Fast Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks for Low-Complexity Object Detection in Autonomous Driving Applications

Spurred by consistent advances and innovation in deep learning, object detection applications have become prevalent, particularly in autonomous driving that leverages various visual data. As convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are being optimized, the performances and computation speeds of object detection in autonomous driving have been significantly improved. However, due to the exponentially rapid growth in the complexity and scale of data used in object detection, there are limitations in terms of computation speeds while conducting object detection solely with classical computing. Motivated by this, quantum convolution-based object detection (QCOD) is proposed to adopt quantum computing to perform object detection at high speed. The QCOD utilizes our proposed fast quantum convolution that uploads input channel information and re-constructs output channels for achieving reduced computational complexity and thus improving performances. Lastly, the extensive experiments with KITTI autonomous driving object detection dataset verify that the proposed fast quantum convolution and QCOD are successfully operated in real object detection applications.

Quantum Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Mobility Cooperation

For Industry 4.0 Revolution, cooperative autonomous mobility systems are widely used based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, the MARL-based algorithms suffer from huge parameter utilization and convergence difficulties with many agents. To tackle these problems, a quantum MARL (QMARL) algorithm based on the concept of actor-critic network is proposed, which is beneficial in terms of scalability, to deal with the limitations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Additionally, our QMARL is also beneficial in terms of efficient parameter utilization and fast convergence due to quantum supremacy. Note that the reward in our QMARL is defined as task precision over computation time in multiple agents, thus, multi-agent cooperation can be realized. For further improvement, an additional technique for scalability is proposed, which is called projection value measure (PVM). Based on PVM, our proposed QMARL can achieve the highest reward, by reducing the action dimension into a logarithmic-scale. Finally, we can conclude that our proposed QMARL with PVM outperforms the other algorithms in terms of efficient parameter utilization, fast convergence, and scalability.

Two Tales of Platoon Intelligence for Autonomous Mobility Control: Enabling Deep Learning Recipes

This paper presents the deep learning-based recent achievements to resolve the problem of autonomous mobility control and efficient resource management of autonomous vehicles and UAVs, i.e., (i) multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), and (ii) neural Myerson auction. Representatively, communication network (CommNet), which is one of the most popular MARL algorithms, is introduced to enable multiple agents to take actions in a distributed manner for their shared goals by training all agents' states and actions in a single neural network. Moreover, the neural Myerson auction guarantees trustfulness among multiple agents as well as achieves the optimal revenue of highly dynamic systems. Therefore, we survey the recent studies on autonomous mobility control based on MARL and neural Myerson auction. Furthermore, we emphasize that integration of MARL and neural Myerson auction is expected to be critical for efficient and trustful autonomous mobility services.

Multi-Site Clinical Federated Learning using Recursive and Attentive Models and NVFlare

The prodigious growth of digital health data has precipitated a mounting interest in harnessing machine learning methodologies, such as natural language processing (NLP), to scrutinize medical records, clinical notes, and other text-based health information. Although NLP techniques have exhibited substantial potential in augmenting patient care and informing clinical decision-making, data privacy and adherence to regulations persist as critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) emerges as a viable solution, empowering multiple organizations to train machine learning models collaboratively without disseminating raw data. This paper proffers a pragmatic approach to medical NLP by amalgamating FL, NLP models, and the NVFlare framework, developed by NVIDIA. We introduce two exemplary NLP models, the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based model and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which have demonstrated exceptional performance in comprehending context and semantics within medical data. This paper encompasses the development of an integrated framework that addresses data privacy and regulatory compliance challenges while maintaining elevated accuracy and performance, incorporating BERT pretraining, and comprehensively substantiating the efficacy of the proposed approach.

Entropy-Aware Similarity for Balanced Clustering: A Case Study with Melanoma Detection

Clustering data is an unsupervised learning approach that aims to divide a set of data points into multiple groups. It is a crucial yet demanding subject in machine learning and data mining. Its successful applications span various fields. However, conventional clustering techniques necessitate the consideration of balance significance in specific applications. Therefore, this paper addresses the challenge of imbalanced clustering problems and presents a new method for balanced clustering by utilizing entropy-aware similarity, which can be defined as the degree of balances. We have coined the term, entropy-aware similarity for balanced clustering (EASB), which maximizes balance during clustering by complementary clustering of unbalanced data and incorporating entropy in a novel similarity formula that accounts for both angular differences and distances. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on actual melanoma medial data, specifically the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2019 and 2020 challenge datasets, to demonstrate how it can successfully cluster the data while preserving balance. Lastly, we can confirm that the proposed method exhibited outstanding performance in detecting melanoma, comparing to classical methods.

Quantum Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Networks for Cooperative Mobile Access in Multi-UAV Systems

This paper proposes a novel quantum multi-agent actor-critic networks (QMACN) algorithm for autonomously constructing a robust mobile access system using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For the cooperation of multiple UAVs for autonomous mobile access, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods are considered. In addition, we also adopt the concept of quantum computing (QC) to improve the training and inference performances. By utilizing QC, scalability and physical issues can happen. However, our proposed QMACN algorithm builds quantum critic and multiple actor networks in order to handle such problems. Thus, our proposed QMACN algorithm verifies the advantage of quantum MARL with remarkable performance improvements in terms of training speed and wireless service quality in various data-intensive evaluations. Furthermore, we validate that a noise injection scheme can be used for handling environmental uncertainties in order to realize robust mobile access. Our data-intensive simulation results verify that our proposed QMACN algorithm outperforms the other existing algorithms.

Quantum Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Neural Networks for Internet-Connected Multi-Robot Coordination in Smart Factory Management

As one of the latest fields of interest in both academia and industry, quantum computing has garnered significant attention. Among various topics in quantum computing, variational quantum circuits (VQC) have been noticed for their ability to carry out quantum deep reinforcement learning (QRL). This paper verifies the potential of QRL, which will be further realized by implementing quantum multi-agent reinforcement learning (QMARL) from QRL, especially for Internet-connected autonomous multi-robot control and coordination in smart factory applications. However, the extension is not straightforward due to the non-stationarity of classical MARL. To cope with this, the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) QMARL framework is proposed under the Internet connection. A smart factory environment with the Internet of Things (IoT)-based multiple agents is used to show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. The simulation corroborates that the proposed QMARL-based autonomous multi-robot control and coordination performs better than the other frameworks.

Situation-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Nonlinear Mobility Control in Cyber-Physical Loitering Munition Systems

According to the rapid development of drone technologies, drones are widely used in many applications including military domains. In this paper, a novel situation-aware DRL- based autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm in cyber-physical loitering munition applications. On the battlefield, the design of DRL-based autonomous control algorithm is not straightforward because real-world data gathering is generally not available. Therefore, the approach in this paper is that cyber-physical virtual environment is constructed with Unity environment. Based on the virtual cyber-physical battlefield scenarios, a DRL-based automated nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm can be designed, evaluated, and visualized. Moreover, many obstacles exist which is harmful for linear trajectory control in real-world battlefield scenarios. Thus, our proposed autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm utilizes situation-aware components those are implemented with a Raycast function in Unity virtual scenarios. Based on the gathered situation-aware information, the drone can autonomously and nonlinearly adjust its trajectory during flight. Therefore, this approach is obviously beneficial for avoiding obstacles in obstacle-deployed battlefields. Our visualization-based performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm is superior from the other linear mobility control algorithms.

Quantum Federated Learning with Entanglement Controlled Circuits and Superposition Coding

While witnessing the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era and beyond, quantum federated learning (QFL) has recently become an emerging field of study. In QFL, each quantum computer or device locally trains its quantum neural network (QNN) with trainable gates, and communicates only these gate parameters over classical channels, without costly quantum communications. Towards enabling QFL under various channel conditions, in this article we develop a depth-controllable architecture of entangled slimmable quantum neural networks (eSQNNs), and propose an entangled slimmable QFL (eSQFL) that communicates the superposition-coded parameters of eS-QNNs. Compared to the existing depth-fixed QNNs, training the depth-controllable eSQNN architecture is more challenging due to high entanglement entropy and inter-depth interference, which are mitigated by introducing entanglement controlled universal (CU) gates and an inplace fidelity distillation (IPFD) regularizer penalizing inter-depth quantum state differences, respectively. Furthermore, we optimize the superposition coding power allocation by deriving and minimizing the convergence bound of eSQFL. In an image classification task, extensive simulations corroborate the effectiveness of eSQFL in terms of prediction accuracy, fidelity, and entropy compared to Vanilla QFL as well as under different channel conditions and various data distributions.

Visual Simulation Software Demonstration for Quantum Multi-Drone Reinforcement Learning

Quantum computing (QC) has received a lot of attention according to its light training parameter numbers and computational speeds by qubits. Moreover, various researchers have tried to enable quantum machine learning (QML) using QC, where there are also multifarious efforts to use QC to implement quantum multi-agent reinforcement learning (QMARL). Existing classical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) using neural network features non-stationarity and uncertain properties due to its large number of parameters. Therefore, this paper presents a visual simulation software framework for a novel QMARL algorithm to control autonomous multi-drone systems to take advantage of QC. Our proposed QMARL framework accomplishes reasonable reward convergence and service quality performance with fewer trainable parameters than the classical MARL. Furthermore, QMARL shows more stable training results than existing MARL algorithms. Lastly, our proposed visual simulation software allows us to analyze the agents' training process and results.