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arXiv:2307.01171 · Physical Review A

Quantum neural estimation of entropies

Ziv Goldfeld, Dhrumil Patel, Sreejith Sreekumar, Mark M. Wilde

Published Mar 25, 2024• 16 citations
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Abstract

Entropy measures quantify the amount of information and correlation present in a quantum system. In practice, when the quantum state is unknown and only copies thereof are available, one must resort to the estimation of such entropy measures. Here we propose a variational quantum algorithm for estimating the von Neumann and R\'enyi entropies, as well as the measured relative entropy and measured R\'enyi relative entropy. Our approach first parametrizes a variational formula for the measure of interest by a quantum circuit and a classical neural network and then optimizes the resulting objective over parameter space. Numerical simulations of our quantum algorithm are provided, using a noiseless quantum simulator. The algorithm provides accurate estimates of the various entropy measures for the examples tested, which renders it a promising approach for usage in downstream tasks.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.109.032431

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Entropy measures quantify the amount of information and correlation present in a quantum system. In practice, when the quantum state is unknown and only copies thereof are available, one must resort to the estimation of such entropy measures. Here we propose a variational quantum algorithm for estimating the von Neumann and R'enyi entropies, as well as the measured relative entropy and measured R'enyi relative entropy. Our approach first parametrizes a variational formula for the measure of interest by a quantum circuit and a classical neural network and then optimizes the resulting objective over parameter space. Numerical simulations of our quantum algorithm are provided, using a noiseless quantum simulator. The algorithm provides accurate estimates of the various entropy measures for the examples tested, which renders it a promising approach for usage in downstream tasks.
Estimating quantum entropies and divergences is an important problem in quantum physics, information theory, and machine learning. Quantum neural estimators (QNEs), which utilize a hybrid classical-quantum architecture, have recently emerged as an appealing computational framework for estimating these measures. Such estimators combine classical neural networks with parametrized quantum circuits, and their deployment typically entails tedious tuning of hyperparameters controlling the sample size, network architecture, and circuit topology. This work initiates the study of formal guarantees for QNEs of measured (Rényi) relative entropies in the form of non-asymptotic error risk bounds. We further establish exponential tail bounds showing that the error is sub-Gaussian and thus sharply concentrates about the ground truth value. For an appropriate sub-class of density operator pairs on a space of dimension ddd with bounded Thompson metric, our theory establishes a copy complexity of O(∣Θ(U)∣d/ε2)O(|Θ(\mathcal{U})|d/ε^2)O(∣Θ(U)∣d/ε2) for QNE with a quantum circuit parameter set Θ(U)Θ(\mathcal{U})Θ(U), which has minimax optimal dependence on the accuracy εεε. Additionally, if the density operator pairs are permutation invariant, we improve the dimension dependence above to O(∣Θ(U)∣polylog(d)/ε2)O(|Θ(\mathcal{U})|\mathrm{polylog}(d)/ε^2)O(∣Θ(U)∣polylog(d)/ε2). Our theory aims to facilitate principled implementation of QNEs for measured relative entropies and guide hyperparameter tuning in practice.
Entropy plays a crucial role in both physics and information science, encompassing classical and quantum domains. In this paper, we present the quantum neural entropy estimator (QNEE), an approach that combines classical neural network (NN) with variational quantum circuits to estimate the von Neumann and Rényi entropies of a quantum state. QNEE provides accurate estimates of entropy while also yielding the eigenvalues and eigenstates of the input density matrix. Leveraging the capabilities of classical NN, QNEE can classify different phases of quantum systems that accompany the changes of entanglement entropy. Our numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of QNEE by applying it to the 1D XXZ Heisenberg model. In particular, QNEE exhibits high sensitivity in estimating entanglement entropy near the phase transition point. We expect that QNEE will serve as a valuable tool for quantum entropy estimation and phase classification.
We present a systematic study of von Neumann entropy estimation in multi-qutrit quantum systems using two complementary approaches: variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) and classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), evaluated using an ideal (noise-free) quantum simulator. For systems up to three qutrits, we construct and evaluate 11 hardware-efficient SU(3)-inspired ansatzes. A parameter sweep shows that estimation accuracy is primarily determined by the number of trainable parameters, provided sufficient entanglement is present. Based on this study, we fix the parameter count to approximately 120 for subsequent experiments, observing that increasing entangling-gate counts beyond a threshold yields only marginal improvements. For larger systems (two to five qutrits), we use a CNN trained on measurement outcomes from tensor-product mutually unbiased bases. The model achieves accurate and stable predictions and exhibits a systematic improvement in performance with system size, with the highest errors for two-qutrit systems and the lowest for five-qutrit systems. Notably, using only 12.5% of the measurements required for full state tomography is sufficient to reach 90th-percentile absolute errors of approximately 0.13-0.16 nats for both four- and five-qutrit systems. The CNN model is also robust to shot noise and generalizes well to out-of-distribution states. Overall, within the simulated settings studied here, our results indicate a transition in practical methods: VQAs are effective for small systems, while CNN-based estimators offer improved scalability and robustness for larger qutrit systems.
The entropy of a quantum system is a measure of its randomness, and has applications in measuring quantum entanglement. We study the problem of estimating the von Neumann entropy, S(ρ), and Rényi entropy, Sα(ρ) of an unknown mixed quantum state ρ in d dimensions, given access to independent copies of ρ. We provide algorithms with copy complexity O(d2/α) for estimating Sα(ρ) for α2) for estimating S(ρ), and Sα(ρ) for non-integral α > 1. These bounds are at least quadratic in d, which is the order dependence on the number of copies required for estimating the entire state ρ. For integral α > 1, on the other hand, we provide an algorithm for estimating Sα(ρ) with a sub-quadratic copy complexity of O(d2-2/α), and we show the optimality of the algorithms by providing a matching lower bound.
The von Neumann and quantum R\'enyi entropies characterize fundamental properties of quantum systems and lead to many theoretical and practical applications. Quantum algorithms using a purified quantum query model can speed up quantum entropy estimation, while little is known about the complexity of using identical copies of the quantum state. This paper presents quantum entropy estimation algorithms with a cost of copies scaling polynomially in the rank of the state. In contrast to current methods that depend on the dimension of the system, our methods could provide exponential resource savings in the scenario of low-rank states. Furthermore, we show how to construct quantum circuits using primitive single-qubit or two-qubit gates efficiently and thus provide practical methods for estimating quantum entropies of quantum systems. We also conduct simulation experiments to show the effectiveness and noise robustness of our algorithms.
Quantum relative entropy serves as a fundamental measure of the distinguishability between quantum states and plays a pivotal role in quantum information science. Despite its importance, efficiently estimating quantum relative entropy between two quantum states on quantum computers remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a quantum algorithm for directly estimating quantum relative entropy and Petz Rényi divergence from two unknown quantum states on quantum computers. The circuit size of our algorithm is at most 2n + 1 with n being the number of qubits in the quantum states and it is directly applicable to distributed scenarios, where quantum states to be compared are hosted on cross-platform devices. We validate the effectiveness of our method through numerical experiments and observe the absence of the barren plateau phenomenon. As an application, we employ our algorithm to investigate the superadditivity of quantum channel capacity. Numerical simulations reveal new examples of qubit channels exhibiting strict superadditivity of coherent information, highlighting the potential of quantum machine learning to address quantum-native problems. Quantum relative entropy is a central measure of distinguishability between quantum states, yet its estimation on quantum computers remains challenging. Here, the authors propose a variational quantum algorithm that directly evaluates it from unknown states and works across distributed quantum devices.