Abstract An active area of investigation in the search for quantum advantage is quantum machine learning. Quantum machine learning, and parameterized quantum circuits in a hybrid quantum-classical setup in particular, could bring advancements in accuracy by utilizing the high dimensionality of the Hilbert space as feature space. But is the ability of a quantum circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space a good indicator of classification accuracy? In our work, we use methods and quantifications from prior art to perform a numerical study in order to evaluate the level of correlation. We find a moderate to strong correlation between the ability of the circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space and the achieved classification accuracy for circuits that entail a single embedding layer followed by 1 or 2 circuit designs. This is based on our study encompassing 19 circuits in both 1- and 2-layer configurations, evaluated on 9 datasets of increasing difficulty. We also evaluate the correlation between entangling capability and classification accuracy in a similar setup, and find a weak correlation. Future work will focus on evaluating if this holds for different circuit designs.
Abstract An active area of investigation in the search for quantum advantage is quantum machine learning. Quantum machine learning, and parameterized quantum circuits in a hybrid quantum-classical setup in particular, could bring advancements in accuracy by utilizing the high dimensionality of the Hilbert space as feature space. But is the ability of a quantum circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space a good indicator of classification accuracy? In our work, we use methods and quantifications from prior art to perform a numerical study in order to evaluate the level of correlation. We find a moderate to strong correlation between the ability of the circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space and the achieved classification accuracy for circuits that entail a single embedding layer followed by 1 or 2 circuit designs. This is based on our study encompassing 19 circuits in both 1- and 2-layer configurations, evaluated on 9 datasets of increasing difficulty. We also evaluate the correlation between entangling capability and classification accuracy in a similar setup, and find a weak correlation. Future work will focus on evaluating if this holds for different circuit designs.
Abstract For classification problems, ansatz circuits are an efficient and promising quantum-classical machine learning technique. However, a difficult design challenge arises: which quantum circuit should be used for model training? Low depth ansatz circuits have been used in a variety of applications in recent years. The earlier works defined several quantum circuit descriptors to evaluate an ansatz design such as the circuit expressibility, the efficiency with which a quantum circuit may exploit the Hilbert Space, and the entanglement capability, a circuit's capability of detecting data correlation. Additionally in this work, we investigate, measure, and analyze the effect of the number of ansatz repetition layers L, and the expressibility power of the data encoding module. The proposed quantum neural network classifiers were trained on four different classical datasets using 19 hardware-efficient parametrized circuits. The heuristic experimental results show that ansatz designs with high to moderate expressibiliy values outperformed ones with low expressibility values. By analyzing the circuit cost, we see a tendency toward maximizing the number of parameters which helps in the QNN model's convergence. On simulated hardware, we observe that the proposed quantum neural network achieves up to 97.5\% prediction accuracy using the angle data encoding module.
Image classification is a core task in the field of computer vision, with significant implications for applications such as medical imaging and autonomous driving. Classical neural network architectures face numerous challenges when dealing with high-dimensional and complex data, particularly in terms of feature extraction and data processing capabilities, limiting their performance in certain applications. Quantum computing offers promising new approaches to processing high-dimensional complex data, most notably through Parameterized Quantum Circuits (PQC) as quantum hybrid neural networks for image classification. In this paper, we propose a hybrid neural network featuring a specific PQC structure designed to generate entanglement in accordance with sample images. This PQC structure utilizes the adjacency matrix of the corresponding graph of the sample image, embedding adjacency relationships among nodes into the entanglement module, thereby generating entanglement aligned with the features of specific images. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our PQC model across various image classification tasks, enhancing the efficiency of feature learning and representation. Our model demonstrates significant advantages in classification accuracy and learning efficiency on classical datasets. Our research not only advances the theoretical understanding of hybrid quantum networks but also paves the way for practical implementations in real-world scenarios.
Machine learning models achieve strong predictive performance by uncovering hidden patterns and structures within data. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) extends this capability by leveraging principles of quantum mechanics to address complex classification tasks. However, designing effective feature extraction strategies remains challenging. The choice of ansatz plays a central role in determining the expressive power and learning capability of quantum models. In this work, we propose a parameterized quantum circuit model incorporating adaptive transformations between neighboring qubits to enhance feature extraction and classification performance. The proposed approach is evaluated on seven benchmark datasets from the UCI repository: Iris, Banknote Authentication (BNA), Raisin, Wireless Indoor Localization (WIL), Wine, Penguin, and HTRU2. Its performance is compared against existing quantum classification models, including the Amplitude Embedding Model (AEM), Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC), and Quantum Multi-Class Classifier (QMCC), using identical numbers of layers and training epochs. Additionally, comparisons are made with well-established standard classical classifiers. Experimental results implemented on the PennyLane platform demonstrate that the proposed model achieves high test accuracies within only 10–15 training epochs, reaching 100% (Iris), 98.3% (BNA), 91.1% (Raisin), 97.0% (WIL), 99.2% (Penguin), 94.0% (Wine), and 95.4% (HTRU2). These findings indicate that the proposed ansatz effectively extracts meaningful features and performs competitively in both binary and multi-class classification tasks, highlighting its potential for practical quantum machine learning applications.
This study investigates classification performance and trainability of variational quantum classifiers on near-term noisy quantum hardware across circuit depth and qubit count regimes within the context of quantum computing and machine learning, an area of growing scientific importance given its implications for hybrid quantum-classical algorithm design and practical NISQ hardware benchmarking for near-term quantum advantage assessment. Using gradient-based parameter optimization of parameterized quantum circuits with hardware noise modeling via density matrix simulation and physical execution on IBM Eagle processors, we examine expressibility of parameterized circuits enabling nonlinear decision boundaries in feature Hilbert space, with trainability constrained by barren plateau gradients at large qubit counts in 96 circuit architectures (4 qubit counts x 4 depths x 6 ansatz families) evaluated across 5 classification datasets with 20 random initialization seeds each drawn from IBM Quantum Eagle (127-qubit) and Falcon (27-qubit) processors with noise mitigation via zero-noise extrapolation. Results indicate that 10-qubit, 4-layer VQC achieves 84.2% classification accuracy on the best benchmark, within 3.8 percentage points of classical SVM, but gradient variance decays exponentially with qubit count (variance halving per 2 added qubits), confirming barren plateau scaling (p < 0.001), with 84.2% accuracy, 3.8 pp gap to classical SVM baseline as the primary quantitative benchmark. Concordance between primary and confirmatory measurement approaches exceeded 93%, validating the analytical framework. These findings contribute empirically to quantum computing and machine learning and carry actionable implications for the design of programs and policies targeting hybrid quantum-classical algorithm design and practical NISQ hardware benchmarking for near-term quantum advantage assessment.
Parameterized quantum circuits are the core of new technologies such as variational quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning, which makes studying its properties a valuable task. We implement parameterized circuits with definite and indefinite causal order and compare their performance under particular descriptors. One of these is the expressibility, which measures how uniformly a given quantum circuit can reach the whole Hilbert space. Another property that we focus on this work is the entanglement capability, more specifically the concurrence and the entangling power. We also find the causal relation between the qubits of our system with the quantum average causal effect measure. We have found that indefinite circuits offer expressibility advantages over definite ones while maintaining the level of entanglement generation. Our results also point to the existence of a correlation between the quantum average causal effect and the entangling power.
As a generalized quantum machine learning model, parameterized quantum circuits (PQC) have been found to perform poorly in terms of classification accuracy and model scalability for multi-category classification tasks. To address this issue, we propose a scalable parameterized quantum circuits classifier (SPQCC), which performs per-channel PQC and combines the measurements as the output of the trainable parameters of the classifier. By minimizing the cross-entropy loss through optimizing the trainable parameters of PQC, SPQCC leads to a fast convergence of the classifier. The parallel execution of identical PQCs on different quantum machines with the same structure and scale reduces the complexity of classifier design. Classification simulations performed on the MNIST Dataset show that the accuracy of our proposed classifier far exceeds that of other quantum classification algorithms, achieving the state-of-the-art simulation result and surpassing/reaching classical classifiers with a considerable number of trainable parameters. Our classifier demonstrates excellent scalability and classification performance.