In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.

Error correction in automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to correct those incorrect words in sentences generated by ASR models. Since recent ASR models usually have low word error rate (WER), to avoid affecting originally correct tokens, error correction models should only modify incorrect words, and therefore detecting incorrect words is important for error correction. Previous works on error correction either implicitly detect error words through target-source attention or CTC (connectionist temporal classification) loss, or explicitly locate specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors. However, implicit error detection does not provide clear signal about which tokens are incorrect and explicit error detection suffers from low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose SoftCorrect with a soft error detection mechanism to avoid the limitations of both explicit and implicit error detection. Specifically, we first detect whether a token is correct or not through a probability produced by a dedicatedly designed language model, and then design a constrained CTC loss that only duplicates the detected incorrect tokens to let the decoder focus on the correction of error tokens. Compared with implicit error detection with CTC loss, SoftCorrect provides explicit signal about which words are incorrect and thus does not need to duplicate every token but only incorrect tokens; compared with explicit error detection, SoftCorrect does not detect specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors but just leaves it to CTC loss. Experiments on AISHELL-1 and Aidatatang datasets show that SoftCorrect achieves 26.1% and 9.4% CER reduction respectively, outperforming previous works by a large margin, while still enjoying fast speed of parallel generation.

Real-world datasets often contain outliers, and the presence of outliers can make the clustering problems to be much more challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple uniform sampling framework for solving three representative center-based clustering with outliers problems: $k$-center/median/means clustering with outliers. Our analysis is fundamentally different from the previous (uniform and non-uniform) sampling based ideas. To explain the effectiveness of uniform sampling in theory, we introduce a measure of "significance" and prove that the performance of our framework depends on the significance degree of the given instance. In particular, the sample size can be independent of the input data size $n$ and the dimensionality $d$, if we assume the given instance is "significant", which is in fact a fairly reasonable assumption in practice. Due to its simplicity, the uniform sampling approach also enjoys several significant advantages over the non-uniform sampling approaches in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that systematically studies the effectiveness of uniform sampling from both theoretical and experimental aspects.

The complex systems with edge computing require a huge amount of multi-feature data to extract appropriate insights for their decision making, so it is important to find a feasible feature selection method to improve the computational efficiency and save the resource consumption. In this paper, a quantum-based feature selection algorithm for the multi-classification problem, namely, QReliefF, is proposed, which can effectively reduce the complexity of algorithm and improve its computational efficiency. First, all features of each sample are encoded into a quantum state by performing operations CMP and R_y, and then the amplitude estimation is applied to calculate the similarity between any two quantum states (i.e., two samples). According to the similarities, the Grover-Long method is utilized to find the nearest k neighbor samples, and then the weight vector is updated. After a certain number of iterations through the above process, the desired features can be selected with regards to the final weight vector and the threshold {\tau}. Compared with the classical ReliefF algorithm, our algorithm reduces the complexity of similarity calculation from O(MN) to O(M), the complexity of finding the nearest neighbor from O(M) to O(sqrt(M)), and resource consumption from O(MN) to O(MlogN). Meanwhile, compared with the quantum Relief algorithm, our algorithm is superior in finding the nearest neighbor, reducing the complexity from O(M) to O(sqrt(M)). Finally, in order to verify the feasibility of our algorithm, a simulation experiment based on Rigetti with a simple example is performed.

As an emerging field that aims to bridge the gap between human activities and computing systems, human-centered computing (HCC) in cloud, edge, fog has had a huge impact on the artificial intelligence algorithms. The quantum generative adversarial network (QGAN) is considered to be one of the quantum machine learning algorithms with great application prospects, which also should be improved to conform to the human-centered paradigm. The generation process of QGAN is relatively random and the generated model does not conform to the human-centered concept, so it is not quite suitable for real scenarios. In order to solve these problems, a hybrid quantum-classical conditional generative adversarial network (QCGAN) algorithm is proposed, which is a knowledge-driven human-computer interaction computing mode that can be implemented in cloud. The purposes of stabilizing the generation process and realizing the interaction between human and computing process are achieved by inputting artificial conditional information in the generator and discriminator. The generator uses the parameterized quantum circuit with an all-to-all connected topology, which facilitates the tuning of network parameters during the training process. The discriminator uses the classical neural network, which effectively avoids the "input bottleneck" of quantum machine learning. Finally, the BAS training set is selected to conduct experiment on the quantum cloud computing platform. The result shows that the QCGAN algorithm can effectively converge to the Nash equilibrium point after training and perform human-centered classification generation tasks.

Due to the large state space of the two-qubit system, and the adoption of ladder reward function in the existing quantum state preparation methods, the convergence speed is slow and it is difficult to prepare the desired target quantum state with high fidelity under limited conditions. To solve the above problems, a difference-driven reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for quantum state preparation of two-qubit system is proposed by improving the reward function and action selection strategy. Firstly, a model is constructed for the problem of preparing quantum states of a two-qubit system, with restrictions on the type of quantum gates and the time for quantum state evolution. In the preparation process, a weighted differential dynamic reward function is designed to assist the algorithm quickly obtain the maximum expected cumulative reward. Then, an adaptive e-greedy action selection strategy is adopted to achieve a balance between exploration and utilization to a certain extent, thereby improving the fidelity of the final quantum state. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can prepare quantum state with high fidelity under limited conditions. Compared with other algorithms, it has different degrees of improvement in convergence speed and fidelity of the final quantum state.

Traditional quantum system control methods often face different constraints, and are easy to cause both leakage and stochastic control errors under the condition of limited resources. Reinforcement learning has been proved as an efficient way to complete the quantum system control task. To learn a satisfactory control strategy under the condition of limited resources, a quantum system control method based on enhanced reinforcement learning (QSC-ERL) is proposed. The states and actions in reinforcement learning are mapped to quantum states and control operations in quantum systems. By using new enhanced neural networks, reinforcement learning can quickly achieve the maximization of long-term cumulative rewards, and a quantum state can be evolved accurately from an initial state to a target state. According to the number of candidate unitary operations, the three-switch control is used for simulation experiments. Compared with other methods, the QSC-ERL achieves close to 1 fidelity learning control of quantum systems, and takes fewer episodes to quantum state evolution under the condition of limited resources.

The Computed Tomography (CT) for diagnosis of lesions in human internal organs is one of the most fundamental topics in medical imaging. Low-dose CT, which offers reduced radiation exposure, is preferred over standard-dose CT, and therefore its reconstruction approaches have been extensively studied. However, current low-dose CT reconstruction techniques mainly rely on model-based methods or deep-learning-based techniques, which often ignore the coherence and smoothness for sequential CT slices. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach using generative adversarial networks (GANs) with enhanced local coherence. The proposed method can capture the local coherence of adjacent images by optical flow, which yields significant improvements in the precision and stability of the constructed images. We evaluate our proposed method on real datasets and the experimental results suggest that it can outperform existing state-of-the-art reconstruction approaches significantly.

In order to solve the problem of non-ideal training sets (i.e., the less-complete or over-complete sets) and implement one-iteration learning, a novel efficient quantum perceptron algorithm based on unitary weights is proposed, where the singular value decomposition of the total weight matrix from the training set is calculated to make the weight matrix to be unitary. The example validation of quantum gates {H, S, T, CNOT, Toffoli, Fredkin} shows that our algorithm can accurately implement arbitrary quantum gates within one iteration. The performance comparison between our algorithm and other quantum perceptron algorithms demonstrates the advantages of our algorithm in terms of applicability, accuracy, and availability. For further validating the applicability of our algorithm, a quantum composite gate which consists of several basic quantum gates is also illustrated.

It is essential to select efficient topology of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) in variational quantum algorithms (VQAs). However, there are problems in current circuits, i.e. optimization difficulties caused by too many parameters or performance is hard to guarantee. How to reduce the number of parameters (number of single-qubit rotation gates and 2-qubit gates) in PQCs without reducing the performance has become a new challenge. To solve this problem, we propose a novel topology, called Block-Ring (BR) topology, to construct the PQCs. This topology allocate all qubits to several blocks, all-to-all mode is adopt inside each block and ring mode is applied to connect different blocks. Compared with the pure all-to-all topology circuits which own the best power, BR topology have similar performance and the number of parameters and 2-qubit gate reduced from 0(n^2) to 0(mn) , m is a hyperparameter set by ourselves. Besides, we compared BR topology with other topology circuits in terms of expressibility and entangling capability. Considering the effects of different 2-qubit gates on circuits, we also make a distinction between controlled X-rotation gates and controlled Z-rotation gates. Finally, the 1- and 2-layer configurations of PQCs are taken into consideration as well, which shows the BR's performance improvement in the condition of multilayer circuits.