On Quantum Natural Policy Gradients

This research delves into the role of the quantum Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) in enhancing the performance of Parameterized Quantum Circuit (PQC)-based reinforcement learning agents. While previous studies have highlighted the effectiveness of PQC-based policies preconditioned with the quantum FIM in contextual bandits, its impact in broader reinforcement learning contexts, such as Markov Decision Processes, is less clear. Through a detailed analysis of L\"owner inequalities between quantum and classical FIMs, this study uncovers the nuanced distinctions and implications of using each type of FIM. Our results indicate that a PQC-based agent using the quantum FIM without additional insights typically incurs a larger approximation error and does not guarantee improved performance compared to the classical FIM. Empirical evaluations in classic control benchmarks suggest even though quantum FIM preconditioning outperforms standard gradient ascent, in general it is not superior to classical FIM preconditioning.

LLM-Guided Multi-View Hypergraph Learning for Human-Centric Explainable Recommendation

As personalized recommendation systems become vital in the age of information overload, traditional methods relying solely on historical user interactions often fail to fully capture the multifaceted nature of human interests. To enable more human-centric modeling of user preferences, this work proposes a novel explainable recommendation framework, i.e., LLMHG, synergizing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and the structural advantages of hypergraph neural networks. By effectively profiling and interpreting the nuances of individual user interests, our framework pioneers enhancements to recommendation systems with increased explainability. We validate that explicitly accounting for the intricacies of human preferences allows our human-centric and explainable LLMHG approach to consistently outperform conventional models across diverse real-world datasets. The proposed plug-and-play enhancement framework delivers immediate gains in recommendation performance while offering a pathway to apply advanced LLMs for better capturing the complexity of human interests across machine learning applications.

Human vs. LMMs: Exploring the Discrepancy in Emoji Interpretation and Usage in Digital Communication

Leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to simulate human behaviors when processing multimodal information, especially in the context of social media, has garnered immense interest due to its broad potential and far-reaching implications. Emojis, as one of the most unique aspects of digital communication, are pivotal in enriching and often clarifying the emotional and tonal dimensions. Yet, there is a notable gap in understanding how these advanced models, such as GPT-4V, interpret and employ emojis in the nuanced context of online interaction. This study intends to bridge this gap by examining the behavior of GPT-4V in replicating human-like use of emojis. The findings reveal a discernible discrepancy between human and GPT-4V behaviors, likely due to the subjective nature of human interpretation and the limitations of GPT-4V's English-centric training, suggesting cultural biases and inadequate representation of non-English cultures.

Index Modulation for Integrated Sensing and Communications: A Signal Processing Perspective

A joint design of both sensing and communication can lead to substantial enhancement for both subsystems in terms of size, cost as well as spectrum and hardware efficiency. In the last decade, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has emerged as a means to efficiently utilize the spectrum on a single and shared hardware platform. Recent studies focused on developing multi-function approaches to share the spectrum between radar sensing and communications. Index modulation (IM) is one particular approach to incorporate information-bearing communication symbols into the emitted radar waveforms. While IM has been well investigated in communications-only systems, the implementation adoption of IM concept in ISAC has recently attracted researchers to achieve improved energy/spectral efficiency while maintaining satisfactory radar sensing performance. This article focuses on recent studies on IM-ISAC, and presents in detail the analytical background and relevance of the major IM-ISAC applications.

CycLight: learning traffic signal cooperation with a cycle-level strategy

This study introduces CycLight, a novel cycle-level deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach for network-level adaptive traffic signal control (NATSC) systems. Unlike most traditional RL-based traffic controllers that focus on step-by-step decision making, CycLight adopts a cycle-level strategy, optimizing cycle length and splits simultaneously using Parameterized Deep Q-Networks (PDQN) algorithm. This cycle-level approach effectively reduces the computational burden associated with frequent data communication, meanwhile enhancing the practicality and safety of real-world applications. A decentralized framework is formulated for multi-agent cooperation, while attention mechanism is integrated to accurately assess the impact of the surroundings on the current intersection. CycLight is tested in a large synthetic traffic grid using the microscopic traffic simulation tool, SUMO. Experimental results not only demonstrate the superiority of CycLight over other state-of-the-art approaches but also showcase its robustness against information transmission delays.

Representation Learning on Event Stream via an Elastic Net-incorporated Tensor Network

Event cameras are neuromorphic sensors that capture asynchronous and sparse event stream when per-pixel brightness changes. The state-of-the-art processing methods for event signals typically aggregate events into a frame or a grid. However, events are dense in time, these works are limited to local information of events due to the stacking. In this paper, we present a novel spatiotemporal representation learning method which can capture the global correlations of all events in the event stream simultaneously by tensor decomposition. In addition, with the events are sparse in space, we propose an Elastic Net-incorporated tensor network (ENTN) model to obtain more spatial and temporal details about event stream. Empirically, the results indicate that our method can represent the spatiotemporal correlation of events with high quality, and can achieve effective results in applications like filtering noise compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Exploring Content-Based and Meta-Data Analysis for Detecting Fake News Infodemic: A case study on COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is probably the most disruptive global health disaster in recent history. It negatively impacted the whole world and virtually brought the global economy to a standstill. However, as the virus was spreading, infecting people and claiming thousands of lives so was the spread and propagation of fake news, misinformation and disinformation about the event. These included the spread of unconfirmed health advice and remedies on social media. In this paper, false information about the pandemic is identified using a content-based approach and metadata curated from messages posted to online social networks. A content-based approach combined with metadata as well as an initial feature analysis is used and then several supervised learning models are tested for identifying and predicting misleading posts. Our approach shows up to 93% accuracy in the detection of fake news related posts about the COVID-19 pandemic

TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) plays a crucial role in enabling dialogue systems to effectively respond to user requests. The emotions in a conversation can be identified by the representations from various modalities, such as audio, visual, and text. However, due to the weak contribution of non-verbal modalities to recognize emotions, multimodal ERC has always been considered a challenging task. In this paper, we propose Teacher-leading Multimodal fusion network for ERC (TelME). TelME incorporates cross-modal knowledge distillation to transfer information from a language model acting as the teacher to the non-verbal students, thereby optimizing the efficacy of the weak modalities. We then combine multimodal features using a shifting fusion approach in which student networks support the teacher. TelME achieves state-of-the-art performance in MELD, a multi-speaker conversation dataset for ERC. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our components through additional experiments.

ENTED: Enhanced Neural Texture Extraction and Distribution for Reference-based Blind Face Restoration

We present ENTED, a new framework for blind face restoration that aims to restore high-quality and realistic portrait images. Our method involves repairing a single degraded input image using a high-quality reference image. We utilize a texture extraction and distribution framework to transfer high-quality texture features between the degraded input and reference image. However, the StyleGAN-like architecture in our framework requires high-quality latent codes to generate realistic images. The latent code extracted from the degraded input image often contains corrupted features, making it difficult to align the semantic information from the input with the high-quality textures from the reference. To overcome this challenge, we employ two special techniques. The first technique, inspired by vector quantization, replaces corrupted semantic features with high-quality code words. The second technique generates style codes that carry photorealistic texture information from a more informative latent space developed using the high-quality features in the reference image's manifold. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method produces results with more realistic contextual details and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. A thorough ablation study confirms the effectiveness of each proposed module.

4D-ONIX: A deep learning approach for reconstructing 3D movies from sparse X-ray projections

The X-ray flux provided by X-ray free-electron lasers and storage rings offers new spatiotemporal possibilities to study in-situ and operando dynamics, even using single pulses of such facilities. X-ray Multi-Projection Imaging (XMPI) is a novel technique that enables volumetric information using single pulses of such facilities and avoids centrifugal forces induced by state-of-the-art time-resolved 3D methods such as time-resolved tomography. As a result, XMPI can acquire 3D movies (4D) at least three orders of magnitude faster than current methods. However, no algorithm can reconstruct 4D from highly sparse projections acquired by XMPI. Here, we present 4D-ONIX, a Deep Learning (DL)-based approach that learns to reconstruct 3D movies (4D) from an extremely limited number of projections. It combines the computational physical model of X-ray interaction with matter and state-of-the-art DL methods. We demonstrate the potential of 4D-ONIX to generate high-quality 4D by generalizing over multiple experiments with only two projections per timestamp for binary droplet collisions. We envision that 4D-ONIX will become an enabling tool for 4D analysis, offering new spatiotemporal resolutions to study processes not possible before.