The **Hard Sigmoid** is an activation function used for neural networks of the form:

$$f\left(x\right) = \max\left(0, \min\left(1,\frac{\left(x+1\right)}{2}\right)\right)$$

Image Source: [Rinat Maksutov](https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-study-of-a-not-very-deep-neural-network-part-2-activation-functions-fd9bd8d406fc)

**Hybrid Task Cascade**, or **HTC**, is a framework for cascading in instance segmentation. It differs from [Cascade Mask R-CNN](https://paperswithcode.com/method/cascade-mask-r-cnn) in two important aspects:  (1) instead of performing cascaded refinement on the two tasks of detection and segmentation separately, it interweaves them for a joint multi-stage processing; (2) it adopts a fully convolutional branch to provide spatial context, which can help distinguishing hard foreground from cluttered background.

Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation

Hard Sigmoid

BinaryConnect: Training Deep Neural Networks with binary weights during propagations

**Variational Entanglement Detection** is a variational quantum algorithm which uses criteria based on positive maps as a bridge and works as follows. Given an unknown target bipartite quantum state, it firstly decomposes the chosen positive map into a linear combination of NISQ implementable quantum operations. Then, it variationally estimates the minimal eigenvalue of the final state, obtained by executing these quantum operations on the target state and averaging the output states. Deterministic and probabilistic methods are proposed to compute the average. At last, it asserts that the target state is entangled if the optimized minimal eigenvalue is negative. VLNE builds upon a linear decomposition of the transpose map into Pauli terms and the recently proposed trace distance estimation algorithm. It variationally estimates the well-known logarithmic negativity entanglement measure and could be applied to quantify entanglement on near-term quantum devices.

Source	BinaryConnect: Training Deep Neural Networks with binary weights during propagations
Year	2000
Data Source	Papers with Code archive (CC BY-SA)