量子计算为某些问题提供了指数加速的潜力。但是，许多具有可证明加速的现有算法都需要当前不可用的耐故障量子计算机。我们提出了NISQ-TDA，这是第一个完全实现的量子机学习算法，其在任意经典（非手动）数据上具有可证明的指数加速，并且仅需要线性电路深度。我们报告了我们的NISQ-TDA算法的成功执行，该算法应用于在量子计算设备以及嘈杂的量子模拟器上运行的小数据集。我们从经验上证实，该算法对噪声是可靠的，并提供了目标深度和噪声水平，以实现现实世界中问题的近期，无耐受耐受性的量子优势。我们独特的数据加载投影方法是噪声鲁棒性的主要来源，引入了一种新的自我校正数据加载方法。

机器学习（ML）研究通常集中在模型上，而最突出的数据集已用于日常的ML任务，而不考虑这些数据集对基本问题的广度，困难和忠诚。忽略数据集的基本重要性已引起了重大问题，该问题涉及现实世界中的数据级联以及数据集驱动标准的模型质量饱和，并阻碍了研究的增长。为了解决此问题，我们提出Dataperf，这是用于评估ML数据集和数据集工作算法的基准软件包。我们打算启用“数据棘轮”，其中培训集将有助于评估相同问题的测试集，反之亦然。这种反馈驱动的策略将产生一个良性的循环，该循环将加速以数据为中心的AI。MLCommons协会将维护Dataperf。

我们介绍了一个新型的多层加权网络模型，该模型除了本地信号外，还考虑了全局噪声。该模型类似于多层随机块模型（SBM），但关键区别在于，跨层之间的块之间的相互作用在整个系统中是常见的，我们称之为环境噪声。单个块还以这些固定的环境参数为特征，以表示不属于其他任何地方的成员。这种方法允许将块同时聚类和类型化到信号或噪声中，以便更好地理解其在整个系统中的作用，而现有块模型未考虑。我们采用了分层变异推断的新颖应用来共同检测和区分块类型。我们称此模型为多层加权网络称为随机块（具有）环境噪声模型（SBANM），并开发了相关的社区检测算法。我们将此方法应用于费城神经发育队列中的受试者，以发现与精神病有关的具有共同心理病理学的受试者社区。

在许多科学应用中出现了从一组共同样本中获得两种（或更多）类型的测量的数据集。此类数据的探索性分析中的一个常见问题是识别有密切相关的不同数据类型的特征组。 Bimodule是来自两种数据类型的特征集的一对（A，B），因此A和B中的特征之间的汇总相关很大。如果A与B中的特征显着相关的特征集合，则BIMODULE（A，B）是稳定的，反之亦然。在本文中，我们提出并研究了基于迭代测试的程序（BSP），以识别Bi-View数据中稳定的双模型。我们进行了一项彻底的模拟研究，以评估BSP的性能，并使用GTEX项目的最新数据提出了表达定量性状基因座（EQTL）分析问题的扩展应用。此外，我们将BSP应用于气候数据，以确定北美地区年温度变化影响降水的区域。

We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total). The dialogs involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text. QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative evaluation. We also report results for a number of reference models, including a recently state-ofthe-art reading comprehension architecture extended to model dialog context. Our best model underperforms humans by 20 F1, suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this data. Dataset, baseline, and leaderboard available at http://quac.ai.

Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and topdown attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.

Designing experiments often requires balancing between learning about the true treatment effects and earning from allocating more samples to the superior treatment. While optimal algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem (MABP) provide allocation policies that optimally balance learning and earning, they tend to be computationally expensive. The Gittins Index (GI) is a solution to the MABP that can simultaneously attain optimality and computationally efficiency goals, and it has been recently used in experiments with Bernoulli and Gaussian rewards. For the first time, we present a modification of the GI rule that can be used in experiments with exponentially-distributed rewards. We report its performance in simulated 2- armed and 3-armed experiments. Compared to traditional non-adaptive designs, our novel GI modified design shows operating characteristics comparable in learning (e.g. statistical power) but substantially better in earning (e.g. direct benefits). This illustrates the potential that designs using a GI approach to allocate participants have to improve participant benefits, increase efficiencies, and reduce experimental costs in adaptive multi-armed experiments with exponential rewards.

Transformer has achieved impressive successes for various computer vision tasks. However, most of existing studies require to pretrain the Transformer backbone on a large-scale labeled dataset (e.g., ImageNet) for achieving satisfactory performance, which is usually unavailable for medical images. Additionally, due to the gap between medical and natural images, the improvement generated by the ImageNet pretrained weights significantly degrades while transferring the weights to medical image processing tasks. In this paper, we propose Bootstrap Own Latent of Transformer (BOLT), a self-supervised learning approach specifically for medical image classification with the Transformer backbone. Our BOLT consists of two networks, namely online and target branches, for self-supervised representation learning. Concretely, the online network is trained to predict the target network representation of the same patch embedding tokens with a different perturbation. To maximally excavate the impact of Transformer from limited medical data, we propose an auxiliary difficulty ranking task. The Transformer is enforced to identify which branch (i.e., online/target) is processing the more difficult perturbed tokens. Overall, the Transformer endeavours itself to distill the transformation-invariant features from the perturbed tokens to simultaneously achieve difficulty measurement and maintain the consistency of self-supervised representations. The proposed BOLT is evaluated on three medical image processing tasks, i.e., skin lesion classification, knee fatigue fracture grading and diabetic retinopathy grading. The experimental results validate the superiority of our BOLT for medical image classification, compared to ImageNet pretrained weights and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches.

Text clustering and topic extraction are two important tasks in text mining. Usually, these two tasks are performed separately. For topic extraction to facilitate clustering, we can first project texts into a topic space and then perform a clustering algorithm to obtain clusters. To promote topic extraction by clustering, we can first obtain clusters with a clustering algorithm and then extract cluster-specific topics. However, this naive strategy ignores the fact that text clustering and topic extraction are strongly correlated and follow a chicken-and-egg relationship. Performing them separately fails to make them mutually benefit each other to achieve the best overall performance. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised text clustering and topic extraction framework (ClusTop) which integrates text clustering and topic extraction into a unified framework and can achieve high-quality clustering result and extract topics from each cluster simultaneously. Our framework includes four components: enhanced language model training, dimensionality reduction, clustering and topic extraction, where the enhanced language model can be viewed as a bridge between clustering and topic extraction. On one hand, it provides text embeddings with a strong cluster structure which facilitates effective text clustering; on the other hand, it pays high attention on the topic related words for topic extraction because of its self-attention architecture. Moreover, the training of enhanced language model is unsupervised. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and provide benchmarks for different model combinations in this framework.

This paper illustrates the technologies of user next intent prediction with a concept knowledge graph. The system has been deployed on the Web at Alipay, serving more than 100 million daily active users. Specifically, we propose AlipayKG to explicitly characterize user intent, which is an offline concept knowledge graph in the Life-Service domain modeling the historical behaviors of users, the rich content interacted by users and the relations between them. We further introduce a Transformer-based model which integrates expert rules from the knowledge graph to infer the online user's next intent. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can effectively enhance the performance of the downstream tasks while retaining explainability.