Quantum annealing was originally proposed as an approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems using quantum effects. D-Wave Systems has released a production model of quantum annealing hardware. However, the inherent noise and various environmental factors in the hardware hamper the determination of optimal solutions. In addition, the freezing effect in regions with weak quantum fluctuations generates outputs approximately following a Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution at an extremely low temperature. Thus, a quantum annealer may also serve as a fast sampler for the Ising spin-glass problem, and several studies have investigated Boltzmann machine learning using a quantum annealer. Previous developments have focused on comparing the performance in the standard distance of the resulting distributions between conventional methods in classical computers and sampling by a quantum annealer. In this study, we focused on the performance of a quantum annealer as a generative model from a different aspect. To evaluate its performance, we prepared a discriminator given by a neural network trained on an a priori dataset. The evaluation results show a higher performance of quantum annealer compared with the classical approach for Boltzmann machine learning in training of the generative model. However the generation of the data suffers from the remanent quantum fluctuation in the quantum annealer. The quality of the generated images from the quantum annealer gets worse than the ideal case of the quantum annealing and the classical Monte-Carlo sampling.
Quantum annealing was originally proposed as an approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems using quantum effects. D-Wave Systems has released a production model of quantum annealing hardware. However, the inherent noise and various environmental factors in the hardware hamper the determination of optimal solutions. In addition, the freezing effect in regions with weak quantum fluctuations generates outputs approximately following a Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution at an extremely low temperature. Thus, a quantum annealer may also serve as a fast sampler for the Ising spin-glass problem, and several studies have investigated Boltzmann machine learning using a quantum annealer. Previous developments have focused on comparing the performance in the standard distance of the resulting distributions between conventional methods in classical computers and sampling by a quantum annealer. In this study, we focused on the performance of a quantum annealer as a generative model from a different aspect. To evaluate its performance, we prepared a discriminator given by a neural network trained on an a priori dataset. The evaluation results show a higher performance of quantum annealer compared with the classical approach for Boltzmann machine learning in training of the generative model. However the generation of the data suffers from the remanent quantum fluctuation in the quantum annealer. The quality of the generated images from the quantum annealer gets worse than the ideal case of the quantum annealing and the classical Monte-Carlo sampling.
Abstract Boltzmann machines, a class of machine learning models, are the basis of several deep learning methods that have been successfully applied to both supervised and unsupervised machine learning tasks. These models assume that some given dataset is generated according to a Boltzmann distribution, and the goal of the training procedure is to learn the set of parameters that most closely match the input data distribution. Training such models is difficult due to the intractability of traditional sampling techniques, and proposals using quantum annealers for sampling hope to mitigate the cost associated with sampling. However, real physical devices will inevitably be coupled to the environment, and the strength of this coupling affects the effective temperature of the distributions from which a quantum annealer samples. To counteract this problem, error correction schemes that can effectively reduce the temperature are needed if there is to be some benefit in using quantum annealing for problems at a larger scale, where we might expect the effective temperature of the device to be too high. To this end, we have applied nested quantum annealing correction (NQAC) to do unsupervised learning with a small bars and stripes dataset, and to do supervised learning with a coarse-grained MNIST dataset, which consists of black-and-white images of hand-written integers. For both datasets we demonstrate improved training and a concomitant effective temperature reduction at higher noise levels relative to the unencoded case. We also find better performance overall with longer anneal times and offer an interpretation of the results based on a comparison to simulated quantum annealing and spin vector Monte Carlo. A counterintuitive aspect of our results is that the output distribution generally becomes less Gibbs-like with increasing nesting level and increasing anneal times, which shows that improved training performance can be achieved without equilibration to the target Gibbs distribution.
In Deep Learning, a well-known approach for training a Deep Neural Network starts by training a generative Deep Belief Network model, typically using Contrastive Divergence (CD), then fine-tuning the weights using backpropagation or other discriminative techniques. However, the generative training can be time-consuming due to the slow mixing of Gibbs sampling. We investigated an alternative approach that estimates model expectations of Restricted Boltzmann Machines using samples from a D-Wave quantum annealing machine. We tested this method on a coarse-grained version of the MNIST data set. In our tests we found that the quantum sampling-based training approach achieves comparable or better accuracy with significantly fewer iterations of generative training than conventional CD-based training. Further investigation is needed to determine whether similar improvements can be achieved for other data sets, and to what extent these improvements can be attributed to quantum effects.
Understanding how the D-Wave quantum computer could be used for machine learning problems is of growing interest. Our work explores the feasibility of using the D-Wave as a sampler for a machine learning task. We describe a hybrid method that combines a classical deep neural network autoencoder with a quantum annealing Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) using the D-Wave for image generation. Our method overcomes two key limitations in the 2000-qubit D-Wave processor, namely the limited number of qubits available to accommodate typical problem sizes for fully connected quantum objective functions, and samples that are binary pixel representations. As a consequence of these limitations we are able to show how we achieved nearly a 22-fold compression factor of grayscale 28 x 28 sized images to binary 6 x 6 sized images with a lossy recovery of the original 28 x 28 grayscale images. We further show how generating samples from the D-Wave after training the RBM, resulted in 28 x 28 images that were variations of the original input data distribution, as opposed to recreating the training samples. We evaluated the quality of this method by using a downstream classification method. We formulated a MNIST classification problem using a deep convolutional neural network that used samples from the quantum RBM to train the MNIST classifier and compared the results with a MNIST classifier trained with the original MNIST training data set, as well as a MNIST classifier trained using classical RBM samples. We also explored using a secondary dataset, the MNIST Fashion dataset and demonstrate the first quantum-generated fashion. Our hybrid autoencoder approach indicates advantage for RBM results relative to the use of a current RBM classical computer implementation for image-based machine learning and even more promising results for the next generation D-Wave quantum system. Our method for compression and image mappings is not constrained to RBMs, the autoencoder part of this method could be coupled with other quantum-based algorithms.
We investigate the quantum effect on machine learning (ML) models exemplified by the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which is a promising deep learning framework. In the general GAN framework the generator maps uniform noise to a fake image. In this study, we utilize the Associative Adversarial Network (AAN), which consists of a standard GAN and an associative memory. Further, we set a Boltzmann Machine (BM), which is an undirected graphical model that learns low-dimensional features extracted from a discriminator, as the memory. Owing to difficulty calculating the BM's log-likelihood gradient, it is necessary to approximate it by using the sample mean obtained from the BM, which has tentative parameters. To calculate the sample mean, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used. In a previous study, this was performed using a quantum annealer device, and the performance of the "Quantum" AAN was compared to that of the standard GAN. However, its better performance than the standard GAN is not well understood. In this study, we introduce two methods to draw samples: classical sampling via MCMC and quantum sampling via quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulation, which is quantum simulation on the classical computer. Then, we compare these methods to investigate whether quantum sampling is advantageous. Specifically, calculating the discriminator loss, the generator loss, inception score and Fréchet inception distance, we discuss the possibility of AAN. We show that the AANs trained by both MCMC and QMC are more stable during training and produce more varied images than the standard GANs. However, the results indicate no difference in sampling by QMC simulation compared to that by MCMC.
Abstract Generative models have the capacity to model and generate new examples from a dataset and have an increasingly diverse set of applications driven by commercial and academic interest. In this work, we present an algorithm for learning a latent variable generative model via generative adversarial learning where the canonical uniform noise input is replaced by samples from a graphical model. This graphical model is learned by a Boltzmann machine which learns low-dimensional feature representation of data extracted by the discriminator. A quantum processor can be used to sample from the model to train the Boltzmann machine. This novel hybrid quantum-classical algorithm joins a growing family of algorithms that use a quantum processor sampling subroutine in deep learning, and provides a scalable framework to test the advantages of quantum-assisted learning. For the latent space model, fully connected, symmetric bipartite and Chimera graph topologies are compared on a reduced stochastically binarized MNIST dataset, for both classical and quantum sampling methods. The quantum-assisted associative adversarial network successfully learns a generative model of the MNIST dataset for all topologies. Evaluated using the Fréchet inception distance and inception score, the quantum and classical versions of the algorithm are found to have equivalent performance for learning an implicit generative model of the MNIST dataset. Classical sampling is used to demonstrate the algorithm on the LSUN bedrooms dataset, indicating scalability to larger and color datasets. Though the quantum processor used here is a quantum annealer, the algorithm is general enough such that any quantum processor, such as gate model quantum computers, may be substituted as a sampler.
A hybrid quantum-classical method for learning Boltzmann machines (BM) for a generative and discriminative task is presented. BM are undirected graphs with a network of visible and hidden nodes where the former is used as the reading site. In contrast, the latter is used to manipulate visible states' probability. In Generative BM, the samples of visible data imitate the probability distribution of a given data set. In contrast, the visible sites of discriminative BM are treated as Input/Output (I/O) reading sites where the conditional probability of output state is optimized for a given set of input states. The cost function for learning BM is defined as a weighted sum of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and Negative conditional Log-likelihood (NCLL), adjusted using a hyper-parameter. Here, the KL Divergence is the cost for generative learning, and NCLL is the cost for discriminative learning. A Stochastic Newton-Raphson optimization scheme is presented. The gradients and the Hessians are approximated using direct samples of BM obtained through quantum annealing. Quantum annealers are hardware representing the physics of the Ising model that operates on low but finite temperatures. This temperature affects the probability distribution of the BM; however, its value is unknown. Previous efforts have focused on estimating this unknown temperature through regression of theoretical Boltzmann energies of sampled states with the probability of states sampled by the actual hardware. These approaches assume that the control parameter change does not affect the system temperature; however, this is usually untrue. Instead of using energies, the probability distribution of samples is employed to estimate the optimal parameter set, ensuring that the optimal set can be obtained from a single set of samples. The KL divergence and NCLL are optimized for the system temperature, and the result is used to rescale the control parameter set. The performance of this approach, as tested against the theoretically expected distributions, shows promising results for Boltzmann training on quantum annealers.