Quantum software is a key enabler for the revolutionary applications promised by Quantum Computing (QC), a field poised to transform industries and attract significant investment. However, quantum software engineering (QSE) faces unique ethical challenges that must be addressed early to ensure responsible and equitable development. This vision paper explores the role of ethics and specifically diversity and inclusion (D&I) considerations in QSE, emphasising the importance of embedding these principles throughout the quantum software lifecycle. Neglecting D&I could lead to power imbalances, algorithmic biases, and limited innovation, ultimately hindering QC's potential to benefit society equitably. By drawing lessons from classical software and artificial intelligence, we discuss our vision for integrating D&I into QSE, for a more transparent, fair, and accountable future for quantum technologies. This paper aims to initiate discussion within the research community and lay the foundation for the ethical development of quantum software that promotes social equity.
As quantum computers advance, the complexity of the software they can execute increases as well. To ensure this software is efficient, maintainable, reusable, and cost-effective -key qualities of any industry-grade software-mature software engineering practices must be applied throughout its design, development, and operation. However, the significant differences between classical and quantum software make it challenging to directly apply classical software engineering methods to quantum systems. This challenge has led to the emergence of Quantum Software Engineering as a distinct field within the broader software engineering landscape. In this work, a group of active researchers analyse in depth the current state of quantum software engineering research. From this analysis, the key areas of quantum software engineering are identified and explored in order to determine the most relevant open challenges that should be addressed in the next years. These challenges help identify necessary breakthroughs and future research directions for advancing Quantum Software Engineering.
With the increased popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), increases also the need for tools to assist developers in the DNN implementation, testing and debugging process. Several approaches have been proposed that automatically analyse and localise potential faults in DNNs under test. In this work, we evaluate and compare existing state-of-the-art fault localisation techniques, which operate based on both dynamic and static analysis of the DNN. The evaluation is performed on a benchmark consisting of both real faults obtained from bug reporting platforms and faulty models produced by a mutation tool. Our findings indicate that the usage of a single, specific ground truth (e.g., the human defined one) for the evaluation of DNN fault localisation tools results in pretty low performance (maximum average recall of 0.31 and precision of 0.23). However, such figures increase when considering alternative, equivalent patches that exist for a given faulty DNN. Results indicate that \dfd is the most effective tool, achieving an average recall of 0.61 and precision of 0.41 on our benchmark.
Compressing integer keys is a fundamental operation among multiple communities, such as database management (DB), information retrieval (IR), and high-performance computing (HPC). Recent advances in \emph{learned indexes} have inspired the development of \emph{learned compressors}, which leverage simple yet compact machine learning (ML) models to compress large-scale sorted keys. The core idea behind learned compressors is to \emph{losslessly} encode sorted keys by approximating them with \emph{error-bounded} ML models (e.g., piecewise linear functions) and using a \emph{residual array} to guarantee accurate key reconstruction. While the concept of learned compressors remains in its early stages of exploration, our benchmark results demonstrate that an SIMD-optimized learned compressor can significantly outperform state-of-the-art CPU-based compressors. Drawing on our preliminary experiments, this vision paper explores the potential of learned data compression to enhance critical areas in DBMS and related domains. Furthermore, we outline the key technical challenges that existing systems must address when integrating this emerging methodology.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the most used tools for extracting low-dimensional representations of data, in particular for time series. Performances are known to strongly depend on the quality (amount of noise) and the quantity of data. We here investigate the impact of heterogeneities, often present in real data, on the reconstruction of low-dimensional trajectories and of their associated modes. We focus in particular on the effects of sample-to-sample fluctuations and of component-dependent temporal convolution and noise in the measurements. We derive analytical predictions for the error on the reconstructed trajectory and the confusion between the modes using the replica method in a high-dimensional setting, in which the number and the dimension of the data are comparable. We find in particular that sample-to-sample variability, is deleterious for the reconstruction of the signal trajectory, but beneficial for the inference of the modes, and that the fluctuations in the temporal convolution kernels prevent perfect recovery of the latent modes even for very weak measurement noise. Our predictions are corroborated by simulations with synthetic data for a variety of control parameters.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Verifiability is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, where editors are encouraged to provide citations for the added statements. Statements can be any arbitrary piece of text, ranging from a sentence up to a paragraph. However, in many cases, citations are either outdated, missing, or link to non-existing references (e.g. dead URL, moved content etc.). In total, 20\% of the cases such citations refer to news articles and represent the second most cited source. Even in cases where citations are provided, there are no explicit indicators for the span of a citation for a given piece of text. In addition to issues related with the verifiability principle, many Wikipedia entity pages are incomplete, with relevant information that is already available in online news sources missing. Even for the already existing citations, there is often a delay between the news publication time and the reference time. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose automated approaches that enforce the verifiability principle in Wikipedia, and suggest relevant and missing news references for further enriching Wikipedia entity pages.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.