The melting of ice sheets and glaciers is one of the main contributors to global sea-level rise. Hence, continuous monitoring of glacier changes and in particular the mapping of positional changes of their calving front is of significant importance. This delineation process, in general, has been carried out manually, which is time-consuming and not feasible for the abundance of available data within the past decade. Automatic delineation of the glacier fronts in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images can be performed using deep learningbased U-Net models. This article aims to study and survey the components of a U-Net model and optimize the model to get the most out of U-Net for glacier (calving front) segmentation. We trained the U-Net to segment the SAR images of Sjogren-Inlet and Dinsmoore-Bombardier-Edgworth glacier systems on the Antarctica Peninsula region taken by ERS-1/2, Envisat, RadarSAT-1, ALOS, TerraSAR-X, and TanDEM-X missions. The U-Net model was optimized in six aspects. The first two aspects, namely data pre-processing and data augmentation, enhanced the representation of information in the image. The remaining four aspects optimized the feature extraction of U-Net by finding the best-suited loss function, bottleneck, normalization technique, and dropouts for the glacier segmentation task. The optimized U-Net model achieves a dice coefficient score of 0.9378 with a 20% improvement over the baseline U-Net model, which achieved a score of 0.7377. This segmentation result is further post-processed to delineate the calving front. The optimized U-Net model shows 23% improvement in the glacier front delineation compared to the baseline model.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has considerably advanced over the past decade. At the same time, state-of-the-art RL algorithms require a large computational budget in terms of training time to converge. Recent work has started to approach this problem through the lens of quantum computing, which promises theoretical speed-ups for several traditionally hard tasks. In this work, we examine a class of hybrid quantumclassical RL algorithms that we collectively refer to as variational quantum deep Q-networks (VQ-DQN). We show that VQ-DQN approaches are subject to instabilities that cause the learned policy to diverge, study the extent to which this afflicts reproduciblity of established results based on classical simulation, and perform systematic experiments to identify potential explanations for the observed instabilities. Additionally, and in contrast to most existing work on quantum reinforcement learning, we execute RL algorithms on an actual quantum processing unit (an IBM Quantum Device) and investigate differences in behaviour between simulated and physical quantum systems that suffer from implementation deficiencies. Our experiments show that, contrary to opposite claims in the literature, it cannot be conclusively decided if known quantum approaches, even if simulated without physical imperfections, can provide an advantage as compared to classical approaches. Finally, we provide a robust, universal and well-tested implementation of VQ-DQN as a reproducible testbed for future experiments.

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Quantum reinforcement learning is an emerging field at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. While we intend to provide a broad overview of the literature on quantum reinforcement learning (our interpretation of this term will be clarified below), we put particular emphasis on recent developments. With a focus on already available noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, these include variational quantum circuits acting as function approximators in an otherwise classical reinforcement learning setting. In addition, we survey quantum reinforcement learning algorithms based on future fault-tolerant hardware, some of which come with a provable quantum advantage. We provide both a birds-eye-view of the field, as well as summaries and reviews for selected parts of the literature.

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