arXiv subjects

Skylar Chan

Publications and source records attributed to Skylar Chan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantum error correction and biological error correction: A structural analogy between qubits and neurons

We draw a structural analogy between quantum error correction (QEC) and error handling in neural circuits with respect to their redundant encodings and constraint-based inferences. In QEC, logical information is embedded in a protected codespace within a larger Hilbert space. A set of commuting checks (e.g. stabilizer constraints) is repeatedly evaluated to produce an error syndrome that identifies which constraints were violated without directly revealing the logical state. A decoder then maps the syndrome to a recovery operation that returns the system to the codespace and suppresses logical failure below a threshold. Neural circuits exhibit error-control strategies that can be viewed through a related biological error correction (BEC) pattern: information is distributed across multiple neurons (redundant encoding), yielding reliable collective activity from error-prone unit operations of individual neurons. The structural analogy with QEC raises the question whether collective activity may be constrained on lower-dimensional manifolds (a biological codespace), allowing recurrent circuit dynamics and mismatch signals to function as syndrome-like indicators of constraint violations, driving fast corrective dynamics and slower adaptive updates. Our structural analogy also suggests that new insights into brain-inspired algorithms for collective information processing may inform novel QEC approaches. We perform numerical experiments using simplified models of qubit and neuron dynamics to illustrate the analogy.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2025

Quantum State Fidelity for Functional Neural Network Construction

Neuroscientists face challenges in analyzing high-dimensional neural recording data of dense functional networks. Without ground-truth reference data, finding the best algorithm for recovering neurologically relevant networks remains an open question. We implemented hybrid quantum algorithms to construct functional networks and compared them with the results of documented classical techniques. We demonstrated that our quantum state fidelity methods can provide competitive alternatives to classical metrics by revealing distinct functional networks. Our results suggest that quantum computing offers a viable and potentially advantageous alternative for data-driven modeling in neuroscience, underscoring its broader applicability in high-dimensional graph inference and complex system analysis.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Expanding the Horizon: Enabling Hybrid Quantum Transfer Learning for Long-Tailed Chest X-Ray Classification

Quantum machine learning (QML) has the potential for improving the multi-label classification of rare, albeit critical, diseases in large-scale chest x-ray (CXR) datasets due to theoretical quantum advantages over classical machine learning (CML) in sample efficiency and generalizability. While prior literature has explored QML with CXRs, it has focused on binary classification tasks with small datasets due to limited access to quantum hardware and computationally expensive simulations. To that end, we implemented a Jax-based framework that enables the simulation of medium-sized qubit architectures with significant improvements in wall-clock time over current software offerings. We evaluated the performance of our Jax-based framework in terms of efficiency and performance for hybrid quantum transfer learning for long-tailed classification across 8, 14, and 19 disease labels using large-scale CXR datasets. The Jax-based framework resulted in up to a 58% and 95% speed-up compared to PyTorch and TensorFlow implementations, respectively. However, compared to CML, QML demonstrated slower convergence and an average AUROC of 0.70, 0.73, and 0.74 for the classification of 8, 14, and 19 CXR disease labels. In comparison, the CML models had an average AUROC of 0.77, 0.78, and 0.80 respectively. In conclusion, our work presents an accessible implementation of hybrid quantum transfer learning for long-tailed CXR classification with a computationally efficient Jax-based framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Hidden in Plain Sight: Undetectable Adversarial Bias Attacks on Vulnerable Patient Populations

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology has shed light on the risk of deep learning (DL) models exacerbating clinical biases towards vulnerable patient populations. While prior literature has focused on quantifying biases exhibited by trained DL models, demographically targeted adversarial bias attacks on DL models and its implication in the clinical environment remains an underexplored field of research in medical imaging. In this work, we demonstrate that demographically targeted label poisoning attacks can introduce undetectable underdiagnosis bias in DL models. Our results across multiple performance metrics and demographic groups like sex, age, and their intersectional subgroups show that adversarial bias attacks demonstrate high-selectivity for bias in the targeted group by degrading group model performance without impacting overall model performance. Furthermore, our results indicate that adversarial bias attacks result in biased DL models that propagate prediction bias even when evaluated with external datasets.

cs.LG↗