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arXiv:1207.4304

Hidden Quantum Markov Models with one qubit

O`Neill, Ben, Thomas M. Barlow, Dominik Šafránek, Almut Beige

Published Jul 18, 2012• 0 citations
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Abstract

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have become very popular as a computational tool for the analysis of sequential data. They are memoryless machines which transition from one internal state to another, while producing symbols. These symbols constitute the output of the machine and form an infinite time series. Analogously, Hidden Quantum Markov Models (HQMM) produce an infinite time series, while progressing from one quantum state to another through stochastic quantum operations. Here we compare 1-bit HMMs and 1-qubit HQMMs and show that the latter can produce stronger correlations, although both machines are, in principle, comparable in resources.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1207.4304

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Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have become very popular as a computational tool for the analysis of sequential data. They are memoryless machines which transition from one internal state to another, while producing symbols. These symbols constitute the output of the machine and form an infinite time series. Analogously, Hidden Quantum Markov Models (HQMM) produce an infinite time series, while progressing from one quantum state to another through stochastic quantum operations. Here we compare 1-bit HMMs and 1-qubit HQMMs and show that the latter can produce stronger correlations, although both machines are, in principle, comparable in resources.
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have become very popular as a computational tool for the analysis of sequential data. They are memoryless machines which transition from one internal state to another, while producing symbols. These symbols constitute the output of the machine and form an infinite time series. Analogously, Hidden Quantum Markov Models (HQMM) produce an infinite time series, while progressing from one quantum state to another through stochastic quantum operations. Here we compare 1-bit HMMs and 1-qubit HQMMs and show that the latter can produce stronger correlations, although both machines are, in principle, comparable in resources.
Hidden Quantum Markov Models (HQMMs) can be thought of as quantum probabilistic graphical models that can model sequential data. We extend previous work on HQMMs with three contributions: (1) we show how classical hidden Markov models (HMMs) can be simulated on a quantum circuit, (2) we reformulate HQMMs by relaxing the constraints for modeling HMMs on quantum circuits, and (3) we present a learning algorithm to estimate the parameters of an HQMM from data. While our algorithm requires further optimization to handle larger datasets, we are able to evaluate our algorithm using several synthetic datasets. We show that on HQMM generated data, our algorithm learns HQMMs with the same number of hidden states and predictive accuracy as the true HQMMs, while HMMs learned with the Baum-Welch algorithm require more states to match the predictive accuracy.
Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are ubiquitous in time-series modelling, with applications ranging from chemical reaction modelling to speech recognition. These HMMs are often large, with high-dimensional memories. A recently-proposed application of quantum technologies is to execute quantum analogues of HMMs. Such quantum HMMs (QHMMs) are strictly more expressive than their classical counterparts, enabling the construction of more parsimonious models of stochastic processes. However, state-of-the-art techniques for QHMM compression, based on tensor networks, are only applicable for a restricted subset of HMMs, where the transitions are deterministic. In this work we introduce a pipeline by which \emph{any} finite, ergodic HMM can be compressed in this manner, providing a route for effective quantum dimension reduction of general HMMs. We demonstrate the method on both a simple toy model, and on a speech-derived HMM trained from data, obtaining favourable memory--accuracy trade-offs in the examples studied, relative to a simple classical state-merging baseline.
We introduce a class of causal hidden quantum Markov models (cHQMMs) that reverse the usual order of hidden updates and emissions compared to conventional HQMMs. Using a simple qubit model with a rotating hidden state and sharp measurements, we show that these two architectures-emission then transition versus transition then emission-generally produce different quantum processes. They can be distinguished by measurements at arbitrarily late times, no matter how the hidden system is initialized, and even when the two models start from different initial states. This means that the two orders of operations lead to genuinely different observable behaviors that cannot be reconciled by waiting longer or by choosing special initial conditions. At the same time, we prove that the two architectures become equivalent when they arise from entangled liftings of classical hidden Markov models, sharing the same classical statistics. This identifies a clear dividing line between classical and genuinely quantum hidden memory. Our findings highlight causal HQMMs as a useful tool for studying and distinguishing quantum memory effects in sequential processes.
Stochastic modeling is an essential component of the quantitative sciences, with hidden Markov models (HMMs) often playing a central role. Concurrently, the rise of quantum technologies promises a host of advantages in computational problems, typically in terms of the scaling of requisite resources such as time and memory. HMMs are no exception to this, with recent results highlighting quantum implementations of deterministic HMMs exhibiting superior memory and thermal efficiency relative to their classical counterparts. In many contexts, however, nondeterministic HMMs are viable alternatives; compared to them, the advantages of current quantum implementations do not always hold. Here, we provide a systematic prescription for constructing quantum implementations of nondeterministic HMMs that reestablish the quantum advantages against this broader class. Crucially, we show that whenever the classical implementation suffers from thermal dissipation due to its need to process information in a time-local manner, our quantum implementations will both mitigate some of this dissipation and achieve an advantage in memory compression.
We introduce a quantum Viterbi decoding algorithm for hidden quantum Markov models (HQMMs) motivated by quantum information processing and quantum algorithms. Given a finite sequence of measurement outcomes, the algorithm identifies hidden quantum trajectories that maximize a joint decoding functional, serving as a genuine quantum analogue of the classical Viterbi score. Unlike classical hidden Markov models, where decoding optimizes over a finite discrete state space, our method performs optimization over a continuous manifold of pure quantum effects, thereby exploiting coherent superpositions in the hidden memory. We prove a strict quantum advantage: coherent hidden trajectories can achieve decoding scores that strictly exceed any classical strategy constrained to diagonal (commuting) effects, even when both models share the same observed statistics. These results position quantum Viterbi decoding as a concrete quantum algorithmic primitive for sequential decision-making, with direct applications to quantum memories, quantum communication with memory, and near-term quantum machine learning on NISQ devices.