Publications (new)

In this study, we apply the tree-search method Gumbel AlphaZero to solve the problem for a subset of exactly synthesizable Clifford+T unitaries. Our method effectively synthesizes circuits for up to five qubits generated from randomized circuits with up to 60 gates, outperforming existing tools like QuantumCircuitOpt and MIN-T-SYNTH in terms of synthesis time for larger qubit counts. Furthermore, it surpasses Synthetiq in successfully synthesizing random, exactly synthesizable unitaries. These results establish a strong baseline for future unitary synthesis algorithms.

This open access book provides a state-of-the-art overview of current machine learning research and its exploitation in various application areas. It has become apparent that the deep integration of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in products and services is essential for companies to stay competitive. The use of AI allows large volumes of data to be analyzed, patterns and trends to be identified, and well-founded decisions to be made on an informative basis. It also enables the optimization of workflows, the automation of processes and the development of new services, thus creating potential for new business models and significant competitive advantages.

We propose a novel channel charting framework that does not require references and dramatically reduces life-cycle management. With velocity information, e.g., pedestrian dead reckoning or odometry, we model relative charts. And with topological map information, e.g., building floor plans, we transform them into real coordinates. In a large-scale study, we acquired two realistic datasets using 5G and single-input and multiple-output distributed radio systems with noisy velocities and coarse map information. Our experiments show that we achieve the localization accuracy of FP but without reference information.

We propose the variational quantum policy iteration (VarQPI) algorithm, realizing this step with a NISQ-compatible quantum-enhanced subroutine. Its scalability is supported by an analysis of the structure of generic reinforcement learning environments’ laying the foundation for potential quantum advantage with utility-scale quantum computers. Furthermore, we introduce the warm-start initialization variant (WS-VarQPI) that significantly reduces resource overhead. The algorithm solves a large FrozenLake environment with an underlying 256×256-dimensional linear system, indicating its practical robustness.

Quantum machine learning implemented by variational quantum circuits (VQCs) is considered a promising concept for the noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing era. Focusing on applications in quantum reinforcement learning, we propose an action decoding procedure for a quantum policy gradient approach. We introduce a quality measure that enables us to optimize the classical post-processing required for action selection, inspired by local and global quantum measurements. The resulting algorithm demonstrates a significant performance improvement in several benchmark environments.

We adapt an entropy-based active learning method with recent work from triplet mining to collect easy-to-answer but still informative annotations from human participants and use them to train a deep convolutional network that generalizes to unseen samples.
Our user study shows that our approach improves the quality of the information retrieval compared to a previous deep metric learning approach that relies on a Siamese network. Specifically, we shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of passive sampling heuristics and active learners alike by analyzing the participants’ response efficacy. To this end, we collect accuracy, algorithmic time complexity, the participants’ fatigue and time-to-response, qualitative self-assessment and statements, as well as the effects of mixed-expertise annotators and their consistency on model performance and transfer-learning.

We introduce a novel approach that uses the approximated gradient from SPSA in combination with state-of-the-art gradient-based classical optimizers. We demonstrate numerically that this out-performs both standard SPSA and the parameter-shift rule in terms of convergence rate and absolute error in simple regression tasks. The improvement of our novel approach over SPSA with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is even amplified when shot- and hardware-noise are taken into account. We also demonstrate that error mitigation does not significantly affect our results.

We present a triplet loss with a dynamic margin for single label and sequence-to-sequence classification tasks. We perform extensive evaluations on synthetic image and time-series data, and on data for offline handwriting recognition (HWR) and on online HWR from sensor-enhanced pens for classifying written words. Our experiments show an improved classification accuracy, faster convergence, and better generalizability due to an improved cross-modal representation. Furthermore, the more suitable generalizability leads to a better adaptability between writers for online HWR.

Circuit cutting, the decomposition of a quantum circuit into independent partitions, has become a promising avenue towards experiments with larger quantum circuits in the noisy-intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era. While previous work focused on cutting qubit wires or two-qubit gates, in this work we introduce a method for cutting multi-controlled Z gates. We construct a decomposition and prove the upper bound O(6^2K) on the associated sampling overhead, where K is the number of cuts in the circuit. This bound is independent of the number of control qubits but can be further reduced to O(4.5^2K) for the special case of CCZ gates. Furthermore, we evaluate our proposal on IBM hardware and experimentally show noise resilience due to the strong reduction of CNOT gates in the cut circuits.

We present a methodology for systematically exploring different DNN pruning, quantization, and deployment strategies for different microcontroller architectures, with a focus on lowpower ARM Cortex-M-based systems. The exploration allows to analyze trade-offs between key metrics such as accuracy, memory consumption, execution time, and power consumption. We discuss experimental results on three different DNN architectures and show that we can compress them to less than 10% of their original parameter count before their prediction quality degrades.

We propose a novel distance metric for CC that approaches a global linear correlation to the physical distance based on time-synchronized single-input/single-output (SISO) CSIs. This allows to learn the environment’s global geometry in a channel chart without annotations.

Dataset here: https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/lv/dataanalytics/pos/fingerprinting-dataset-for-positioning.html

We propose the novel Scaled and Translated Image Recognition (STIR) benchmark based on four different domains. Additionally, we introduce a new family of models that applies many re-scaled kernels with shared weights in parallel and then selects the most appropriate one. Our experimental results on STIR show that both the existing and proposed approaches can improve generalization across scales compared to standard convolutions. We also demonstrate that our family of models is able to generalize well towards larger scales and improve scale equivariance. Moreover, due to their unique design we can validate that kernel selection is consistent with input scale. Even so, none of the evaluated models maintain their performance for large differences in scale, demonstrating that a general understanding of how scale equivariance can improve generalization and robustness is still lacking.

We propose an MPC delay estimation pipeline based on a Transformer (TF) neural network, which implicitly estimates the number and delays of the MPCs. We achieve subsample accuracy without using computational expensive super-resolution techniques. Our approach outperforms state-of-the art on detection and delay estimation of MPCs on different bandwidths. We also show that our approach can easily be fine-tuned on real world data with very few labeled data samples, making it a well-suited candidate for real world deployments.

We propose the quantum natural policy gradient (QNPG) algorithm – a second-order gradient-based routine that takes advantage of an efficient approximation of the quantum Fisher information matrix. We experimentally demonstrate that QNPG outperforms first-order based training on different Contextual Bandits environments regarding convergence speed and stability and moreover reduces the sample complexity. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the practical feasibility of our approach by training on a 12-qubit hardware device.

In this paper we propose methods for uncertainty estimation of AI-based fingerprinting to determine its validity. Our experiments show that we can implicitly switch between classic and fingerprinting-based approaches to reliably estimate accurate positions, even in NLoS-dominated radio environments. Our approach works even if the AI models are only trained on radio data in certain areas of the environment. In contrast to the state-of-the-art, our approach intrinsically identifies the spatial boundaries of the AI model, and thus does not require prior area identification.

This work-in-progress paper presents results on the feasibility of single-shot object detection on microcontrollers using YOLO. Single-shot object detectors like YOLO are widely used, however due to their complexity mainly on larger GPU-based platforms. We present YOLO, which can be used on Cortex-M based microcontrollers, such as the OpenMV H7 R2, achieving about 3.5 FPS when classifying 128128 RGB images while using less than 800 KB Flash and less than 350 KB RAM. Furthermore, we share experimental results for three different object detection tasks, analyzing the accuracy of YOLO on them.

We intend to provide a broad overview of the literature on quantum reinforcement learning and put particular emphasis on recent developments. With a focus on already available noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, these include variational quantum circuits acting as function approximators in an otherwise classical reinforcement learning setting. We provide both a birds-eye-view of the field, as well as summaries and reviews for selected parts of the literature.

We give an overview of MARL to researchers in autonomous mobility. We first explain MARL and introduce important concepts. Then, we discuss the central paradigms that underlie MARL algorithms and give an overview of state-of-the-art methods and ideas in each paradigm. With this background, we survey applications of MARL in autonomous mobility scenarios and give an overview of existing scenarios and implementations.

We present data and benchmark models . We propose a variety of datasets including equations and words for both the writer-dependent and writer-independent real-time sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning and single character-based recognition. We provide an evaluation benchmark for the seq2seq and single character-based HWR using recurrent and temporal convolutional networks and Transformers combined with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. Our methods do not resort to language or lexicon models.

Visual-inertial localization is a key problem in computer vision and robotics applications such as virtual reality, self-driving cars, and aerial vehicles. The goal is to estimate an accurate pose of an object when either the environment or the dynamics are known. Absolute pose regression (APR) techniques directly regress the absolute pose from an image input in a known scene using convolutional and spatio-temporal networks. Odometry methods perform relative pose regression (RPR) that predicts the relative pose from a known object dynamic (visual or inertial inputs). The localization task can be improved by retrieving information from both data sources for a cross-modal setup, which is a challenging problem due to contradictory tasks. In this work, we conduct a benchmark to evaluate deep multimodal fusion based on pose graph optimization and attention networks. Auxiliary and Bayesian learning are utilized for the APR task. We show accuracy improvements for the APR-RPR task and for the RPR-RPR task for aerial vehicles and hand-held devices. We conduct experiments on the EuRoC MAV and PennCOSYVIO datasets and record and evaluate a novel industry dataset.

We propose a pipeline built upon the U-Net convolutional neural network architecture. Unlike the state of the art our pipeline extracts an arbitrary number of delays without prior knowledge, includes a threshold for weighting between detection rate and false alarms, and does not rely on computationally demanding operations such as eigenvalue decomposition. We evaluate the presented method with synthetic data of different noise configurations and signal bandwidths and a publicly available dataset, achieving considerable performance gains w.r.t. detection performance and tracking accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method is far less computationally demanding in inference.

We propose a novel supervised DA based on two steps. First, we search for an optimal class-dependent transformation from the source to the target domain from a few samples. We consider optimal transport methods such as the earth mover’s distance, Sinkhorn transport and correlation alignment. Second, we use embedding similarity techniques to select the corresponding transformation at inference. We use correlation metrics and higher-order moment matching techniques.

We propose a challenging benchmark for generalizable RL for AD based on a configurable, flexible, and performant code base. Our benchmark uses a catalog of randomized scenario generators, including multiple mechanisms for road layout and traffic variations, different numerical and visual observation types, distinct action spaces, diverse vehicle models, and allows for use under static scenario definitions. In addition to purely algorithmic insights, our application-oriented benchmark also enables a better understanding of the impact of design decisions such as action and observation space on the generalizability of policies. Our benchmark aims to encourage researchers to propose solutions that are able to successfully generalize across scenarios, a task in which current RL methods fail.

Code available here: https://github.com/seawee1/driver-dojo