Graph self-supervised learning has sparked a research surge in training informative representations without accessing any labeled data. However, our understanding of graph self-supervised learning remains limited, and the inherent relationships between various self-supervised tasks are still unexplored. Our paper aims to provide a fresh understanding of graph self-supervised learning based on task correlations. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of the representations trained by one specific task on other tasks and define correlation values to quantify task correlations. Through this process, we unveil the task correlations between various self-supervised tasks and can measure their expressive capabilities, which are closely related to downstream performance. By analyzing the correlation values between tasks across various datasets, we reveal the complexity of task correlations and the limitations of existing multi-task learning methods. To obtain more capable representations, we propose Graph Task Correlation Modeling (GraphTCM) to illustrate the task correlations and utilize it to enhance graph self-supervised training. The experimental results indicate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods across various downstream tasks.

This work focuses on addressing two major challenges in the context of large-scale nonconvex Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) problems, which are increasingly applied in machine learning due to their ability to model nested structures. These challenges involve ensuring computational efficiency and providing theoretical guarantees. While recent advances in scalable BLO algorithms have primarily relied on lower-level convexity simplification, our work specifically tackles large-scale BLO problems involving nonconvexity in both the upper and lower levels. We simultaneously address computational and theoretical challenges by introducing an innovative single-loop gradient-based algorithm, utilizing the Moreau envelope-based reformulation, and providing non-asymptotic convergence analysis for general nonconvex BLO problems. Notably, our algorithm relies solely on first-order gradient information, enhancing its practicality and efficiency, especially for large-scale BLO learning tasks. We validate our approach's effectiveness through experiments on various synthetic problems, two typical hyper-parameter learning tasks, and a real-world neural architecture search application, collectively demonstrating its superior performance.

Quantum hypothesis testing (QHT) has been traditionally studied from the information-theoretic perspective, wherein one is interested in the optimal decay rate of error probabilities as a function of the number of samples of an unknown state. In this paper, we study the sample complexity of QHT, wherein the goal is to determine the minimum number of samples needed to reach a desired error probability. By making use of the wealth of knowledge that already exists in the literature on QHT, we characterize the sample complexity of binary QHT in the symmetric and asymmetric settings, and we provide bounds on the sample complexity of multiple QHT. In more detail, we prove that the sample complexity of symmetric binary QHT depends logarithmically on the inverse error probability and inversely on the negative logarithm of the fidelity. As a counterpart of the quantum Stein's lemma, we also find that the sample complexity of asymmetric binary QHT depends logarithmically on the inverse type II error probability and inversely on the quantum relative entropy, provided that the type II error probability is sufficiently small. We then provide lower and upper bounds on the sample complexity of multiple QHT, with it remaining an intriguing open question to improve these bounds. The final part of our paper outlines and reviews how sample complexity of QHT is relevant to a broad swathe of research areas and can enhance understanding of many fundamental concepts, including quantum algorithms for simulation and search, quantum learning and classification, and foundations of quantum mechanics. As such, we view our paper as an invitation to researchers coming from different communities to study and contribute to the problem of sample complexity of QHT, and we outline a number of open directions for future research.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a leading paradigm for decentralized, privacy preserving machine learning training. However, recent research on gradient inversion attacks (GIAs) have shown that gradient updates in FL can leak information on private training samples. While existing surveys on GIAs have focused on the honest-but-curious server threat model, there is a dearth of research categorizing attacks under the realistic and far more privacy-infringing cases of malicious servers and clients. In this paper, we present a survey and novel taxonomy of GIAs that emphasize FL threat models, particularly that of malicious servers and clients. We first formally define GIAs and contrast conventional attacks with the malicious attacker. We then summarize existing honest-but-curious attack strategies, corresponding defenses, and evaluation metrics. Critically, we dive into attacks with malicious servers and clients to highlight how they break existing FL defenses, focusing specifically on reconstruction methods, target model architectures, target data, and evaluation metrics. Lastly, we discuss open problems and future research directions.

Speech production is a complex phenomenon, wherein the brain orchestrates a sequence of processes involving thought processing, motor planning, and the execution of articulatory movements. However, this intricate execution of various processes is susceptible to influence and disruption by various neurodegenerative pathological speech disorders, such as Parkinsons' disease, resulting in dysarthria, apraxia, and other conditions. These disorders lead to pathological speech characterized by abnormal speech patterns and imprecise articulation. Diagnosing these speech disorders in clinical settings typically involves auditory perceptual tests, which are time-consuming, and the diagnosis can vary among clinicians based on their experiences, biases, and cognitive load during the diagnosis. Additionally, unlike neurotypical speakers, patients with speech pathologies or impairments are unable to access various virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, etc. To address these challenges, several automatic pathological speech detection (PSD) approaches have been proposed. These approaches aim to provide efficient and accurate detection of speech disorders, thereby facilitating timely intervention and support for individuals affected by these conditions. These approaches mainly vary in two aspects: the input representations utilized and the classifiers employed. Due to the limited availability of data, the performance of detection remains subpar. Self-supervised learning (SSL) embeddings, such as wav2vec2, and their multilingual versions, are being explored as a promising avenue to improve performance. These embeddings leverage self-supervised learning techniques to extract rich representations from audio data, thereby offering a potential solution to address the limitations posed by the scarcity of labeled data.

We introduce a hybrid quantum-classical vision transformer architecture, notable for its integration of variational quantum circuits within both the attention mechanism and the multi-layer perceptrons. The research addresses the critical challenge of computational efficiency and resource constraints in analyzing data from the upcoming High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, presenting the architecture as a potential solution. In particular, we evaluate our method by applying the model to multi-detector jet images from CMS Open Data. The goal is to distinguish quark-initiated from gluon-initiated jets. We successfully train the quantum model and evaluate it via numerical simulations. Using this approach, we achieve classification performance almost on par with the one obtained with the completely classical architecture, considering a similar number of parameters.

These emergencies are unexpected events that occur suddenly and result in or have the potential to result in significant casualties, property damage, ecological harm, and serious social consequences [147]. Throughout history, natural disasters (such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, storms, floods, avalanches, droughts, and wildfires) and accident disasters (including environmental disasters, traffic accidents, explosions, and gas leaks) have caused numerous fatalities, infrastructure damage, and extensive economic loss. According to the Emergencies Database (EM-DAT), between 2000 and 2023, 5,922 public emergencies occurred, leading to 480,000 casualties and 3.5 trillion in economic losses, as shown in Figure 1 [1]. Therefore, it is increasingly vital to use data, information, and various models to predict potential public emergencies that jeopardize public safety and well-being. Predicting the cascade of information in the event deduction process under public emergencies assists governments, organizations, and individuals in taking proactive measures to mitigate the impact of emergencies and minimize damage. Public emergencies are classified into different categories. The most common categories of public emergencies include (1) Natural disasters, (2) Accident disasters.

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly impacted human society, driving significant advancements in multiple sectors. Yet, the escalating demands on AI have highlighted the limitations of AI's current offerings, catalyzing a movement towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI, distinguished by its ability to execute diverse real-world tasks with efficiency and effectiveness comparable to human intelligence, reflects a paramount milestone in AI evolution. While existing works have summarized specific recent advancements of AI, they lack a comprehensive discussion of AGI's definitions, goals, and developmental trajectories. Different from existing survey papers, this paper delves into the pivotal questions of our proximity to AGI and the strategies necessary for its realization through extensive surveys, discussions, and original perspectives. We start by articulating the requisite capability frameworks for AGI, integrating the internal, interface, and system dimensions. As the realization of AGI requires more advanced capabilities and adherence to stringent constraints, we further discuss necessary AGI alignment technologies to harmonize these factors. Notably, we emphasize the importance of approaching AGI responsibly by first defining the key levels of AGI progression, followed by the evaluation framework that situates the status-quo, and finally giving our roadmap of how to reach the pinnacle of AGI. Moreover, to give tangible insights into the ubiquitous impact of the integration of AI, we outline existing challenges and potential pathways toward AGI in multiple domains. In sum, serving as a pioneering exploration into the current state and future trajectory of AGI, this paper aims to foster a collective comprehension and catalyze broader public discussions among researchers and practitioners on AGI.

Incomplete multi-view clustering primarily focuses on dividing unlabeled data into corresponding categories with missing instances, and has received intensive attention due to its superiority in real applications. Considering the influence of incomplete data, the existing methods mostly attempt to recover data by adding extra terms. However, for the unsupervised methods, a simple recovery strategy will cause errors and outlying value accumulations, which will affect the performance of the methods. Broadly, the previous methods have not taken the effectiveness of recovered instances into consideration, or cannot flexibly balance the discrepancies between recovered data and original data. To address these problems, we propose a novel method termed Manifold-based Incomplete Multi-view clustering via Bi-consistency guidance (MIMB), which flexibly recovers incomplete data among various views, and attempts to achieve biconsistency guidance via reverse regularization. In particular, MIMB adds reconstruction terms to representation learning by recovering missing instances, which dynamically examines the latent consensus representation. Moreover, to preserve the consistency information among multiple views, MIMB implements a biconsistency guidance strategy with reverse regularization of the consensus representation and proposes a manifold embedding measure for exploring the hidden structure of the recovered data. Notably, MIMB aims to balance the importance of different views, and introduces an adaptive weight term for each view. Finally, an optimization algorithm with an alternating iteration optimization strategy is designed for final clustering. Extensive experimental results on 6 benchmark datasets are provided to confirm that MIMB can significantly obtain superior results as compared with several state-of-the-art baselines.

To advance the circular economy (CE), it is crucial to gain insights into the evolution of public sentiments, cognitive pathways of the masses concerning circular products and digital technology, and recognise the primary concerns. To achieve this, we collected data related to the CE from diverse platforms including Twitter, Reddit, and The Guardian. This comprehensive data collection spanned across three distinct strata of the public: the general public, professionals, and official sources. Subsequently, we utilised three topic models on the collected data. Topic modelling represents a type of data-driven and machine learning approach for text mining, capable of automatically categorising a large number of documents into distinct semantic groups. Simultaneously, these groups are described by topics, and these topics can aid in understanding the semantic content of documents at a high level. However, the performance of topic modelling may vary depending on different hyperparameter values. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a framework for topic modelling with hyperparameter optimisation for CE and conducted a series of systematic experiments to ensure that topic models are set with appropriate hyperparameters and to gain insights into the correlations between the CE and public opinion based on well-established models. The results of this study indicate that concerns about sustainability and economic impact persist across all three datasets. Official sources demonstrate a higher level of engagement with the application and regulation of CE. To the best of our knowledge, this study is pioneering in investigating various levels of public opinions concerning CE through topic modelling with the exploration of hyperparameter optimisation.