The distortion-rate function of output-constrained lossy source coding with limited common randomness is analyzed for the special case of squared error distortion measure. An explicit expression is obtained when both source and reconstruction distributions are Gaussian. This further leads to a partial characterization of the information-theoretic limit of quadratic Gaussian rate-distortion-perception coding with the perception measure given by Kullback-Leibler divergence or squared quadratic Wasserstein distance.
Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes are among the most promising candidates for future quantum error correction schemes. However, a limited number of short to moderate-length QLDPC codes have been designed and their decoding performance is sub-optimal with a quaternary belief propagation (BP) decoder due to unavoidable short cycles in their Tanner graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel joint code and decoder design for QLDPC codes. The constructed codes have a minimum distance of about the square root of the block length. In addition, it is, to the best of our knowledge, the first QLDPC code family where BP decoding is not impaired by short cycles of length 4. This is achieved by using an ensemble BP decoder mitigating the influence of assembled short cycles. We outline two code construction methods based on classical quasi-cyclic codes and finite geometry codes. Numerical results demonstrate outstanding decoding performance over depolarizing channels.
Modeling open hole failure of composites is a complex task, consisting in a highly nonlinear response with interacting failure modes. Numerical modeling of this phenomenon has traditionally been based on the finite element method, but requires to tradeoff between high fidelity and computational cost. To mitigate this shortcoming, recent work has leveraged machine learning to predict the strength of open hole composite specimens. Here, we also propose using data-based models but to tackle open hole composite failure from a classification point of view. More specifically, we show how to train surrogate models to learn the ultimate failure envelope of an open hole composite plate under in-plane loading. To achieve this, we solve the classification problem via support vector machine (SVM) and test different classifiers by changing the SVM kernel function. The flexibility of kernel-based SVM also allows us to integrate the recently developed quantum kernels in our algorithm and compare them with the standard radial basis function (RBF) kernel. Finally, thanks to kernel-target alignment optimization, we tune the free parameters of all kernels to best separate safe and failure-inducing loading states. The results show classification accuracies higher than 90% for RBF, especially after alignment, followed closely by the quantum kernel classifiers.
The diversity of knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to apply this knowledge zero-shot in a range of settings makes them a promising candidate for use in decision-making. However, they are currently limited by their inability to reliably provide outputs which are explainable and contestable. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile these strengths and weaknesses by introducing a method for supplementing LLMs with argumentative reasoning. Concretely, we introduce argumentative LLMs, a method utilising LLMs to construct argumentation frameworks, which then serve as the basis for formal reasoning in decision-making. The interpretable nature of these argumentation frameworks and formal reasoning means that any decision made by the supplemented LLM may be naturally explained to, and contested by, humans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of argumentative LLMs experimentally in the decision-making task of claim verification. We obtain results that are competitive with, and in some cases surpass, comparable state-of-the-art techniques.
Of all the vector fields surrounding the minima of recurrent learning setups, the gradient field with its exploding and vanishing updates appears a poor choice for optimization, offering little beyond efficient computability. We seek to improve this suboptimal practice in the context of physics simulations, where backpropagating feedback through many unrolled time steps is considered crucial to acquiring temporally coherent behavior. The alternative vector field we propose follows from two principles: physics simulators, unlike neural networks, have a balanced gradient flow, and certain modifications to the backpropagation pass leave the positions of the original minima unchanged. As any modification of backpropagation decouples forward and backward pass, the rotation-free character of the gradient field is lost. Therefore, we discuss the negative implications of using such a rotational vector field for optimization and how to counteract them. Our final procedure is easily implementable via a sequence of gradient stopping and component-wise comparison operations, which do not negatively affect scalability. Our experiments on three control problems show that especially as we increase the complexity of each task, the unbalanced updates from the gradient can no longer provide the precise control signals necessary while our method still solves the tasks. Our code can be found at //github.com/tum-pbs/StableBPTT.
The landscape of information retrieval has broadened from search services to a critical component in various advanced applications, where indexing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and freshness are increasingly important yet remain less explored. To address these demands, we introduce Semi-parametric Vocabulary Disentangled Retrieval (SVDR). SVDR is a novel semi-parametric retrieval framework that supports two types of indexes: an embedding-based index for high effectiveness, akin to existing neural retrieval methods; and a binary token index that allows for quick and cost-effective setup, resembling traditional term-based retrieval. In our evaluation on three open-domain question answering benchmarks with the entire Wikipedia as the retrieval corpus, SVDR consistently demonstrates superiority. It achieves a 3% higher top-1 retrieval accuracy compared to the dense retriever DPR when using an embedding-based index and an 9% higher top-1 accuracy compared to BM25 when using a binary token index. Specifically, the adoption of a binary token index reduces index preparation time from 30 GPU hours to just 2 CPU hours and storage size from 31 GB to 2 GB, achieving a 90% reduction compared to an embedding-based index.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential in autonomous driving, to determine when learning-based components encounter unexpected inputs. Traditional detectors typically use encoder models with fixed settings, thus lacking effective human interaction capabilities. With the rise of large foundation models, multimodal inputs offer the possibility of taking human language as a latent representation, thus enabling language-defined OOD detection. In this paper, we use the cosine similarity of image and text representations encoded by the multimodal model CLIP as a new representation to improve the transparency and controllability of latent encodings used for visual anomaly detection. We compare our approach with existing pre-trained encoders that can only produce latent representations that are meaningless from the user's standpoint. Our experiments on realistic driving data show that the language-based latent representation performs better than the traditional representation of the vision encoder and helps improve the detection performance when combined with standard representations.
This work considers the non-interactive source simulation problem (NISS). In the standard NISS scenario, a pair of distributed agents, Alice and Bob, observe a distributed binary memoryless source $(X^d,Y^d)$ generated based on joint distribution $P_{X,Y}$. The agents wish to produce a pair of discrete random variables $(U_d,V_d)$ with joint distribution $P_{U_d,V_d}$, such that $P_{U_d,V_d}$ converges in total variation distance to a target distribution $Q_{U,V}$. Two variations of the standard NISS scenario are considered. In the first variation, in addition to $(X^d,Y^d)$ the agents have access to a shared Bell state. The agents each measure their respective state, using a measurement of their choice, and use its classical output along with $(X^d,Y^d)$ to simulate the target distribution. This scenario is called the entanglement-assisted NISS (EA-NISS). In the second variation, the agents have access to a classical common random bit $Z$, in addition to $(X^d,Y^d)$. This scenario is called the classical common randomness NISS (CR-NISS). It is shown that for binary-output NISS scenarios, the set of feasible distributions for EA-NISS and CR-NISS are equal with each other. Hence, there is not quantum advantage in these EA-NISS scenarios. For non-binary output NISS scenarios, it is shown through an example that there are distributions that are feasible in EA-NISS but not in CR-NISS. This shows that there is a quantum advantage in non-binary output EA-NISS.
In subject-driven text-to-image synthesis, the synthesis process tends to be heavily influenced by the reference images provided by users, often overlooking crucial attributes detailed in the text prompt. In this work, we propose Subject-Agnostic Guidance (SAG), a simple yet effective solution to remedy the problem. We show that through constructing a subject-agnostic condition and applying our proposed dual classifier-free guidance, one could obtain outputs consistent with both the given subject and input text prompts. We validate the efficacy of our approach through both optimization-based and encoder-based methods. Additionally, we demonstrate its applicability in second-order customization methods, where an encoder-based model is fine-tuned with DreamBooth. Our approach is conceptually simple and requires only minimal code modifications, but leads to substantial quality improvements, as evidenced by our evaluations and user studies.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.