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Abstract Entanglement serves as the resource to empower quantum computing. Recent progress has highlighted its positive impact on learning quantum dynamics, wherein the integration of entanglement into quantum operations or measurements of quantum machine learning (QML) models leads to substantial reductions in training data size, surpassing a specified prediction error threshold. However, an analytical understanding of how the entanglement degree in data affects model performance remains elusive. In this study, we address this knowledge gap by establishing a quantum no-free-lunch (NFL) theorem for learning quantum dynamics using entangled data. Contrary to previous findings, we prove that the impact of entangled data on prediction error exhibits a dual effect, depending on the number of permitted measurements. With a sufficient number of measurements, increasing the entanglement of training data consistently reduces the prediction error or decreases the required size of the training data to achieve the same prediction error. Conversely, when few measurements are allowed, employing highly entangled data could lead to an increased prediction error. The achieved results provide critical guidance for designing advanced QML protocols, especially for those tailored for execution on early-stage quantum computers with limited access to quantum resources.

Foundation models have reshaped the landscape of remote sensing (RS) by enhancing various image interpretation tasks. Pretraining is an active research topic, encompassing supervised and self-supervised learning methods to initialize model weights effectively. However, transferring the pretrained models to downstream tasks may encounter task discrepancy due to their formulation of pretraining as image classification or object discrimination tasks. In this study, we explore the multitask pretraining (MTP) paradigm for RS foundation models to address this issue. Using a shared encoder and task-specific decoder architecture, we conduct multitask supervised pretraining on the segment anything model annotated remote sensing segmentation dataset, encompassing semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and rotated object detection. MTP supports both convolutional neural networks and vision transformer foundation models with over 300 million parameters. The pretrained models are finetuned on various RS downstream tasks, such as scene classification, horizontal, and rotated object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. Extensive experiments across 14 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our models over existing ones of similar size and their competitive performance compared to larger state-of-the-art models, thus validating the effectiveness of MTP.

Ischemic strokes (IS) and transient ischemic attacks (TIA) account for approximately 80% of all strokes and are leading causes of death worldwide. Assessing the risk of recurrence or functional impairment in IS and TIA patients is essential to both acute phase treatment and secondary prevention. Current risk prediction systems that rely on clinical parameters alone without leveraging imaging data have only modest performance. Herein, a deep learning‐based risk prediction system (RPS) is developed to predict the probability of stroke recurrence or disability (i.e., deep‐learning stroke recurrence risk score, SRR score). Then, Kaplan–Meier analysis to evaluate the ability of SRR score to stratify patients at stroke recurrence risk is discussed. Using 15 166 Third China National Stroke Registry (CNSR‐III) cases, the RPS's receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) values of 0.850 for 14 day TIA recurrence prediction and 0.837 for 3 month IS disability prediction are used. Among patients deemed high risk by SRR score, 22.9% and 24.4% of individuals with TIA and IS respectively have stroke recurrence within 1 year, which are significantly higher than the rates in low‐risk individuals. Deep learning‐based RPS can outperform conventional risk scores and has the potential to assist accurate prognostication in stroke patients to optimize management.

Abstract Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are expected to be a path to quantum advantages on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. However, both empirical and theoretical results exhibit that the deployed ansatz heavily affects the performance of VQAs such that an ansatz with a larger number of quantum gates enables a stronger expressivity, while the accumulated noise may render a poor trainability. To maximally improve the robustness and trainability of VQAs, here we devise a resource and runtime efficient scheme termed quantum architecture search (QAS). In particular, given a learning task, QAS automatically seeks a near-optimal ansatz (i.e., circuit architecture) to balance benefits and side-effects brought by adding more noisy quantum gates to achieve a good performance. We implement QAS on both the numerical simulator and real quantum hardware, via the IBM cloud, to accomplish data classification and quantum chemistry tasks. In the problems studied, numerical and experimental results show that QAS cannot only alleviate the influence of quantum noise and barren plateaus but also outperforms VQAs with pre-selected ansatze.

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are prime contenders to gain computational advantages over classical algorithms using near-term quantum machines. As such, many endeavors have been made to accelerate the optimization of modern VQAs in past years. To further improve the capability of VQAs, here, we propose a quantum distributed optimization scheme (dubbed as QUDIO), whose back ends support both real quantum devices and various quantum simulators. Unlike traditional VQAs subsuming a single quantum chip or simulator, QUDIO collaborates with multiple quantum machines or simulators to complete learning tasks. In doing so, the required wall-clock time for optimization can be continuously reduced by increasing the accessible computational resources when ignoring the communication and synchronization time. Moreover, through the lens of optimization theory, we unveil the potential factors that could affect the convergence of QUDIO. In addition, we systematically understand the ability of QUDIO to reduce wall-clock time via two standard benchmarks, which are hand-written image classification and the ground energy estimation of the dihydrogen. Our proposal facilitates the development of advanced VQAs to narrow the gap between the state of the art and applications with the quantum advantage.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction, i.e., identifying MCI patients of high risks converting to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), is essential for preventing or slowing the progression of AD. Although previous studies have shown that the fusion of multi-modal data can effectively improve the prediction accuracy, their applications are largely restricted by the limited availability or high cost of multi-modal data. Building an effective prediction model using only magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains a challenging research topic. In this work, we propose a multi-modal multi-instance distillation scheme, which aims to distill the knowledge learned from multi-modal data to an MRI-based network for MCI conversion prediction. In contrast to existing distillation algorithms, the proposed multi-instance probabilities demonstrate a superior capability of representing the complicated atrophy distributions, and can guide the MRI-based network to better explore the input MRI. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to improve an MRI-based prediction model by leveraging extra supervision distilled from multi-modal information. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our framework, suggesting its potentials in the data-limited clinical settings.

Image inpainting seeks to fill in corrupted areas with pixels that have a similar texture and content with its surroundings. For high-structured data, e.g., human face, some recent works can achieve quite realistic results. However, almost all existing methods learned a determined mapping from a corrupted input to the final result, yet ignored the potential multiple plausible solutions of the same input. Furthermore, they have not explored the underlying connections between those plausible solutions and semantic conditions. In this work, we propose a novel deep representation calibrated Bayesian neural network (DRCBNN) for semantically explainable face inpainting and editing. By leveraging the advantages that Bayesian decision theory deals with uncertainty, the proposed framework exploits deep representation into Bayesian decision theory and derive a deep representation calibrated evidence lower bound (ELBO). In comparison with traditional ELBO in BNN, the newly calibrated ELBO is a more task-specific loss function. After optimizing the newly calibrated ELBO, it allows to inference desired inpainting outputs in accordance with specific semantics. Finally, experiments demonstrated that our method can produce multiple semantics-aware inpainting outputs and outperforms the state-of-the-arts.

Abstract Background Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a transformative technology, allowing global transcriptomes of individual cells to be profiled with high accuracy. An essential task in scRNA-seq data analysis is the identification of cell types from complex samples or tissues profiled in an experiment. To this end, clustering has become a key computational technique for grouping cells based on their transcriptome profiles, enabling subsequent cell type identification from each cluster of cells. Due to the high feature-dimensionality of the transcriptome (i.e. the large number of measured genes in each cell) and because only a small fraction of genes are cell type-specific and therefore informative for generating cell type-specific clusters, clustering directly on the original feature/gene dimension may lead to uninformative clusters and hinder correct cell type identification. Results Here, we propose an autoencoder-based cluster ensemble framework in which we first take random subspace projections from the data, then compress each random projection to a low-dimensional space using an autoencoder artificial neural network, and finally apply ensemble clustering across all encoded datasets to generate clusters of cells. We employ four evaluation metrics to benchmark clustering performance and our experiments demonstrate that the proposed autoencoder-based cluster ensemble can lead to substantially improved cell type-specific clusters when applied with both the standard k-means clustering algorithm and a state-of-the-art kernel-based clustering algorithm (SIMLR) designed specifically for scRNA-seq data. Compared to directly using these clustering algorithms on the original datasets, the performance improvement in some cases is up to 100%, depending on the evaluation metric used. Conclusions Our results suggest that the proposed framework can facilitate more accurate cell type identification as well as other downstream analyses. The code for creating the proposed autoencoder-based cluster ensemble framework is freely available from https://github.com/gedcom/scCCESS

One main challenge in tunnel constructions is to predict the tunnel geological conditions without excavation to ensure safety during the construction process. This paper proposes a data-driven framework for real-time interpreting the operating data of tunnel boring machines (TBMs) without interrupting tunneling operations, and eventually automate the tunneling operation. In this framework, we first convert the indexes of the original data from discontinuous operating time to continuous operating displacement. After screening outliers, to more exhaustively explore the inherent characteristics of the TBM operating data, we then augment features by using the first-order and the second-order difference information. There are two main concerns for developing a desired geological-type predictor: 1) since multiple geological types could coexist in one tunnel section, the predictor should have multiple outputs and 2) since the geological types are specified by the values of 7 kinds of physical-mechanical indexes of geological types, this geological characteristic should also be encoded into the predictor's structure. Therefore, we design a feed-forward multiple-output artificial neural network (ANN) with two hidden layers as the predictor, where the second hidden layer has 7 nodes that correspond to 7 kinds of physical-mechanical indexes. The experimental results show that: 1) the feature augmentation (FA) method indeed improves the prediction performance; 2) the ANN predictor has the best performance on the test set when the second hidden layer has 7 nodes; 3) the proposed ANN predictor outperforms many widely-used learning models, e.g., XGboost, random forest (RF), and support vector regression (SVR); and 4) the predictor is capable of accurately predicting the geological types of stratum.

Many quantum algorithms that claim speedup over their classical counterparts only generates quantum states as solutions instead of their final classical description. The additional step to decode quantum states into classical vectors normally will destroy the quantum advantage in most scenarios because all existing tomographic methods require runtime that is polynomial with respect to the state dimension. In this work, we present an efficient readout protocol that yields the classical vector form of the generated state, so it will achieve the end-to-end advantage for those quantum algorithms. Our protocol suits the case in which the output state lies in the row space of the input matrix, of rank r, that is stored in the quantum random access memory. The quantum resources for decoding the state in ℓ^{2} norm with ε error require poly(r,1/ε) copies of the output state and poly(r,κ^{r},1/ε) queries to the input oracles, where κ is the condition number of the input matrix. With our readout protocol, we completely characterize the end-to-end resources for quantum linear equation solvers and quantum singular value decomposition. One of our technical tools is an efficient quantum algorithm for performing the Gram-Schmidt orthonormal procedure, which we believe will be of independent interest.

Quantum neural network (QNN), or equivalently, the parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) with a gradient-based classical optimizer, has been broadly applied to many experimental proposals for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, the learning capability of QNN remains largely unknown due to the nonconvex optimization landscape, the measurement error, and the unavoidable gate noise introduced by NISQ machines. In this study, we theoretically explore the learnability of QNN in the view of the trainability and generalization. Particularly, we derive the convergence performance of QNN under the NISQ setting, and identify classes of computationally hard concepts that can be efficiently learned by QNN. Our results demonstrate that large gate noise, few quantum measurements, and deep circuit depth will lead to poor convergence rates of QNN towards the empirical risk minimization. Moreover, we prove that any concept class, which is efficiently learnable by a quantum statistical query (QSQ) learning model, can also be efficiently learned by PQCs. Since the QSQ learning model can tackle certain problems such as parity learning with a runtime speedup, our result suggests that PQCs established on NISQ devices will retain the quantum advantage measured by generalization ability. Our work provides theoretical guidance for developing advanced QNNs and opens up avenues for exploring quantum advantages beyond hybrid quantum-classical learning protocols in the NISQ era.

A key problem in the field of quantum computing is understanding whether quantum machine learning (QML) models implemented on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines can achieve quantum advantages. Recently, Huang et al. [Nat Commun 12, 2631] partially answered this question by the lens of quantum kernel learning. Namely, they exhibited that quantum kernels can learn specific datasets with lower generalization error over the optimal classical kernel methods. However, most of their results are established on the ideal setting and ignore the caveats of near-term quantum machines. To this end, a crucial open question is: does the power of quantum kernels still hold under the NISQ setting? In this study, we fill this knowledge gap by exploiting the power of quantum kernels when the quantum system noise and sample error are considered. Concretely, we first prove that the advantage of quantum kernels is vanished for large size of datasets, few number of measurements, and large system noise. With the aim of preserving the superiority of quantum kernels in the NISQ era, we further devise an effective method via indefinite kernel learning. Numerical simulations accord with our theoretical results. Our work provides theoretical guidance of exploring advanced quantum kernels to attain quantum advantages on NISQ devices.

Noise in quantum information processing is often viewed as a disruptive and difficult-to-avoid feature, especially in near-term quantum technologies. However, noise has often played beneficial roles, from enhancing weak signals in stochastic resonance to protecting the privacy of data in differential privacy. It is then natural to ask: Can we harness the power of quantum noise that is beneficial to quantum computing? An important current direction for quantum computing is its application to machine learning, such as classification problems. One outstanding problem in machine learning for classification is its sensitivity to adversarial examples. These are small, undetectable perturbations from the original data where the perturbed data is completely misclassified in otherwise extremely accurate classifiers. They can also be considered as worst-case perturbations by unknown noise sources. We show that by taking advantage of depolarization noise in quantum circuits for classification, a robustness bound against adversaries can be derived where the robustness improves with increasing noise. This robustness property is intimately connected with an important security concept called differential privacy, which can be extended to quantum differential privacy. For the protection of quantum data, this quantum protocol can be used against the most general adversaries. Furthermore, we show how the robustness in the classical case can be sensitive to the details of the classification model, but in the quantum case the details of the classification model are absent, thus also providing a potential quantum advantage for classical data. This opens the opportunity to explore other ways in which quantum noise can be used in our favor, as well as identifying other ways quantum algorithms can be helpful in a way which is distinct from quantum speedups.

The hybrid quantum–classical learning scheme provides a prominent way to achieve quantum advantages on near-term quantum devices. A concrete example toward this goal is the quantum neural network (QNN), which has been developed to accomplish various supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. However, there are two central issues that remain obscure when QNN is exploited to accomplish classification tasks. First, a quantum classifier that can well balance the computational cost such as the number of measurements and the learning performance is unexplored. Second, it is unclear whether quantum classifiers can be applied to solve certain problems that outperform their classical counterparts. Here we devise a Grover-search based quantum learning scheme (GBLS) to address the above two issues. Notably, most existing QNN-based quantum classifiers can be seamlessly embedded into the proposed scheme. The key insight behind our proposal is reformulating the classification tasks as the search problem. Numerical simulations exhibit that GBLS can achieve comparable performance with other quantum classifiers under various noise settings, while the required number of measurements is dramatically reduced. We further demonstrate a potential quantum advantage of GBLS over classical classifiers in the measure of query complexity. Our work provides guidance to develop advanced quantum classifiers on near-term quantum devices and opens up an avenue to explore potential quantum advantages in various classification tasks.

A wide range of fundamental machine learning tasks that are addressed by the maximum a posteriori estimation can be reduced to a general minimum conical hull problem. The best-known solution to tackle general minimum conical hull problems is the divide-and-conquer anchoring learning scheme (DCA), whose runtime complexity is polynomial in size. However, big data are pushing these polynomial algorithms to their performance limits. In this paper, we propose a sublinear classical algorithm to tackle general minimum conical hull problems when the input has stored in a sample-based low-overhead data structure. The algorithm's runtime complexity is polynomial in the rank and polylogarithmic in size. The proposed algorithm achieves the exponential speedup over DCA and, therefore, provides advantages for high-dimensional problems.

Parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) have been broadly used as a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning scheme to accomplish generative tasks. However, whether PQCs have better expressive power than classical generative neural networks, such as restricted or deep Boltzmann machines, remains an open issue. In this paper, we prove that PQCs with a simple structure already outperform any classical neural network for generative tasks, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Our proof builds on known results from tensor networks and quantum circuits (in particular, instantaneous quantum polynomial circuits). In addition, PQCs equipped with ancillary qubits for postselection may possess expressive power stronger than that of those without postselection. We employ them as an application for Bayesian learning, since it is possible to learn prior probabilities rather than assuming they are known. We expect that it will find many more applications in semisupervised learning where prior distributions are normally assumed to be unknown. Lastly, we conduct several numerical experiments using the Rigetti Forest platform to demonstrate the performance of the proposed Bayesian quantum circuit.

The application of machine learning techniques to solve problems in quantum control together with established geometric methods for solving optimisation problems leads naturally to an exploration of how machine learning approaches can be used to enhance geometric approaches for solving problems in quantum information processing. In this work, we review and extend the application of deep learning to quantum geometric control problems. Specifically, we demonstrate enhancements in time-optimal control in the context of quantum circuit synthesis problems by applying novel deep learning algorithms in order to approximate geodesics (and thus minimal circuits) along Lie group manifolds relevant to low-dimensional multi-qubit systems, such as SU(2), SU(4) and SU(8). We demonstrate the superior performance of greybox models, which combine traditional blackbox algorithms with whitebox models (which encode prior domain knowledge of quantum mechanics), as means of learning underlying quantum circuit distributions of interest. Our results demonstrate how geometric control techniques can be used to both (a) verify the extent to which geometrically synthesised quantum circuits lie along geodesic, and thus time-optimal, routes and (b) synthesise those circuits. Our results are of interest to researchers in quantum control and quantum information theory seeking to combine machine learning and geometric techniques for time-optimal control problems.

Amnestic MCI (aMCI) and non-amnestic MCI (naMCI) are considered to differ in etiology and outcome. Accurately classifying MCI into meaningful subtypes would enable early intervention with targeted treatment. In this study, we employed structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for MCI subtype classification. This was carried out in a sample of 184 community-dwelling individuals (aged 73–85 years). Cortical surface based measurements were computed from longitudinal and cross-sectional scans. By introducing a feature selection algorithm, we identified a set of discriminative features, and further investigated the temporal patterns of these features. A voting classifier was trained and evaluated via 10 iterations of cross-validation. The best classification accuracies achieved were: 77% (naMCI vs. aMCI), 81% (aMCI vs. cognitively normal (CN)) and 70% (naMCI vs. CN). The best results for differentiating aMCI from naMCI were achieved with baseline features. Hippocampus, amygdala and frontal pole were found to be most discriminative for classifying MCI subtypes. Additionally, we observed the dynamics of classification of several MRI biomarkers. Learning the dynamics of atrophy may aid in the development of better biomarkers, as it may track the progression of cognitive impairment.