Recent advances in classical machine learning have shown that creating models with inductive biases encoding the symmetries of a problem can greatly improve performance. Importation of these ideas, combined with an existing rich body of work at the nexus of quantum theory and symmetry, has given rise to the field of Geometric Quantum Machine Learning (GQML). Following the success of its classical counterpart, it is reasonable to expect that GQML will play a crucial role in developing problem-specific and quantum-aware models capable of achieving a computational advantage. Despite the simplicity of the main idea of GQML -- create architectures respecting the symmetries of the data -- its practical implementation requires a significant amount of knowledge of group representation theory. We present an introduction to representation theory tools from the optics of quantum learning, driven by key examples involving discrete and continuous groups. These examples are sewn together by an exposition outlining the formal capture of GQML symmetries via "label invariance under the action of a group representation", a brief (but rigorous) tour through finite and compact Lie group representation theory, a reexamination of ubiquitous tools like Haar integration and twirling, and an overview of some successful strategies for detecting symmetries.
Recent advances in classical machine learning have shown that creating models with inductive biases encoding the symmetries of a problem can greatly improve performance. Importation of these ideas, combined with an existing rich body of work at the nexus of quantum theory and symmetry, has given rise to the field of Geometric Quantum Machine Learning (GQML). Following the success of its classical counterpart, it is reasonable to expect that GQML will play a crucial role in developing problem-specific and quantum-aware models capable of achieving a computational advantage. Despite the simplicity of the main idea of GQML -- create architectures respecting the symmetries of the data -- its practical implementation requires a significant amount of knowledge of group representation theory. We present an introduction to representation theory tools from the optics of quantum learning, driven by key examples involving discrete and continuous groups. These examples are sewn together by an exposition outlining the formal capture of GQML symmetries via "label invariance under the action of a group representation", a brief (but rigorous) tour through finite and compact Lie group representation theory, a reexamination of ubiquitous tools like Haar integration and twirling, and an overview of some successful strategies for detecting symmetries.
Quantum machine learning (QML) models are aimed at learning from data encoded in quantum states.Recently, it has been shown that models with little to no inductive biases (i.e., with no assumptions about the problem embedded in the model) are likely to have trainability and generalization issues, especially for large problem sizes.As such, it is fundamental to develop schemes that encode as much information as available about the problem at hand.In this work we present a simple, yet powerful, framework where the underlying invariances in the data are used to build QML models that, by construction, respect those symmetries.These so-called group-invariant models produce outputs that remain invariant under the action of any element of the symmetry group G associated with the dataset.We present theoretical results underpinning the design of G-invariant models, and exemplify their application through several paradigmatic QML classification tasks, including cases when G is a continuous Lie group and also when it is a discrete symmetry group.Notably, our framework allows us to recover, in an elegant way, several well-known algorithms for the literature, as well as to discover new ones.Taken together, we expect that our results will help pave the way towards a more geometric and group-theoretic approach to QML model design.
Geometric Machine Learning (GML) successes have been achieved through the thorough study and design of new equivariant neural networks. In comparison, geometric quantum machine learning (GQML) models lack such a detailed understanding and, despite already several proposals, a unifying perspective on their design remains elusive. In this work, we focus on GQML models for graph problems that showcase a lot of structure and still remain frontier in machine learning. For the case when n-node graphs are encoded in n-qubit states, we provide a comprehensive characterization of their constituents. Taken together, these furnish us with a toolbox for the design of quantum graph models, and we further probe its benefits including the natural integration with classical models, generalization of known GQML models (sometimes extending their expressivity at virtually no cost), and straightforward classical pre-training strategies. The latter two features are demonstrated in dedicated numerical experiments.
To understand the intricacies of quantum geometric machine learning (QGML), it is essential to first examine the foundational concepts of geometric deep learning (GDL). This section addresses key questions such as: “Why is GDL necessary?”, “What advantages does it offer over traditional non-GDL?”, and “How does its complexity compare?”. We also explore the types of data required for GDL models and the preprocessing steps involved, which naturally leads to a discussion on why QGML provides significant advantages over classical GDL. The data commonly used in deep learning is Euclidean (text, image, and audio), meaning it is either one-dimensional or two-dimensional. However, our world is three-dimensional, and so should our data be. Non-Euclidean data represents more complex information with greater accuracy. For instance, in non-Euclidean data, the shortest valid path between two points is not necessarily the Euclidean distance. GDL mainly deals with graphs and manifold data. Graphs consist of nodes and edges – like in a network, where nodes might represent individuals and edges their relationships. Manifold data describes data points that lie on a lower-dimensional surface, even though they are embedded in higher-dimensional space. Our Earth, though not a perfect manifold, is a good approximation for practical purposes, aiding in navigation, remote sensing, and satellite imaging. Given that non-Euclidean data is large scale and irregularly arranged, traditional deep learning methods cannot be applied effectively, necessitating the use of GDL. GDL generally involves graph data processing and manifold data processing. We explore these areas before shifting focus to GQML. In quantum machine learning (QML), inductive biases inductive biases (the choices made during model construction) are crucial. Unlike classical machine learning, which is limited by vectors in Euclidean space, QML operates in Hilbert space. Leveraging underlying symmetries and data structures has led to the rise of QGML. Recent research has focused on designing equivariant quantum neural networks to efficiently find unitary or general equivariant quantum channels, even for large or continuous symmetry groups, alleviating issues like barren plateaus and poor local minima. Efforts have also been made to 2 impose symmetries through classical post-processing and by altering the ansatz to enforce symmetries. Recent studies involve learning symmetries in learning tasks to construct variational quantum learning models with improved generalization performance.
Abstract Despite the great promise of quantum machine learning models, there are several challenges one must overcome before unlocking their full potential. For instance, models based on quantum neural networks (QNNs) can suffer from excessive local minima and barren plateaus in their training landscapes. Recently, the nascent field of geometric quantum machine learning (GQML) has emerged as a potential solution to some of those issues. The key insight of GQML is that one should design architectures, such as equivariant QNNs, encoding the symmetries of the problem at hand. Here, we focus on problems with permutation symmetry (i.e., symmetry group Sn), and show how to build Sn-equivariant QNNs We provide an analytical study of their performance, proving that they do not suffer from barren plateaus, quickly reach overparametrization, and generalize well from small amounts of data. To verify our results, we perform numerical simulations for a graph state classification task. Our work provides theoretical guarantees for equivariant QNNs, thus indicating the power and potential of GQML.
Abstract Machine learning is among the most widely anticipated use cases for near-term quantum computers, however there remain significant theoretical and implementation challenges impeding its scale up. In particular, there is an emerging body of work which suggests that generic, data agnostic quantum machine learning (QML) architectures may suffer from severe trainability issues, with the gradient of typical variational parameters vanishing exponentially in the number of qubits. Additionally, the high expressibility of QML models can lead to overfitting on training data and poor generalisation performance. A promising strategy to combat both of these difficulties is to construct models which explicitly respect the symmetries inherent in their data, so-called geometric quantum machine learning (GQML). In this work, we utilise the techniques of GQML for the task of image classification, building new QML models which are equivariant with respect to reflections of the images. We find that these networks are capable of consistently and significantly outperforming generic ansatze on complicated real-world image datasets, bringing high-resolution image classification via quantum computers closer to reality. Our work highlights a potential pathway for the future development and implementation of powerful QML models which directly exploit the symmetries of data.
We consider the problem of distinguishing two vectors (visualized as images or barcodes) and learning if they are related to one another. For this, we develop a geometric quantum machine learning (GQML) approach with embedded symmetries that allows for the classification of similar and dissimilar pairs based on global correlations, and enables generalization from just a few samples. Unlike GQML algorithms developed to date, we propose to focus on symmetry-aware measurement adaptation that outperforms unitary parametrizations. We compare GQML for similarity testing against classical deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks with Siamese architectures. We show that quantum networks demonstrate strong empirical performance gains over their classical counterparts in generalization. We explain this difference in performance by analyzing correlated distributions used for composing our dataset. We relate the similarity testing to problems that showcase a proven maximal separation between the bounded-error quantum polynomial time complexity class and the polynomial hierarchy. While the ability to achieve a formal advantage depends on how data are loaded, we discuss how similar problems can benefit from quantum machine learning. Finally, we present a 40-qubit hardware implementation of our quantum model, using a superconducting processor (IBM Kyiv), showing remarkable scalability and resilience to noise.