Abstract Despite the pursuit of quantum supremacy in various applications, the power of quantum computers in machine learning (such as neural network models) has mostly remained unknown, primarily due to a missing link that effectively designs a neural network model suitable for quantum circuit implementation. In this article, we present the first co-design framework, namelyQuantumFlow, to fixed the missing link. QuantumFlow consists of a novel quantum-friendly neural network (QF-Net) design, an automatic tool (QF-Map) to generate the quantum circuit (QF-Circ) for QF-Net, and a theoretic-based execution engine (QF-FB) to efficiently support the training of QF-Net on a classical computer. We discover that, in order to make full use of the strength of quantum representation, data in QF-Net is best modeled as random variables rather than real numbers. Moreover, instead of using the classical batch normalization (which is key to achieve high accuracy for deep neural networks), a quantum-aware batch normalization method is proposed for QF-Net. Evaluation results show that QF-Net can achieve 97.01% accuracy in distinguishing digits 3 and 6 in the widely used MNIST dataset, which is 14.55% higher than the state-of-the-art quantum-aware implementation. A case study on a binary classification application is conducted. Running on IBM Quantum processor’s“ibmq_essex” backend, a neural network designed by QuantumFlow can achieve 82% accuracy. To the best of our knowledge,QuantumFlow is the first framework that co-designs both the machine learning model and its quantum circuit.
Abstract Despite the pursuit of quantum supremacy in various applications, the power of quantum computers in machine learning (such as neural network models) has mostly remained unknown, primarily due to a missing link that effectively designs a neural network model suitable for quantum circuit implementation. In this article, we present the first co-design framework, namelyQuantumFlow, to fixed the missing link. QuantumFlow consists of a novel quantum-friendly neural network (QF-Net) design, an automatic tool (QF-Map) to generate the quantum circuit (QF-Circ) for QF-Net, and a theoretic-based execution engine (QF-FB) to efficiently support the training of QF-Net on a classical computer. We discover that, in order to make full use of the strength of quantum representation, data in QF-Net is best modeled as random variables rather than real numbers. Moreover, instead of using the classical batch normalization (which is key to achieve high accuracy for deep neural networks), a quantum-aware batch normalization method is proposed for QF-Net. Evaluation results show that QF-Net can achieve 97.01% accuracy in distinguishing digits 3 and 6 in the widely used MNIST dataset, which is 14.55% higher than the state-of-the-art quantum-aware implementation. A case study on a binary classification application is conducted. Running on IBM Quantum processor’s“ibmq_essex” backend, a neural network designed by QuantumFlow can achieve 82% accuracy. To the best of our knowledge,QuantumFlow is the first framework that co-designs both the machine learning model and its quantum circuit.
Abstract Despite the pursuit of quantum advantages in various applications, the power of quantum computers in executing neural network has mostly remained unknown, primarily due to a missing tool that effectively designs a neural network suitable for quantum circuit. Here, we present a neural network and quantum circuit co-design framework, namely QuantumFlow, to address the issue. In QuantumFlow, we represent data as unitary matrices to exploit quantum power by encoding n = 2k inputs into k qubits and representing data as random variables to seamlessly connect layers without measurement. Coupled with a novel algorithm, the cost complexity of the unitary matrices-based neural computation can be reduced from O(n) in classical computing to O(polylog(n)) in quantum computing. Results show that on MNIST dataset, QuantumFlow can achieve an accuracy of 94.09% with a cost reduction of 10.85 × against the classical computer. All these results demonstrate the potential for QuantumFlow to achieve the quantum advantage.
Abstract Quantum computers have become reality thanks to the effort of some majors in developing innovative technologies that enable the usage of quantum effects in computation, so as to pave the way towards the design of efficient quantum algorithms to use in different applications domains, from finance and chemistry to artificial and computational intelligence. However, there are still some technological limitations that do not allow a correct design of quantum algorithms, compromising the achievement of the so-called quantum advantage. Specifically, a major limitation in the design of a quantum algorithm is related to its proper mapping to a specific quantum processor so that the underlying physical constraints are satisfied. This hard problem, known as circuit mapping, is a critical task to face in quantum world, and it needs to be efficiently addressed to allow quantum computers to work correctly and productively. In order to bridge above gap, this paper introduces a very first circuit mapping approach based on deep neural networks, which opens a completely new scenario in which the correct execution of quantum algorithms is supported by classical machine learning techniques. As shown in experimental section, the proposed approach speeds up current state-of-the-art mapping algorithms when used on 5-qubits IBM Q processors, maintaining suitable mapping accuracy.
With the constant increase of the number of quantum bits (qubits) in the actual quantum computers, implementing and accelerating the prevalent deep learning on quantum computers are becoming possible. Along with this trend, there emerge quantum neural architectures based on different designs of quantum neurons. A fundamental question in quantum deep learning arises: what is the best quantum neural architecture? Inspired by the design of neural architectures for classical computing which typically employs multiple types of neurons, this paper makes the very first attempt to mix quantum neuron designs to build quantum neural architectures. We observe that the existing quantum neuron designs may be quite different but complementary, such as neurons from variational quantum circuits (VQC) and Quantumflow. More specifically, VQC can apply real-valued weights but suffer from being extended to multiple layers, while QuantumFlow can build a multi-layer network efficiently, but is limited to use binary weights. To take their respective advantages, we propose to mix them together and figure out a way to connect them seamlessly without additional costly measurement. We further investigate the design principles to mix quantum neurons, which can provide guidance for quantum neural architecture exploration in the future. Experimental results demonstrate that the identified quantum neural architectures with mixed quantum neurons can achieve 90.62% of accuracy on the MNIST dataset, compared with 52.77% and 69.92% on the VQC and QuantumFlow, respectively.
Along with the development of AI democratization, the machine learning approach, in particular neural networks, has been applied to wide-range applications. In different application scenarios, the neural network will be accelerated on the tailored computing platform. The acceleration of neural networks on classical computing platforms, such as CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC, has been widely studied; however, when the scale of the application consistently grows up, the memory bottleneck becomes obvious, widely known as memory-wall. In response to such a challenge, advanced quantum computing, which can represent 2N states with N quantum bits (qubits), is regarded as a promising solution. It is imminent to know how to design the quantum circuit for accelerating neural networks. Most recently, there are initial works studying how to map neural networks to actual quantum processors. To better understand the state-of-the-art design and inspire new design methodology, this paper carries out a case study to demonstrate an end-to-end implementation. On the neural network side, we employ the multilayer perceptron to complete image classification tasks using the standard and widely used MNIST dataset. On the quantum computing side, we target IBM Quantum processors, which can be programmed and simulated by using IBM Qiskit. This work targets the acceleration of the inference phase of a trained neural network on the quantum processor. Along with the case study, we will demonstrate the typical procedure for mapping neural networks to quantum circuits.
With the constant increase of the number of quantum bits (qubits) in the actual quantum computers, implementing and accelerating the prevalent deep learning on quantum computers are becoming possible. Along with this trend, there emerge quantum neural architectures based on different designs of quantum neurons. A fundamental question in quantum deep learning arises: what is the best quantum neural architecture? Inspired by the design of neural architectures for classical computing which typically employs multiple types of neurons, this paper makes the very first attempt to mix quantum neuron designs to build quantum neural architectures. We observe that the existing quantum neuron designs may be quite different but complementary, such as neurons from variational quantum circuits (VQC) and Quantumflow. More specifically, VQC can apply real-valued weights but suffer from being extended to multiple layers, while QuantumFlow can build a multi-layer network efficiently, but is limited to use binary weights. To take their respective advantages, we propose to mix them together and figure out a way to connect them seamlessly without additional costly measurement. We further investigate the design principles to mix quantum neurons, which can provide guidance for quantum neural architecture exploration in the future. Experimental results demonstrate that the identified quantum neural architectures with mixed quantum neurons can achieve 90.62% of accuracy on the MNIST dataset, compared with 52.77% and 69.92% on the VQC and QuantumFlow, respectively.
In the past decade, remarkable progress has been achieved in deep learning related systems and applications. In the post Moore's Law era, however, the limit of semiconductor fabrication technology along with the increasing data size have slowed down the development of learning algorithms. In parallel, the fast development of quantum computing has pushed it to the new ear. Google illustrates quantum supremacy by completing a specific task (random sampling problem), in 200 seconds, which is impracticable for the largest classical computers. Due to the limitless potential, quantum based learning is an area of interest, in hopes that certain systems might offer a quantum speedup. In this work, we propose a novel architecture QuClassi, a quantum neural network for both binary and multi-class classification. Powered by a quantum differentiation function along with a hybrid quantum-classic design, QuClassi encodes the data with a reduced number of qubits and generates the quantum circuit, pushing it to the quantum platform for the best states, iteratively. We conduct intensive experiments on both the simulator and IBM-Q quantum platform. The evaluation results demonstrate that QuClassi is able to outperform the state-of-the-art quantum-based solutions, Tensorflow-Quantum and QuantumFlow by up to 53.75% and 203.00% for binary and multi-class classifications. When comparing to traditional deep neural networks, QuClassi achieves a comparable performance with 97.37% fewer parameters.