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At least 523 records · Page 29

Natural evolutionary strategies for variational quantum computation

Abstract Natural evolutionary strategies (NES) are a family of gradient-free black-box optimization algorithms. This study illustrates their use for the optimization of randomly initialized parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) in the region of vanishing gradients. We show that using the NES gradient estimator the exponential decrease in variance can be alleviated. We implement two specific approaches, the exponential and separable NES, for parameter optimization of PQCs and compare them against standard gradient descent. We apply them to two different problems of ground state energy estimation using variational quantum eigensolver and state preparation with circuits of varying depth and length. We also introduce batch optimization for circuits with larger depth to extend the use of ES to a larger number of parameters. We achieve accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art optimization techniques in all the above cases with a lower number of circuit evaluations. Our empirical results indicate that one can use NES as a hybrid tool in tandem with other gradient-based methods for optimization of deep quantum circuits in regions with vanishing gradients.

Anand, Abhinav (ORCID:0000000280812310)↗

Probing scrambling and operator size distributions using random mixed states and local measurements

The dynamical spreading of quantum information through a many-body system, typically called scrambling, is a complex process that has proven to be essential to describe many properties of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems. Scrambling can, in principle, be fully characterized via the use of out-of-time-ordered correlation functions, which are notoriously hard to access experimentally. In this work, we put forward an alternative toolbox of measurement protocols to experimentally probe scrambling by accessing properties of the operator size probability distribution, which tracks the size of the support of observables in a many-body system over time. Our measurement protocols require the preparation of separable mixed states together with local operations and measurements, and combine the tools of randomized operations, a modern development of near-term quantum algorithms, with the use of mixed states, a standard tool in NMR experiments. We demonstrate how to efficiently probe the probability-generating function of the operator distribution and discuss the challenges associated with obtaining the moments of the operator distribution. We further show that manipulating the initial state of the protocol allows us to directly obtain the individual elements of the distribution for small system sizes. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Blocher, Philip Daniel (ORCID:0000000163027567)↗

Collaborative Fault Tolerant Control of Non-Signalized Intersections for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

With the potential of increased penetration of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), intersectional signal control faces new challenges in terms of its operation and implementation. One possibility is to fully make use of the communication capabilities of CAVs so that intersectional signal control can be realized by CAVs alone – this leads to non-signalized intersectional operation for traffic networks in urban areas. In this paper, the state-of-the-art on collaborative fault tolerant control schemes for complex systems will be briefly described. This is then followed by the formulation of operational fault tolerant control that realizes the collaborative fault tolerance functionality at CAVs operational level in response to possible individual vehicle faults, where detailed modelling using vehicle movement dynamics will be described together with the construction of fast fault diagnosis and a collaborative fault tolerant control algorithm. A simple example will be given as well to demonstrate the proposed algorithm together with the discussions on other issues such as randomness of the system, communication errors and full energy consideration. These leads to several future directions of the research for the traffic flow control of non-signalized intersections with 100% penetration of CAVs.

Wang, Hong↗

Graph Analytics on Jellyfish topology

Because large unstructured datasets is important for many science domains, distributed graph analytics is critical to many scientists. Unfortunately, obtaining scaling and performance for irregular communication is challenging because contemporary network interconnects are primarily designed to maximize bandwidths of fixed-neighborhoods large-message exchanges (e.g., stencils). Although there is no consensus on the “best” network topologies for irregular communication, unstructured graph-based interconnects can be more suitable. We analyze three popular graph workloads – clustering, pattern enumeration, and traversal — on comparable networks (in terms of resources and costs) constructed from Jellyfish Random Regular, Dragonfly and Fat tree topologies, varying the routing algorithms. Using packet-level simulations, we demonstrate up to 60% improvement in communication time with Jellyfish due to diversity of the short paths between arbitrary endpoints, which can reduce overall network stalls and congestion.

Graph Analytics, network topology, interconnect, H↗

Information Leakage Analysis using a Co-design-Based Fault Injection Technique on a RISC-V Microprocessor

The RISC-V instruction set architecture open licensing policy has spawned a hive of development activity, making a range of implementations publicly available. The environments in which RISC-V operates have expanded correspondingly, driving the need for a generalized approach to evaluating the reliability of RISC-V implementations under adverse operating conditions or after normal wear-out periods. Fault injection (FI) refers to the process of changing the state of registers or wires, either permanently or momentarily, and then observing execution behavior. The analysis provides insight into the development of countermeasures that protect against the leakage or corruption of sensitive information which might occur because of unexpected execution behavior. In this paper, we develop a hardware-software co-design architecture that enables fast, configurable fault emulation and utilize it for information leakage and data corruption analysis. Modern System-on-chip FPGAs enable building an evaluation platform where control elements run on a processor(s) (PS) simultaneously with the target design running in the programmable logic (PL). Software components of the FI system introduce faults and report execution behavior. A pair of RISC-V FI-instrumented implementations are created and configured to execute the Advanced Encryption Standard and Twister algorithms. Key and plaintext information leakage and degraded pseudo-random sequences are both observed in the output for a subset of the emulated faults.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Sliced-Inverse-Regression--Aided Rotated Compressive Sensing Method for Uncertainty Quantification

Compressive-sensing-based uncertainty quantification methods have become a pow- erful tool for problems with limited data. In this paper, we use the sliced inverse regression (SIR) method to provide an initial guess for the alternating direction method, which is used to enhance sparsity of the Hermite polynomial expansion of stochastic state variables. The sparsity improvement increases both the efficiency and accuracy of the compressive-sensing-based uncertainty quantification method. We demonstrate that the initial guess from SIR is more suitable for the cases when the available data is very limited (Algorithm 4). We also propose another algorithm (Algorithm 5) that performs dimension reduction first with sliced inverse regression, then constructs a Hermite polynomial expansion of the reduced model. This method allows us to approximate the statistics accurately with even less available data. Both methods are non-intrusive and require no a priori information of the sparsity of the system. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these two methods (Algorithms 4 and 5) using problems with up to 500 random dimensions.

Yang, Xiu↗

Long-Term Variability of Soil Moisture in the Southern Sierra: Measurement and Prediction

Using 6 yr (Water Year [WY] 2009–WY 2014) of hourly in situ measurements from a spatially distributed water-balance cluster, we quantified the long-term accuracy of an algorithm used to predict spatial patterns of depth-integrated soil-water storage within the rain–snow transition zone of the southern Sierra Nevada. The algorithm—the multivariate, non-parametric regression-tree estimator Random Forest—was used to predict soil-water storage based on a combination of attributes at each instrument cluster (soil texture, topographic wetness index, elevation, northness, and canopy cover). Out-of-bag R 2 (similar to cross-validation for Random Forest) was used to quantify the accuracy of the estimator for unobserved data. Accuracy was consistently high during the wet-up, snow-cover, and early recession periods of average and wet years. The accuracy declined at the end of a 3-yr dry period, and the relative rank of the independent variables in the model shifted. Soil texture was the highest-ranked independent variable across all years, followed by elevation and northness. Topographic wetness increased in importance during dry periods. Northness exhibited high importance during the wet-up and early recession periods of most water years. As a result, during dry years, the importance of elevation declined. In dry years, notable differences in soil-water storage at each depth include lower-than-average storage in the deeper regolith at the beginning of the water year and lower storage in near-surface layers during the winter resulting from transient snow cover.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Frost prediction using machine learning and deep neural network models

This study describes accurate, computationally efficient models that can be implemented for practical use in predicting frost events for point-scale agricultural applications. Frost damage in agriculture is a costly burden to farmers and global food security alike. Timely prediction of frost events is important to reduce the cost of agricultural frost damage and traditional numerical weather forecasts are often inaccurate at the field-scale in complex terrain. In this paper, we developed machine learning (ML) algorithms for the prediction of such frost events near Alcalde, NM at the point-scale. ML algorithms investigated include deep neural network, convolution neural networks, and random forest models at lead-times of 6–48 h. Our results show promising accuracy (6-h prediction RMSE = 1.53–1.72°C) for use in frost and minimum temperature prediction applications. Seasonal differences in model predictions resulted in a slight negative bias during Spring and Summer months and a positive bias in Fall and Winter months. Additionally, we tested the model transferability by continuing training and testing using data from sensors at a nearby farm. We calculated the feature importance of the random forest models and were able to determine which parameters provided the models with the most useful information for predictions. We determined that soil temperature is a key parameter in longer term predictions (>24 h), while other temperature related parameters provide the majority of information for shorter term predictions. The model error compared favorable to previous ML based frost studies and outperformed the physically based High Resolution Rapid Refresh forecasting system making our ML-models attractive for deployment toward real-time monitoring of frost events and damage at commercial farming operations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Stochastic gradient descent algorithm for stochastic optimization in solving analytic continuation problems

We propose a stochastic gradient descent based optimization algorithm to solve the analytic continuation problem in which we extract real frequency spectra from imaginary time Quantum Monte Carlo data. The procedure of analytic continuation is an ill-posed inverse problem which is usually solved by regularized optimization methods, such like the Maximum Entropy method, or stochastic optimization methods. The main contribution of this work is to improve the performance of stochastic optimization approaches by introducing a supervised stochastic gradient descent algorithm to solve a flipped inverse system which processes the random solutions obtained by a type of Fast and Efficient Stochastic Optimization Method.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SU-F-T-167: Measurement of Proton Beam Spot Size Using a 2D Ion Chamber Array for Daily QA

Purpose: To develop an algorithm which can calculate the Full Width Half Maximum (FWHM) of a Proton Pencil Beam from a 2D dimensional ion chamber array (IBA Matrixx) with limited spatial resolution ( 7.6 mm inter chamber distance). The algorithm would allow beam FWHM measurements to be taken during daily QA without an appreciable time increase. Methods: Combinations of 147 MeV single spot beams were delivered onto an IBA Matrixx and concurrently on EBT3 films for a standard. Data were collected around the Bragg Peak region and evaluated by a custom MATLAB script based on our algorithm using a least squared analysis. A set of artificial data, modified with random noise, was also processed to test for robustness. Results: The Matlab script processed Matixx data shows acceptable agreement (within 5%) with film measurements with no single measurement differing by more than 1.8 mm. In cases where the spots show some degree of asymmetry, the algorithm is able to resolve the differences. The algorithm was able to process artificial data with noise up to 15% of the maximum value. Time assays of each measurement took less than 3 minutes to perform, indicating that such measurements may be efficiently added to daily QA treatment. Conclusion: The developed algorithm can be implemented in daily QA program for Proton Pencil Beam scanning beams (PBS) with Matrixx to extract spot size and position information. The developed algorithm may be extended to small field sizes in photon clinic.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Timely Reporting of Heavy Hitters Using External Memory

Given an input stream S of size N, a Φ-heavy hitter is an item that occurs at least ΦN times in S. The problem of finding heavy-hitters is extensively studied in the database literature. In this work, we study a real-time heavy-hitters variant in which an element must be reported shortly after we see its T = Φ N-th occurrence (and hence it becomes a heavy hitter). We call this the Timely Event Detection (TED) Problem. The TED problem models the needs of many real-world monitoring systems, which demand accurate (i.e., no false negatives) and timely reporting of all events from large, high-speed streams with a low reporting threshold (high sensitivity). Like the classic heavy-hitters problem, solving the TED problem without false-positives requires large space (Ω (N) words). Thus in-RAM heavy-hitters algorithms typically sacrifice accuracy (i.e., allow false positives), sensitivity, or timeliness (i.e., use multiple passes). We show how to adapt heavy-hitters algorithms to external memory to solve the TED problem on large high-speed streams while guaranteeing accuracy, sensitivity, and timeliness. Our data structures are limited only by I/O-bandwidth (not latency) and support a tunable tradeoff between reporting delay and I/O overhead. With a small bounded reporting delay, our algorithms incur only a logarithmic I/O overhead. We implement and validate our data structures empirically using the Firehose streaming benchmark. Multi-threaded versions of our structures can scale to process 11M observations per second before becoming CPU bound. In comparison, a naive adaptation of the standard heavy-hitters algorithm to external memory would be limited by the storage device’s random I/O throughput, i.e., ≈100K observations per second.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Design, Selection, and Evaluation of Reinforcement Learning Single Agents for Ground Target Tracking

Previous approaches for small fixed-wing unmanned air systems that carry strapdown rather than gimbaled cameras achieved satisfactory ground target tracking performance using both standard and deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, these approaches have significant restrictions and abstractions to the dynamics of the vehicle, such as constant airspeed and constant altitude, because the number of states and actions was necessarily limited. Thus, extensive tuning was required to obtain good tracking performance. The expansion from 4 state–action degrees of freedom to 15 enabled the agent to exploit previous reward functions that produced novel yet undesirable emergent behavior. This paper investigates the causes of and various potential solutions to undesirable emergent behavior in the ground target tracking problem. A combination of changes to the environment, reward structure, action space simplification, command rate, and controller implementation provides insight into obtaining stable tracking results. Consideration is given to reward structure selection and refinement to mitigate undesirable emergent behavior. Results presented in the paper for a simulated environment of a single unmanned air system tracking a randomly moving single ground target show that a soft actor–critic algorithm can produce feasible tracking trajectories without limiting the state space and action space, provided that the environment is properly posed.

Engineering↗

A Pebble Tracking Transport Algorithm for Pebble Bed Reactor Analysis

Pebble bed reactor (PBR) designs pose unique challenges to modeling and simulation. The challenges originate from the multiple levels of heterogeneity partly due to random packing in and flow through the core of fuel pebbles. This paper proposes a novel pebble tracking transport (PTT) algorithm to address some of the challenges facing PBR analysis. Each individual pebble is tracked and modeled on an unstructured mesh of which the nodes are aligned with the pebble centroids. The neutron transport equation is solved on this pebble tracking mesh with pre-assembled elemental matrices. These elemental matrices are independent of the cross sections and the streaming directions, thus can be assembled before the calculation without introducing too much memory overhead especially when combined with spatial domain decomposition. Numerical results show that these matrices can be assembled efficiently. PTT is implemented in Rattlesnake, the INL MOOSE-based multigroup radiation transport application. Both the angular and spatial convergence are investigated and the results indicate that low order angular and spatial resolution is typically sufficient for analysis. A complete work flow for PBR analysis with PTT including, pebble packing, meshing, cross section generation, solution of the transport equation, postprocessing, etc. is demonstrated with a simplified reactor with 41,048 pebbles.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) evapotranspiration product Version 5.0: Algorithm development and preliminary validation

An accurate estimation of spatially and temporally continuous global terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) is essential in the assessment of surface energy, water and carbon cycles. The Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) ET product Version 4.0 (v4.0) based on the Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method was generated to estimate global terrestrial ET. However, certain uncertainty for the GLASS ET product v4.0 limits its application. In this study, we introduced the deep neural networks (DNN) merging framework to improve terrestrial ET estimation for GLASS ET product Version 5.0 (v5.0) generation by integrating five satellite-derived ET products [Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) ET product (MOD16), Shuttleworth–Wallace dual-source ET product (SW), Priestley–Taylor-based ET product (PT-JPL), modified satellite-based Priestley–Taylor ET product (MS-PT) and simple hybrid ET product (SIM)]. We compared the performance of DNN method against other merging methods, including GLASS ET algorithm v4.0 (BMA), the gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) method and the random forest (RF) method, based on 195 global eddy covariance (EC) flux towers covering observations from 2000 through 2015. Validations indicated that the DNN had the highest accuracy among four merging methods across different land cover types, yielding the highest average determination coefficients (R 2 , 0.62), root-mean-squared-error (RMSE, 24.1 W/m 2 ) and Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE, 0.77) with a of 99% confidence interval. Compared with GLASS ET algorithm v4.0, the DNN improved on the R 2 by approximately 7% (p < 0.01) and the KGE by 10%. Based on the DNN, we then generated 8-day GLASS ET product v5.0 globally with a 1 km spatial resolution from 2001 to 2015 driven by GLASS vegetation and surface net radiation (R n ) datasets and Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA2) datasets. Finally, this global terrestrial ET product provides a valuable dataset for monitoring regional and global water resources and environmental changes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Posiform planting: generating QUBO instances for benchmarking

We are interested in benchmarking both quantum annealing and classical algorithms for minimizing quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. Such problems are NP-hard in general, implying that the exact minima of randomly generated instances are hard to find and thus typically unknown. While brute forcing smaller instances is possible, such instances are typically not interesting due to being too easy for both quantum and classical algorithms. In this contribution, we propose a novel method, called posiform planting , for generating random QUBO instances of arbitrary size with known optimal solutions, and use those instances to benchmark the sampling quality of four D-Wave quantum annealers utilizing different interconnection structures (Chimera, Pegasus, and Zephyr hardware graphs) and the simulated annealing algorithm. Posiform planting differs from many existing methods in two key ways. It ensures the uniqueness of the planted optimal solution, thus avoiding groundstate degeneracy, and it enables the generation of QUBOs that are tailored to a given hardware connectivity structure, provided that the connectivity is not too sparse. Posiform planted QUBOs are a type of 2-SAT boolean satisfiability combinatorial optimization problems. Our experiments demonstrate the capability of the D-Wave quantum annealers to sample the optimal planted solution of combinatorial optimization problems with up to 5, 627 qubits.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SU-G-JeP3-09: Tumor Location Prediction Using Natural Respiratory Volume for Respiratory Gated Radiation Therapy (RGRT): System Verification Study

Purpose: Respiratory gated radiation therapy (RGRT) gives accurate results when a patient’s breathing is stable and regular. Thus, the patient should be fully aware during respiratory pattern training before undergoing the RGRT treatment. In order to bypass the process of respiratory pattern training, we propose a target location prediction system for RGRT that uses only natural respiratory volume, and confirm its application. Methods: In order to verify the proposed target location prediction system, an in-house phantom set was used. This set involves a chest phantom including target, external markers, and motion generator. Natural respiratory volume signals were generated using the random function in MATLAB code. In the chest phantom, the target takes a linear motion based on the respiratory signal. After a four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) scan of the in-house phantom, the motion trajectory was derived as a linear equation. The accuracy of the linear equation was compared with that of the motion algorithm used by the operating motion generator. In addition, we attempted target location prediction using random respiratory volume values. Results: The correspondence rate of the linear equation derived from the 4DCT images with the motion algorithm of the motion generator was 99.41%. In addition, the average error rate of target location prediction was 1.23% for 26 cases. Conclusion: We confirmed the applicability of our proposed target location prediction system for RGRT using natural respiratory volume. If additional clinical studies can be conducted, a more accurate prediction system can be realized without requiring respiratory pattern training.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Application of predictive data analytics to model daily hydrocarbon production using petrophysical, geomechanical, fiber-optic, completions, and surface data: A case study from the Marcellus Shale, North America

Predicting gas production from stimulated unconventional reservoirs has always been a challenge to oil and gas companies because the physics of fluid flow through such reservoirs is not well understood. On the other hand, modeling gas production from shale reservoirs is a complex multi-variate problem that requires proper integration of data from multiple disciplines, such as geology, petrophysics, geomechanics, completions, and surface-based measurements, etc. Here this study demonstrates the application of data-driven machine learning algorithms, integrating geoscientific, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), distributed temperature sensing (DTS) fiber-optic, completions, flow scanner production log, and surface data to model daily gas production from a 28-stage stimulated horizontal well drilled in the Marcellus Shale of the Appalachian basin in North America. In addition, this study aims to utilize the data from a fiber-optic monitoring system, such as DAS and DTS to evaluate the well performance. We build supervised data-driven machine learning models using Random Forest (RF), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms to understand the well performance and forecast the daily gas production. The study compares the forecasted results, tests the level of accuracy, and addresses different issues with these machine learning algorithms. A spatio-temporal database is constructed and used to perform sensitivity analyses to identify the key drivers for gas production. The results show that RF and ANN algorithms can be used to predict daily gas production with significantly high accuracy; however, RF algorithm is the best predictor in terms of highest accuracy (96%), less computational time and cost. Based on sensitivity analysis, it appears that Poisson's ratio, minimum horizontal stress, DAS, casing pressure, gamma log are the most important parameters to predict gas production.

02 PETROLEUM↗

Dynamic defense and network randomization for computer systems

The various technologies presented herein relate to determining a network attack is taking place, and further to adjust one or more network parameters such that the network becomes dynamically configured. A plurality of machine learning algorithms are configured to recognize an active attack pattern. Notification of the attack can be generated, and knowledge gained from the detected attack pattern can be utilized to improve the knowledge of the algorithms to detect a subsequent attack vector(s). Further, network settings and application communications can be dynamically randomized, wherein artificial diversity converts control systems into moving targets that help mitigate the early reconnaissance stages of an attack. An attack(s) based upon a known static address(es) of a critical infrastructure network device(s) can be mitigated by the dynamic randomization. Network parameters that can be randomized include IP addresses, application port numbers, paths data packets navigate through the network, application randomization, etc.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗