Quantum computing is a game-changing technology for global academia, research centers and industries including computational science, mathematics, finance, pharmaceutical, materials science, chemistry and cryptography. Although it has seen a major boost in the last decade, we are still a long way from reaching the maturity of a full-fledged quantum computer. That said, we will be in the Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era for a long time, working on dozens or even thousands of qubits quantum computing systems. An outstanding challenge, then, is to come up with an application that can reliably carry out a nontrivial task of interest on the near-term quantum devices with non-negligible quantum noise. To address this challenge, several near-term quantum computing techniques, including variational quantum algorithms, error mitigation, quantum circuit compilation and benchmarking protocols, have been proposed to characterize and mitigate errors, and to implement algorithms with a certain resistance to noise, so as to enhance the capabilities of near-term quantum devices and explore the boundaries of their ability to realize useful applications. Besides, the development of near-term quantum devices is inseparable from the efficient classical simulation, which plays a vital role in quantum algorithm design and verification, error-tolerant verification and other applications. This review will provide a thorough introduction of these near-term quantum computing techniques, report on their progress, and finally discuss the future prospect of these techniques, which we hope will motivate researchers to undertake additional studies in this field.

培训量子机学习模型通常需要一个大标签的数据集，这会产生高标签和计算成本。为了降低这种成本，一种称为主动学习（AL）的选择性培训策略，仅选择原始数据集的一个子集，同时保持训练有素的模型的性能。在这里，我们设计并实施了两个具有AL能力的变分量子分类器，以研究AL在量子机学习中的潜在应用和有效性。首先，我们构建了一个可编程的自由空间光子量子处理器，该处理器可以实现各种混合量子量子计算算法的编程实现。然后，我们将设计的变分量子分类器与Al编码为量子处理器，并对有或没有AL策略进行分类器进行比较测试。结果证明了AL在量子机学习中的最大优势，因为它最多节省了$ 85 \％$标签工作，而没有AL在数据分类任务的情况下，$ 91.6 \％$ $％的计算工作。我们的结果激发了AL在大规模量子机学习中的进一步应用，以大大减少训练数据并加快训练的速度，并为探索量子物理或现实世界应用中实用量子优势的探索提供了基础。

变异量子算法（VQA）已成为一种有希望的近期技术，可以探索噪音中间尺度量子（NISQ）设备上实用的量子优势。但是，由于与返回的不兼容和大量测量的成本，效率低下的参数训练过程构成了巨大的挑战，对VQA的大规模发展构成了巨大挑战。在这里，我们提出了一个参数平行的分布式变异量子算法（PPD-VQA），以通过使用多个量子处理器的参数平行训练来加速训练过程。为了在现实的噪声场景中保持PPD-VQA的高性能，提出了一种替代训练策略来减轻由多个量子处理器之间噪声差异引起的加速衰减，这是分布式VQA的不可避免的共同问题。此外，还采用了梯度压缩来克服潜在的通信瓶颈。所达到的结果表明，PPD-VQA可以提供一个实用的解决方案，用于协调多个量子处理器以处理大规模的实词应用程序。

This paper focuses on designing efficient models with low parameters and FLOPs for dense predictions. Even though CNN-based lightweight methods have achieved stunning results after years of research, trading-off model accuracy and constrained resources still need further improvements. This work rethinks the essential unity of efficient Inverted Residual Block in MobileNetv2 and effective Transformer in ViT, inductively abstracting a general concept of Meta-Mobile Block, and we argue that the specific instantiation is very important to model performance though sharing the same framework. Motivated by this phenomenon, we deduce a simple yet efficient modern \textbf{I}nverted \textbf{R}esidual \textbf{M}obile \textbf{B}lock (iRMB) for mobile applications, which absorbs CNN-like efficiency to model short-distance dependency and Transformer-like dynamic modeling capability to learn long-distance interactions. Furthermore, we design a ResNet-like 4-phase \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{MO}del (EMO) based only on a series of iRMBs for dense applications. Massive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EMO over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, our EMO-1M/2M/5M achieve 71.5, 75.1, and 78.4 Top-1 that surpass \textbf{SoTA} CNN-/Transformer-based models, while trading-off the model accuracy and efficiency well.

Supervised Question Answering systems (QA systems) rely on domain-specific human-labeled data for training. Unsupervised QA systems generate their own question-answer training pairs, typically using secondary knowledge sources to achieve this outcome. Our approach (called PIE-QG) uses Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) to generate synthetic training questions from paraphrased passages and uses the question-answer pairs as training data for a language model for a state-of-the-art QA system based on BERT. Triples in the form of <subject, predicate, object> are extracted from each passage, and questions are formed with subjects (or objects) and predicates while objects (or subjects) are considered as answers. Experimenting on five extractive QA datasets demonstrates that our technique achieves on-par performance with existing state-of-the-art QA systems with the benefit of being trained on an order of magnitude fewer documents and without any recourse to external reference data sources.

Transformer has achieved impressive successes for various computer vision tasks. However, most of existing studies require to pretrain the Transformer backbone on a large-scale labeled dataset (e.g., ImageNet) for achieving satisfactory performance, which is usually unavailable for medical images. Additionally, due to the gap between medical and natural images, the improvement generated by the ImageNet pretrained weights significantly degrades while transferring the weights to medical image processing tasks. In this paper, we propose Bootstrap Own Latent of Transformer (BOLT), a self-supervised learning approach specifically for medical image classification with the Transformer backbone. Our BOLT consists of two networks, namely online and target branches, for self-supervised representation learning. Concretely, the online network is trained to predict the target network representation of the same patch embedding tokens with a different perturbation. To maximally excavate the impact of Transformer from limited medical data, we propose an auxiliary difficulty ranking task. The Transformer is enforced to identify which branch (i.e., online/target) is processing the more difficult perturbed tokens. Overall, the Transformer endeavours itself to distill the transformation-invariant features from the perturbed tokens to simultaneously achieve difficulty measurement and maintain the consistency of self-supervised representations. The proposed BOLT is evaluated on three medical image processing tasks, i.e., skin lesion classification, knee fatigue fracture grading and diabetic retinopathy grading. The experimental results validate the superiority of our BOLT for medical image classification, compared to ImageNet pretrained weights and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), which maps entities and relations in a knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces, has achieved great success in predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. However, knowledge graphs often contain incomplete triples that are difficult to inductively infer by KGEs. To address this challenge, we resort to analogical inference and propose a novel and general self-supervised framework AnKGE to enhance KGE models with analogical inference capability. We propose an analogical object retriever that retrieves appropriate analogical objects from entity-level, relation-level, and triple-level. And in AnKGE, we train an analogy function for each level of analogical inference with the original element embedding from a well-trained KGE model as input, which outputs the analogical object embedding. In order to combine inductive inference capability from the original KGE model and analogical inference capability enhanced by AnKGE, we interpolate the analogy score with the base model score and introduce the adaptive weights in the score function for prediction. Through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that AnKGE achieves competitive results on link prediction task and well performs analogical inference.

Digital engineering transformation is a crucial process for the engineering paradigm shifts in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), and artificial intelligence (AI) is a critical enabling technology in digital engineering transformation. This article discusses the following research questions: What are the fundamental changes in the 4IR? More specifically, what are the fundamental changes in engineering? What is digital engineering? What are the main uncertainties there? What is trustworthy AI? Why is it important today? What are emerging engineering paradigm shifts in the 4IR? What is the relationship between the data-intensive paradigm and digital engineering transformation? What should we do for digitalization? From investigating the pattern of industrial revolutions, this article argues that ubiquitous machine intelligence (uMI) is the defining power brought by the 4IR. Digitalization is a condition to leverage ubiquitous machine intelligence. Digital engineering transformation towards Industry 4.0 has three essential building blocks: digitalization of engineering, leveraging ubiquitous machine intelligence, and building digital trust and security. The engineering design community at large is facing an excellent opportunity to bring the new capabilities of ubiquitous machine intelligence and trustworthy AI principles, as well as digital trust, together in various engineering systems design to ensure the trustworthiness of systems in Industry 4.0.

Surgical robot automation has attracted increasing research interest over the past decade, expecting its huge potential to benefit surgeons, nurses and patients. Recently, the learning paradigm of embodied AI has demonstrated promising ability to learn good control policies for various complex tasks, where embodied AI simulators play an essential role to facilitate relevant researchers. However, existing open-sourced simulators for surgical robot are still not sufficiently supporting human interactions through physical input devices, which further limits effective investigations on how human demonstrations would affect policy learning. In this paper, we study human-in-the-loop embodied intelligence with a new interactive simulation platform for surgical robot learning. Specifically, we establish our platform based on our previously released SurRoL simulator with several new features co-developed to allow high-quality human interaction via an input device. With these, we further propose to collect human demonstrations and imitate the action patterns to achieve more effective policy learning. We showcase the improvement of our simulation environment with the designed new features and tasks, and validate state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms using the interactive environment. Promising results are obtained, with which we hope to pave the way for future research on surgical embodied intelligence. Our platform is released and will be continuously updated in the website: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL/

Learning the underlying distribution of molecular graphs and generating high-fidelity samples is a fundamental research problem in drug discovery and material science. However, accurately modeling distribution and rapidly generating novel molecular graphs remain crucial and challenging goals. To accomplish these goals, we propose a novel Conditional Diffusion model based on discrete Graph Structures (CDGS) for molecular graph generation. Specifically, we construct a forward graph diffusion process on both graph structures and inherent features through stochastic differential equations (SDE) and derive discrete graph structures as the condition for reverse generative processes. We present a specialized hybrid graph noise prediction model that extracts the global context and the local node-edge dependency from intermediate graph states. We further utilize ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers for efficient graph sampling, based on the semi-linear structure of the probability flow ODE. Experiments on diverse datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework. Particularly, the proposed method still generates high-quality molecular graphs in a limited number of steps.