Vipul Bansal

Vipul Bansal

Activation functions have come up as one of the essential components of neural networks. The choice of adequate activation function can impact the accuracy of these methods. In this study, we experiment for finding an optimal activation function by defining it as a weighted sum of existing activation functions and then further optimizing these weights while training the network. The study uses three activation functions, ReLU, tanh, and sin, over three popular image datasets, MNIST, FashionMNIST, and KMNIST. We observe that the ReLU activation function can easily overlook other activation functions. Also, we see that initial layers prefer to have ReLU or LeakyReLU type of activation functions, but deeper layers tend to prefer more convergent activation functions.

Dheeraj Peddireddy, Vipul Bansal, Vaneet Aggarwal

In recent times, Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC) have been widely adopted to different tasks in machine learning such as Combinatorial Optimization and Supervised Learning. With the growing interest, it is pertinent to study the boundaries of the classical simulation of VQCs to effectively benchmark the algorithms. Classically simulating VQCs can also provide the quantum algorithms with a better initialization reducing the amount of quantum resources needed to train the algorithm. This manuscript proposes an algorithm that compresses the quantum state within a circuit using a tensor ring representation which allows for the implementation of VQC based algorithms on a classical simulator at a fraction of the usual storage and computational complexity. Using the tensor ring approximation of the input quantum state, we propose a method that applies the parametrized unitary operations while retaining the low-rank structure of the tensor ring corresponding to the transformed quantum state, providing an exponential improvement of storage and computational time in the number of qubits and layers. This approximation is used to implement the tensor ring VQC for the task of supervised learning on Iris and MNIST datasets to demonstrate the comparable performance as that of the implementations from classical simulator using Matrix Product States.

Vipul Bansal, Himanshu Buckchash, Balasubramanian Raman

Evaluation of students' performance for the completion of courses has been a major problem for both students and faculties during the work-from-home period in this COVID pandemic situation. To this end, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of deep learning and machine learning approaches for the formulation of an automated students' performance estimation system that works on partially available students' academic records. Our main contributions are (a) a large dataset with fifteen courses (shared publicly for academic research) (b) statistical analysis and ablations on the estimation problem for this dataset (c) predictive analysis through deep learning approaches and comparison with other arts and machine learning algorithms. Unlike previous approaches that rely on feature engineering or logical function deduction, our approach is fully data-driven and thus highly generic with better performance across different prediction tasks.