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arXiv:2307.08446 · Physical Review A

Quantum circuit autoencoder

Jun Wu, Hao Fu, Mingzheng Zhu, H. Y. Zhang, Wei Xie, Xiang‐Yang Li

Published Mar 26, 2024• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A quantum autoencoder is a quantum neural network model for compressing information stored in quantum states. However, one needs to process information stored in quantum circuits for many tasks in the emerging quantum information technology. In this work, generalizing the ideas of classical and quantum autoencoders, we introduce the quantum circuit autoencoder (QCAE) model to compress and encode information within quantum circuits. We provide a comprehensive protocol for QCAE and design a variational quantum algorithm, varQCAE, for its implementation. We theoretically analyze this model by deriving conditions for lossless compression and establishing both upper and lower bounds on its recovery fidelity. Finally, we apply varQCAE to three practical tasks, and numerical results show that it can effectively (1) compress the information within quantum circuits, (2) detect anomalies in quantum circuits, and (3) mitigate the depolarizing noise in quantum circuits. These suggest that our algorithm is potentially applicable to other information processing tasks for quantum circuits.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.109.032623

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As a ubiquitous aspect of modern information technology, data compression has a wide range of applications. Therefore, a quantum autoencoder which can compress quantum information into a low-dimensional space is fundamentally important to achieve automatic data compression in the field of quantum information. Such a quantum autoencoder can be implemented through training the parameters of a quantum device using classical optimization algorithms. In this paper, we demonstrate the condition of achieving a perfect quantum autoencoder and theoretically prove that a quantum autoencoder can losslessly compress high-dimensional quantum information into a low-dimensional space (also called latent space) if the number of maximum linearly independent vectors from input states is no more than the dimension of the latent space. Also, we experimentally realize a universal two-qubit unitary gate and design a quantum autoencoder device by applying a machine learning method. Experimental results demonstrate that our quantum autoencoder is able to compress two two-qubit states into two one-qubit states. Besides compressing quantum information, the quantum autoencoder is used to experimentally discriminate two groups of nonorthogonal states.
In recent years, machine learning and deep learning have driven advances in domains such as image classification, speech recognition, and anomaly detection by leveraging multi-layer neural networks to model complex data. Simultaneously, quantum computing (QC) promises to address classically intractable problems via quantum parallelism, motivating research in quantum machine learning (QML). Among QML techniques, quantum autoencoders show promise for compressing high-dimensional quantum and classical data. However, designing effective quantum circuit architectures for quantum autoencoders remains challenging due to the complexity of selecting gates, arranging circuit layers, and tuning parameters. This paper proposes a neural architecture search (NAS) framework that automates the design of quantum autoencoders using a genetic algorithm (GA). By systematically evolving variational quantum circuit (VQC) configurations, our method seeks to identify high-performing hybrid quantum-classical autoencoders for data reconstruction without becoming trapped in local minima. We demonstrate effectiveness on image datasets, highlighting the potential of quantum autoencoders for efficient feature extraction within a noise-prone, near-term quantum era. Our approach lays a foundation for broader application of genetic algorithms to quantum architecture search, aiming for a robust, automated method that can adapt to varied data and hardware constraints.
Abstract Quantum autoencoder (QAE) compresses a bipartite quantum state into its subsystem using a self-checking mechanism. How to characterize and minimize the lost information in this process is essential for understanding the compression mechanism of QAE. Here, we investigate how to minimize the lost information in QAE for any input mixed state. We theoretically show that the lost information is the quantum mutual information between the remaining subsystem and the discarded one; the encoding unitary transformation is designed to minimize this mutual information. Furthermore, we show that the optimized unitary transformation can be decomposed as the product of a permutation unitary transformation and a disentanglement unitary transformation, and the permutation unitary transformation can be searched by a regular Young tableau algorithm. When the search can be made exhaustive in lower-dimensional systems, the lost information is minimized numerically, which is shown theoretically to be a global minimum. When the dimension of the system becomes larger such that an exhaustive search is impossible, we adopt an approximate search algorithm to numerically identify that our compression scheme gives lower lost information than that from the quantum variational circuit-based QAE.