Near-term quantum devices generally suffer from shallow circuit depth and hence limited expressivity due to noise and decoherence. To address this, we propose tensor-network-assisted parametrized quantum circuits, which concatenate a classical tensor-network operator with a quantum circuit to effectively increase the circuit's expressivity without requiring a physically deeper circuit. We present a framework for tensor-network-assisted variational quantum algorithms that can solve quantum many-body problems using shallower quantum circuits. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach by considering two examples of unitary matrix-product operators and unitary tree tensor networks, showing that they can both be implemented efficiently. Through numerical simulations, we show that the expressivity of these circuits is greatly enhanced with the assistance of tensor networks. We apply our method to two-dimensional Ising models and one-dimensional time-crystal Hamiltonian models with up to 16 qubits and demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional methods using shallow quantum circuits.
Near-term quantum devices generally suffer from shallow circuit depth and hence limited expressivity due to noise and decoherence. To address this, we propose tensor-network-assisted parametrized quantum circuits, which concatenate a classical tensor-network operator with a quantum circuit to effectively increase the circuit's expressivity without requiring a physically deeper circuit. We present a framework for tensor-network-assisted variational quantum algorithms that can solve quantum many-body problems using shallower quantum circuits. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach by considering two examples of unitary matrix-product operators and unitary tree tensor networks, showing that they can both be implemented efficiently. Through numerical simulations, we show that the expressivity of these circuits is greatly enhanced with the assistance of tensor networks. We apply our method to two-dimensional Ising models and one-dimensional time-crystal Hamiltonian models with up to 16 qubits and demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional methods using shallow quantum circuits.
Despite the advantage quantum computers are expected to deliver when performing simulations compared to their classical counterparts, the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remain limited in their capabilities. The training of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) remains a significant practical challenge, exacerbated by the requirement of shallow circuit depth necessary for their hardware implementation. Hybrid methods employing classical computers alongside quantum devices, such as the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), have proven useful for analyzing the capabilities of NISQ devices to solve relevant optimization problems. Still, in the simulation of complex structures involving the many-body problem in quantum mechanics, major issues remain about the representation of the system and obtaining results which clearly outperform classical computational devices. In this research contribution we propose the use of parameterized Tensor Networks (TNs) to attempt an improved performance of the VQE algorithm. A joint approach is presented where the Hamiltonian of a system is encapsulated into a Matrix Product Operator (MPO) within a parameterized unitary TN hereby splitting up the optimization task between the TN and the VQE. We show that the hybrid TN-VQE implementation improves the convergence of the algorithm in comparison to optimizing randomly-initialized quantum circuits via VQE.
Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are being highlighted as key quantum algorithms for demonstrating quantum advantage on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, which are limited to executing shallow quantum circuits because of noise. However, the barren plateau problem, where the gradient of the loss function becomes exponentially small with system size, hinders this goal. Recent studies suggest that embedding tensor networks into quantum circuits and initializing the parameters can avoid the barren plateau. Yet, embedding tensor networks into quantum circuits is generally difficult, and methods have been limited to the simplest structure, Matrix Product States (MPSs). This study proposes a method to embed Tree Tensor Networks (TTNs), characterized by their hierarchical structure, into shallow quantum circuits. TTNs are suitable for representing two-dimensional systems and systems with long-range correlations, which MPSs are inadequate for representing. Our numerical results show that embedding TTNs provides better initial quantum circuits than MPS. Additionally, our method has a practical computational complexity, making it applicable to a wide range of TTNs. This study is expected to extend the application of VQAs to two-dimensional systems and those with long-range correlations, which have been challenging to utilize.
We introduce the concept of concatenated tensor networks to efficiently describe quantum states. We show that the corresponding concatenated tensor network states can efficiently describe time evolution and possess arbitrary block-wise entanglement and long-ranged correlations. We illustrate the approach for the enhancement of matrix product states, i.e. one-dimensional (1D) tensor networks, where we replace each of the matrices of the original matrix product state with another 1D tensor network. This procedure yields a 2D tensor network, which includes—already for tensor dimension 2—all states that can be prepared by circuits of polynomially many (possibly non-unitary) two-qubit quantum operations, as well as states resulting from time evolution with respect to Hamiltonians with short-ranged interactions. We investigate the possibility of efficiently extracting information from these states, which serves as the basic step in a variational optimization procedure. To this aim, we utilize the known exact and approximate methods for 2D tensor networks and demonstrate some improvements thereof, which are also applicable e.g. in the context of 2D projected entangled pair states. We generalize the approach to higher dimensional and tree tensor networks.
Abstract Tensor networks (TNs) are a family of computational methods built on graph-structured factorizations of large tensors, which have long represented state-of-the-art methods for the approximate simulation of complex quantum systems on classical computers. The rapid pace of recent advancements in numerical computation, notably the rise of GPU and TPU hardware accelerators, have allowed TN algorithms to scale to even larger quantum simulation problems, and to be employed more broadly for solving machine learning tasks. The "quantum-inspired" nature of TNs permits them to be mapped to parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs), a fact which has inspired recent proposals for enhancing the performance of TN algorithms using near-term quantum devices, as well as enabling joint quantum-classical training frameworks which benefit from the distinct strengths of TN and PQC models. However, the success of any such methods depends on efficient and accurate methods for approximating TN states using realistic quantum circuits, something which remains an unresolved question. In this work, we compare a range of novel and previously-developed algorithmic protocols for decomposing matrix product states (MPS) of arbitrary bond dimension into low-depth quantum circuits consisting of stacked linear layers of two-qubit unitaries. These protocols are formed from different combinations of a preexisting analytical decomposition scheme with constrained optimization of circuit unitaries, and all possess efficient classical runtimes. Our experimental results reveal one particular protocol, involving sequential growth and optimization of the quantum circuit, to outperform all other methods, with even greater benefits seen in the setting of limited computational resources. Given these promising results, we expect our proposed decomposition protocol to form a useful ingredient within any joint application of TNs and PQCs, in turn further unlocking the rich and complementary benefits of classical and quantum computation.
Encoding classical data into quantum states is a central bottleneck in quantum machine learning: many widely used encodings are circuit-inefficient, requiring deep circuits and substantial quantum resources, which limits scalability on quantum hardware. In this work, we propose tensor network-based quantum data encoding (TNQE), a circuit-efficient framework built on structured unitary tensor network (TN) representations. TNQE first represents each classical input via a TN decomposition and then compiles the resulting tensor cores into an encoding circuit through two complementary core-to-circuit strategies. To make this compilation trainable while respecting the unitary nature of quantum operations, we introduce a unitary-aware constraint that parameterizes TN cores as learnable block unitaries, enabling them to be directly optimized and directly encoded as quantum operators. The proposed TNQE framework enables explicit control over circuit depth and qubit resources, allowing the construction of shallow, resource-efficient circuits. Across a range of benchmarks, TNQE achieves encoding circuits as shallow as 0.04× the depth of amplitude encoding, while naturally scaling to high-resolution images (256×256) and demonstrating practical feasibility on real quantum hardware.
Machine learning (ML) has recently facilitated many advances in solving problems related to many-body physical systems. Given the intrinsic quantum nature of these problems, it is natural to speculate that quantum-enhanced machine learning will enable us to unveil even greater details than we currently have. With this motivation, this paper examines a quantum machine learning approach based on shallow variational ansatz inspired by tensor networks for supervised learning tasks. In particular, we first look at the standard image classification tasks using the Fashion-MNIST dataset and study the effect of repeating tensor network layers on ansatz's expressibility and performance. Finally, we use this strategy to tackle the problem of quantum phase recognition for the transverse-field Ising and Heisenberg spin models in one and two dimensions, where we were able to reach ≥98% test-set accuracies with both multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) and tree tensor network (TTN) inspired parametrized quantum circuits.