arXiv subjects

Sofia Vallecorsa

Publications and source records attributed to Sofia Vallecorsa.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Running the Dual-PQC GAN on noisy simulators and real quantum hardware

In an earlier work, we introduced dual-Parameterized Quantum Circuit (PQC) Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), an advanced prototype of a quantum GAN. We applied the model on a realistic High-Energy Physics (HEP) use case: the exact theoretical simulation of a calorimeter response with a reduced problem size. This paper explores the dual- PQC GAN for a more practical usage by testing its performance in the presence of different types of quantum noise, which are the major obstacles to overcome for successful deployment using near-term quantum devices. The results propose the possibility of running the model on current real hardware, but improvements are still required in some areas.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Dual-Tasks Siamese Transformer Framework for Building Damage Assessment

Accurate and fine-grained information about the extent of damage to buildings is essential for humanitarian relief and disaster response. However, as the most commonly used architecture in remote sensing interpretation tasks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have limited ability to model the non-local relationship between pixels. Recently, Transformer architecture first proposed for modeling long-range dependency in natural language processing has shown promising results in computer vision tasks. Considering the frontier advances of Transformer architecture in the computer vision field, in this paper, we present the first attempt at designing a Transformer-based damage assessment architecture (DamFormer). In DamFormer, a siamese Transformer encoder is first constructed to extract non-local and representative deep features from input multitemporal image-pairs. Then, a multitemporal fusion module is designed to fuse information for downstream tasks. Finally, a lightweight dual-tasks decoder aggregates multi-level features for final prediction. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that such a deep Transformer-based network is proposed for multitemporal remote sensing interpretation tasks. The experimental results on the large-scale damage assessment dataset xBD demonstrate the potential of the Transformer-based architecture.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

IBM quantum platforms: a quantum battery perspective

We characterize for the first time the performances of IBM quantum chips as quantum batteries, specifically addressing the single-qubit Armonk processor. By exploiting the Pulse access enabled to some of the IBM Quantum processors via the Qiskit package, we investigate advantages and limitations of different profiles for classical drives used to charge these miniaturized batteries, establishing the optimal compromise between charging time and stored energy. Moreover, we consider the role played by various possible initial conditions on the functioning of the quantum batteries. As main result of our analysis, we observe that unavoidable errors occurring in the initialization phase of the qubit, which can be detrimental for quantum computing applications, only marginally affects energy transfer and storage. This can lead counter-intuitively to improvements of the performances. This is a strong indication of the fact that IBM quantum devices are already in the proper range of parameters to be considered as good and stable quantum batteries, comparable to state of the art devices recently discussed in literature.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Snowmass White Paper: Quantum Computing Systems and Software for High-energy Physics Research

Quantum computing offers a new paradigm for advancing high-energy physics research by enabling novel methods for representing and reasoning about fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena. Realizing these ideals will require the development of novel computational tools for modeling and simulation, detection and classification, data analysis, and forecasting of high-energy physics (HEP) experiments. While the emerging hardware, software, and applications of quantum computing are exciting opportunities, significant gaps remain in integrating such techniques into the HEP community research programs. Here we identify both the challenges and opportunities for developing quantum computing systems and software to advance HEP discovery science. We describe opportunities for the focused development of algorithms, applications, software, hardware, and infrastructure to support both practical and theoretical applications of quantum computing to HEP problems within the next 10 years.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Quantum neural networks force fields generation

Accurate molecular force fields are of paramount importance for the efficient implementation of molecular dynamics techniques at large scales. In the last decade, machine learning methods have demonstrated impressive performances in predicting accurate values for energy and forces when trained on finite size ensembles generated with ab initio techniques. At the same time, quantum computers have recently started to offer new viable computational paradigms to tackle such problems. On the one hand, quantum algorithms may notably be used to extend the reach of electronic structure calculations. On the other hand, quantum machine learning is also emerging as an alternative and promising path to quantum advantage. Here we follow this second route and establish a direct connection between classical and quantum solutions for learning neural network potentials. To this end, we design a quantum neural network architecture and apply it successfully to different molecules of growing complexity. The quantum models exhibit larger effective dimension with respect to classical counterparts and can reach competitive performances, thus pointing towards potential quantum advantages in natural science applications via quantum machine learning.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Impact of quantum noise on the training of quantum Generative Adversarial Networks

Current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices suffer from various sources of intrinsic quantum noise. Overcoming the effects of noise is a major challenge, for which different error mitigation and error correction techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we conduct a first study of the performance of quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (qGANs) in the presence of different types of quantum noise, focusing on a simplified use case in high-energy physics. In particular, we explore the effects of readout and two-qubit gate errors on the qGAN training process. Simulating a noisy quantum device classically with IBM's Qiskit framework, we examine the threshold of error rates up to which a reliable training is possible. In addition, we investigate the importance of various hyperparameters for the training process in the presence of different error rates, and we explore the impact of readout error mitigation on the results.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Deep Learning strategies for ProtoDUNE raw data denoising

In this work, we investigate different machine learning-based strategies for denoising raw simulation data from the ProtoDUNE experiment. The ProtoDUNE detector is hosted by CERN and it aims to test and calibrate the technologies for DUNE, a forthcoming experiment in neutrino physics. The reconstruction workchain consists of converting digital detector signals into physical high-level quantities. We address the first step in reconstruction, namely raw data denoising, leveraging deep learning algorithms. We design two architectures based on graph neural networks, aiming to enhance the receptive field of basic convolutional neural networks. We benchmark this approach against traditional algorithms implemented by the DUNE collaboration. We test the capabilities of graph neural network hardware accelerator setups to speed up training and inference processes.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Accelerating GAN training using highly parallel hardware on public cloud

With the increasing number of Machine and Deep Learning applications in High Energy Physics, easy access to dedicated infrastructure represents a requirement for fast and efficient R&D. This work explores different types of cloud services to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in a parallel environment, using Tensorflow data parallel strategy. More specifically, we parallelize the training process on multiple GPUs and Google Tensor Processing Units (TPU) and we compare two algorithms: the TensorFlow built-in logic and a custom loop, optimised to have higher control of the elements assigned to each GPU worker or TPU core. The quality of the generated data is compared to Monte Carlo simulation. Linear speed-up of the training process is obtained, while retaining most of the performance in terms of physics results. Additionally, we benchmark the aforementioned approaches, at scale, over multiple GPU nodes, deploying the training process on different public cloud providers, seeking for overall efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The combination of data science, cloud deployment options and associated economics allows to burst out heterogeneously, exploring the full potential of cloud-based services.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Hybrid Quantum Classical Graph Neural Networks for Particle Track Reconstruction

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be upgraded to further increase the instantaneous rate of particle collisions (luminosity) and become the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). This increase in luminosity will significantly increase the number of particles interacting with the detector. The interaction of particles with a detector is referred to as "hit". The HL-LHC will yield many more detector hits, which will pose a combinatorial challenge by using reconstruction algorithms to determine particle trajectories from those hits. This work explores the possibility of converting a novel Graph Neural Network model, that can optimally take into account the sparse nature of the tracking detector data and their complex geometry, to a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Graph Neural Network that benefits from using Variational Quantum layers. We show that this hybrid model can perform similar to the classical approach. Also, we explore Parametrized Quantum Circuits (PQC) with different expressibility and entangling capacities, and compare their training performance in order to quantify the expected benefits. These results can be used to build a future road map to further develop circuit based Hybrid Quantum-Classical Graph Neural Networks.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Fast Simulation of a High Granularity Calorimeter by Generative Adversarial Networks

We present the 3DGAN for the simulation of a future high granularity calorimeter output as three-dimensional images. We prove the efficacy of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for generating scientific data while retaining a high level of accuracy for diverse metrics across a large range of input variables. We demonstrate a successful application of the transfer learning concept: we train the network to simulate showers for electrons from a reduced range of primary energies, we then train further for a five times larger range (the model could not train for the larger range directly). The same concept is extended to generate showers for other particles (photons and neutral pions) depositing most of their energies in electromagnetic interactions. In addition, the generation of charged pion showers is also explored, a more accurate effort would require additional data from other detectors not included in the scope of the current work. Our further contribution is a demonstration of using GAN-generated data for a practical application. We train a third-party network using GAN-generated data and prove that the response is similar to a network trained with data from the Monte Carlo simulation. The showers generated by GAN present accuracy within $10\%$ of Monte Carlo for a diverse range of physics features, with three orders of magnitude speedup. The speedup for both the training and inference can be further enhanced by distributed training.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2021

Pandemic Drugs at Pandemic Speed: Infrastructure for Accelerating COVID-19 Drug Discovery with Hybrid Machine Learning- and Physics-based Simulations on High Performance Computers

The race to meet the challenges of the global pandemic has served as a reminder that the existing drug discovery process is expensive, inefficient and slow. There is a major bottleneck screening the vast number of potential small molecules to shortlist lead compounds for antiviral drug development. New opportunities to accelerate drug discovery lie at the interface between machine learning methods, in this case developed for linear accelerators, and physics-based methods. The two in silico methods, each have their own advantages and limitations which, interestingly, complement each other. Here, we present an innovative infrastructural development that combines both approaches to accelerate drug discovery. The scale of the potential resulting workflow is such that it is dependent on supercomputing to achieve extremely high throughput. We have demonstrated the viability of this workflow for the study of inhibitors for four COVID-19 target proteins and our ability to perform the required large-scale calculations to identify lead antiviral compounds through repurposing on a variety of supercomputers.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Convolutional LSTM models to estimate network traffic

Network utilisation efficiency can, at least in principle, often be improved by dynamically re-configuring routing policies to better distribute on-going large data transfers. Unfortunately, the information necessary to decide on an appropriate reconfiguration - details of on-going and upcoming data transfers such as their source and destination and, most importantly, their volume and duration - is usually lacking. Fortunately, the increased use of scheduled transfer services, such as FTS, makes it possible to collect the necessary information. However, the mere detection and characterisation of larger transfers is not sufficient to predict with confidence the likelihood a network link will become overloaded. In this paper we present the use of LSTM-based models (CNN-LSTM and Conv-LSTM) to effectively estimate future network traffic and so provide a solid basis for formulating a sensible network configuration plan.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Physics Validation of Novel Convolutional 2D Architectures for Speeding Up High Energy Physics Simulations

The precise simulation of particle transport through detectors remains a key element for the successful interpretation of high energy physics results. However, Monte Carlo based simulation is extremely demanding in terms of computing resources. This challenge motivates investigations of faster, alternative approaches for replacing the standard Monte Carlo approach. We apply Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a deep learning technique, to replace the calorimeter detector simulations and speeding up the simulation time by orders of magnitude. We follow a previous approach which used three-dimensional convolutional neural networks and develop new two-dimensional convolutional networks to solve the same 3D image generation problem faster. Additionally, we increased the number of parameters and the neural networks representational power, obtaining a higher accuracy. We compare our best convolutional 2D neural network architecture and evaluate it versus the previous 3D architecture and Geant4 data. Our results demonstrate a high physics accuracy and further consolidate the use of GANs for fast detector simulations.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2021

Higgs analysis with quantum classifiers

We have developed two quantum classifier models for the $t\bar{t}H(b\bar{b})$ classification problem, both of which fall into the category of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum devices (NISQ). Our results, along with other studies, serve as a proof of concept that Quantum Machine Learning (QML) methods can have similar or better performance, in specific cases of low number of training samples, with respect to conventional ML methods even with a limited number of qubits available in current hardware. To utilise algorithms with a low number of qubits -- to accommodate for limitations in both simulation hardware and real quantum hardware -- we investigated different feature reduction methods. Their impact on the performance of both the classical and quantum models was assessed. We addressed different implementations of two QML models, representative of the two main approaches to supervised quantum machine learning today: a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), a kernel-based method, and a Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC), a variational approach.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Dual-Parameterized Quantum Circuit GAN Model in High Energy Physics

Generative models, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) in particular, are being studied as possible alternatives to Monte Carlo simulations. It has been proposed that, in certain circumstances, simulation using GANs can be sped-up by using quantum GANs (qGANs). We present a new design of qGAN, the dual-Parameterized Quantum Circuit(PQC) GAN, which consists of a classical discriminator and two quantum generators which take the form of PQCs. The first PQC learns a probability distribution over N-pixel images, while the second generates normalized pixel intensities of an individual image for each PQC input. With a view to HEP applications, we evaluated the dual-PQC architecture on the task of imitating calorimeter outputs, translated into pixelated images. The results demonstrate that the model can reproduce a fixed number of images with a reduced size as well as their probability distribution and we anticipate it should allow us to scale up to real calorimeter outputs.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Validation of Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks for High Energy Physics Calorimeter Simulations

In particle physics the simulation of particle transport through detectors requires an enormous amount of computational resources, utilizing more than 50% of the resources of the CERN Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Grid. This challenge has motivated the investigation of different, faster approaches for replacing the standard Monte Carlo simulations. Deep Learning Generative Adversarial Networks are among the most promising alternatives. Previous studies showed that they achieve the necessary level of accuracy while decreasing the simulation time by orders of magnitudes. In this paper we present a newly developed neural network architecture which reproduces a three-dimensional problem employing 2D convolutional layers and we compare its performance with an earlier architecture consisting of 3D convolutional layers. The performance evaluation relies on direct comparison to Monte Carlo simulations, in terms of different physics quantities usually employed to quantify the detector response. We prove that our new neural network architecture reaches a higher level of accuracy with respect to the 3D convolutional GAN while reducing the necessary computational resources. Calorimeters are among the most expensive detectors in terms of simulation time. Therefore we focus our study on an electromagnetic calorimeter prototype with a regular highly granular geometry, as an example of future calorimeters.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2021

Reduced Precision Strategies for Deep Learning: A High Energy Physics Generative Adversarial Network Use Case

Deep learning is finding its way into high energy physics by replacing traditional Monte Carlo simulations. However, deep learning still requires an excessive amount of computational resources. A promising approach to make deep learning more efficient is to quantize the parameters of the neural networks to reduced precision. Reduced precision computing is extensively used in modern deep learning and results to lower execution inference time, smaller memory footprint and less memory bandwidth. In this paper we analyse the effects of low precision inference on a complex deep generative adversarial network model. The use case which we are addressing is calorimeter detector simulations of subatomic particle interactions in accelerator based high energy physics. We employ the novel Intel low precision optimization tool (iLoT) for quantization and compare the results to the quantized model from TensorFlow Lite. In the performance benchmark we gain a speed-up of 1.73x on Intel hardware for the quantized iLoT model compared to the initial, not quantized, model. With different physics-inspired self-developed metrics, we validate that the quantized iLoT model shows a lower loss of physical accuracy in comparison to the TensorFlow Lite model.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2021

Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks in a Continuous-Variable Architecture to Simulate High Energy Physics Detectors

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) come into the limelight in High Energy Physics (HEP) in order to manipulate the increasing amount of data encountered in the next generation of accelerators. Recently, the HEP community has suggested Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to replace traditional time-consuming Geant4 simulations based on the Monte Carlo method. In parallel with advances in deep learning, intriguing studies have been conducted in the last decade on quantum computing, including the Quantum GAN model suggested by IBM. However, this model is limited in learning a probability distribution over discrete variables, while we initially aim to reproduce a distribution over continuous variables in HEP. We introduce and analyze a new prototype of quantum GAN (qGAN) employed in continuous-variable (CV) quantum computing, which encodes quantum information in a continuous physical observable. Two CV qGAN models with a quantum and a classical discriminator have been tested to reproduce calorimeter outputs in a reduced size, and their advantages and limitations are discussed.

quant-ph↗