Abstract Boosting is an ensemble learning method that converts a weak learner into a strong learner in the PAC learning framework. The AdaBoost algorithm is a well-known classical boosting algorithm for weak learners with binary hypotheses. Recently, Arunachalam and Maity presented the first quantum boosting algorithm by quantizing AdaBoost. Their algorithm, which we refer to as QAdaBoost hereafter, is a quantum adaptation of AdaBoost and only works for the binary hypothesis case. QAdaBoost is quadratically faster than AdaBoost in terms of the VC dimension of the hypothesis class of the weak learner. However, QAdaBoost is polynomially worse in the bias of the weak learner. In this work, we address an open question by Izdebski et al. on the existence of boosting algorithms for quantum weak learners with non-binary hypotheses. We answer this question in the affirmative by developing the QRealBoost algorithm motivated by the classical RealBoost algorithm. The main technical challenge was to provide provable guarantees for convergence, generalization bounds, and quantum speedup, given that quantum subroutines are noisy and probabilistic. We prove that QRealBoost retains the quadratic speedup of QAdaBoost over AdaBoost and further achieves a polynomial speedup over QAdaBoost in terms of both the bias of the learner and the time taken by the learner to learn the target concept class. Finally, we perform empirical evaluations on QRealBoost and report encouraging observations on quantum simulators by benchmarking the convergence performance of QRealBoost against QAdaBoost, AdaBoost, and RealBoost on a subset of the MNIST dataset and Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset.
Abstract Boosting is an ensemble learning method that converts a weak learner into a strong learner in the PAC learning framework. The AdaBoost algorithm is a well-known classical boosting algorithm for weak learners with binary hypotheses. Recently, Arunachalam and Maity presented the first quantum boosting algorithm by quantizing AdaBoost. Their algorithm, which we refer to as QAdaBoost hereafter, is a quantum adaptation of AdaBoost and only works for the binary hypothesis case. QAdaBoost is quadratically faster than AdaBoost in terms of the VC dimension of the hypothesis class of the weak learner. However, QAdaBoost is polynomially worse in the bias of the weak learner. In this work, we address an open question by Izdebski et al. on the existence of boosting algorithms for quantum weak learners with non-binary hypotheses. We answer this question in the affirmative by developing the QRealBoost algorithm motivated by the classical RealBoost algorithm. The main technical challenge was to provide provable guarantees for convergence, generalization bounds, and quantum speedup, given that quantum subroutines are noisy and probabilistic. We prove that QRealBoost retains the quadratic speedup of QAdaBoost over AdaBoost and further achieves a polynomial speedup over QAdaBoost in terms of both the bias of the learner and the time taken by the learner to learn the target concept class. Finally, we perform empirical evaluations on QRealBoost and report encouraging observations on quantum simulators by benchmarking the convergence performance of QRealBoost against QAdaBoost, AdaBoost, and RealBoost on a subset of the MNIST dataset and Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset.
Suppose we have a weak learning algorithm A for a Boolean-valued problem: A produces hypotheses whose bias γ is small, only slightly better than random guessing (this could, for instance, be due to implementing A on a noisy device), can we boost the performance of A so that A's output is correct on 2/3 of the inputs? Boosting is a technique that converts a weak and inaccurate machine learning algorithm into a strong accurate learning algorithm. The AdaBoost algorithm by Freund and Schapire (for which they were awarded the Gödel prize in 2003) is one of the widely used boosting algorithms, with many applications in theory and practice. Suppose we have a γ-weak learner for a Boolean concept class C that takes time R(C), then the time complexity of AdaBoost scales as VC(C)⋅poly(R(C),1/γ), where VC(C) is the VC-dimension of C. In this paper, we show how quantum techniques can improve the time complexity of classical AdaBoost. To this end, suppose we have a γ-weak quantum learner for a Boolean concept class C that takes time Q(C), we introduce a quantum boosting algorithm whose complexity scales as VC(C)⋅poly(Q(C),1/γ); thereby achieving a quadratic quantum improvement over classical AdaBoost in terms of VC(C).
Boosting is a general method to convert a weak learner (which generates hypotheses that are just slightly better than random) into a strong learner (which generates hypotheses that are much better than random). Recently, Arunachalam and Maity gave the first quantum improvement for boosting, by combining Freund and Schapire's AdaBoost algorithm with a quantum algorithm for approximate counting. Their booster is faster than classical boosting as a function of the VC-dimension of the weak learner's hypothesis class, but worse as a function of the quality of the weak learner. In this paper we give a substantially faster and simpler quantum boosting algorithm, based on Servedio's SmoothBoost algorithm.
In the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, the capabilities of variational quantum algorithms are greatly constrained due to a limited number of qubits and the shallow depth of quantum circuits. We may view these variational quantum algorithms as weak learners in supervised learning. Ensemble methods are general approaches to combining weak learners to construct a strong one in machine learning. In this paper, by focusing on classification, we theoretically establish and numerically verify a learning guarantee for quantum adaptive boosting (AdaBoost). The supervised-learning risk bound describes how the prediction error of quantum AdaBoost on binary classification decreases as the number of boosting rounds and sample size increase. We further empirically demonstrate the advantages of quantum AdaBoost by focusing on a 4-class classification. The quantum AdaBoost not only outperforms several other ensemble methods, but in the presence of noise it can also surpass the ideally noiseless but unboosted primitive classifier after only a few boosting rounds. Our work indicates that in the current NISQ era, introducing appropriate ensemble methods is particularly valuable in improving the performance of quantum machine learning algorithms.
The technique of combining multiple votes to enhance the quality of a decision is the core of boosting algorithms in machine learning. In particular, boosting provably increases decision quality by combining multiple weak learners-hypotheses that are only slightly better than random guessing-into a single strong learner that classifies data well. There exist various versions of boosting algorithms, which we improve upon through the introduction of QuantumBoost. Inspired by classical work by Barak, Hardt and Kale, our QuantumBoost algorithm achieves the best known runtime over other boosting methods through two innovations. First, it uses a quantum algorithm to compute approximate Bregman projections faster. Second, it combines this with a lazy projection strategy, a technique from convex optimization where projections are performed infrequently rather than every iteration. To our knowledge, QuantumBoost is the first algorithm, classical or quantum, to successfully adopt a lazy projection strategy in the context of boosting.
The agnostic setting is the hardest generalization of the PAC model since it is akin to learning with adversarial noise. In this paper, we give a poly(n,t,ε1) quantum algorithm for learning size t decision trees with uniform marginal over instances, in the agnostic setting, without membership queries. Our algorithm is the first algorithm (classical or quantum) for learning decision trees in polynomial time without membership queries. We show how to construct a quantum agnostic weak learner by designing a quantum version of the classical Goldreich-Levin algorithm that works with strongly biased function oracles. We show how to quantize the agnostic boosting algorithm by Kalai and Kanade (NIPS 2009) to obtain the first efficient quantum agnostic boosting algorithm. Our quantum boosting algorithm has a polynomial improvement in the dependence of the bias of the weak learner over all adaptive quantum boosting algorithms while retaining the standard speedup in the VC dimension over classical boosting algorithms. We then use our quantum boosting algorithm to boost the weak quantum learner we obtained in the previous step to obtain a quantum agnostic learner for decision trees. Using the above framework, we also give quantum decision tree learning algorithms for both the realizable setting and random classification noise model, again without membership queries.
Ensemble learning algorithms, especially Boosting, have achieved remarkable success in classification tasks by combining multiple weak classifiers-you know, the sort that aren’t all that strong by themselves but work real well when you put them together-though traditional methods like AdaBoost? They’re prone to overfitting in noisy datasets, see? Like when a few labels are off or the data has random little glitches, they end up fitting that noise too hard instead of the real pattern, and methods like QBoost-the ones that use quantuminspired optimization, right?-they usually run into two problems: picking the right weak classifiers and just not being very fast computationally, so this study? We propose an optimized QBoost version plus a new way to build weak classifiers, just to fix those issues we mentioned, and the weak classifiers here? We made them based on decision stumps but added adaptive feature weighting, and that weighting part, by the way, helps make the weak classifiers more diverse and better at telling different classes apart, while as for the QBoost framework itself? We tweaked the objective function-threw in a regularization term, yeah?-to balance two things: getting solid classification accuracy and not letting the model get too complex, and we also used a gradient-based optimization algorithm to speed up convergence so the model doesn’t take forever to train; now, the experimental results?We tested on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and UCI Credit. The method shows 3.2% higher accuracy than AdaBoost.It cuts training time by 28%. In label-noise settings, the error rate falls by 5.7%.