The impact of hardware noise on quantum circuits is circumvented using a machine learning strategy that outputs the best circuit design for optimizing the performance of a given algorithmic task under the noisy environment.
Noisy devices Quantum computing has the potential to solve classical intractable problems, but today's quantum devices are limited by noise that can create errors capable of vastly distorting the computation. This notebook introduces simulating and mitigating circuit noise with a focus on the domain of quantum machine learning (QML). We use the PennyLane framework to show how to model common noise channels such as bit flip, depolarizing and amplitude damping and study their effects on quantum circuit outputs. We introduce a number of optimization techniques to fit noise parameters to observed expectation values, giving tools for practical characterization of and compensation for noise in quantum experiments. Recent advances, including noise-aware circuit learning (NACL), use machine learning to automatically design quantum circuits that are resilient to device-specific noise, optimizing the required circuit structure (topology) and depth for the given hardware constraints. These methods are crucial for unlocking the promise of near-term quantum computers, making QML algorithms more resilient and speeding the journey to quantum advantage.
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQC) have emerged as a quantum analogue of deep neural networks and can be trained for discriminative or generative tasks and can be trained with gradient-based optimization on near-term quantum devices [1], [2], [3]. In the current era of quantum computing, known as the noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era [4], these devices contain a moderate number of qubits (< 100), and algorithmic performance is strongly impacted by hardware noise. Additionally, the training of PQCs are hybrid algorithms, in which the computational workflow is split between quantum and classical computing platforms.
Machine Learning (ML) has been widely applied across numerous domains due to its ability to automatically identify informative patterns from data for various tasks. The availability of large-scale data and advanced computational power enables the development of sophisticated models and training strategies, leading to state-of-the-art performance, but it also introduces substantial challenges. Quantum Computing (QC), which exploits quantum mechanisms for computation, has attracted growing attention and significant global investment as it may address these challenges. Consequently, Quantum Machine Learning (QML), the integration of these two fields, has received increasing interest, with a notable rise in related studies in recent years. We are motivated to review these existing contributions regarding quantum circuit-based learning models for classical data analysis and highlight the identified potentials and challenges of this technique. Specifically, we focus not only on QML models, both kernel-based and neural network-based, but also on recent explorations of their integration with classical machine learning layers within hybrid frameworks. Moreover, we examine both theoretical analysis and empirical findings to better understand their capabilities, and we also discuss the efforts on noise-resilient and hardware-efficient QML that could enhance its practicality under current hardware limitations. In addition, we cover several emerging paradigms for advanced quantum circuit design and highlight the adaptability of QML across representative application domains. This study aims to provide an overview of the contributions made to bridge quantum computing and machine learning, offering insights and guidance to support its future development and pave the way for broader adoption in the coming years.
Hybridizing machine learning (ML) with quantum computing has become an attractive strategy to increase computational power on Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Although these can be potentially quantum advantage devices, their qubit numbers and noise are bounded and there are challenges when it comes to practical quantum circuit realization. This work concentrates on the creation of optimized quantum circuits via ML-based strategies, to enhance the performance of the circuits, to reduce the error rate and to accommodate the particular noise profile of the hardware of NISQ devices. The resulting suboptimal mappings with little or no consideration of noise and hardware topology in traditional quantum compilers can ruin the fidelity of quantum algorithm. Leveraging machine learning, and specifically reinforcement and supervised learning methods, our method learns to optimize compilation strategy for specific quantum hardware architecture. The paper proposes a framework that uses machine learning models to predict qubit mappings, gate decompositions, and transpilation paths that minimize gate depth and error accumulation. We also investigate transfer learning methods for propagating the learned compilation strategies to novel NISQ machines. Such methods are empirically validated on both simulated and real quantum hardware backends, providing evidence of circuit depth, execution time and error reductions. The results show that ML-assisted compilation can achieve better success probabilities for benchmark quantum algorithms like VQE and QAOA than conventional compilers. Furthermore, the work examines the interpretability of ML models providing hardware-aware optimization recommendations and understanding the noise patterns and methods of error correction. Our work highlights the key role of ML for transferring between theoretical quantum algorithms and their practical NISQ implementations. This integration boosts the immediate applicability of existing quantum devices and provides a basis for adaptive and scalable likelihood-based compilation for the era of fault-tolerant quantum computation. Our results motivate further investigation of hybrid classical-quantum workflows, in which ML iteratively improves compilation in accordance with changing hardware noise and capabilities. By improving quantum circuit compilation onNISQ computers, this work is taking steps toward the realization of quantum advantage in application scenarios such as optimization, cryptography, and quantum simulation without needing to wait for fully fault-tolerant large-scale quantum computers.
The limited supply of qubits and significant quantum noise impose limitations on the capability of quantum algorithms in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. NISQ devices have a variety of applications, such as Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC), which provides answers to difficult optimization and machine learning problems. This paper presents a thorough investigation of quantum variational classification in the NISQ context, with a focus on comprehending noise's impact on various feature maps and VQCs. We evaluate the effectiveness of quantum classifiers using a variety of datasets, ranging from straightforward binary classification problems to more complex tasks. Our results reveal the critical role that feature maps and variational circuit selection play in mitigating the effect of noise, identifying specific quantum circuit designs that exhibit robustness even in noisy situations. In order to highlight the potential of quantum machine learning in solving complex problems within in the NISQ setting, this study emphasizes the delicate interaction between feature map selection, variational circuit design, dataset complexity, and quantum noise.
There is increasing interest in the development of gate- based quantum circuits for the training of machine learning models. Yet, little is understood concerning the parameters of circuit design, and the effects of noise and other measurement errors on the performance of quantum machine learning models. In this paper, we explore the practical implications of key circuit design parameters (number of qubits, depth etc.) using several standard machine learning datasets and IBM's Qiskit simulator. In total we evaluate over 6500 unique circuits with n ≈ 120700 individual runs. We find that in general shallow (low depth) wide (more qubits) circuit topologies tend to outperform deeper ones in settings without noise. We also explore the implications and effects of different notions of noise and discuss circuit topologies that are more / less robust to noise for classification machine learning tasks. Based on the findings we define guidelines for circuit topologies that show near-term promise for the realisation of quantum machine learning algorithms using gate-based NISQ quantum computer.