Abstract The barren plateau problem in quantum neural networks (QNNs) is a significant challenge that hinders the practical success of QNNs. In this paper, we introduce residual quantum neural networks (ResQNets) as a solution to address this problem. ResQNets are inspired by classical residual neural networks and involve splitting the conventional QNN architecture into multiple quantum nodes, each containing its own parameterized quantum circuit, and introducing residual connections between these nodes. Our study demonstrates the efficacy of ResQNets by comparing their performance with that of conventional QNNs and plain quantum neural networks through multiple training experiments and analyzing the cost function landscapes. Our results show that the incorporation of residual connections results in improved training performance. Therefore, we conclude that ResQNets offer a promising solution to overcome the barren plateau problem in QNNs and provide a potential direction for future research in the field of quantum machine learning.
Abstract The barren plateau problem in quantum neural networks (QNNs) is a significant challenge that hinders the practical success of QNNs. In this paper, we introduce residual quantum neural networks (ResQNets) as a solution to address this problem. ResQNets are inspired by classical residual neural networks and involve splitting the conventional QNN architecture into multiple quantum nodes, each containing its own parameterized quantum circuit, and introducing residual connections between these nodes. Our study demonstrates the efficacy of ResQNets by comparing their performance with that of conventional QNNs and plain quantum neural networks through multiple training experiments and analyzing the cost function landscapes. Our results show that the incorporation of residual connections results in improved training performance. Therefore, we conclude that ResQNets offer a promising solution to overcome the barren plateau problem in QNNs and provide a potential direction for future research in the field of quantum machine learning.
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) have emerged as a foundational element in the development and applications of quantum algorithms. However, when initialized with random parameter values, PQCs often exhibit barren plateaus (BP). These plateaus, characterized by vanishing gradients with an increasing number of qubits, hinder optimization in quantum algorithms. In this paper, we analyze the impact of state-of-the-art parameter initialization strategies from classical machine learning in random PQCs from the aspect of BP phenomenon. Our investigation encompasses a spectrum of initialization techniques, including random, Xavier (both normal and uniform variants), He, LeCun, and Orthogonal methods. Empirical assessment reveals a pronounced reduction in variance decay of gradients across all these methodologies compared to the randomly initialized PQCs. Specifically, the Xavier initialization technique outperforms the rest, showing a 62% improvement in variance decay compared to the random initialization. The He, Lecun, and orthogonal methods also display improvements, with respective enhancements of 32 %, 28 %, and 26 %. This compellingly suggests that the adoption of these existing initialization techniques holds the potential to significantly amplify the training efficacy of Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), a subclass of PQCs. Demonstrating this effect, we employ the identified techniques to train QNNs for learning the identity function, effectively mitigating the adverse effects of BPs. The training performance, ranked from the best to the worst, aligns with the variance decay enhancement as outlined above. This paper underscores the role of tailored parameter initialization in mitigating the BP problem and eventually enhancing the training dynamics of QNNs.
Inspired by the success of neural networks in the classical machine learning tasks, there has been tremendous effort to develop quantum neural networks (QNNs), especially for quantum data or tasks that are inherently quantum in nature. Currently, with the imminent advent of quantum computing processors to evade the computational and thermodynamic limitation of classical computations,} designing an efficient quantum neural network becomes a valuable task in quantum machine learning. In this paper, a novel quantum neural network with deep residual learning (ResQNN) is proposed. {Specifically, a multiple layer quantum perceptron with residual connection is provided. Our ResQNN is able to learn an unknown unitary and get remarkable performance. Besides, the model can be trained with an end-to-end fashion, as analogue of the backpropagation in the classical neural networks. To explore the effectiveness of our ResQNN , we perform extensive experiments on the quantum data under the setting of both clean and noisy training data. The experimental results show the robustness and superiority of our ResQNN, when compared to current remarkable work, which is from \textit{Nature communications, 2020}. Moreover, when training with higher proportion of noisy data, the superiority of our ResQNN model can be even significant, which implies the generalization ability and the remarkable tolerance for noisy data of the proposed method.
In hybrid classical-quantum computing, variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a promising approach in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era; however, their performance is often hindered by barren plateaus, where gradients vanish exponentially, rendering optimization ineffective. In this work, we introduce a residual-inspired quantum circuit architecture that incorporates a single messenger qubit, referred to as Q-LINK. By conducting numerical simulations on random quantum states, we observe that Q-LINK significantly enhances optimization behavior by sustaining larger gradient variance and accelerating convergence. Additionally, Q-LINK improves convergence efficiency by 4-6 times and increases gradient variance by up to two orders of magnitude compared with the Vanilla model. To further characterize the impact of the proposed structure, we analyze the expressibility of the circuits before and after introducing Q-LINK and find that the overall expressibility value remains largely unchanged, indicating that the original representational capacity of the circuit is preserved. In addition, we visualize the loss landscapes of different architectures to provide insights into how the proposed design reshapes the cost function landscape. These results demonstrate that introducing only a single messenger qubit can effectively mitigate barren plateau effects while maintaining the ability to explore the Hilbert space of variational quantum circuits.
Abstract The rapid development of quantum computers promises transformative impacts across diverse fields of science and technology. Quantum neural networks (QNNs), as a forefront application, hold substantial potential. Despite the multitude of proposed models in the literature, persistent challenges, notably the vanishing gradient (VG) and cost function concentration (CFC) problems, impede their widespread success. In this study, we introduce a novel approach to quantum neural network construction, specifically addressing the issues of VG and CFC.Our methodology employs ensemble learning, advocating for the simultaneous deployment of multiple quantum circuits with a depth equal to 1, a departure from the conventional use of a single quantum circuit with depth L. We assess the efficacy of our proposed model through a comparative analysis with a conventionally constructed QNN. The evaluation unfolds in the context of a classification problem, yielding valuable insights into the potential advantages of our innovative approach.
In hybrid classical-quantum computing, variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a promising approach in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era; however, their performance is often hindered by barren plateaus, where gradients vanish exponentially, rendering optimization in-effective. In this work, we introduce a residual-inspired quantum circuit architecture that incorporates a single messenger qubit, referred to as Q-LINK. By conducting numerical simulations on random quantum states, we observe that Q-LINK significantly enhances optimization behavior by sustaining larger gradient variance and accelerating convergence. Additionally, Q-LINK improves convergence efficiency by4−6times and increases gradient variance by up to two orders of magnitude compared with the Vanilla model. To further characterize the impact of the proposed structure, we analyze the expressibility of the circuits before and after introducing Q-LINK and find that the overall expressibility value remains largely unchanged, indicating that the original representational capacity of the circuit is preserved. In addition, we visualize the loss landscapes of different architectures to provide insights into how the proposed design reshapes the cost function landscape. These results demonstrate that introducing only a single messenger qubit can effectively mitigate barren plateau effects while maintaining the ability to explore the Hilbert space of variational quantum circuits.
This work presents a systematic empirical study of techniques for mitigating the barren plateau phenomena in quantum neural networks (QNNs). We conduct 45 controlled experiments for binary MNIST classification of digits 3 and 6 using a computational benchmark built using TensorFlow Quantum. We compare three different training procedures: a standard baseline setup, an incremental layerwise learning curriculum and a protocol based on local cost functions. For 8 layers we see mean accuracies of 73.9% and 75.4% for layerwise and local-cost interventions (over five stochastic seeds). The baseline setting drops from about 74% at 4 and 6 layers to 52.7% at 8 layers. Statistical reconstruction of the 8-layer regime suggests that the difference of 1.5 percentage points between layerwise and local-cost methods is not statistically significant, but both strategies are statistically significantly different from the baseline (one-way ANOVA F = 138.90; Welch tests p < 1.5 × 10−5). These results also suggest that practical training degradation is possible even when gradient magnitudes are above a conventional barren plateau detection threshold, highlighting the significance of continuous indicators for trainability, rather than binary threshold-based diagnostics.