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As complex AI systems further prove to be an integral part of our lives, a persistent and critical problem is the underlying black-box nature of such products and systems. In pursuit of productivity enhancements, one must not forget the need for various technology to boost the overall trustworthiness of such AI systems. One example, which is studied extensively in this work, is the domain of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Research works in this scope are centred around the objective of making AI systems more transparent and interpretable, to further boost reliability and trust in using them. In this work, we discuss the various motivation for XAI and its approaches, the underlying challenges that XAI faces, and some open problems that we believe deserve further efforts to look into. We also provide a brief discussion of various XAI approaches for image processing, and finally discuss some future directions, to hopefully express and motivate the positive development of the XAI research space.

Contrary to fermions and bosons, anyons are quasiparticles that keep a robust memory of particle exchanges via a braiding phase factor. This provides them with unique dynamical properties so far unexplored. When an anyon excitation is emitted toward a quantum point contact (QPC) in a fractional quantum Hall (FQH) fluid, this memory translates into tunneling events that may occur long after the anyon excitation has exited the QPC. Here, we use triggered anyon pulses incident on a QPC in a $\nu= 1/3$ FQH fluid to investigate anyon tunneling in the time domain. We observe that braiding increases the tunneling timescale, which is set by the temperature and the anyon scaling dimension that characterizes the edge state dynamics. This contrasts with the electron behavior where braiding is absent and the tunneling timescale is set by the temporal width of the generated electron pulses. Our experiment introduces time-domain measurements for characterizing the braiding phase and scaling dimension of anyons.

We propose a source of purely electronic energy-entangled states implemented in a solid-state system with potential applications in quantum information protocols based on electron flying qubits. The proposed device relies on the standard tools of Electron Quantum Optics (EQO) and exploits entanglement of the Cooper pairs of a BCS superconductor. The latter is coupled via an adjustable quantum point contact to two opposite spin polarized electron wave-guides, which are driven by trains of Lorentzian pulses. This specific choice for the drive is crucial to inject purely electronic entangled-states devoid of spurious electron-hole pairs. In the Andreev regime, a perturbative calculation in the tunnel coupling confirms that entangled electrons states (EES) are generated at the output of the normal side. We introduce a quantity related to charge current cross-correlations which allows one to verify experimentally the entangled nature of the emitted state., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, comments are welcomed ! Final version published in Physical Review B

Deep learning models are crucial for autonomous vehicle perception, but their reliability is challenged by algorithmic limitations and hardware faults. We address the latter by examining fault-tolerance in semantic segmentation models. Using established hardware fault models, we evaluate existing hardening techniques both in terms of accuracy and uncertainty and introduce ReLUMax, a novel simple activation function designed to enhance resilience against transient faults. ReLUMax integrates seamlessly into existing architectures without time overhead. Our experiments demonstrate that ReLUMax effectively improves robustness, preserving performance and boosting prediction confidence, thus contributing to the development of reliable autonomous driving systems., Comment: Accepted ECCV 2024 UnCV Workshop - https://github.com/iurada/neutron-segmentation

Quantum Computing (QC) offers the potential to enhance traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads by leveraging the unique properties of quantum computers, leading to the emergence of a new paradigm: HPC-QC. While this integration presents new opportunities, it also brings novel challenges, particularly in ensuring the dependability of such hybrid systems. This paper aims to identify integration challenges, anticipate failures, and foster a diverse co-design for HPC-QC systems by bringing together QC, cloud computing, HPC, and network security. The focus of this emerging inter-disciplinary effort is to develop engineering principles that ensure the dependability of hybrid systems, aiming for a more prescriptive co-design cycle. Our framework will help to prevent design pitfalls and accelerate the maturation of the QC technology ecosystem. Key aspects include building resilient HPC-QC systems, analyzing the applicability of conventional techniques to the quantum domain, and exploring the complexity of scaling in such hybrid systems. This underscores the need for performance-reliability metrics specific to this new computational paradigm.

Reliability is fundamental for developing large-scale quantum computers. Since the benefit of technological advancements to the qubit's stability is saturating, algorithmic solutions, such as quantum error correction (QEC) codes, are needed to bridge the gap to reliable computation. Unfortunately, the deployment of the first quantum computers has identified faults induced by natural radiation as an additional threat to qubits reliability. The high sensitivity of qubits to radiation hinders the large-scale adoption of quantum computers, since the persistence and area-of-effect of the fault can potentially undermine the efficacy of the most advanced QEC. In this paper, we investigate the resilience of various implementations of state-of-the-art QEC codes to radiation-induced faults. We report data from over 400 million fault injections and correlate hardware faults with the logical error observed after decoding the code output, extrapolating physical-to-logical error rates. We compare the code's radiation-induced logical error rate over the code distance, the number and role in the QEC of physical qubits, the underlying quantum computer topology, and particle energy spread in the chip. We show that, by simply selecting and tuning properly the surface code, thus without introducing any overhead, the probability of correcting a radiation-induced fault is increased by up to 10\%. Finally, we provide indications and guidelines for the design of future QEC codes to further increase their effectiveness against radiation-induced events., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures

We present a fault-tolerant by-design RISC-V SoC and experimentally assess it under atmospheric neutrons and 200 MeV protons. The dedicated ECC and Triple-Core Lockstep countermeasures correct most errors, guaranteeing a device cross-section lower than $5.36 \times 10^{-12}$ cm$^2$., Comment: 4 pages (excluding title page), accepted at RADECS 2024

Conversational AI (CAI) systems which encompass voice- and text-based assistants are on the rise and have been largely integrated into people's everyday lives. Despite their widespread adoption, users voice concerns regarding privacy, security and trust in these systems. However, the composition of these perceptions, their impact on technology adoption and usage and the relationship between privacy, security and trust perceptions in the CAI context remain open research challenges. This study contributes to the field by conducting a Systematic Literature Review and offers insights into the current state of research on privacy, security and trust perceptions in the context of CAI systems. The review covers application fields and user groups and sheds light on empirical methods and tools used for assessment. Moreover, it provides insights into the reliability and validity of privacy, security and trust scales, as well as extensively investigating the subconstructs of each item as well as additional concepts which are concurrently collected. We point out that the perceptions of trust, privacy and security overlap based on the subconstructs we identified. While the majority of studies investigate one of these concepts, only a few studies were found exploring privacy, security and trust perceptions jointly. Our research aims to inform on directions to develop and use reliable scales for users' privacy, security and trust perceptions and contribute to the development of trustworthy CAI systems., Comment: 39 pages, 4 figures

in nanoscale systems in the presence of single-electron excitations generated by Lorentzian voltage drives, termed \textit{Levitons}. These excitations allow to realize the analog of quantum optics experiments using electrons instead of photons. Importantly, electrons in condensed matter systems are strongly affected by the presence of different types of non-trivial correlations, with no counterpart in the domain of photonic quantum optics. After providing a short introduction about Levitons in non-interacting systems, we focus on how they operate in the presence of two types of strong electronic correlations in nanoscale systems, such as those arising in the fractional quantum Hall effect or in superconducting systems. Specifically, we consider Levitons in a quantum Hall bar of the fractional quantum Hall effect, pinched by a quantum point contact, where anyons with fractional charge and statistics tunnel between opposite edges. In this case, a Leviton-Leviton interaction can be induced by the strongly correlated background. Concerning the effect of superconducting correlations on Levitons, we show that, in a normal metal system coupled to BCS superconductors, half integer Levitons minimize the excess noise in the Andreev regime. Interestingly, energy-entangled electron states can be realized on-demand in this type of hybrid setups by exploiting crossed Andreev reflection. The results exposed in this review have potential applications in the context of quantum information and computation with single-electron flying qubits., Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, Special issue in honor of the 80th birthday of D.K. Campbell

The frontier of quantum computing (QC) simulation on classical hardware is quickly reaching the hard scalability limits for computational feasibility. Nonetheless, there is still a need to simulate large quantum systems classically, as the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices are yet to be considered fault tolerant and performant enough in terms of operations per second. Each of the two main exact simulation techniques, state vector and tensor network simulators, boasts specific limitations. The exponential memory requirement of state vector simulation, when compared to the qubit register sizes of currently available quantum computers, quickly saturates the capacity of the top HPC machines currently available. Tensor network contraction approaches, which encode quantum circuits into tensor networks and then contract them over an output bit string to obtain its probability amplitude, still fall short of the inherent complexity of finding an optimal contraction path, which maps to a max-cut problem on a dense mesh, a notably NP-hard problem. This article aims at investigating the limits of current state-of-the-art simulation techniques on a test bench made of eight widely used quantum subroutines, each in 31 different configurations, with special emphasis on performance. We then correlate the performance measures of the simulators with the metrics that characterise the benchmark circuits, identifying the main reasons behind the observed performance trend. From our observations, given the structure of a quantum circuit and the number of qubits, we highlight how to select the best simulation strategy, obtaining a speedup of up to an order of magnitude., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 1 table

The technical limitations of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) (re)configurations in terms of both communication overhead and energy efficiency must be considered when IRSs are used in cellular networks. In this paper, we investigate the downlink time-frequency scheduling of an IRS-assisted multi-user system in the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) framework wherein both the set of possible IRS configurations and the number of IRS reconfigurations within a time frame are limited. We formulate the sum rate maximization problem as a non-polynomial (NP)-complete generalized multi-knapsack problem. A heuristic greedy algorithm for the joint IRS configuration and time-frequency scheduling is also proposed. Numerical simulations prove the effectiveness of our greedy solution., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, journal paper

Andreev reflection is a fundamental transport process occurring at the junction between a normal metal and a superconductor (a N-S junction), when an incident electron from the normal side can only be transmitted in the superconductor as a Cooper pair, with the reflection of a hole in the normal metal. As a consequence of the spin singlet nature of the BCS Cooper pairs, the current due to Andreev reflection at a N-S junction is always symmetric in spin. Using a Keldysh Nambu Floquet approach, combining analytical and numerical calculations, we study in details the AC transport at a N-S junction, when the two spin components in the normal metal are driven by different periodic drives. We show that, in the Andreev regime, i.e. when the superconducting gap is much larger than the frequency of the drives, the spin-resolved photo-assisted currents are always equal even if the two drives are different. In addition, we show that in this regime the excess noise depends only on the sum of the periodic drives, and we consider in particular the case of Lorentzian pulses (Levitons). We also show how these properties get modified when going beyond the Andreev regime. Finally we give a simple analytical proof of the special properties of the Andreev regime using an exact mapping to a particular N-N junction., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

Anyons are particles intermediate between fermions and bosons, characterized by a nontrivial exchange phase, yielding remarkable braiding statistics. Recent experiments have shown that anyonic braiding has observable consequences on edge transport in the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE). Here, we study transport signatures of anyonic braiding when the anyons have a finite width. We show that the width of the anyons, even extremely small, can have a tremendous impact on transport properties and braiding signatures. In particular, we find that taking the finite width into account allows us to explain recent experimental results on FQHE at filling factor $2/5$ [Ruelle et al., Phys. Rev. X \textbf{13}, 011031 (2023)]. Our work shows that the finite width of anyons crucially influences setups involving anyonic braiding, especially when the exchange phase is larger than $\pi/2$., Comment: 5 pages + supplemental material

Andreev reflection occurs in a normal metal-superconductor junction, when an electron on the normal side can only be transmitted as a Cooper pair in the superconductor, with the reflection of a hole on the normal side. A similar phenomenon can occur in strongly correlated systems, in particular in the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE), as the system quasiparticles have a charge $e/m$ different from the electron charge. We study theoretically a setup involving two quantum point contacts (QPC) in the FQHE where Andreev reflection occurs, as charges $e/m$ impinging on the second QPC can only be transmitted as charges $e$, with the reflection of holes of charge $e (1-m)/m $. Using the bosonization formalism, and out-of-equilibrium Keldysh Green function techniques, we provide a full analytical calculation of the current correlations at the outputs of the QPC, both at zero and finite temperature. The ratio between the auto- and cross-correlations of the output currents is a direct manifestation of Andreev reflection. Our results agree with recent experimental observations, and give precious information on the temperature dependence of this ratio.

Partial-information multiple access (PIMA) is an orthogonal multiple access (OMA) uplink scheme where time is divided into frames, each composed of two parts. The first part is used to count the number of users with packets to transmit, while the second has a variable number of allocated slots, each assigned to multiple users to uplink data transmission. We investigate the case of correlated user activations, wherein the correlation is due to the retransmissions of the collided packets, modeling PIMA as a partially observable-Markov decision process. The assignment of users to slots is optimized based on the knowledge of both the number of active users and past successful transmissions and collisions. The scheduling turns out to be a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, with a complexity exponentially growing with the number of users. Thus, sub-optimal greedy solutions are proposed and evaluated. Our solutions show substantial performance improvements with respect to both traditional OMA schemes and conventional PIMA., Comment: Conference paper, 6 pages, 4 figures

We consider a two-dimensional electron system in the Laughlin sequence of the fractional quantum Hall regime to investigate the effect of strong correlations on the mutual interaction between two Levitons, single-electron excitations generated by trains of quantized Lorentzian pulses. We focus on two-Leviton states injected in a single period with a time separation $\Delta t$. In the presence of a quantum point contact operating in the weak-backscattering regime, we compute the backscattered charge by means of the Keldysh technique. In the limit of an infinite period and zero temperature, we show that the backscattered charge for a two-Leviton state is not equal to twice the backscattered charge for a single Leviton. We present an interpretation for this result in terms of the wave-packet formalism for Levitons, thus proposing that an effective interaction between the two Levitons is induced by the strongly-correlated background. Finally, we perform numerical calculations in the periodic case by using the Floquet formalism for photo-assisted transport. By varying the system parameters such as pulse width, filling factor and temperature we show that the value of the backscattered charge for two-Leviton states is strongly dependent on the pulse separation, thus opening scenarios where the effective interaction between Levitons can be controllably tuned., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, all comments are welcome!