Hao Hu

Yuhua Jiang, Qihan Liu, Yiqin Yang et al.

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic motivation methods for CMDPs primarily rely on count-based approaches, which are ineffective in large state spaces, or on similarity-based methods that lack appropriate metrics for state comparison. To address these shortcomings, we propose Episodic Novelty Through Temporal Distance (ETD), a novel approach that introduces temporal distance as a robust metric for state similarity and intrinsic reward computation. By employing contrastive learning, ETD accurately estimates temporal distances and derives intrinsic rewards based on the novelty of states within the current episode. Extensive experiments on various benchmark tasks demonstrate that ETD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing exploration in sparse reward CMDPs.

Yijie Dang, Nan Jiang, Hao Hu et al.

Image classification is an important task in the field of machine learning and image processing. However, the usually used classification method --- the K Nearest-Neighbor algorithm has high complexity, because its two main processes: similarity computing and searching are time-consuming. Especially in the era of big data, the problem is prominent when the amount of images to be classified is large. In this paper, we try to use the powerful parallel computing ability of quantum computers to optimize the efficiency of image classification. The scheme is based on quantum K Nearest-Neighbor algorithm. Firstly, the feature vectors of images are extracted on classical computers. Then the feature vectors are inputted into a quantum superposition state, which is used to achieve parallel computing of similarity. Next, the quantum minimum search algorithm is used to speed up searching process for similarity. Finally, the image is classified by quantum measurement. The complexity of the quantum algorithm is only O((kM)^(1/2)), which is superior to the classical algorithms. Moreover, the measurement step is executed only once to ensure the validity of the scheme. The experimental results show that, the classification accuracy is 83.1% on Graz-01 dataset and 78% on Caltech-101 dataset, which is close to existing classical algorithms. Hence, our quantum scheme has a good classification performance while greatly improving the efficiency.