Machine Learning for Analyzing Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) Images Generated from Polymer Blends

In this paper we present a new machine learning workflow with unsupervised learning techniques to identify domains within atomic force microscopy images obtained from polymer films. The goal of the workflow is to identify the spatial location of the two types of polymer domains with little to no manual intervention and calculate the domain size distributions which in turn can help qualify the phase separated state of the material as macrophase or microphase ordered or disordered domains. We briefly review existing approaches used in other fields, computer vision and signal processing that can be applicable for the above tasks that happen frequently in the field of polymer science and engineering. We then test these approaches from computer vision and signal processing on the AFM image dataset to identify the strengths and limitations of each of these approaches for our first task. For our first domain segmentation task, we found that the workflow using discrete Fourier transform or discrete cosine transform with variance statistics as the feature works the best. The popular ResNet50 deep learning approach from computer vision field exhibited relatively poorer performance in the domain segmentation task for our AFM images as compared to the DFT and DCT based workflows. For the second task, for each of 144 input AFM images, we then used an existing porespy python package to calculate the domain size distribution from the output of that image from DFT based workflow. The information and open source codes we share in this paper can serve as a guide for researchers in the polymer and soft materials fields who need ML modeling and workflows for automated analyses of AFM images from polymer samples that may have crystalline or amorphous domains, sharp or rough interfaces between domains, or micro or macrophase separated domains.

Crimson: Empowering Strategic Reasoning in Cybersecurity through Large Language Models

We introduces Crimson, a system that enhances the strategic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the realm of cybersecurity. By correlating CVEs with MITRE ATT&CK techniques, Crimson advances threat anticipation and strategic defense efforts. Our approach includes defining and evaluating cybersecurity strategic tasks, alongside implementing a comprehensive human-in-the-loop data-synthetic workflow to develop the CVE-to-ATT&CK Mapping (CVEM) dataset. We further enhance LLMs' reasoning abilities through a novel Retrieval-Aware Training (RAT) process and its refined iteration, RAT-R. Our findings demonstrate that an LLM fine-tuned with our techniques, possessing 7 billion parameters, approaches the performance level of GPT-4, showing markedly lower rates of hallucination and errors, and surpassing other models in strategic reasoning tasks. Moreover, domain-specific fine-tuning of embedding models significantly improves performance within cybersecurity contexts, underscoring the efficacy of our methodology. By leveraging Crimson to convert raw vulnerability data into structured and actionable insights, we bolster proactive cybersecurity defenses.

Quantum Machine Learning: from NISQ to Fault Tolerance

Quantum machine learning, which involves running machine learning algorithms on quantum devices, has garnered significant attention in both academic and business circles. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive and unbiased review of the various concepts that have emerged in the field of quantum machine learning. This includes techniques used in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technologies and approaches for algorithms compatible with fault-tolerant quantum computing hardware. Our review covers fundamental concepts, algorithms, and the statistical learning theory pertinent to quantum machine learning.

Long Short-Term Planning for Conversational Recommendation Systems

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), the central question is how the conversational agent can naturally ask for user preferences and provide suitable recommendations. Existing works mainly follow the hierarchical architecture, where a higher policy decides whether to invoke the conversation module (to ask questions) or the recommendation module (to make recommendations). This architecture prevents these two components from fully interacting with each other. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel architecture, the long short-term feedback architecture, to connect these two essential components in CRS. Specifically, the recommendation predicts the long-term recommendation target based on the conversational context and the user history. Driven by the targeted recommendation, the conversational model predicts the next topic or attribute to verify if the user preference matches the target. The balance feedback loop continues until the short-term planner output matches the long-term planner output, that is when the system should make the recommendation.

Fundamental causal bounds of quantum random access memories

Quantum devices should operate in adherence to quantum physics principles. Quantum random access memory (QRAM), a fundamental component of many essential quantum algorithms for tasks such as linear algebra, data search, and machine learning, is often proposed to offer $\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ circuit depth for $\mathcal{O}(N)$ data size, given $N$ qubits. However, this claim appears to breach the principle of relativity when dealing with a large number of qubits in quantum materials interacting locally. In our study we critically explore the intrinsic bounds of rapid quantum memories based on causality, employing the relativistic quantum field theory and Lieb-Robinson bounds in quantum many-body systems. In this paper, we consider a hardware-efficient QRAM design in hybrid quantum acoustic systems. Assuming clock cycle times of approximately $10^{-3}$ seconds and a lattice spacing of about 1 micrometer, we show that QRAM can accommodate up to $\mathcal{O}(10^7)$ logical qubits in 1 dimension, $\mathcal{O}(10^{15})$ to $\mathcal{O}(10^{20})$ in various 2D architectures, and $\mathcal{O}(10^{24})$ in 3 dimensions. We contend that this causality bound broadly applies to other quantum hardware systems. Our findings highlight the impact of fundamental quantum physics constraints on the long-term performance of quantum computing applications in data science and suggest potential quantum memory designs for performance enhancement.

Inductive Meta-path Learning for Schema-complex Heterogeneous Information Networks

Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) are information networks with multiple types of nodes and edges. The concept of meta-path, i.e., a sequence of entity types and relation types connecting two entities, is proposed to provide the meta-level explainable semantics for various HIN tasks. Traditionally, meta-paths are primarily used for schema-simple HINs, e.g., bibliographic networks with only a few entity types, where meta-paths are often enumerated with domain knowledge. However, the adoption of meta-paths for schema-complex HINs, such as knowledge bases (KBs) with hundreds of entity and relation types, has been limited due to the computational complexity associated with meta-path enumeration. Additionally, effectively assessing meta-paths requires enumerating relevant path instances, which adds further complexity to the meta-path learning process. To address these challenges, we propose SchemaWalk, an inductive meta-path learning framework for schema-complex HINs. We represent meta-paths with schema-level representations to support the learning of the scores of meta-paths for varying relations, mitigating the need of exhaustive path instance enumeration for each relation. Further, we design a reinforcement-learning based path-finding agent, which directly navigates the network schema (i.e., schema graph) to learn policies for establishing meta-paths with high coverage and confidence for multiple relations. Extensive experiments on real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed paradigm.

View-Disentangled Transformer for Brain Lesion Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely adopted in brain lesion detection and segmentation. However, locating small lesions in 2D MRI slices is challenging, and requires to balance between the granularity of 3D context aggregation and the computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel view-disentangled transformer to enhance the extraction of MRI features for more accurate tumour detection. First, the proposed transformer harvests long-range correlation among different positions in a 3D brain scan. Second, the transformer models a stack of slice features as multiple 2D views and enhance these features view-by-view, which approximately achieves the 3D correlation computing in an efficient way. Third, we deploy the proposed transformer module in a transformer backbone, which can effectively detect the 2D regions surrounding brain lesions. The experimental results show that our proposed view-disentangled transformer performs well for brain lesion detection on a challenging brain MRI dataset.