An Analytic Theory of Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution

Quantum imaginary time evolution (QITE) algorithm is one of the most promising variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), bridging the current era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices and the future of fully fault-tolerant quantum computing. Although practical demonstrations of QITE and its potential advantages over the general VQA trained with vanilla gradient descent (GD) in certain tasks have been reported, a first-principle, theoretical understanding of QITE remains limited. Here, we aim to develop an analytic theory for the dynamics of QITE. First, we show that QITE can be interpreted as a form of a general VQA trained with Quantum Natural Gradient Descent (QNGD), where the inverse quantum Fisher information matrix serves as the learning-rate tensor. This equivalence is established not only at the level of gradient update rules, but also through the action principle: the variational principle can be directly connected to the geometric geodesic distance in the quantum Fisher information metric, up to an integration constant. Second, for wide quantum neural networks, we employ the quantum neural tangent kernel framework to construct an analytic model for QITE. We prove that QITE always converges faster than GD-based VQA, though this advantage is suppressed by the exponential growth of Hilbert space dimension. This helps explain certain experimental results in quantum computational chemistry. Our theory encompasses linear, quadratic, and more general loss functions. We validate the analytic results through numerical simulations. Our findings establish a theoretical foundation for QITE dynamics and provide analytic insights for the first-principle design of variational quantum algorithms.

Data Virtualization for Machine Learning

Nowadays, machine learning (ML) teams have multiple concurrent ML workflows for different applications. Each workflow typically involves many experiments, iterations, and collaborative activities and commonly takes months and sometimes years from initial data wrangling to model deployment. Organizationally, there is a large amount of intermediate data to be stored, processed, and maintained. \emph{Data virtualization} becomes a critical technology in an infrastructure to serve ML workflows. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a data virtualization service, focusing on its service architecture and service operations. The infrastructure currently supports six ML applications, each with more than one ML workflow. The data virtualization service allows the number of applications and workflows to grow in the coming years.

Met$^2$Net: A Decoupled Two-Stage Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model for Complex Meteorological Systems

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to global climate change urges accurate weather prediction. Recently, great advances have been made by the \textbf{end-to-end methods}, thanks to deep learning techniques, but they face limitations of \textit{representation inconsistency} in multivariable integration and struggle to effectively capture the dependency between variables, which is required in complex weather systems. Treating different variables as distinct modalities and applying a \textbf{two-stage training approach} from multimodal models can partially alleviate this issue, but due to the inconformity in training tasks between the two stages, the results are often suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit two-stage training method, configuring separate encoders and decoders for each variable. In detailed, in the first stage, the Translator is frozen while the Encoders and Decoders learn a shared latent space, in the second stage, the Encoders and Decoders are frozen, and the Translator captures inter-variable interactions for prediction. Besides, by introducing a self-attention mechanism for multivariable fusion in the latent space, the performance achieves further improvements. Empirically, extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it reduces the MSE for near-surface air temperature and relative humidity predictions by 28.82\% and 23.39\%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShremG/Met2Net.

SASep: Saliency-Aware Structured Separation of Geometry and Feature for Open Set Learning on Point Clouds

Recent advancements in deep learning have greatly enhanced 3D object recognition, but most models are limited to closed-set scenarios, unable to handle unknown samples in real-world applications. Open-set recognition (OSR) addresses this limitation by enabling models to both classify known classes and identify novel classes. However, current OSR methods rely on global features to differentiate known and unknown classes, treating the entire object uniformly and overlooking the varying semantic importance of its different parts. To address this gap, we propose Salience-Aware Structured Separation (SASep), which includes (i) a tunable semantic decomposition (TSD) module to semantically decompose objects into important and unimportant parts, (ii) a geometric synthesis strategy (GSS) to generate pseudo-unknown objects by combining these unimportant parts, and (iii) a synth-aided margin separation (SMS) module to enhance feature-level separation by expanding the feature distributions between classes. Together, these components improve both geometric and feature representations, enhancing the model's ability to effectively distinguish known and unknown classes. Experimental results show that SASep achieves superior performance in 3D OSR, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.

GradEscape: A Gradient-Based Evader Against AI-Generated Text Detectors

In this paper, we introduce GradEscape, the first gradient-based evader designed to attack AI-generated text (AIGT) detectors. GradEscape overcomes the undifferentiable computation problem, caused by the discrete nature of text, by introducing a novel approach to construct weighted embeddings for the detector input. It then updates the evader model parameters using feedback from victim detectors, achieving high attack success with minimal text modification. To address the issue of tokenizer mismatch between the evader and the detector, we introduce a warm-started evader method, enabling GradEscape to adapt to detectors across any language model architecture. Moreover, we employ novel tokenizer inference and model extraction techniques, facilitating effective evasion even in query-only access. We evaluate GradEscape on four datasets and three widely-used language models, benchmarking it against four state-of-the-art AIGT evaders. Experimental results demonstrate that GradEscape outperforms existing evaders in various scenarios, including with an 11B paraphrase model, while utilizing only 139M parameters. We have successfully applied GradEscape to two real-world commercial AIGT detectors. Our analysis reveals that the primary vulnerability stems from disparity in text expression styles within the training data. We also propose a potential defense strategy to mitigate the threat of AIGT evaders. We open-source our GradEscape for developing more robust AIGT detectors.

GroverGPT-2: Simulating Grover's Algorithm via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Quantum-Native Tokenization

Quantum computing offers theoretical advantages over classical computing for specific tasks, yet the boundary of practical quantum advantage remains an open question. To investigate this boundary, it is crucial to understand whether, and how, classical machines can learn and simulate quantum algorithms. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated strong reasoning abilities, prompting exploration into their potential for this challenge. In this work, we introduce GroverGPT-2, an LLM-based method for simulating Grover's algorithm using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and quantum-native tokenization. Building on its predecessor, GroverGPT-2 performs simulation directly from quantum circuit representations while producing logically structured and interpretable outputs. Our results show that GroverGPT-2 can learn and internalize quantum circuit logic through efficient processing of quantum-native tokens, providing direct evidence that classical models like LLMs can capture the structure of quantum algorithms. Furthermore, GroverGPT-2 outputs interleave circuit data with natural language, embedding explicit reasoning into the simulation. This dual capability positions GroverGPT-2 as a prototype for advancing machine understanding of quantum algorithms and modeling quantum circuit logic. We also identify an empirical scaling law for GroverGPT-2 with increasing qubit numbers, suggesting a path toward scalable classical simulation. These findings open new directions for exploring the limits of classical simulatability, enhancing quantum education and research, and laying groundwork for future foundation models in quantum computing.

FT-MoE: Sustainable-learning Mixture of Experts Model for Fault-Tolerant Computing with Multiple Tasks

Intelligent fault-tolerant (FT) computing has recently demonstrated significant advantages of predicting and diagnosing faults in advance, enabling reliable service delivery. However, due to heterogeneity of fault knowledge and complex dependence relationships of time series log data, existing deep learning-based FT algorithms further improve detection performance relying on single neural network model with difficulty. To this end, we propose FT-MoE, a sustainable-learning mixture-of-experts model for fault-tolerant computing with multiple tasks, which enables different parameters learning distinct fault knowledge to achieve high-reliability for service system. Firstly, we use decoder-based transformer models to obtain fault prototype vectors of decoupling long-distance dependencies. Followed by, we present a dual mixture of experts networks for high-accurate prediction for both fault detection and classification tasks. Then, we design a two-stage optimization scheme of offline training and online tuning, which allows that in operation FT-MoE can also keep learning to adapt to dynamic service environments. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of FT-MoE, we conduct extensive experiments on the FT benchmark. Experimental results show that FT-MoE achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Code will be available upon publication.

GraphEdge: Dynamic Graph Partition and Task Scheduling for GNNs Computing in Edge Network

With the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, edge computing (EC) is gradually playing an important role in providing cost-effective services. However, existing approaches struggle to perform well in graph-structured scenarios where user data is correlated, such as traffic flow prediction and social relationship recommender systems. In particular, graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches lead to expensive server communication cost. To address this problem, we propose GraphEdge, an efficient GNN-based EC architecture. It considers the EC system of GNN tasks, where there are associations between users and it needs to take into account the task data of its neighbors when processing the tasks of a user. Specifically, the architecture first perceives the user topology and represents their data associations as a graph layout at each time step. Then the graph layout is optimized by calling our proposed hierarchical traversal graph cut algorithm (HiCut), which cuts the graph layout into multiple weakly associated subgraphs based on the aggregation characteristics of GNN, and the communication cost between different subgraphs during GNN inference is minimized. Finally, based on the optimized graph layout, our proposed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based graph offloading algorithm (DRLGO) is executed to obtain the optimal offloading strategy for the tasks of users, the offloading strategy is subgraph-based, it tries to offload user tasks in a subgraph to the same edge server as possible while minimizing the task processing time and energy consumption of the EC system. Experimental results show the good effectiveness and dynamic adaptation of our proposed architecture and it also performs well even in dynamic scenarios.

ArtistAuditor: Auditing Artist Style Pirate in Text-to-Image Generation Models

Text-to-image models based on diffusion processes, such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, are capable of transforming texts into detailed images and have widespread applications in art and design. As such, amateur users can easily imitate professional-level paintings by collecting an artist's work and fine-tuning the model, leading to concerns about artworks' copyright infringement. To tackle these issues, previous studies either add visually imperceptible perturbation to the artwork to change its underlying styles (perturbation-based methods) or embed post-training detectable watermarks in the artwork (watermark-based methods). However, when the artwork or the model has been published online, i.e., modification to the original artwork or model retraining is not feasible, these strategies might not be viable. To this end, we propose a novel method for data-use auditing in the text-to-image generation model. The general idea of ArtistAuditor is to identify if a suspicious model has been finetuned using the artworks of specific artists by analyzing the features related to the style. Concretely, ArtistAuditor employs a style extractor to obtain the multi-granularity style representations and treats artworks as samplings of an artist's style. Then, ArtistAuditor queries a trained discriminator to gain the auditing decisions. The experimental results on six combinations of models and datasets show that ArtistAuditor can achieve high AUC values (> 0.937). By studying ArtistAuditor's transferability and core modules, we provide valuable insights into the practical implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ArtistAuditor in real-world cases by an online platform Scenario. ArtistAuditor is open-sourced at https://github.com/Jozenn/ArtistAuditor.

EdgeGFL: Rethinking Edge Information in Graph Feature Preference Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have significant advantages in handling non-Euclidean data and have been widely applied across various areas, thus receiving increasing attention in recent years. The framework of GNN models mainly includes the information propagation phase and the aggregation phase, treating nodes and edges as information entities and propagation channels, respectively. However, most existing GNN models face the challenge of disconnection between node and edge feature information, as these models typically treat the learning of edge and node features as independent tasks. To address this limitation, we aim to develop an edge-empowered graph feature preference learning framework that can capture edge embeddings to assist node embeddings. By leveraging the learned multidimensional edge feature matrix, we construct multi-channel filters to more effectively capture accurate node features, thereby obtaining the non-local structural characteristics and fine-grained high-order node features. Specifically, the inclusion of multidimensional edge information enhances the functionality and flexibility of the GNN model, enabling it to handle complex and diverse graph data more effectively. Additionally, integrating relational representation learning into the message passing framework allows graph nodes to receive more useful information, thereby facilitating node representation learning. Finally, experiments on four real-world heterogeneous graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of theproposed model.