method to reduce transfer learning bias and improve distillation efficiency. This method filters out 43.7% of image-text pairs from the LAION400M while maintaining superior performance. After that, we leverage cluster-instance discrimination to facilitate knowledge transfer from the teacher model to the student model, thereby empowering the student model to acquire a holistic semantic comprehension of the pretraining data. Experimental results demonstrate that CLIP-CID achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks including linear probe and zero-shot classification.

CLIP-CID: Efficient CLIP Distillation via Cluster-Instance Discrimination

Infrared (IR) spectroscopy is a fundamental technique in analytical chemistry. Recently, deep learning (DL) has drawn great interest as the modeling method of infrared spectral data. However, unlike vision or language tasks, IR spectral data modeling is faced with the problem of calibration transfer and has distinctive characteristics. Introducing the prior knowledge of IR spectroscopy could guide the DL methods to learn representations aligned with the domain-invariant characteristics of spectra, and thus improve the performance. Despite such potential, there is a notable absence of DL methods that incorporate such inductive bias. To this end, we propose Analytical-Chemistry-Informed Transformer (ACT) with two modules informed by the field knowledge in analytical chemistry. First, ACT includes learnable spectral processing inspired by chemometrics, which comprises spectral pre-processing, tokenization, and post-processing. Second, a straightforward yet effective attention mechanism, namely spectral-attention, is incorporated into ACT. Spectral-attention utilizes the intra-spectral and inter-spectral correlations to extract spectral representations. Empirical results show that ACT has achieved competitive results in 9 analytical tasks covering applications across pharmacy, chemistry, and agriculture. Compared with existing networks, ACT reduces the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) by more than 20\% in calibration transfer tasks. These results indicate that DL methods in IR spectroscopy could benefit from the integration of prior knowledge in analytical chemistry.

Analytical-Chemistry-Informed Transformer for Infrared Spectra Modeling

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a mainstream paradigm for multi-view 3D object detection, demonstrating impressive perceptual capabilities. However, existing methods overlook the geometric quality of BEV representation, leaving it in a low-resolution state and failing to restore the authentic geometric information of the scene. In this paper, we identify the drawbacks of previous approaches that limit the geometric quality of BEV representation and propose Radial-Cartesian BEV Sampling (RC-Sampling), which outperforms other feature transformation methods in efficiently generating high-resolution dense BEV representations to restore fine-grained geometric information. Additionally, we design a novel In-Box Label to substitute the traditional depth label generated from the LiDAR points. This label reflects the actual geometric structure of objects rather than just their surfaces, injecting real-world geometric information into the BEV representation. In conjunction with the In-Box Label, Centroid-Aware Inner Loss (CAI Loss) is developed to capture the inner geometric structure of objects. Finally, we integrate the aforementioned modules into a novel multi-view 3D object detection framework, dubbed GeoBEV. It achieves a state-of-the-art result of 66.2% NDS on the nuScenes test set and surpasses 2.6% NDS over StreamPETR. The code and models will be made publicly available.

GeoBEV: Learning Geometric BEV Representation for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

This paper presents a novel framework for multi-armed bandit problems with side-observations and switching constraints, which arises in a range of real-world applications such as robotic. To address the challenges of effectively utilizing graph-structured observations while adhering to graph constraints, we design graph-agnostic and graph-aware algorithms tailored to this new setting. Specifically, our graph-agnostic algorithm selects nodes with the highest upper confidence bound without prior knowledge of feedback probabilities, while minimizing switching costs using offline shortest path planning and the doubling trick. If the graph structure and associated probability matrix are known, our graph-aware algorithm plans the exploration step using a linear programming approach and eliminates suboptimal nodes iteratively. We rigorously analyze the performance of our proposed algorithms, providing near-optimal minimax and instance-dependent regret upper bounds. Our analysis shows that our algorithms outperform generic reinforcement learning methods in terms of both regret and computational efficiency. Extensive numerical experiments on various types of graphs, including two real-world datasets, demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods and their advantages over benchmark methods in graph bandit settings.

Efficient Graph Bandit Learning with Side-Observations and Switching Constraints

Although existing Sparsely Annotated Object Detection (SAOD) approches have made progress in handling sparsely annotated environments in multispectral domain, where only some pedestrians are annotated, they still have the following limitations: (i) they lack considerations for improving the quality of pseudo-labels for missing annotations, and (ii) they rely on fixed ground truth annotations, which leads to learning only a limited range of pedestrian visual appearances in the multispectral domain. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Sparsely Annotated Multispectral Pedestrian Detection (SAMPD). For limitation (i), we introduce Multispectral Pedestrian-aware Adaptive Weight (MPAW) and Positive Pseudo-label Enhancement (PPE) module. Utilizing multispectral knowledge, these modules ensure the generation of high-quality pseudo-labels and enable effective learning by increasing weights for high-quality pseudo-labels based on modality characteristics. To address limitation (ii), we propose an Adaptive Pedestrian Retrieval Augmentation (APRA) module, which adaptively incorporates pedestrian patches from ground-truth and dynamically integrates high-quality pseudo-labels with the ground-truth, facilitating a more diverse learning pool of pedestrians. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our SAMPD significantly enhances performance in sparsely annotated environments within the multispectral domain.

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