Nan Jiang

Haoran Li, Jiayu Lv, Congying Han et al.

Achieving optimality and adversarial robustness in deep reinforcement learning has long been regarded as conflicting goals. Nonetheless, recent theoretical insights presented in CAR suggest a potential alignment, raising the important question of how to realize this in practice. This paper first identifies a key gap between theory and practice by comparing standard policy optimization (SPO) and adversarially robust policy optimization (ARPO). Although they share theoretical consistency, a fundamental tension between robustness and optimality arises in practical policy gradient methods. SPO tends toward convergence to vulnerable first-order stationary policies (FOSPs) with strong natural performance, whereas ARPO typically favors more robust FOSPs at the expense of reduced returns. Furthermore, we attribute this tradeoff to the reshaping effect of the strongest adversary in ARPO, which significantly complicates the global landscape by inducing deceptive sticky FOSPs. This improves robustness but makes navigation more challenging. To alleviate this, we develop the BARPO, a bilevel framework unifying SPO and ARPO by modulating adversary strength, thereby facilitating navigability while preserving global optima. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that BARPO consistently outperforms vanilla ARPO, providing a practical approach to reconcile theoretical and empirical performance.

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.