我们提出了一种基于政策梯度加强学习的技术来查找量子电路的近似汇编的方法。随机策略的选择允许我们在概率分布方面的优化问题，而不是变分参数。这意味着通过优化分布参数而不是通过电路自由角来搜索最佳配置。所以我们可以始终计算梯度，但是提供了策略是可微分的。我们在数值上表明这种方法比使用梯度方法的方法更竞争，即使在存在去极化的噪声的情况下，也可以分析地争论为什么这一情况。这种变分的另一个方法的另一个有趣特征是它不需要单独的寄存器和远程交互来估计终点保真度。我们预计这些技术在其他背景下与训练变分电路相关

Springs can provide force at zero net energy cost by recycling negative mechanical work to benefit motor-driven robots or spring-augmented humans. However, humans have limited force and range of motion, and motors have a limited ability to produce force. These limits constrain how much energy a conventional spring can store and, consequently, how much assistance a spring can provide. In this paper, we introduce an approach to accumulating negative work in assistive springs over several motion cycles. We show that, by utilizing a novel floating spring mechanism, the weight of a human or robot can be used to iteratively increase spring compression, irrespective of the potential energy stored by the spring. Decoupling the force required to compress a spring from the energy stored by a spring advances prior works, and could enable spring-driven robots and humans to perform physically demanding tasks without the use of large actuators.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on adversarial machine learning. Numerous papers demonstrate powerful algorithmic attacks against a wide variety of machine learning (ML) models, and numerous other papers propose defenses that can withstand most attacks. However, abundant real-world evidence suggests that actual attackers use simple tactics to subvert ML-driven systems, and as a result security practitioners have not prioritized adversarial ML defenses. Motivated by the apparent gap between researchers and practitioners, this position paper aims to bridge the two domains. We first present three real-world case studies from which we can glean practical insights unknown or neglected in research. Next we analyze all adversarial ML papers recently published in top security conferences, highlighting positive trends and blind spots. Finally, we state positions on precise and cost-driven threat modeling, collaboration between industry and academia, and reproducible research. We believe that our positions, if adopted, will increase the real-world impact of future endeavours in adversarial ML, bringing both researchers and practitioners closer to their shared goal of improving the security of ML systems.

By optimizing the rate-distortion-realism trade-off, generative compression approaches produce detailed, realistic images, even at low bit rates, instead of the blurry reconstructions produced by rate-distortion optimized models. However, previous methods do not explicitly control how much detail is synthesized, which results in a common criticism of these methods: users might be worried that a misleading reconstruction far from the input image is generated. In this work, we alleviate these concerns by training a decoder that can bridge the two regimes and navigate the distortion-realism trade-off. From a single compressed representation, the receiver can decide to either reconstruct a low mean squared error reconstruction that is close to the input, a realistic reconstruction with high perceptual quality, or anything in between. With our method, we set a new state-of-the-art in distortion-realism, pushing the frontier of achievable distortion-realism pairs, i.e., our method achieves better distortions at high realism and better realism at low distortion than ever before.

Understanding our brain is one of the most daunting tasks, one we cannot expect to complete without the use of technology. MindBigData aims to provide a comprehensive and updated dataset of brain signals related to a diverse set of human activities so it can inspire the use of machine learning algorithms as a benchmark of 'decoding' performance from raw brain activities into its corresponding (labels) mental (or physical) tasks. Using commercial of the self, EEG devices or custom ones built by us to explore the limits of the technology. We describe the data collection procedures for each of the sub datasets and with every headset used to capture them. Also, we report possible applications in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces or BCI that could impact the life of billions, in almost every sector like healthcare game changing use cases, industry or entertainment to name a few, at the end why not directly using our brains to 'disintermediate' senses, as the final HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) device? simply what we call the journey from Type to Touch to Talk to Think.

Biometrics is the science of identifying an individual based on their intrinsic anatomical or behavioural characteristics, such as fingerprints, face, iris, gait, and voice. Iris recognition is one of the most successful methods because it exploits the rich texture of the human iris, which is unique even for twins and does not degrade with age. Modern approaches to iris recognition utilize deep learning to segment the valid portion of the iris from the rest of the eye, so it can then be encoded, stored and compared. This paper aims to improve the accuracy of iris semantic segmentation systems by introducing a novel data augmentation technique. Our method can transform an iris image with a certain dilation level into any desired dilation level, thus augmenting the variability and number of training examples from a small dataset. The proposed method is fast and does not require training. The results indicate that our data augmentation method can improve segmentation accuracy up to 15% for images with high pupil dilation, which creates a more reliable iris recognition pipeline, even under extreme dilation.

Building a quantum analog of classical deep neural networks represents a fundamental challenge in quantum computing. A key issue is how to address the inherent non-linearity of classical deep learning, a problem in the quantum domain due to the fact that the composition of an arbitrary number of quantum gates, consisting of a series of sequential unitary transformations, is intrinsically linear. This problem has been variously approached in the literature, principally via the introduction of measurements between layers of unitary transformations. In this paper, we introduce the Quantum Path Kernel, a formulation of quantum machine learning capable of replicating those aspects of deep machine learning typically associated with superior generalization performance in the classical domain, specifically, hierarchical feature learning. Our approach generalizes the notion of Quantum Neural Tangent Kernel, which has been used to study the dynamics of classical and quantum machine learning models. The Quantum Path Kernel exploits the parameter trajectory, i.e. the curve delineated by model parameters as they evolve during training, enabling the representation of differential layer-wise convergence behaviors, or the formation of hierarchical parametric dependencies, in terms of their manifestation in the gradient space of the predictor function. We evaluate our approach with respect to variants of the classification of Gaussian XOR mixtures - an artificial but emblematic problem that intrinsically requires multilevel learning in order to achieve optimal class separation.

Deploying machine learning models in production may allow adversaries to infer sensitive information about training data. There is a vast literature analyzing different types of inference risks, ranging from membership inference to reconstruction attacks. Inspired by the success of games (i.e., probabilistic experiments) to study security properties in cryptography, some authors describe privacy inference risks in machine learning using a similar game-based style. However, adversary capabilities and goals are often stated in subtly different ways from one presentation to the other, which makes it hard to relate and compose results. In this paper, we present a game-based framework to systematize the body of knowledge on privacy inference risks in machine learning.

Detecting actions in untrimmed videos should not be limited to a small, closed set of classes. We present a simple, yet effective strategy for open-vocabulary temporal action detection utilizing pretrained image-text co-embeddings. Despite being trained on static images rather than videos, we show that image-text co-embeddings enable openvocabulary performance competitive with fully-supervised models. We show that the performance can be further improved by ensembling the image-text features with features encoding local motion, like optical flow based features, or other modalities, like audio. In addition, we propose a more reasonable open-vocabulary evaluation setting for the ActivityNet data set, where the category splits are based on similarity rather than random assignment.

In intensively managed forests in Europe, where forests are divided into stands of small size and may show heterogeneity within stands, a high spatial resolution (10 - 20 meters) is arguably needed to capture the differences in canopy height. In this work, we developed a deep learning model based on multi-stream remote sensing measurements to create a high-resolution canopy height map over the "Landes de Gascogne" forest in France, a large maritime pine plantation of 13,000 km$^2$ with flat terrain and intensive management. This area is characterized by even-aged and mono-specific stands, of a typical length of a few hundred meters, harvested every 35 to 50 years. Our deep learning U-Net model uses multi-band images from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 with composite time averages as input to predict tree height derived from GEDI waveforms. The evaluation is performed with external validation data from forest inventory plots and a stereo 3D reconstruction model based on Skysat imagery available at specific locations. We trained seven different U-net models based on a combination of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 bands to evaluate the importance of each instrument in the dominant height retrieval. The model outputs allow us to generate a 10 m resolution canopy height map of the whole "Landes de Gascogne" forest area for 2020 with a mean absolute error of 2.02 m on the Test dataset. The best predictions were obtained using all available satellite layers from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 but using only one satellite source also provided good predictions. For all validation datasets in coniferous forests, our model showed better metrics than previous canopy height models available in the same region.