Enhancing Circuit Trainability with Selective Gate Activation Strategy

Hybrid quantum-classical computing relies heavily on Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) to tackle challenges in diverse fields like quantum chemistry and machine learning. However, VQAs face a critical limitation: the balance between circuit trainability and expressibility. Trainability, the ease of optimizing circuit parameters for problem-solving, is often hampered by the Barren Plateau, where gradients vanish and hinder optimization. On the other hand, increasing expressibility, the ability to represent a wide range of quantum states, often necessitates deeper circuits with more parameters, which in turn exacerbates trainability issues. In this work, we investigate selective gate activation strategies as a potential solution to these challenges within the context of Variational Quantum Eigensolvers (VQEs). We evaluate three different approaches: activating gates randomly without considering their type or parameter magnitude, activating gates randomly but limited to a single gate type, and activating gates based on the magnitude of their parameter values. Experiment results reveal that the Magnitude-based strategy surpasses other methods, achieving improved convergence.

Q-MAML: Quantum Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Variational Quantum Algorithms

In the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, using variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) to solve optimization problems has become a key application. However, these algorithms face significant challenges, such as choosing an effective initial set of parameters and the limited quantum processing time that restricts the number of optimization iterations. In this study, we introduce a new framework for optimizing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) that employs a classical optimizer, inspired by Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) technique. This approach aim to achieve better parameter initialization that ensures fast convergence. Our framework features a classical neural network, called Learner}, which interacts with a PQC using the output of Learner as an initial parameter. During the pre-training phase, Learner is trained with a meta-objective based on the quantum circuit cost function. In the adaptation phase, the framework requires only a few PQC updates to converge to a more accurate value, while the learner remains unchanged. This method is highly adaptable and is effectively extended to various Hamiltonian optimization problems. We validate our approach through experiments, including distribution function mapping and optimization of the Heisenberg XYZ Hamiltonian. The result implies that the Learner successfully estimates initial parameters that generalize across the problem space, enabling fast adaptation.

Carrot and Stick: Inducing Self-Motivation with Positive & Negative Feedback

Positive thinking is thought to be an important component of self-motivation in various practical fields such as education and the workplace. Previous work, including sentiment transfer and positive reframing, has focused on the positive side of language. However, self-motivation that drives people to reach their goals has not yet been studied from a computational perspective. Moreover, negative feedback has not yet been explored, even though positive and negative feedback are both necessary to grow self-motivation. To facilitate self-motivation, we propose CArrot and STICk (CASTIC) dataset, consisting of 12,590 sentences with 5 different strategies for enhancing self-motivation. Our data and code are publicly available at here.

Emotion Recognition Using Transformers with Masked Learning

In recent years, deep learning has achieved innovative advancements in various fields, including the analysis of human emotions and behaviors. Initiatives such as the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition have been particularly instrumental in driving research in this area by providing diverse and challenging datasets that enable precise evaluation of complex emotional states. This study leverages the Vision Transformer (ViT) and Transformer models to focus on the estimation of Valence-Arousal (VA), which signifies the positivity and intensity of emotions, recognition of various facial expressions, and detection of Action Units (AU) representing fundamental muscle movements. This approach transcends traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based methods, proposing a new Transformer-based framework that maximizes the understanding of temporal and spatial features. The core contributions of this research include the introduction of a learning technique through random frame masking and the application of Focal loss adapted for imbalanced data, enhancing the accuracy and applicability of emotion and behavior analysis in real-world settings. This approach is expected to contribute to the advancement of emotional computing and deep learning methodologies.

Deep Hybrid Camera Deblurring

Mobile cameras, despite their significant advancements, still face low-light challenges due to compact sensors and lenses, leading to longer exposures and motion blur. Traditional solutions like blind deconvolution and learning-based methods often fall short in handling ill-posedness of the deblurring problem. To address this, we propose a novel deblurring framework for multi-camera smartphones, utilizing a hybrid imaging technique. We simultaneously capture a long exposure wide-angle image and ultra-wide burst images from a smartphone, and use the sharp burst to estimate blur kernels for deblurring the wide-angle image. For learning and evaluation of our network, we introduce the HCBlur dataset, which includes pairs of blurry wide-angle and sharp ultra-wide burst images, and their sharp wide-angle counterparts. We extensively evaluate our method, and the result shows the state-of-the-art quality.

ParamISP: Learned Forward and Inverse ISPs using Camera Parameters

RAW images are rarely shared mainly due to its excessive data size compared to their sRGB counterparts obtained by camera ISPs. Learning the forward and inverse processes of camera ISPs has been recently demonstrated, enabling physically-meaningful RAW-level image processing on input sRGB images. However, existing learning-based ISP methods fail to handle the large variations in the ISP processes with respect to camera parameters such as ISO and exposure time, and have limitations when used for various applications. In this paper, we propose ParamISP, a learning-based method for forward and inverse conversion between sRGB and RAW images, that adopts a novel neural-network module to utilize camera parameters, which is dubbed as ParamNet. Given the camera parameters provided in the EXIF data, ParamNet converts them into a feature vector to control the ISP networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ParamISP achieve superior RAW and sRGB reconstruction results compared to previous methods and it can be effectively used for a variety of applications such as deblurring dataset synthesis, raw deblurring, HDR reconstruction, and camera-to-camera transfer.

Rationale-aware Autonomous Driving Policy utilizing Safety Force Field implemented on CARLA Simulator

Despite the rapid improvement of autonomous driving technology in recent years, automotive manufacturers must resolve liability issues to commercialize autonomous passenger car of SAE J3016 Level 3 or higher. To cope with the product liability law, manufacturers develop autonomous driving systems in compliance with international standards for safety such as ISO 26262 and ISO 21448. Concerning the safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) requirement in ISO 26262, the driving policy recommends providing an explicit rational basis for maneuver decisions. In this case, mathematical models such as Safety Force Field (SFF) and Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) which have interpretability on decision, may be suitable. In this work, we implement SFF from scratch to substitute the undisclosed NVIDIA's source code and integrate it with CARLA open-source simulator. Using SFF and CARLA, we present a predictor for claimed sets of vehicles, and based on the predictor, propose an integrated driving policy that consistently operates regardless of safety conditions it encounters while passing through dynamic traffic. The policy does not have a separate plan for each condition, but using safety potential, it aims human-like driving blended in with traffic flow.

Real-Time Video Deblurring via Lightweight Motion Compensation

While motion compensation greatly improves video deblurring quality, separately performing motion compensation and video deblurring demands huge computational overhead. This paper proposes a real-time video deblurring framework consisting of a lightweight multi-task unit that supports both video deblurring and motion compensation in an efficient way. The multi-task unit is specifically designed to handle large portions of the two tasks using a single shared network, and consists of a multi-task detail network and simple networks for deblurring and motion compensation. The multi-task unit minimizes the cost of incorporating motion compensation into video deblurring and enables real-time deblurring. Moreover, by stacking multiple multi-task units, our framework provides flexible control between the cost and deblurring quality. We experimentally validate the state-of-the-art deblurring quality of our approach, which runs at a much faster speed compared to previous methods, and show practical real-time performance (30.99dB@30fps measured in the DVD dataset).

Reference-based Video Super-Resolution Using Multi-Camera Video Triplets

We propose the first reference-based video super-resolution (RefVSR) approach that utilizes reference videos for high-fidelity results. We focus on RefVSR in a triple-camera setting, where we aim at super-resolving a low-resolution ultra-wide video utilizing wide-angle and telephoto videos. We introduce the first RefVSR network that recurrently aligns and propagates temporal reference features fused with features extracted from low-resolution frames. To facilitate the fusion and propagation of temporal reference features, we propose a propagative temporal fusion module. For learning and evaluation of our network, we present the first RefVSR dataset consisting of triplets of ultra-wide, wide-angle, and telephoto videos concurrently taken from triple cameras of a smartphone. We also propose a two-stage training strategy fully utilizing video triplets in the proposed dataset for real-world 4x video super-resolution. We extensively evaluate our method, and the result shows the state-of-the-art performance in 4x super-resolution.

Realistic Blur Synthesis for Learning Image Deblurring

Training learning-based deblurring methods demands a significant amount of blurred and sharp image pairs. Unfortunately, existing synthetic datasets are not realistic enough, and existing real-world blur datasets provide limited diversity of scenes and camera settings. As a result, deblurring models trained on them still suffer from the lack of generalization ability for handling real blurred images. In this paper, we analyze various factors that introduce differences between real and synthetic blurred images, and present a novel blur synthesis pipeline that can synthesize more realistic blur. We also present RSBlur, a novel dataset that contains real blurred images and the corresponding sequences of sharp images. The RSBlur dataset can be used for generating synthetic blurred images to enable detailed analysis on the differences between real and synthetic blur. With our blur synthesis pipeline and RSBlur dataset, we reveal the effects of different factors in the blur synthesis. We also show that our synthesis method can improve the deblurring performance on real blurred images.