QA4IE	Information Extraction (IE) refers to automatically extracting structured relation tuples from unstructured texts. Common IE solutions, including Relation Extraction (RE) and open IE systems, can hardly handle cross-sentence tuples, and are severely restricted by limited relation types as well as informal relation specifications (e.g., free-text based relation tuples). In order to overcome these weaknesses, we propose a novel IE framework named QA4IE, which leverages the flexible question answering (QA) approaches to produce high quality relation triples across sentences. Based on the framework, we develop a large IE benchmark with high quality human evaluation. This benchmark contains 293K documents, 2M golden relation triples, and 636 relation types. We compare our system with some IE baselines on our benchmark and the results show that our system achieves great improvements.
QADiver	Question answering (QA) extracting answers from text to the given question in natural language, has been actively studied and existing models have shown a promise of outperforming human performance when trained and evaluated with SQuAD dataset. However, such performance may not be replicated in the actual setting, for which we need to diagnose the cause, which is non-trivial due to the complexity of model. We thus propose a web-based UI that provides how each model contributes to QA performances, by integrating visualization and analysis tools for model explanation. We expect this framework can help QA model researchers to refine and improve their models.
QA-NLI	Existing datasets for natural language inference (NLI) have propelled research on language understanding. We propose a new method for automatically deriving NLI datasets from the growing abundance of large-scale question answering datasets. Our approach hinges on learning a sentence transformation model which converts question-answer pairs into their declarative forms. Despite being primarily trained on a single QA dataset, we show that it can be successfully applied to a variety of other QA resources. Using this system, we automatically derive a new freely available dataset of over 500k NLI examples (QA-NLI), and show that it exhibits a wide range of inference phenomena rarely seen in previous NLI datasets.
Q-CP	Research on multi-robot systems has demonstrated promising results in manifold applications and domains. Still, efficiently learning an effective robot behaviors is very difficult, due to unstructured scenarios, high uncertainties, and large state dimensionality (e.g. hyper-redundant and groups of robot). To alleviate this problem, we present Q-CP a cooperative model-based reinforcement learning algorithm, which exploits action values to both (1) guide the exploration of the state space and (2) generate effective policies. Specifically, we exploit Q-learning to attack the curse-of-dimensionality in the iterations of a Monte-Carlo Tree Search. We implement and evaluate Q-CP on different stochastic cooperative (general-sum) games: (1) a simple cooperative navigation problem among 3 robots, (2) a cooperation scenario between a pair of KUKA YouBots performing hand-overs, and (3) a coordination task between two mobile robots entering a door. The obtained results show the effectiveness of Q-CP in the chosen applications, where action values drive the exploration and reduce the computational demand of the planning process while achieving good performance.
QGIS	QGIS (previously known as ‘Quantum GIS’) is a cross-platform free and open-source desktop geographic information system (GIS) application that provides data viewing, editing, and analysis capabilities.Similar to other software GIS systems QGIS allows users to create maps with many layers using different map projections. Maps can be assembled in different formats and for different uses. QGIS allows maps to be composed of raster or vector layers. Typical for this kind of software the vector data is stored as either point, line, or polygon-feature. Different kinds of raster images are supported and the software can perform georeferencing of images. QGIS provides integration with other open source GIS packages, including PostGIS, GRASS, and MapServer to give users extensive functionality. Plugins, written in Python or C++, extend the capabilities of QGIS. There are plugins to geocode using the Google Geocoding API, perform geoprocessing (fTools) similar to the standard tools found in ArcGIS, interface with PostgreSQL/PostGIS, SpatiaLite and MySQL databases.
Q-Graph	Arising user-centric graph applications such as route planning and personalized social network analysis have initiated a shift of paradigms in modern graph processing systems towards multi-query analysis, i.e., processing multiple graph queries in parallel on a shared graph. These applications generate a dynamic number of localized queries around query hotspots such as popular urban areas. However, existing graph processing systems are not yet tailored towards these properties: The employed methods for graph partitioning and synchronization management disregard query locality and dynamism which leads to high query latency. To this end, we propose the system Q-Graph for multi-query graph analysis that considers query locality on three levels. (i) The query-aware graph partitioning algorithm Q-cut maximizes query locality to reduce communication overhead. (ii) The method for synchronization management, called hybrid barrier synchronization, allows for full exploitation of local queries spanning only a subset of partitions. (iii) Both methods adapt at runtime to changing query workloads in order to maintain and exploit locality. Our experiments show that Q-cut reduces average query latency by up to 57 percent compared to static query-agnostic partitioning algorithms.
QICD (QICD)	Extremely fast algorithm ‘QICD’, Iterative Coordinate Descent Algorithm for High-dimensional Nonconvex Penalized Quantile Regression. This algorithm combines the coordinate descent algorithm in the inner iteration with the majorization minimization step in the outside step. For each inner univariate minimization problem, we only need to compute a one-dimensional weighted median, which ensures fast computation. Tuning parameter selection is based on two different method: the cross validation and BIC for quantile regression model. Details are described in the Peng,B and Wang,L. (2015) linked to via the URL below with <DOI:10.1080/10618600.2014.913516>.
Q-Learning	Q-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, Q-learning can be used to find an optimal action-selection policy for any given (finite) Markov decision process (MDP). It works by learning an action-value function that ultimately gives the expected utility of taking a given action in a given state and following the optimal policy thereafter. A policy is a rule that the agent follows in selecting actions, given the state it is in. When such an action-value function is learned, the optimal policy can be constructed by simply selecting the action with the highest value in each state. One of the strengths of Q-learning is that it is able to compare the expected utility of the available actions without requiring a model of the environment. Additionally, Q-learning can handle problems with stochastic transitions and rewards, without requiring any adaptations. It has been proven that for any finite MDP, Q-learning eventually finds an optimal policy, in the sense that the expected value of the total reward return over all successive steps, starting from the current state, is the maximum achievable. Deep-Q-Learning DynTxRegime
Q-Learning Sine-Cosine Algorithm (QLSCA)	The sine-cosine algorithm (SCA) is a new population-based meta-heuristic algorithm. In addition to exploiting sine and cosine functions to perform local and global searches (hence the name sine-cosine), the SCA introduces several random and adaptive parameters to facilitate the search process. Although it shows promising results, the search process of the SCA is vulnerable to local minima/maxima due to the adoption of a fixed switch probability and the bounded magnitude of the sine and cosine functions (from -1 to 1). In this paper, we propose a new hybrid Q-learning sine-cosine- based strategy, called the Q-learning sine-cosine algorithm (QLSCA). Within the QLSCA, we eliminate the switching probability. Instead, we rely on the Q-learning algorithm (based on the penalty and reward mechanism) to dynamically identify the best operation during runtime. Additionally, we integrate two new operations (L\’evy flight motion and crossover) into the QLSCA to facilitate jumping out of local minima/maxima and enhance the solution diversity. To assess its performance, we adopt the QLSCA for the combinatorial test suite minimization problem. Experimental results reveal that the QLSCA is statistically superior with regard to test suite size reduction compared to recent state-of-the-art strategies, including the original SCA, the particle swarm test generator (PSTG), adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO) and the cuckoo search strategy (CS) at the 95% confidence level. However, concerning the comparison with discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO), there is no significant difference in performance at the 95% confidence level. On a positive note, the QLSCA statistically outperforms the DPSO in certain configurations at the 90% confidence level.
Q-map	Goal-oriented learning has become a core concept in reinforcement learning (RL), extending the reward signal as a sole way to define tasks. However, as parameterizing value functions with goals increases the learning complexity, efficiently reusing past experience to update estimates towards several goals at once becomes desirable but usually requires independent updates per goal. Considering that a significant number of RL environments can support spatial coordinates as goals, such as on-screen location of the character in ATARI or SNES games, we propose a novel goal-oriented agent called Q-map that utilizes an autoencoder-like neural network to predict the minimum number of steps towards each coordinate in a single forward pass. This architecture is similar to Horde with parameter sharing and allows the agent to discover correlations between visual patterns and navigation. For example learning how to use a ladder in a game could be transferred to other ladders later. We show how this network can be efficiently trained with a 3D variant of Q-learning to update the estimates towards all goals at once. While the Q-map agent could be used for a wide range of applications, we propose a novel exploration mechanism in place of epsilon-greedy that relies on goal selection at a desired distance followed by several steps taken towards it, allowing long and coherent exploratory steps in the environment. We demonstrate the accuracy and generalization qualities of the Q-map agent on a grid-world environment and then demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed exploration mechanism on the notoriously difficult Montezuma’s Revenge and Super Mario All-Stars games.
QMiner	QMiner is a data analytics platform for processing large-scale real-time streams containing structured and unstructured data.
QMIX	In many real-world settings, a team of agents must coordinate their behaviour while acting in a decentralised way. At the same time, it is often possible to train the agents in a centralised fashion in a simulated or laboratory setting, where global state information is available and communication constraints are lifted. Learning joint action-values conditioned on extra state information is an attractive way to exploit centralised learning, but the best strategy for then extracting decentralised policies is unclear. Our solution is QMIX, a novel value-based method that can train decentralised policies in a centralised end-to-end fashion. QMIX employs a network that estimates joint action-values as a complex non-linear combination of per-agent values that condition only on local observations. We structurally enforce that the joint-action value is monotonic in the per-agent values, which allows tractable maximisation of the joint action-value in off-policy learning, and guarantees consistency between the centralised and decentralised policies. We evaluate QMIX on a challenging set of StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, and show that QMIX significantly outperforms existing value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning methods.
Q-Probabilistic Multiagent Learning (QPML)	The ever-increasingly urban populations and their material demands have brought unprecedented burdens to cities. Smart cities leverage emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Network (CR-WSN) to provide better QoE and QoS for all citizens. However, resource scarcity is an important challenge in CR-WSN. Generally, this problem is handled by auction theory or game theory. To make CR-WSN nodes intelligent and more autonomous in resource allocation, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm to learn the optimal resource allocation strategy in the oligopoly market model. Firstly, we model a multi-agent scenario, in which the primary users (PUs) is the sellers and the secondary users (SUs) is the buyers. Then, we propose the Q-probabilistic multiagent learning (QPML) and apply it to allocate resources in the market. In the multi-agent interactive learning process, the PUs and SUs learn strategies to maximize their benefits and improve spectrum utilization. Experimental results show the efficiency of our QPML approach, which can also converge quickly.
QR Decomposition	In linear algebra, a QR decomposition (also called a QR factorization) of a matrix is a decomposition of a matrix A into a product A = QR of an orthogonal matrix Q and an upper triangular matrix R. QR decomposition is often used to solve the linear least squares problem, and is the basis for a particular eigenvalue algorithm, the QR algorithm. If A has n linearly independent columns, then the first n columns of Q form an orthonormal basis for the column space of A. More generally, the first k columns of Q form an orthonormal basis for the span of the first k columns of A for any 1 ≤ k ≤ n. The fact that any column k of A only depends on the first k columns of Q is responsible for the triangular form of R.
Qresp	The open source software Qresp ‘Curation and Exploration of Reproducible Scientific Papers’ facilitates the organization, annotation and exploration of data presented in scientific papers.
QRkit	Embedded computer vision applications increasingly require the speed and power benefits of single-precision (32 bit) floating point. However, applications which make use of Levenberg-like optimization can lose significant accuracy when reducing to single precision, sometimes unrecoverably so. This accuracy can be regained using solvers based on QR rather than Cholesky decomposition, but the absence of sparse QR solvers for common sparsity patterns found in computer vision means that many applications cannot benefit. We introduce an open-source suite of solvers for Eigen, which efficiently compute the QR decomposition for matrices with some common sparsity patterns (block diagonal, horizontal and vertical concatenation, and banded). For problems with very particular sparsity structures, these elements can be composed together in ‘kit’ form, hence the name QRkit. We apply our methods to several computer vision problems, showing competitive performance and suitability especially in single precision arithmetic.
q-Space Novelty Detection	In machine learning, novelty detection is the task of identifying novel unseen data. During training, only samples from the normal class are available. Test samples are classified as normal or abnormal by assignment of a novelty score. Here we propose novelty detection methods based on training variational autoencoders (VAEs) on normal data. Since abnormal samples are not used during training, we define novelty metrics based on the (partially complementary) assumptions that the VAE is less capable of reconstructing abnormal samples well; that abnormal samples more strongly violate the VAE regularizer; and that abnormal samples differ from normal samples not only in input-feature space, but also in the VAE latent space and VAE output. These approaches, combined with various possibilities of using (e.g.~sampling) the probabilistic VAE to obtain scalar novelty scores, yield a large family of methods. We apply these methods to magnetic resonance imaging, namely to the detection of diffusion-space (\mbox{q-space}) abnormalities in diffusion MRI scans of multiple sclerosis patients, i.e.~to detect multiple sclerosis lesions without using any lesion labels for training. Many of our methods outperform previously proposed q-space novelty detection methods.
QuAC	We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total). The interactions involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text. QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative evaluation. We also report results for a number of reference models, including a recently state-of-the-art reading comprehension architecture extended to model dialog context. Our best model underperforms humans by 20 F1, suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this data. Dataset, baseline, and leaderboard are available at quac.ai.
Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP)	The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is one of the fundamental combinatorial optimization problems in the branch of optimization or operations research in mathematics, from the category of the facilities location problems. The problem models the following real-life problem: There are a set of n facilities and a set of n locations. For each pair of locations, a distance is specified and for each pair of facilities a weight or flow is specified (e.g., the amount of supplies transported between the two facilities). The problem is to assign all facilities to different locations with the goal of minimizing the sum of the distances multiplied by the corresponding flows. Intuitively, the cost function encourages factories with high flows between each other to be placed close together. The problem statement resembles that of the assignment problem, except that the cost function is expressed in terms of quadratic inequalities, hence the name. qap
Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA)	Quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) is closely related to linear discriminant analysis (LDA), where it is assumed that the measurements from each class are normally distributed. Unlike LDA however, in QDA there is no assumption that the covariance of each of the classes is identical. When the normality assumption is true, the best possible test for the hypothesis that a given measurement is from a given class is the likelihood ratio test. QUDA: A Direct Approach for Sparse Quadratic Discriminant Analysis SQDA
Quadratic Exponential Model	cquad
Quadratic Programming (QP)	Quadratic programming (QP) is a special type of mathematical optimization problem. It is the problem of optimizing (minimizing or maximizing) a quadratic function of several variables subject to linear constraints on these variables.
Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO)	Gaussian Processes are used in many applications to model spatial phenomena. Within this context, a key issue is to decide the set of locations where to take measurements so as to obtain a better approximation of the underlying function. Current state of the art techniques select such set to minimize the posterior variance of the Gaussian process. We explore the feasibility of solving this problem by proposing a novel Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) model. In recent years this QUBO formulation has gained increasing attention since it represents the input for the specialized quantum annealer D-Wave machines. Hence, our contribution takes an important first step towards the sampling optimization of Gaussian processes in the context of quantum computation. Results of our empirical evaluation shows that the optimum of the QUBO objective function we derived represents a good solution for the above mentioned problem. In fact we are able to obtain comparable and in some cases better results than the widely used submodular technique.
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)	Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a technique, originally developed by Charles Ragin in 1987. QCA currently has more adherents in Europe than in the United States. It is used for analyzing data sets by listing and counting all the combinations of variables observed in the data set, and then applying the rules of logical inference to determine which descriptive inferences or implications the data supports. QCAtools,QCAfalsePositive,iaQCA
Qualitative Data Science	The often celebrated artificial intelligence of machine learning is impressive but does not come close to human intelligence and ability to understand the world. Many data scientists are working on automated text analysis to solve this issue (the topicmodels package is an example of such an attempt). These efforts are impressive but even the smartest text analysis algorithm is not able to derive meaning from text. To fully embrace all aspects of data science we need to be able to methodically undertake qualitative data analysis. RDQA
Qualitative Dueling Bandit (QDB)	We formulate and study a novel multi-armed bandit problem called the qualitative dueling bandit (QDB) problem, where an agent observes not numeric but qualitative feedback by pulling each arm. We employ the same regret as the dueling bandit (DB) problem where the duel is carried out by comparing the qualitative feedback. Although we can naively use classic DB algorithms for solving the QDB problem, this reduction significantly worsens the performance—actually, in the QDB problem, the probability that one arm wins the duel over another arm can be directly estimated without carrying out actual duels. In this paper, we propose such direct algorithms for the QDB problem. Our theoretical analysis shows that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform DB algorithms by incorporating the qualitative feedback, and experimental results also demonstrate vast improvement over the existing DB algorithms.
Quality-Aware Template Matching (QATM)	Finding a template in a search image is one of the core problems many computer vision, such as semantic image semantic, image-to-GPS verification \etc. We propose a novel quality-aware template matching method, QATM, which is not only used as a standalone template matching algorithm, but also a trainable layer that can be easily embedded into any deep neural network. Specifically, we assess the quality of a matching pair using soft-ranking among all matching pairs, and thus different matching scenarios such as 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and many-to-many will be all reflected to different values. Our extensive evaluation on classic template matching benchmarks and deep learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of QATM. It not only outperforms state-of-the-art template matching methods when used alone, but also largely improves existing deep network solutions.
QuaNet	Quantification is a supervised learning task that consists in predicting, given a set of classes C and a set D of unlabelled items, the prevalence (or relative frequency) p(c|D) of each class c in C. Quantification can in principle be solved by classifying all the unlabelled items and counting how many of them have been attributed to each class. However, this ‘classify and count’ approach has been shown to yield suboptimal quantification accuracy; this has established quantification as a task of its own, and given rise to a number of methods specifically devised for it. We propose a recurrent neural network architecture for quantification (that we call QuaNet) that observes the classification predictions to learn higher-order ‘quantification embeddings’, which are then refined by incorporating quantification predictions of simple classify-and-count-like methods. We test {QuaNet on sentiment quantification on text, showing that it substantially outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.
Quanitzed Stochastic Gradient Scheme (QSGD)	In this paper we focus on the problem of finding the optimal weights of the shallowest of neural networks consisting of a single Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). These functions are of the form $\mathbf{x}\rightarrow \max(0,\langle\mathbf{w},\mathbf{x}\rangle)$ with $\mathbf{w}\in\mathbb{R}^d$ denoting the weight vector. We focus on a planted model where the inputs are chosen i.i.d. from a Gaussian distribution and the labels are generated according to a planted weight vector. We first show that mini-batch stochastic gradient descent when suitably initialized, converges at a geometric rate to the planted model with a number of samples that is optimal up to numerical constants. Next we focus on a parallel implementation where in each iteration the mini-batch gradient is calculated in a distributed manner across multiple processors and then broadcast to a master or all other processors. To reduce the communication cost in this setting we utilize a Quanitzed Stochastic Gradient Scheme (QSGD) where the partial gradients are quantized. Perhaps unexpectedly, we show that QSGD maintains the fast convergence of SGD to a globally optimal model while significantly reducing the communication cost. We further corroborate our numerical findings via various experiments including distributed implementations over Amazon EC2.
Quantification	In mathematics and empirical science, quantification is the act of counting and measuring that maps human sense observations and experiences into members of some set of numbers. Quantification in this sense is fundamental to the scientific method.
Quantification	Quantification is the machine learning task of estimating test-data class proportions that are not necessarily similar to those in training. Apart from its intrinsic value as an aggregate statistic, quantification output can also be used to optimize classifier probabilities, thereby increasing classification accuracy. We unify major quantification approaches under a constrained multi-variate regression framework, and use mathematical programming to estimate class proportions for different loss functions. With this modeling approach, we extend existing binary-only quantification approaches to multi-class settings as well. We empirically verify our unified framework by experimenting with several multi-class datasets including the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and CIFAR-10.
Quantile Copula Causal Discovery (QCCD)	Telling cause from effect using observational data is a challenging problem, especially in the bivariate case. Contemporary methods often assume an independence between the cause and the generating mechanism of the effect given the cause. From this postulate, they derive asymmetries to uncover causal relationships. In this work, we propose such an approach, based on the link between Kolmogorov complexity and quantile scoring. We use a nonparametric conditional quantile estimator based on copulas to implement our procedure, thus avoiding restrictive assumptions about the joint distribution between cause and effect. In an extensive study on real and synthetic data, we show that quantile copula causal discovery (QCCD) compares favorably to state-of-the-art methods, while at the same time being computationally efficient and scalable.
Quantile Double Autoregression	Many financial time series have varying structures at different quantile levels, and also exhibit the phenomenon of conditional heteroscedasticity at the same time. In the meanwhile, it is still lack of a time series model to accommodate both of the above features simultaneously. This paper fills the gap by proposing a novel conditional heteroscedastic model, which is called the quantile double autoregression. The strict stationarity of the new model is derived, and a self-weighted conditional quantile estimation is suggested. Two promising properties of the original double autoregressive model are shown to be preserved. Based on the quantile autocorrelation function and self-weighting concept, two portmanteau tests are constructed, and they can be used in conjunction to check the adequacy of fitted conditional quantiles. The finite-sample performance of the proposed inference tools is examined by simulation studies, and the necessity of the new model is further demonstrated by analyzing the S&P500 Index.
Quantile Fourier Neural Network	A novel quantile Fourier neural network is presented for nonparametric probabilistic forecasting. Prediction are provided in the form of composite quantiles using time as the only input to the model. This effectively is a form of extrapolation based quantile regression applied for forecasting. Empirical results showcase that for time series data that have clear seasonality and trend, the model provides high quality probabilistic predictions. This work introduces a new class of forecasting of using only time as the input versus using past data such as an autoregressive model. Extrapolation based regression has not been studied before for probabilistic forecasting.
Quantile Function (QF)	In probability and statistics, the quantile function specifies, for a given probability in the probability distribution of a random variable, the value at which the probability of the random variable will be less than or equal to that probability. It is also called the percent point function or inverse cumulative distribution function. The quantile function is one way of prescribing a probability distribution, and it is an alternative to the probability density function (pdf) or probability mass function, the cumulative distribution function (cdf) and the characteristic function. The quantile function, Q, of a probability distribution is the inverse of its cumulative distribution function F. The derivative of the quantile function, namely the quantile density function, is yet another way of prescribing a probability distribution. It is the reciprocal of the pdf composed with the quantile function.
Quantile Markov Decision Processes (QMDP)	In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing the quantiles of the cumulative rewards of Markov Decision Processes (MDP), to which we refers as Quantile Markov Decision Processes (QMDP). Traditionally, the goal of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly to be infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific quantile of the cumulative reward instead of its expectation. (If we have some reference here, it would be good.) Our framework of QMDP provides analytical results characterizing the optimal QMDP solution and presents the algorithm for solving the QMDP. We provide analytical results characterizing the optimal QMDP solution and present the algorithms for solving the QMDP. We illustrate the model with two experiments: a grid game and a HIV optimal treatment experiment.
Quantile Option Architecture (QUOTA)	In this paper, we propose the Quantile Option Architecture (QUOTA) for exploration based on recent advances in distributional reinforcement learning (RL). In QUOTA, decision making is based on quantiles of a value distribution, not only the mean. QUOTA provides a new dimension for exploration via making use of both optimism and pessimism of a value distribution. We demonstrate the performance advantage of QUOTA in both challenging video games and physical robot simulators.
Quantile Regression (QR)	Quantile regression is a type of regression analysis used in statistics and econometrics. Whereas the method of least squares results in estimates that approximate the conditional mean of the response variable given certain values of the predictor variables, quantile regression aims at estimating either the conditional median or other quantiles of the response variable. GLDreg
Quantile Reinforcement Learning (QRL)	In reinforcement learning, the standard criterion to evaluate policies in a state is the expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However, this criterion may not always be suitable, we consider an alternative criterion based on the notion of quantiles. In the case of episodic reinforcement learning problems, we propose an algorithm based on stochastic approximation with two timescales. We evaluate our proposition on a simple model of the TV show, Who wants to be a millionaire.
Quantile Tempering Algorithm (QuanTA)	Using MCMC to sample from a target distribution, $\pi(x)$ on a $d$-dimensional state space can be a difficult and computationally expensive problem. Particularly when the target exhibits multimodality, then the traditional methods can fail to explore the entire state space and this results in a bias sample output. Methods to overcome this issue include the parallel tempering algorithm which utilises an augmented state space approach to help the Markov chain traverse regions of low probability density and reach other modes. This method suffers from the curse of dimensionality which dramatically slows the transfer of mixing information from the auxiliary targets to the target of interest as $d \rightarrow \infty$. This paper introduces a novel prototype algorithm, QuanTA, that uses a Gaussian motivated transformation in an attempt to accelerate the mixing through the temperature schedule of a parallel tempering algorithm. This new algorithm is accompanied by a comprehensive theoretical analysis quantifying the improved efficiency and scalability of the approach; concluding that under weak regularity conditions the new approach gives accelerated mixing through the temperature schedule. Empirical evidence of the effectiveness of this new algorithm is illustrated on canonical examples.
Quantile Treatment Effect (QTE)	➘ “Quantile Regression” qte
Quantile Variables	In the framework of Symbolic Data Analysis (SDA), distribution-variables are a particular case of multi-valued variables: each unit is represented by a set of distributions (e.g. histograms, density functions or quantile functions), one for each variable. Factor analysis (FA) methods are primary exploratory tools for dimension reduction and visualization. In the present work, we use Multiple Factor Analysis (MFA) approach for the analysis of data described by distributional variables. Each distributional variable induces a set new numeric variable related to the quantiles of each distribution. We call these new variables as \textit{quantile variables} and the set of quantile variables related to a distributional one is a block in the MFA approach. Thus, MFA is performed on juxtaposed tables of quantile variables. \\ We show that the criterion decomposed in the analysis is an approximation of the variability based on a suitable metrics between distributions: the squared $L_2$ Wasserstein distance. \\ Applications on simulated and real distributional data corroborate the method. The interpretation of the results on the factorial planes is performed by new interpretative tools that are related to the several characteristics of the distributions (location, scale and shape).
Quantiles Return (QR)
Quantitative Analysis (QA)
Quantitative Analyst (Quant)	The quant, or quantitative analyst, is a financial professional who makes use of a mathematical approach to evaluating the current conditions in a trading market. As part of this evaluation, the quant will also employ the same general methods to individual investment opportunities within the market. The general concept is to make use of a numerical analysis in order to help an investor identify the most profitable purchases and sales to make within the market.
Quantitative CBA	Quantitative CBA is a postprocessing algorithm for association rule classification algorithm CBA (Liu et al, 1998). QCBA uses original, undiscretized numerical attributes to optimize the discovered association rules, refining the boundaries of literals in the antecedent of the rules produced by CBA. Some rules as well as literals from the rules can consequently be removed, which makes the resulting classifier smaller. One-rule classification and crisp rules make CBA classification models possibly most comprehensible among all association rule classification algorithms. These viable properties are retained by QCBA. The postprocessing is conceptually fast, because it is performed on a relatively small number of rules that passed data coverage pruning in CBA. Benchmark of our QCBA approach on 22 UCI datasets shows average 53% decrease in the total size of the model as measured by the total number of conditions in all rules. Model accuracy remains on the same level as for CBA.
Quantitative Discourse Analysis	Quantitative Discourse Analysis is basically looking at patterns in language. qdap
QUantization Engine for low-power Neural Network (QUENN)	Deep Learning is moving to edge devices, ushering in a new age of distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI). The high demand of computational resources required by deep neural networks may be alleviated by approximate computing techniques, and most notably reduced-precision arithmetic with coarsely quantized numerical representations. In this context, Bonseyes comes in as an initiative to enable stakeholders to bring AI to low-power and autonomous environments such as: Automotive, Medical Healthcare and Consumer Electronics. To achieve this, we introduce LPDNN, a framework for optimized deployment of Deep Neural Networks on heterogeneous embedded devices. In this work, we detail the quantization engine that is integrated in LPDNN. The engine depends on a fine-grained workflow which enables a Neural Network Design Exploration and a sensitivity analysis of each layer for quantization. We demonstrate the engine with a case study on Alexnet and VGG16 for three different techniques for direct quantization: standard fixed-point, dynamic fixed-point and k-means clustering, and demonstrate the potential of the latter. We argue that using a Gaussian quantizer with k-means clustering can achieve better performance than linear quantizers. Without retraining, we achieve over 55.64\% saving for weights’ storage and 69.17\% for run-time memory accesses with less than 1\% drop in top5 accuracy in Imagenet.
Quantized Compressive K-Means	The recent framework of compressive statistical learning aims at designing tractable learning algorithms that use only a heavily compressed representation-or sketch-of massive datasets. Compressive K-Means (CKM) is such a method: it estimates the centroids of data clusters from pooled, non-linear, random signatures of the learning examples. While this approach significantly reduces computational time on very large datasets, its digital implementation wastes acquisition resources because the learning examples are compressed only after the sensing stage. The present work generalizes the sketching procedure initially defined in Compressive K-Means to a large class of periodic nonlinearities including hardware-friendly implementations that compressively acquire entire datasets. This idea is exemplified in a Quantized Compressive K-Means procedure, a variant of CKM that leverages 1-bit universal quantization (i.e. retaining the least significant bit of a standard uniform quantizer) as the periodic sketch nonlinearity. Trading for this resource-efficient signature (standard in most acquisition schemes) has almost no impact on the clustering performances, as illustrated by numerical experiments.
Quantized Epoch Stochastic Gradient Descent (QESGD)	Due to its efficiency and ease to implement, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning. In particular, SGD is one of the most popular optimization methods for distributed learning. Recently, quantized SGD (QSGD), which adopts quantization to reduce the communication cost in SGD-based distributed learning, has attracted much attention. Although several QSGD methods have been proposed, some of them are heuristic without theoretical guarantee, and others have high quantization variance which makes the convergence become slow. In this paper, we propose a new method, called Quantized Epoch-SGD (QESGD), for communication-efficient distributed learning. QESGD compresses (quantizes) the parameter with variance reduction, so that it can get almost the same performance as that of SGD with less communication cost. QESGD is implemented on the Parameter Server framework, and empirical results on distributed deep learning show that QESGD can outperform other state-of-the-art quantization methods to achieve the best performance.
Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (QGAN)	The intensive computation and memory requirements of generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) hinder its real-world deployment on edge devices such as smartphones. Despite the success in model reduction of CNNs, neural network quantization methods have not yet been studied on GANs, which are mainly faced with the issues of both the effectiveness of quantization algorithms and the instability of training GAN models. In this paper, we start with an extensive study on applying existing successful methods to quantize GANs. Our observation reveals that none of them generates samples with reasonable quality because of the underrepresentation of quantized values in model weights, and the generator and discriminator networks show different sensitivities upon quantization methods. Motivated by these observations, we develop a novel quantization method for GANs based on EM algorithms, named as QGAN. We also propose a multi-precision algorithm to help find the optimal number of bits of quantized GAN models in conjunction with corresponding result qualities. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CelebA show that QGAN can quantize GANs to even 1-bit or 2-bit representations with results of quality comparable to original models.
Quantized MANN (Q-MANN)	Memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) refer to a class of neural network models equipped with external memory (such as neural Turing machines and memory networks). These neural networks outperform conventional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in terms of learning long-term dependency, allowing them to solve intriguing AI tasks that would otherwise be hard to address. This paper concerns the problem of quantizing MANNs. Quantization is known to be effective when we deploy deep models on embedded systems with limited resources. Furthermore, quantization can substantially reduce the energy consumption of the inference procedure. These benefits justify recent developments of quantized multi layer perceptrons, convolutional networks, and RNNs. However, no prior work has reported the successful quantization of MANNs. The in-depth analysis presented here reveals various challenges that do not appear in the quantization of the other networks. Without addressing them properly, quantized MANNs would normally suffer from excessive quantization error which leads to degraded performance. In this paper, we identify memory addressing (specifically, content-based addressing) as the main reason for the performance degradation and propose a robust quantization method for MANNs to address the challenge. In our experiments, we achieved a computation-energy gain of 22x with 8-bit fixed-point and binary quantization compared to the floating-point implementation. Measured on the bAbI dataset, the resulting model, named the quantized MANN (Q-MANN), improved the error rate by 46% and 30% with 8-bit fixed-point and binary quantization, respectively, compared to the MANN quantized using conventional techniques. ➚ “Memory Augmented Neural Network”
Quantized Neural Network (QNN)	We introduce a method to train Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs) — neural networks with extremely low precision (e.g., 1-bit) weights and activations, at run-time. At train-time the quantized weights and activations are used for computing the parameter gradients. During the forward pass, QNNs drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and replace most arithmetic operations with bit-wise operations. As a result, power consumption is expected to be drastically reduced. We trained QNNs over the MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN and ImageNet datasets. The resulting QNNs achieve prediction accuracy comparable to their 32-bit counterparts. For example, our quantized version of AlexNet with 1-bit weights and 2-bit activations achieves 51% top-1 accuracy. Moreover, we quantize the parameter gradients to 6-bits as well which enables gradients computation using only bit-wise operation. Quantized recurrent neural networks were tested over the Penn Treebank dataset, and achieved comparable accuracy as their 32-bit counterparts using only 4-bits. Last but not least, we programmed a binary matrix multiplication GPU kernel with which it is possible to run our MNIST QNN 7 times faster than with an unoptimized GPU kernel, without suffering any loss in classification accuracy. The QNN code is available online.
Quantized Stochastic Gradient Descent (QSGD)	Quantized Epoch-SGD for Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning
Quantum Annealing (QA)	Quantum annealing (QA) is a metaheuristic for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions (candidate states), by a process using quantum fluctuations. Quantum annealing is used mainly for problems where the search space is discrete (combinatorial optimization problems) with many local minima; such as finding the ground state of a spin glass. It was formulated in its present form by T. Kadowaki and H. Nishimori (ja) in ‘Quantum annealing in the transverse Ising model’ though a proposal in a different form had been made by A. B. Finilla, M. A. Gomez, C. Sebenik and J. D. Doll, in ‘Quantum annealing: A new method for minimizing multidimensional functions’. Quantum annealing starts from a quantum-mechanical superposition of all possible states (candidate states) with equal weights. Then the system evolves following the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, a natural quantum-mechanical evolution of physical systems. The amplitudes of all candidate states keep changing, realizing a quantum parallelism, according to the time-dependent strength of the transverse field, which causes quantum tunneling between states. If the rate of change of the transverse field is slow enough, the system stays close to the ground state of the instantaneous Hamiltonian, i.e., adiabatic quantum computation. If the rate of change of the transverse field is accelerated, the system may leave the ground state temporarily but produce a higher likelihood of concluding in the ground state of the final problem Hamiltonian, i.e., diabatic quantum computation. The transverse field is finally switched off, and the system is expected to have reached the ground state of the classical Ising model that corresponds to the solution to the original optimization problem. An experimental demonstration of the success of quantum annealing for random magnets was reported immediately after the initial theoretical proposal. An introduction to combinatorial optimization (NP-hard) problems, the general structure of quantum annealing-based algorithms and two examples of this kind of algorithms for solving instances of the max-SAT and Minimum Multicut problems together with an overview of the quantum annealing systems manufactured by D-Wave Systems are presented in.
Quantum Grid Search Algorithm	In this paper we present a novel quantum algorithm, namely the quantum grid search algorithm, to solve a special search problem. Suppose $ k $ non-empty buckets are given, such that each bucket contains some marked and some unmarked items. In one trial an item is selected from each of the $ k $ buckets. If every selected item is a marked item, then the search is considered successful. This search problem can also be formulated as the problem of finding a ‘marked path’ associated with specified bounds on a discrete grid. Our algorithm essentially uses several Grover search operators in parallel to efficiently solve such problems. We also present an extension of our algorithm combined with a binary search algorithm in order to efficiently solve global trajectory optimization problems. Estimates of the expected run times of the algorithms are also presented, and it is proved that our proposed algorithms offer exponential improvement over pure classical search algorithms, while a traditional Grover’s search algorithm offers only a quadratic speedup. We note that this gain comes at the cost of increased complexity of the quantum circuitry. The implication of such exponential gains in performance is that many high dimensional optimization problems, which are intractable for classical computers, can be efficiently solved by our proposed quantum grid search algorithm.
Quantum Low Entropy based Associative Reasoning (QLEAR learning)	In this paper, we propose the classification method based on a learning paradigm we are going to call Quantum Low Entropy based Associative Reasoning or QLEAR learning. The approach is based on the idea that classification can be understood as supervised clustering, where a quantum entropy in the context of the quantum probabilistic model, will be used as a ‘capturer’ (measure, or external index), of the ‘natural structure’ of the data. By using quantum entropy we do not make any assumption about linear separability of the data that are going to be classified. The basic idea is to find close neighbors to a query sample and then use relative change in the quantum entropy as a measure of similarity of the newly arrived sample with the representatives of interest. In other words, method is based on calculation of quantum entropy of the referent system and its relative change with the addition of the newly arrived sample. Referent system consists of vectors that represent individual classes and that are the most similar, in Euclidean distance sense, to the vector that is analyzed. Here, we analyze the classification problem in the context of measuring similarities to prototype examples of categories. While nearest neighbor classifiers are natural in this setting, they suffer from the problem of high variance (in bias-variance decomposition) in the case of limited sampling. Alternatively, one could use machine learning techniques (like support vector machines) but they involve time-consuming optimization. Here we propose a hybrid of nearest neighbor and machine learning technique which deals naturally with the multi-class setting, has reasonable computational complexity both in training and at run time, and yields excellent results in practice.
Quantum Neural Network (QNN)	Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are neural network models which are based on the principles of quantum mechanics. There are two different approaches to QNN research, one exploiting quantum information processing to improve existing neural network models (sometimes also vice versa), and the other one searching for potential quantum effects in the brain.
Quantum Variational Autoencoder (QVAE)	Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models with the salient ability to perform inference. Here, we introduce a \emph{quantum variational autoencoder} (QVAE): a VAE whose latent generative process is implemented as a quantum Boltzmann machine (QBM). We show that our model can be trained end-to-end by maximizing a well-defined loss-function: a ‘quantum’ lower-bound to a variational approximation of the log-likelihood. We use quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations to train and evaluate the performance of QVAEs. To achieve the best performance, we first create a VAE platform with discrete latent space generated by a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MNIST dataset when compared against similar approaches that only involve discrete variables in the generative process. We consider QVAEs with a smaller number of latent units to be able to perform QMC simulations, which are computationally expensive. We show that QVAEs can be trained effectively in regimes where quantum effects are relevant despite training via the quantum bound. Our findings open the way to the use of quantum computers to train QVAEs to achieve competitive performance for generative models. Placing a QBM in the latent space of a VAE leverages the full potential of current and next-generation quantum computers as sampling devices.
QuaRel	Many natural language questions require recognizing and reasoning with qualitative relationships (e.g., in science, economics, and medicine), but are challenging to answer with corpus-based methods. Qualitative modeling provides tools that support such reasoning, but the semantic parsing task of mapping questions into those models has formidable challenges. We present QuaRel, a dataset of diverse story questions involving qualitative relationships that characterize these challenges, and techniques that begin to address them. The dataset has 2771 questions relating 19 different types of quantities. For example, ‘Jenny observes that the robot vacuum cleaner moves slower on the living room carpet than on the bedroom carpet. Which carpet has more friction?’ We contribute (1) a simple and flexible conceptual framework for representing these kinds of questions; (2) the QuaRel dataset, including logical forms, exemplifying the parsing challenges; and (3) two novel models for this task, built as extensions of type-constrained semantic parsing. The first of these models (called QuaSP+) significantly outperforms off-the-shelf tools on QuaRel. The second (QuaSP+Zero) demonstrates zero-shot capability, i.e., the ability to handle new qualitative relationships without requiring additional training data, something not possible with previous models. This work thus makes inroads into answering complex, qualitative questions that require reasoning, and scaling to new relationships at low cost. The dataset and models are available at http://…/quarel.
Quasi Large Margin Classifier Based on Hyperdisk (QLMC-HD)	In the area of data classification, the different classifiers have been developed by its own strengths and weaknesses. Among these classifiers, we propose a method which is based on the maximum margin between two classes. One of the main challenges in this area is dealt with noisy data. In this paper, our aim is to optimize the method of large margin classifier based on hyperdisk (LMC-HD) and incorporate it into quasi-support vector data description (QSVDD) method. In the proposed method, the bounding hypersphere is calculated based on the QSVDD method. So our convex class model is more robust in compared with support vector machine (SVM) and less tight than LMC-HD. Applying this idea causes the reduction of the impact of the noisy data set in classification. Large margin classifiers aim to maximize the margin and minimizing the risk. Sine our proposed method ignores the effect of outliers and noises, so this method has the widest margin compared with other large margin classifiers. In the end, we compare our proposed method with other popular large margin classifiers by the experiments on a set of standard data which indicates our results are more efficient than the others.
Quasi-Fully Supervised Learning (QFSL)	Most existing Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) methods have the strong bias problem, in which instances of unseen (target) classes tend to be categorized as one of the seen (source) classes. So they yield poor performance after being deployed in the generalized ZSL settings. In this paper, we propose a straightforward yet effective method named Quasi-Fully Supervised Learning (QFSL) to alleviate the bias problem. Our method follows the way of transductive learning, which assumes that both the labeled source images and unlabeled target images are available for training. In the semantic embedding space, the labeled source images are mapped to several fixed points specified by the source categories, and the unlabeled target images are forced to be mapped to other points specified by the target categories. Experiments conducted on AwA2, CUB and SUN datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a huge margin of 9.3~24.5% following generalized ZSL settings, and by a large margin of 0.2~16.2% following conventional ZSL settings.
Quasi-KL Divergence (QKL)	Dropout, a stochastic regularisation technique for training of neural networks, has recently been reinterpreted as a specific type of approximate inference algorithm for Bayesian neural networks. The main contribution of the reinterpretation is in providing a theoretical framework useful for analysing and extending the algorithm. We show that the proposed framework suffers from several issues; from undefined or pathological behaviour of the true posterior related to use of improper priors, to an ill-defined variational objective due to singularity of the approximating distribution relative to the true posterior. Our analysis of the improper log uniform prior used in variational Gaussian dropout suggests the pathologies are generally irredeemable, and that the algorithm still works only because the variational formulation annuls some of the pathologies. To address the singularity issue, we proffer Quasi-KL (QKL) divergence, a new approximate inference objective for approximation of high-dimensional distributions. We show that motivations for variational Bernoulli dropout based on discretisation and noise have QKL as a limit. Properties of QKL are studied both theoretically and on a simple practical example which shows that the QKL-optimal approximation of a full rank Gaussian with a degenerate one naturally leads to the Principal Component Analysis solution.
quasi-MCMC	Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for estimating integrals are attractive since the resulting estimators converge at a faster rate than pseudo-random Monte Carlo. However, they can be difficult to set up on arbitrary posterior densities within the Bayesian framework, in particular for inverse problems. We introduce a general parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework, for which we prove a law of large numbers and a central limit theorem. We further extend this approach to the use of adaptive kernels and state conditions, under which ergodicity holds. As a further extension, an importance sampling estimator is derived, for which asymptotic unbiasedness is proven. We consider the use of completely uniformly distributed (CUD) numbers and non-reversible transitions within the above stated methods, which leads to a general parallel quasi-MCMC (QMCMC) methodology. We prove consistency of the resulting estimators and demonstrate numerically that this approach scales close to $n^{-1}$ as we increase parallelisation, instead of the usual $n^{-1/2}$ that is typical of standard MCMC algorithms. In practical statistical models we observe up to 2 orders of magnitude improvement compared with pseudo-random methods.
Quasi-Monte Carlo Variational Inference (QMC)	Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic gradients. We propose variance reduction by means of Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling. QMC replaces N i.i.d. samples from a uniform probability distribution by a deterministic sequence of samples of length N. This sequence covers the underlying random variable space more evenly than i.i.d. draws, reducing the variance of the gradient estimator. With our novel approach, both the score function and the reparameterization gradient estimators lead to much faster convergence. We also propose a new algorithm for Monte Carlo objectives, where we operate with a constant learning rate and increase the number of QMC samples per iteration. We prove that this way, our algorithm can converge asymptotically at a faster rate than SGD. We furthermore provide theoretical guarantees on QMC for Monte Carlo objectives that go beyond MCVI, and support our findings by several experiments on large-scale data sets from various domains.
Quasi-Newton Methods	Quasi-Newton methods are methods used to either find zeroes or local maxima and minima of functions. They are an alternative to Newton’s method when the Jacobian (when searching for zeroes) or the Hessian (when searching for extrema) is unavailable or too expensive to compute at every iteration.
Quasi-Orthogonal Cocycle	We introduce the notion of quasi-orthogonal cocycle. This is motivated in part by the maximal determinant problem for square …-matrices of size congruent to $2$ modulo $4$. Quasi-orthogonal cocycles are analogous to the orthogonal cocycles of algebraic design theory. Equivalences with new and known combinatorial objects afforded by this analogy, such as quasi-Hadamard groups, relative quasi-difference sets, and certain partially balanced incomplete block designs, are proved.
Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNN)	Recurrent neural networks are a powerful tool for modeling sequential data, but the dependence of each timestep’s computation on the previous timestep’s output limits parallelism and makes RNNs unwieldy for very long sequences. We introduce quasi-recurrent neural networks (QRNNs), an approach to neural sequence modeling that alternates convolutional layers, which apply in parallel across timesteps, and a minimalist recurrent pooling function that applies in parallel across channels. Despite lacking trainable recurrent layers, stacked QRNNs have better predictive accuracy than stacked LSTMs of the same hidden size. Due to their increased parallelism, they are up to 16 times faster at train and test time. Experiments on language modeling, sentiment classification, and character-level neural machine translation demonstrate these advantages and underline the viability of QRNNs as a basic building block for a variety of sequence tasks.
Quasi-Support Vector Data Description (QSVDD)	In the area of data classification, the different classifiers have been developed by its own strengths and weaknesses. Among these classifiers, we propose a method which is based on the maximum margin between two classes. One of the main challenges in this area is dealt with noisy data. In this paper, our aim is to optimize the method of large margin classifier based on hyperdisk (LMC-HD) and incorporate it into quasi-support vector data description (QSVDD) method. In the proposed method, the bounding hypersphere is calculated based on the QSVDD method. So our convex class model is more robust in compared with support vector machine (SVM) and less tight than LMC-HD. Applying this idea causes the reduction of the impact of the noisy data set in classification. Large margin classifiers aim to maximize the margin and minimizing the risk. Sine our proposed method ignores the effect of outliers and noises, so this method has the widest margin compared with other large margin classifiers. In the end, we compare our proposed method with other popular large margin classifiers by the experiments on a set of standard data which indicates our results are more efficient than the others.
Quaternion Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN)	Neural networks in the real domain have been studied for a long time and achieved promising results in many vision tasks for recent years. However, the extensions of the neural network models in other number fields and their potential applications are not fully-investigated yet. Focusing on color images, which can be naturally represented as quaternion matrices, we propose a quaternion convolutional neural network (QCNN) model to obtain more representative features. In particular, we redesign the basic modules like convolution layer and fully-connected layer in the quaternion domain, which can be used to establish fully-quaternion convolutional neural networks. Moreover, these modules are compatible with almost all deep learning techniques and can be plugged into traditional CNNs easily. We test our QCNN models in both color image classification and denoising tasks. Experimental results show that they outperform the real-valued CNNs with same structures.
Quaternion Long-Short Term Memory (QLSTM)	Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are at the core of modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In particular, long-short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in many speech recognition tasks, due to their efficient representation of long and short term dependencies in sequences of inter-dependent features. Nonetheless, internal dependencies within the element composing multidimensional features are weakly considered by traditional real-valued representations. We propose a novel quaternion long-short term memory (QLSTM) recurrent neural network that takes into account both the external relations between the features composing a sequence, and these internal latent structural dependencies with the quaternion algebra. QLSTMs are compared to LSTMs during a memory copy-task and a realistic application of speech recognition on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dataset. QLSTM reaches better performances during the two experiments with up to $2.8$ times less learning parameters, leading to a more expressive representation of the information.
Quegel	Pioneered by Google’s Pregel, many distributed systems have been developed for large-scale graph analytics. These systems expose the user-friendly ‘think like a vertex’ programming interface to users, and exhibit good horizontal scalability. However, these systems are designed for tasks where the majority of graph vertices participate in computation, but are not suitable for processing light-workload graph queries where only a small fraction of vertices need to be accessed. The programming paradigm adopted by these systems can seriously under-utilize the resources in a cluster for graph query processing. In this work, we develop a new open-source system, called Quegel, for querying big graphs, which treats queries as first-class citizens in the design of its computing model. Users only need to specify the Pregel-like algorithm for a generic query, and Quegel processes light-workload graph queries on demand using a novel superstep-sharing execution model to effectively utilize the cluster resources. Quegel further provides a convenient interface for constructing graph indexes, which significantly improve query performance but are not supported by existing graph-parallel systems. Our experiments verified that Quegel is highly efficient in answering various types of graph queries and is up to orders of magnitude faster than existing systems.
Query Autofiltering	Query Autofiltering is autotagging of the incoming query where the knowledge source is the search index itself. What does this mean and why should we care? Content tagging processes are traditionally done at index time either manually or automatically by machine learning or knowledge based (taxonomy/ontology) approaches. To ‘tag’ a piece of content means to attach a piece of metadata that defines some attribute of that content (such as product type, color, price, date and so on). We use this now for faceted search – if I search for ‘shirts’, the search engine will bring back all records that have the token ‘shirts’ or the singular form ‘shirt’ (using a technique called stemming). At the same time, it will display all of the values of the various tags that we added to the content at index time under the field name or ‘category’ of these tags. We call these things facets. When the user clicks on a facet link, say color = red, we then generate a Solr filter query with the name / value pair of <field name> = <facet value> and add that to the original query. What this does is narrow the search result set to all records that have ‘shirt’ or ‘shirts’ and the ‘color’ facet value of ‘red’. Another benefit of faceting is that the user can see all of the colors that shirts come in, so they can also find blue shirts in the same way. Query Autofiltering Revisited
Query Binning (QB)	Despite extensive research on cryptography, secure and efficient query processing over outsourced data remains an open challenge. This paper continues along the emerging trend in secure data processing that recognizes that the entire dataset may not be sensitive, and hence, non-sensitivity of data can be exploited to overcome limitations of existing encryption-based approaches. We propose a new secure approach, entitled query binning (QB) that allows non-sensitive parts of the data to be outsourced in clear-text while guaranteeing that no information is leaked by the joint processing of non-sensitive data (in clear-text) and sensitive data (in encrypted form). QB maps a query to a set of queries over the sensitive and non-sensitive data in a way that no leakage will occur due to the joint processing over sensitive and non-sensitive data. Interestingly, in addition to improve performance, we show that QB actually strengthens the security of the underlying cryptographic technique by preventing size, frequency-count, and workload-skew attacks.
Query Expansion (QE)	Query expansion (QE) is the process of reformulating a seed query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval operations. In the context of web search engines, query expansion involves evaluating a user’s input (what words were typed into the search query area, and sometimes other types of data) and expanding the search query to match additional documents. Query expansion involves techniques such as: · Finding synonyms of words, and searching for the synonyms as well · Finding all the various morphological forms of words by stemming each word in the search query · Fixing spelling errors and automatically searching for the corrected form or suggesting it in the results · Re-weighting the terms in the original query Query expansion is a methodology studied in the field of computer science, particularly within the realm of natural language processing and information retrieval.
Query, Request, Feedback, Answer (QRFA)	Understanding the structure of interaction processes helps us to improve information-seeking dialogue systems. Analyzing an interaction process boils down to discovering patterns in sequences of alternating utterances exchanged between a user and an agent. Process mining techniques have been successfully applied to analyze structured event logs, discovering the underlying process models or evaluating whether the observed behavior is in conformance with the known process. In this paper, we apply process mining techniques to discover patterns in conversational transcripts and extract a new model of information-seeking dialogues, QRFA, for Query, Request, Feedback, Answer. Our results are grounded in an empirical evaluation across multiple conversational datasets from different domains, which was never attempted before. We show that the QRFA model better reflects conversation flows observed in real information-seeking conversations than models proposed previously. Moreover, QRFA allows us to identify malfunctioning in dialogue system transcripts as deviations from the expected conversation flow described by the model via conformance analysis.
Query-Based Anomaly Detection in Heterogeneous Information Network (QANet)	Complex networks have now become integral parts of modern information infrastructures. This paper proposes a user-centric method for detecting anomalies in heterogeneous information networks, in which nodes and/or edges might be from different types. In the proposed anomaly detection method, users interact directly with the system and anomalous entities can be detected through queries. Our approach is based on tensor decomposition and clustering methods. We also propose a network generation model to construct synthetic heterogeneous information network to test the performance of the proposed method. The proposed anomaly detection method is compared with state-of-the-art methods in both synthetic and real-world networks. Experimental results show that the proposed tensor-based method considerably outperforms the existing anomaly detection methods.
Query-Oriented-Constrained Spreading Activation	Syntactic search relies on keywords contained in a query to find suitable documents. So, documents that do not contain the keywords but contain information related to the query are not retrieved. Spreading activation is an algorithm for finding latent information in a query by exploiting relations between nodes in an associative network or semantic network. However, the classical spreading activation algorithm uses all relations of a node in the network that will add unsuitable information into the query. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for semantic text search, called query-oriented-constrained spreading activation that only uses relations relating to the content of the query to find really related information. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that, in terms of the MAP measure, our search engine is 18.9% and 43.8% respectively better than the syntactic search and the search using the classical constrained spreading activation. KEYWORDS: Information Retrieval, Ontology, Semantic Search, Spreading Activation
Quetelet Index (QI)
Queue-Based Resampling	Online class imbalance learning constitutes a new problem and an emerging research topic that focusses on the challenges of online learning under class imbalance and concept drift. Class imbalance deals with data streams that have very skewed distributions while concept drift deals with changes in the class imbalance status. Little work exists that addresses these challenges and in this paper we introduce queue-based resampling, a novel algorithm that successfully addresses the co-existence of class imbalance and concept drift. The central idea of the proposed resampling algorithm is to selectively include in the training set a subset of the examples that appeared in the past. Results on two popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of queue-based resampling over state-of-the-art methods in terms of learning speed and quality.
QuickeNing	We propose an approach to accelerate gradient-based optimization algorithms by giving them the ability to exploit curvature information using quasi-Newton update rules. The proposed scheme, called QuickeNing, is generic and can be applied to a large class of first-order methods such as incremental and block-coordinate algorithms; it is also compatible with composite objectives, meaning that it has the ability to provide exactly sparse solutions when the objective involves a sparsity-inducing regularization. QuickeNing relies on limited-memory BFGS rules, making it appropriate for solving high-dimensional optimization problems; with no line-search, it is also simple to use and to implement. Besides, it enjoys a worst-case linear convergence rate for strongly convex problems. We present experimental results where QuickeNing gives significant improvements over competing methods for solving large-scale high-dimensional machine learning problems.
QuickIM	The Influence Maximization (IM) problem aims at finding k seed vertices in a network, starting from which influence can be spread in the network to the maximum extent. In this paper, we propose QuickIM, the first versatile IM algorithm that attains all the desirable properties of a practically applicable IM algorithm at the same time, namely high time efficiency, good result quality, low memory footprint, and high robustness. On real-world social networks, QuickIM achieves the $\Omega(n + m)$ lower bound on time complexity and $\Omega(n)$ space complexity, where $n$ and $m$ are the number of vertices and edges in the network, respectively. Our experimental evaluation verifies the superiority of QuickIM. Firstly, QuickIM runs 1-3 orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art IM algorithms. Secondly, except EasyIM, QuickIM requires 1-2 orders of magnitude less memory than the state-of-the-art algorithms. Thirdly, QuickIM always produces as good quality results as the state-of-the-art algorithms. Lastly, the time and the memory performance of QuickIM is independent of influence probabilities. On the largest network used in the experiments that contains more than 3.6 billion edges, QuickIM is able to find hundreds of influential seeds in less than 4 minutes, while all the state-of-the-art algorithms fail to terminate in an hour.
QuickNet	We present QuickNet, a fast and accurate network architecture that is both faster and significantly more accurate than other fast deep architectures like SqueezeNet. Furthermore, it uses less parameters than previous networks, making it more memory efficient. We do this by making two major modifications to the reference Darknet model (Redmon et al, 2015): 1) The use of depthwise separable convolutions and 2) The use of parametric rectified linear units. We make the observation that parametric rectified linear units are computationally equivalent to leaky rectified linear units at test time and the observation that separable convolutions can be interpreted as a compressed Inception network (Chollet, 2016). Using these observations, we derive a network architecture, which we call QuickNet, that is both faster and more accurate than previous models. Our architecture provides at least four major advantages: (1) A smaller model size, which is more tenable on memory constrained systems; (2) A significantly faster network which is more tenable on computationally constrained systems; (3) A high accuracy of 95.7 percent on the CIFAR-10 Dataset which outperforms all but one result published so far, although we note that our works are orthogonal approaches and can be combined (4) Orthogonality to previous model compression approaches allowing for further speed gains to be realized.
QuickSel	Estimating the selectivity of a query is a key step in almost any cost-based query optimizer. Most of today’s databases rely on histograms or samples that are periodically refreshed by re-scanning the data as the underlying data changes. Since frequent scans are costly, these statistics are often stale and lead to poor selectivity estimates. As an alternative to scans, query-driven histograms have been proposed, which refine the histograms based on the actual selectivities of the observed queries. Unfortunately, these approaches are either too costly to use in practice—i.e., require an exponential number of buckets—or quickly lose their advantage as they observe more queries. For example, the state-of-the-art technique requires 318,936 buckets (and over 8 seconds of refinement overhead per query) after observing only 300 queries. In this paper, we propose a selectivity learning framework, called QuickSel, which falls into the query-driven paradigm but does not use histograms. Instead, it builds an internal model of the underlying data, which can be refined significantly faster (e.g., only 1.9 milliseconds for 300 queries). This fast refinement allows QuickSel to continuously learn from each query and yield increasingly more accurate selectivity estimates over time. Unlike query-driven histograms, QuickSel relies on a mixture model and a new optimization algorithm for training its model. Our extensive experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that, given the same target accuracy, QuickSel is on average 254.6x faster than state-of-the-art query-driven histograms, including ISOMER and STHoles. Further, given the same space budget, QuickSel is on average 57.3% and 91.1% more accurate than periodically-updated histograms and samples, respectively.
QuickXsort	QuickXsort is a highly efficient in-place sequential sorting scheme that mixes Hoare’s Quicksort algorithm with X, where X can be chosen from a wider range of other known sorting algorithms, like Heapsort, Insertionsort and Mergesort. Its major advantage is that QuickXsort can be in-place even if X is not. In this work we provide general transfer theorems expressing the number of comparisons of QuickXsort in terms of the number of comparisons of X. More specifically, if pivots are chosen as medians of (not too fast) growing size samples, the average number of comparisons of QuickXsort and X differ only by $o(n)$-terms. For median-of-$k$ pivot selection for some constant $k$, the difference is a linear term whose coefficient we compute precisely. For instance, median-of-three QuickMergesort uses at most $n \lg n – 0.8358n + O(\log n)$ comparisons. Furthermore, we examine the possibility of sorting base cases with some other algorithm using even less comparisons. By doing so the average-case number of comparisons can be reduced down to $n \lg n- 1.4106n + o(n)$ for a remaining gap of only $0.0321n$ comparisons to the known lower bound (while using only $O(\log n)$ additional space and $O(n \log n)$ time overall). Implementations of these sorting strategies show that the algorithms challenge well-established library implementations like Musser’s Introsort.
Quilt Plot	Quilt plots. Sounds interesting. If you looked at that and thought “Hey, that’s a heat map!”, you are correct. That is a heat map. Let’s be quite clear about that. It’s a heat map.
Quintly Query Language (QQL)	QQL stands for quintly query language and gives you the power to define your own metrics based on the quintly data pool. As you can hear from the name this is based on the SQL language, technically based on SQLite.
Quiver Plot	ggquiver
Quizbowl	Quizbowl is a scholastic trivia competition that tests human knowledge and intelligence; additionally, it supports diverse research in question answering (QA). A Quizbowl question consists of multiple sentences whose clues are arranged by difficulty (from obscure to obvious) and uniquely identify a well-known entity such as those found on Wikipedia. Since players can answer the question at any time, an elite player (human or machine) demonstrates its superiority by answering correctly given as few clues as possible. We make two key contributions to machine learning research through Quizbowl: (1) collecting and curating a large factoid QA dataset and an accompanying gameplay dataset, and (2) developing a computational approach to playing Quizbowl that involves determining both what to answer and when to answer. Our Quizbowl system has defeated some of the best trivia players in the world over a multi-year series of exhibition matches. Throughout this paper, we show that collaborations with the vibrant Quizbowl community have contributed to the high quality of our dataset, led to new research directions, and doubled as an exciting way to engage the public with research in machine learning and natural language processing.
Quotient Hash Table (QHT)	This article presents the Quotient Hash Table (QHT) a new data structure for duplicate detection in unbounded streams. QHTs stem from a corrected analysis of streaming quotient filters (SQFs), resulting in a 33\% reduction in memory usage for equal performance. We provide a new and thorough analysis of both algorithms, with results of interest to other existing constructions. We also introduce an optimised version of our new data structure dubbed Queued QHT with Duplicates (QQHTD). Finally we discuss the effect of adversarial inputs for hash-based duplicate filters similar to QHT.