Simone Gasperini

Simone Angelozzi, Simone Gasperini, Daniele Bonacorsi

Neutral-atom quantum devices offer a natural and powerful platform for Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC), a non-variational approach to quantum-enhanced machine learning that is attracting growing interest in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this work, we implement a QRC-based learning model tailored to Pasqal neutral-atom hardware, where classical data are encoded into time-dependent detuning waveforms and processed through programmable many-body dynamics. Feature embeddings are extracted from single- and two-qubit Pauli-$Z$ observables and used within a simple linear readout model. We systematically investigate both global and local detuning encoding strategies on a supervised image classification task, benchmarking performance against a purely classical linear baseline. Our results show that processing the data through the quantum reservoir yields a consistent $\sim$4\% improvement in accuracy, highlighting the system effectiveness as a nonlinear feature map. Both encoding strategies exhibit comparable performance, suggesting that QRC can leverage different control schemes while remaining compatible with near-term and emerging hardware capabilities. These findings provide concrete evidence that QRC can enhance classical machine learning pipelines by injecting non-classical correlations without the need for variational optimization, thereby avoiding issues such as barren plateaus and training instabilities. More broadly, this work establishes neutral-atom platforms as a promising and scalable setting for QRC, opening the way toward practical quantum-enhanced learning on near-term devices.