Guoqiang Zhong

Yanan Li, Zhimin Wang, Rongbing Han et al.

Quantum neural network (QNN) is one of the promising directions where the near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices could find advantageous applications against classical resources. Recurrent neural networks are the most fundamental networks for sequential learning, but up to now there is still a lack of canonical model of quantum recurrent neural network (QRNN), which certainly restricts the research in the field of quantum deep learning. In the present work, we propose a new kind of QRNN which would be a good candidate as the canonical QRNN model, where, the quantum recurrent blocks (QRBs) are constructed in the hardware-efficient way, and the QRNN is built by stacking the QRBs in a staggered way that can greatly reduce the algorithm's requirement with regard to the coherent time of quantum devices. That is, our QRNN is much more accessible on NISQ devices. Furthermore, the performance of the present QRNN model is verified concretely using three different kinds of classical sequential data, i.e., meteorological indicators, stock price, and text categorization. The numerical experiments show that our QRNN achieves much better performance in prediction (classification) accuracy against the classical RNN and state-of-the-art QNN models for sequential learning, and can predict the changing details of temporal sequence data. The practical circuit structure and superior performance indicate that the present QRNN is a promising learning model to find quantum advantageous applications in the near term.

Shangshang Shi, Zhimin Wang, Ruimin Shang et al.

The taxonomic composition and abundance of phytoplankton, having direct impact on marine ecosystem dynamic and global environment change, are listed as essential ocean variables. Phytoplankton classification is very crucial for Phytoplankton analysis, but it is very difficult because of the huge amount and tiny volume of Phytoplankton. Machine learning is the principle way of performing phytoplankton image classification automatically. When carrying out large-scale research on the marine phytoplankton, the volume of data increases overwhelmingly and more powerful computational resources are required for the success of machine learning algorithms. Recently, quantum machine learning has emerged as the potential solution for large-scale data processing by harnessing the exponentially computational power of quantum computer. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of quantum deep neural networks for phytoplankton classification. Hybrid quantum-classical convolutional and residual neural networks are developed based on the classical architectures. These models make a proper balance between the limited function of the current quantum devices and the large size of phytoplankton images, which make it possible to perform phytoplankton classification on the near-term quantum computers. Better performance is obtained by the quantum-enhanced models against the classical counterparts. In particular, quantum models converge much faster than classical ones. The present quantum models are versatile, and can be applied for various tasks of image classification in the field of marine science.

Shuo Yin, Weihao You, Zhilong Ji et al.

The tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) that integrate with external Python interpreters have significantly enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities for open-source LLMs, while tool-free methods chose another track: augmenting math reasoning data. However, a great method to integrate the above two research paths and combine their advantages remains to be explored. In this work, we firstly include new math questions via multi-perspective data augmenting methods and then synthesize code-nested solutions to them. The open LLMs (i.e., Llama-2) are finetuned on the augmented dataset to get the resulting models, MuMath-Code ($μ$-Math-Code). During the inference phase, our MuMath-Code generates code and interacts with the external python interpreter to get the execution results. Therefore, MuMath-Code leverages the advantages of both the external tool and data augmentation. To fully leverage the advantages of our augmented data, we propose a two-stage training strategy: In Stage-1, we finetune Llama-2 on pure CoT data to get an intermediate model, which then is trained on the code-nested data in Stage-2 to get the resulting MuMath-Code. Our MuMath-Code-7B achieves 83.8 on GSM8K and 52.4 on MATH, while MuMath-Code-70B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance among open methods -- achieving 90.7% on GSM8K and 55.1% on MATH. Extensive experiments validate the combination of tool use and data augmentation, as well as our two-stage training strategy. We release the proposed dataset along with the associated code for public use.

Huiqiang Wang, Mingchen Song, Guoqiang Zhong

Currently, restoring clean images from a variety of degradation types using a single model is still a challenging task. Existing all-in-one image restoration approaches struggle with addressing complex and ambiguously defined degradation types. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic degradation decomposition network for all-in-one image restoration, named D$^3$Net. D$^3$Net achieves degradation-adaptive image restoration with guided prompt through cross-domain interaction and dynamic degradation decomposition. Concretely, in D$^3$Net, the proposed Cross-Domain Degradation Analyzer (CDDA) engages in deep interaction between frequency domain degradation characteristics and spatial domain image features to identify and model variations of different degradation types on the image manifold, generating degradation correction prompt and strategy prompt, which guide the following decomposition process. Furthermore, the prompt-based Dynamic Decomposition Mechanism (DDM) for progressive degradation decomposition, that encourages the network to adaptively select restoration strategies utilizing the two-level prompt generated by CDDA. Thanks to the synergistic cooperation between CDDA and DDM, D$^3$Net achieves superior flexibility and scalability in handling unknown degradation, while effectively reducing unnecessary computational overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple image restoration tasks demonstrate that D$^3$Net significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, especially improving PSNR by 5.47dB and 3.30dB on the SOTS-Outdoor and GoPro datasets, respectively.

Mingchen Song, Xiang Deng, Guoqiang Zhong et al.

Recently, Transformer-based robotic manipulation methods utilize multi-view spatial representations and language instructions to learn robot motion trajectories by leveraging numerous robot demonstrations. However, the collection of robot data is extremely challenging, and existing methods lack the capability for continuous learning on new tasks with only a few demonstrations. In this paper, we formulate these challenges as the Few-Shot Action-Incremental Learning (FSAIL) task, and accordingly design a Task-prOmpt graPh evolutIon poliCy (TOPIC) to address these issues. Specifically, to address the data scarcity issue in robotic imitation learning, TOPIC learns Task-Specific Prompts (TSP) through the deep interaction of multi-modal information within few-shot demonstrations, thereby effectively extracting the task-specific discriminative information. On the other hand, to enhance the capability for continual learning on new tasks and mitigate the issue of catastrophic forgetting, TOPIC adopts a Continuous Evolution Strategy (CES). CES leverages the intrinsic relationships between tasks to construct a task relation graph, which effectively facilitates the adaptation of new tasks by reusing skills learned from previous tasks. TOPIC pioneers few-shot continual learning in the robotic manipulation task, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that TOPIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 26$\%$ in success rate, significantly enhancing the continual learning capabilities of existing Transformer-based policies.

Jinxuan Sun, Yang Chen, Junyu Dong et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are widely used in image generation tasks, yet the generated images are usually lack of texture details. In this paper, we propose a general framework, called Progressively Unfreezing Perceptual GAN (PUPGAN), which can generate images with fine texture details. Particularly, we propose an adaptive perceptual discriminator with a pre-trained perceptual feature extractor, which can efficiently measure the discrepancy between multi-level features of the generated and real images. In addition, we propose a progressively unfreezing scheme for the adaptive perceptual discriminator, which ensures a smooth transfer process from a large scale classification task to a specified image generation task. The qualitative and quantitative experiments with comparison to the classical baselines on three image generation tasks, i.e. single image super-resolution, paired image-to-image translation and unpaired image-to-image translation demonstrate the superiority of PUPGAN over the compared approaches.

Zhenlin Fan, Guoqiang Zhong

Mesoscale eddies play a significant role in marine energy transport, marine biological environment and marine climate. Due to their huge impact on the ocean, mesoscale eddy detection has become a hot research area in recent years. Therefore, more and more people are entering the field of mesoscale eddy detection. However, the existing detection methods mainly based on traditional detection methods typically only use Sea Surface Height (SSH) as a variable to detect, resulting in inaccurate performance. In this paper, we propose a mesoscale eddy detection method based on multivariate fusion data to solve this problem. We not only use the SSH variable, but also add the two variables: Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and velocity of flow, achieving a multivariate information fusion input. We design a novel symmetric network, which merges low-level feature maps from the downsampling pathway and high-level feature maps from the upsampling pathway by lateral connection. In addition, we apply dilated convolutions to network structure to increase the receptive field and obtain more contextual information in the case of constant parameter. In the end, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on dataset provided by us, achieving the test set performance of 97.06% , greatly improved the performance of previous methods of mesoscale eddy detection.

Qingyang Li, Guoqiang Zhong, Cui Xie

The ocean front has an important impact in many areas, it is meaningful to obtain accurate ocean front positioning, therefore, ocean front detection is a very important task. However, the traditional edge detection algorithm does not detect the weak edge information of the ocean front very well. In response to this problem, we collected relevant ocean front gradient images and found relevant experts to calibrate the ocean front data to obtain groundtruth, and proposed a weak edge identification nets(WEIN) for ocean front detection. Whether it is qualitative or quantitative, our methods perform best. The method uses a welltrained deep learning model to accurately extract the ocean front from the ocean front gradient image. The detection network is divided into multiple stages, and the final output is a multi-stage output image fusion. The method uses the stochastic gradient descent and the correlation loss function to obtain a good ocean front image output.

Jinxuan Sun, Guoqiang Zhong, Yang Chen et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have a great performance in image generation, but they need a large scale of data to train the entire framework, and often result in nonsensical results. We propose a new method referring to conditional GAN, which equipments the latent noise with mixture of Student's t-distribution with attention mechanism in addition to class information. Student's t-distribution has long tails that can provide more diversity to the latent noise. Meanwhile, the discriminator in our model implements two tasks simultaneously, judging whether the images come from the true data distribution, and identifying the class of each generated images. The parameters of the mixture model can be learned along with those of GANs. Moreover, we mathematically prove that any multivariate Student's t-distribution can be obtained by a linear transformation of a normal multivariate Student's t-distribution. Experiments comparing the proposed method with typical GAN, DeliGAN and DCGAN indicate that, our method has a great performance on generating diverse and legible objects with limited data.

Guoqiang Zhong, Wencong Jiao, Wei Gao

Recently, with convolutional neural networks gaining significant achievements in many challenging machine learning fields, hand-crafted neural networks no longer satisfy our requirements as designing a network will cost a lot, and automatically generating architectures has attracted increasingly more attention and focus. Some research on auto-generated networks has achieved promising results. However, they mainly aim at picking a series of single layers such as convolution or pooling layers one by one. There are many elegant and creative designs in the carefully hand-crafted neural networks, such as Inception-block in GoogLeNet, residual block in residual network and dense block in dense convolutional network. Based on reinforcement learning and taking advantages of the superiority of these networks, we propose a novel automatic process to design a multi-block neural network, whose architecture contains multiple types of blocks mentioned above, with the purpose to do structure learning of deep neural networks and explore the possibility whether different blocks can be composed together to form a well-behaved neural network. The optimal network is created by the Q-learning agent who is trained to sequentially pick different types of blocks. To verify the validity of our proposed method, we use the auto-generated multi-block neural network to conduct experiments on image benchmark datasets MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR-10 image classification task with restricted computational resources. The results demonstrate that our method is very effective, achieving comparable or better performance than hand-crafted networks and advanced auto-generated neural networks.

Guoqiang Zhong, Guohua Yue, Xiao Ling

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) has been successfully applied in many sequence learning problems. Such as handwriting recognition, image description, natural language processing and video motion analysis. After years of development, researchers have improved the internal structure of the RNN and introduced many variants. Among others, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is one of the most widely used RNN model. However, GRU lacks the capability of adaptively paying attention to certain regions or locations, so that it may cause information redundancy or loss during leaning. In this paper, we propose a RNN model, called Recurrent Attention Unit (RAU), which seamlessly integrates the attention mechanism into the interior of GRU by adding an attention gate. The attention gate can enhance GRU's ability to remember long-term memory and help memory cells quickly discard unimportant content. RAU is capable of extracting information from the sequential data by adaptively selecting a sequence of regions or locations and pay more attention to the selected regions during learning. Extensive experiments on image classification, sentiment classification and language modeling show that RAU consistently outperforms GRU and other baseline methods.

Guoqiang Zhong, Xin Lin, Kang Chen et al.

Attention is an important cognition process of humans, which helps humans concentrate on critical information during their perception and learning. However, although many machine learning models can remember information of data, they have no the attention mechanism. For example, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network is able to remember sequential information, but it cannot pay special attention to part of the sequences. In this paper, we present a novel model called long short-term attention (LSTA), which seamlessly integrates the attention mechanism into the inner cell of LSTM. More than processing long short term dependencies, LSTA can focus on important information of the sequences with the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LSTA outperforms LSTM and related models on the sequence learning tasks.

Guoqiang Zhong, Tao Li, Wenxue Liu et al.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has gained state-of-the-art results in many pattern recognition and computer vision tasks. However, most of the CNN structures are manually designed by experienced researchers. Therefore, auto- matically building high performance networks becomes an important problem. In this paper, we introduce the idea of using DNA computing algorithm to automatically learn high-performance architectures. In DNA computing algorithm, we use short DNA strands to represent layers and long DNA strands to represent overall networks. We found that most of the learned models perform similarly, and only those performing worse during the first runs of training will perform worse finally than others. The indicates that: 1) Using DNA computing algorithm to learn deep architectures is feasible; 2) Local minima should not be a problem of deep networks; 3) We can use early stop to kill the models with the bad performance just after several runs of training. In our experiments, an accuracy 99.73% was obtained on the MNIST data set and an accuracy 95.10% was obtained on the CIFAR-10 data set.

Guoqiang Zhong, Wei Gao, Yongbin Liu et al.

In recent years, research on image generation methods has been developing fast. The auto-encoding variational Bayes method (VAEs) was proposed in 2013, which uses variational inference to learn a latent space from the image database and then generates images using the decoder. The generative adversarial networks (GANs) came out as a promising framework, which uses adversarial training to improve the generative ability of the generator. However, the generated pictures by GANs are generally blurry. The deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs) were then proposed to leverage the quality of generated images. Since the input noise vectors are randomly sampled from a Gaussian distribution, the generator has to map from a whole normal distribution to the images. This makes DCGANs unable to reflect the inherent structure of the training data. In this paper, we propose a novel deep model, called generative adversarial networks with decoder-encoder output noise (DE-GANs), which takes advantage of both the adversarial training and the variational Bayesain inference to improve the performance of image generation. DE-GANs use a pre-trained decoder-encoder architecture to map the random Gaussian noise vectors to informative ones and pass them to the generator of the adversarial networks. Since the decoder-encoder architecture is trained by the same images as the generators, the output vectors could carry the intrinsic distribution information of the original images. Moreover, the loss function of DE-GANs is different from GANs and DCGANs. A hidden-space loss function is added to the adversarial loss function to enhance the robustness of the model. Extensive empirical results show that DE-GANs can accelerate the convergence of the adversarial training process and improve the quality of the generated images.

Qin Zhang, Hui Wang, Junyu Dong et al.

This letter adopts long short-term memory(LSTM) to predict sea surface temperature(SST), which is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to use recurrent neural network to solve the problem of SST prediction, and to make one week and one month daily prediction. We formulate the SST prediction problem as a time series regression problem. LSTM is a special kind of recurrent neural network, which introduces gate mechanism into vanilla RNN to prevent the vanished or exploding gradient problem. It has strong ability to model the temporal relationship of time series data and can handle the long-term dependency problem well. The proposed network architecture is composed of two kinds of layers: LSTM layer and full-connected dense layer. LSTM layer is utilized to model the time series relationship. Full-connected layer is utilized to map the output of LSTM layer to a final prediction. We explore the optimal setting of this architecture by experiments and report the accuracy of coastal seas of China to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we also show its online updated characteristics.

Yanhai Gan, Huifang Chi, Ying Gao et al.

This paper investigates a novel task of generating texture images from perceptual descriptions. Previous work on texture generation focused on either synthesis from examples or generation from procedural models. Generating textures from perceptual attributes have not been well studied yet. Meanwhile, perceptual attributes, such as directionality, regularity and roughness are important factors for human observers to describe a texture. In this paper, we propose a joint deep network model that combines adversarial training and perceptual feature regression for texture generation, while only random noise and user-defined perceptual attributes are required as input. In this model, a preliminary trained convolutional neural network is essentially integrated with the adversarial framework, which can drive the generated textures to possess given perceptual attributes. An important aspect of the proposed model is that, if we change one of the input perceptual features, the corresponding appearance of the generated textures will also be changed. We design several experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can produce high quality texture images with desired perceptual properties.

Guoqiang Zhong, Li-Na Wang, Junyu Dong

Since about 100 years ago, to learn the intrinsic structure of data, many representation learning approaches have been proposed, including both linear ones and nonlinear ones, supervised ones and unsupervised ones. Particularly, deep architectures are widely applied for representation learning in recent years, and have delivered top results in many tasks, such as image classification, object detection and speech recognition. In this paper, we review the development of data representation learning methods. Specifically, we investigate both traditional feature learning algorithms and state-of-the-art deep learning models. The history of data representation learning is introduced, while available resources (e.g. online course, tutorial and book information) and toolboxes are provided. Finally, we conclude this paper with remarks and some interesting research directions on data representation learning.

Jianyuan Sun, Guoqiang Zhong, Junyu Dong et al.

Random forests are a type of ensemble method which makes predictions by combining the results of several independent trees. However, the theory of random forests has long been outpaced by their application. In this paper, we propose a novel random forests algorithm based on cooperative game theory. Banzhaf power index is employed to evaluate the power of each feature by traversing possible feature coalitions. Unlike the previously used information gain rate of information theory, which simply chooses the most informative feature, the Banzhaf power index can be considered as a metric of the importance of each feature on the dependency among a group of features. More importantly, we have proved the consistency of the proposed algorithm, named Banzhaf random forests (BRF). This theoretical analysis takes a step towards narrowing the gap between the theory and practice of random forests for classification problems. Experiments on several UCI benchmark data sets show that BRF is competitive with state-of-the-art classifiers and dramatically outperforms previous consistent random forests. Particularly, it is much more efficient than previous consistent random forests.

Guoqiang Zhong, Pan Yang, Sijiang Wang et al.

Hashing-based methods seek compact and efficient binary codes that preserve the neighborhood structure in the original data space. For most existing hashing methods, an image is first encoded as a vector of hand-crafted visual feature, followed by a hash projection and quantization step to get the compact binary vector. Most of the hand-crafted features just encode the low-level information of the input, the feature may not preserve the semantic similarities of images pairs. Meanwhile, the hashing function learning process is independent with the feature representation, so the feature may not be optimal for the hashing projection. In this paper, we propose a supervised hashing method based on a well designed deep convolutional neural network, which tries to learn hashing code and compact representations of data simultaneously. The proposed model learn the binary codes by adding a compact sigmoid layer before the loss layer. Experiments on several image data sets show that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Yanhai Gan, Jun Liu, Junyu Dong et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised deep learning model, called PCA-based Convolutional Network (PCN). The architecture of PCN is composed of several feature extraction stages and a nonlinear output stage. Particularly, each feature extraction stage includes two layers: a convolutional layer and a feature pooling layer. In the convolutional layer, the filter banks are simply learned by PCA. In the nonlinear output stage, binary hashing is applied. For the higher convolutional layers, the filter banks are learned from the feature maps that were obtained in the previous stage. To test PCN, we conducted extensive experiments on some challenging tasks, including handwritten digits recognition, face recognition and texture classification. The results show that PCN performs competitive with or even better than state-of-the-art deep learning models. More importantly, since there is no back propagation for supervised finetuning, PCN is much more efficient than existing deep networks.

Guoqiang Zhong, Mohamed Cheriet

Other than vector representations, the direct objects of human cognition are generally high-order tensors, such as 2D images and 3D textures. From this fact, two interesting questions naturally arise: How does the human brain represent these tensor perceptions in a "manifold" way, and how can they be recognized on the "manifold"? In this paper, we present a supervised model to learn the intrinsic structure of the tensors embedded in a high dimensional Euclidean space. With the fixed point continuation procedures, our model automatically and jointly discovers the optimal dimensionality and the representations of the low dimensional embeddings. This makes it an effective simulation of the cognitive process of human brain. Furthermore, the generalization of our model based on similarity between the learned low dimensional embeddings can be viewed as counterpart of recognition of human brain. Experiments on applications for object recognition and face recognition demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over state-of-the-art approaches.