A Boltzmann machine is a powerful tool for modeling probability distributions that govern the training data. A thermal equilibrium state is typically used for the Boltzmann machine learning to obtain a suitable probability distribution. The Boltzmann machine learning consists of calculating the gradient of the loss function given in terms of the thermal average, which is the most time-consuming procedure. Here, we propose a method to implement the Boltzmann machine learning by using noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. We prepare an initial pure state that contains all possible computational basis states with the same amplitude, and we apply a variational imaginary time simulation. Readout of the state after the evolution in the computational basis approximates the probability distribution of the thermal equilibrium state that is used for the Boltzmann machine learning. We perform the numerical simulations of our scheme and confirm that the Boltzmann machine learning works well. Our scheme leads to a significant step toward an efficient machine learning using quantum hardware.
A Boltzmann machine is a powerful tool for modeling probability distributions that govern the training data. A thermal equilibrium state is typically used for the Boltzmann machine learning to obtain a suitable probability distribution. The Boltzmann machine learning consists of calculating the gradient of the loss function given in terms of the thermal average, which is the most time-consuming procedure. Here, we propose a method to implement the Boltzmann machine learning by using noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. We prepare an initial pure state that contains all possible computational basis states with the same amplitude, and we apply a variational imaginary time simulation. Readout of the state after the evolution in the computational basis approximates the probability distribution of the thermal equilibrium state that is used for the Boltzmann machine learning. We perform the numerical simulations of our scheme and confirm that the Boltzmann machine learning works well. Our scheme leads to a significant step toward an efficient machine learning using quantum hardware.
Abstract This work presents a novel realization approach to quantum Boltzmann machines (QBMs). The preparation of the required Gibbs states, as well as the evaluation of the loss function’s analytic gradient, is based on variational quantum imaginary time evolution, a technique that is typically used for ground-state computation. In contrast to existing methods, this implementation facilitates near-term compatible QBM training with gradients of the actual loss function for arbitrary parameterized Hamiltonians which do not necessarily have to be fully visible but may also include hidden units. The variational Gibbs state approximation is demonstrated with numerical simulations and experiments run on real quantum hardware provided by IBM Quantum. Furthermore, we illustrate the application of this variational QBM approach to generative and discriminative learning tasks using numerical simulation.
Quantum Boltzmann machines are natural quantum generalizations of Boltzmann machines that are expected to be more expressive than their classical counterparts, as evidenced both numerically for small systems and asymptotically under various complexity theoretic assumptions. However, training quantum Boltzmann machines using gradient-based methods requires sampling observables in quantum thermal distributions, a problem that is NP-hard. In this work, we find that the locality of the gradient observables gives rise to an efficient sampling method based on the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis, and thus through Hamiltonian simulation an efficient method for training quantum Boltzmann machines on near-term quantum devices. Furthermore, under realistic assumptions on the moments of the data distribution to be modeled, the distribution sampled using our algorithm is approximately the same as that of an ideal quantum Boltzmann machine. We demonstrate numerically that under the proposed training scheme, quantum Boltzmann machines capture multimodal Bernoulli distributions better than classical restricted Boltzmann machines with the same connectivity structure. We also provide numerical results on the robustness of our training scheme with respect to noise.
Born-rule generative modeling, a central task in quantum machine learning, seeks to learn probability distributions that can be efficiently sampled by measuring complex quantum states. One hope is for quantum models to efficiently capture probability distributions that are difficult to learn and simulate by classical means alone. Quantum Boltzmann machines were proposed about one decade ago for this purpose, yet efficient training methods have remained elusive. In this paper, I overcome this obstacle by proposing a practical solution that trains quantum Boltzmann machines for Born-rule generative modeling. Two key ingredients in the proposal are the Donsker-Varadhan variational representation of the classical relative entropy and the quantum Boltzmann gradient estimator of [Patel et al., arXiv:2410.12935]. I present the main result for a more general ansatz known as an evolved quantum Boltzmann machine [Minervini et al., arXiv:2501.03367], which combines parameterized real- and imaginary-time evolution. I also show how to extend the findings to other distinguishability measures beyond relative entropy. Finally, I present four different hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for the minimax optimization underlying training, and I discuss their theoretical convergence guarantees.
We present a Hybrid-Quantum-classical method for learning Boltzmann machines (BM) for generative and discriminative tasks. Boltzmann machines are undirected graphs that form the building block of many learning architectures such as Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM's) and Deep Boltzmann machines (DBM's). They have a network of visible and hidden nodes where the former are used as the reading sites while the latter are used to manipulate the probability of the visible states. BM's are versatile machines that can be used for both learning distributions as a generative task as well as for performing classification or function approximation as a discriminative task. We show that minimizing KL-divergence works best for training BM for applications of function approximation. In our approach, we use Quantum annealers for sampling Boltzmann states. These states are used to approximate gradients in a stochastic gradient descent scheme. The approach is used to demonstrate logic circuits in the discriminative sense and a specialized two-phase distribution using generative BM.
Bayesian learning is ubiquitous for implementing classification and regression tasks, however, it is accompanied by computationally intractable limitations when the feature spaces become extremely large. Aiming to solve this problem, we develop a quantum bayesian learning framework of the restricted Boltzmann machine in the quantum-enhanced feature spaces. Our framework provides the encoding phase to map the real data and Boltzmann weight onto the quantum feature spaces and the training phase to learn an optimal inference function. Specifically, the training phase provides a physical quantity to measure the posterior distribution in quantum feature spaces, and this measure is utilized to design the quantum maximum a posterior (QMAP) algorithm and the quantum predictive distribution estimator (QPDE). It is shown that both quantum algorithms achieve exponential speed-up over their classical counterparts. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that our framework can figure out the classical bayesian learning tasks, i.e. processing the classical data and outputting corresponding classical labels. And a simulation, which is performed on an open-source software framework for quantum computing, illustrates that our algorithms show almost the same classification performance compared to their classical counterparts. Noting that the proposed quantum algorithms utilize the shallow circuit, our work is expected to be implemented on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, and is one of the promising candidates to achieve quantum supremacy.
The preparation of quantum Gibbs states is a fundamental challenge in quantum computing, essential for applications ranging from modeling open quantum systems to quantum machine learning. Building on the Meta-Variational Quantum Eigensolver framework proposed by Cervera-Lierta et al. and a problem-driven ansatz design, we introduce two meta-learning algorithms: Meta-Variational Quantum Thermalizer (Meta-VQT) and Neural Network Meta-VQT (NN-Meta VQT) for efficient thermal state preparation of parametrized Hamiltonians on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Meta-VQT utilizes a fully quantum ansatz, while NN Meta-VQT integrates a quantum--classical hybrid architecture. Both use collective optimization over a finite set of training parameter values to prepare approximate Gibbs states at held-out parameter values within the sampled parameter domain. We validate our methods on Transverse Field Ising Models (TFIM) with up to eight qubits and on a two-qubit Heisenberg model with all field terms. Within these finite-size benchmarks, the trained models accurately prepare thermal states at test points inside the training interval. For the six and eight qubit cases of TFIM, meta-learned parameters when combined with appropriately designed ansatz serve as warm-start initializations, significantly outperforming random initializations in the optimization tasks. Furthermore, a 3 qubit Kitaev ring example showcases our algorithm's effectiveness across finite-temperature crossover regimes. Finally, we apply our algorithms to train a Quantum Boltzmann Machine (QBM) on a 2-qubit Heisenberg model with all field terms, achieving enhanced training efficiency, improved Gibbs state accuracy, and a 30-fold runtime speedup over existing techniques such as variational quantum imaginary time (VarQITE)-based QBM highlighting the practicality of meta-algorithm-based QBMs.