We propose a scheme to calibrate the internal parameters of a quantum annealer to obtain well-approximated samples for training a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Empirically, samples from quantum annealers obey the Boltzmann distribution, making them suitable for RBM training. Quantum annealers utilize physical phenomena to generate a large number of samples in a short time. However, hardware imperfections make it challenging to obtain accurate samples. Existing research often estimates the inverse temperature for the compensation. Our scheme efficiently utilizes samples for RBM training also to estimate internal parameters. Furthermore, we consider additional parameters and demonstrate that they improve sample quality. We evaluate our approach by comparing the obtained samples with classical Gibbs sampling, which theoretically generates accurate samples. Our results indicate that our scheme demonstrates performance on par with Gibbs sampling. In addition, the training results with our estimation scheme outperform those of the contrastive divergence algorithm, a standard training algorithm for RBM.
We propose a scheme to calibrate the internal parameters of a quantum annealer to obtain well-approximated samples for training a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Empirically, samples from quantum annealers obey the Boltzmann distribution, making them suitable for RBM training. Quantum annealers utilize physical phenomena to generate a large number of samples in a short time. However, hardware imperfections make it challenging to obtain accurate samples. Existing research often estimates the inverse temperature for the compensation. Our scheme efficiently utilizes samples for RBM training also to estimate internal parameters. Furthermore, we consider additional parameters and demonstrate that they improve sample quality. We evaluate our approach by comparing the obtained samples with classical Gibbs sampling, which theoretically generates accurate samples. Our results indicate that our scheme demonstrates performance on par with Gibbs sampling. In addition, the training results with our estimation scheme outperform those of the contrastive divergence algorithm, a standard training algorithm for RBM.
Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is an energy-based, undirected graphical model. It is commonly used for unsupervised and supervised machine learning. Typically, RBM is trained using contrastive divergence (CD). However, training with CD is slow and does not estimate the exact gradient of the log-likelihood cost function. In this work, the model expectation of gradient learning for RBM has been calculated using a quantum annealer (D-Wave 2000Q), where obtaining samples is faster than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) used in CD. Training and classification results of RBM trained using quantum annealing are compared with the CD-based method. The performance of the two approaches is compared with respect to the classification accuracies, image reconstruction, and log-likelihood results. The classification accuracy results indicate comparable performances of the two methods. Image reconstruction and log-likelihood results show improved performance of the CD-based method. It is shown that the samples obtained from quantum annealer can be used to train an RBM on a 64-bit “bars and stripes” dataset with classification performance similar to an RBM trained with CD. Though training based on CD showed improved learning performance, training using a quantum annealer could be useful as it eliminates computationally expensive MCMC steps of CD.
Energy-based generative models, such as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), require unbiased Boltzmann samples for effective training. Classical Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, however, converge slowly and yield correlated samples, making large-scale training difficult. We address this bottleneck by applying the analytic relation between annealing schedules and effective inverse temperature in diabatic quantum annealing. By implementing this prescription on a quantum annealer, we obtain temperature-controlled Boltzmann samples that enable RBM training with faster convergence and lower validation error than classical sampling. We further identify a systematic temperature misalignment intrinsic to analog quantum computers and propose an analytical rescaling method that mitigates this hardware noise, thereby enhancing the practicality of quantum annealers as Boltzmann samplers. In our method, the model's connectivity is set directly by the qubit connectivity, transforming the computational complexity inherent in classical sampling into a requirement on quantum hardware. This shift allows the approach to extend naturally from RBMs to fully connected Boltzmann machines, opening opportunities inaccessible to classical training methods.
Restricted Boltzmann machines are common machine learning models that can utilize quantum annealing devices in their training processes as quantum samplers. While this approach has shown promise as an alternative to classical sampling methods, the limitations of quantum annealing hardware, such as the number of qubits and the lack of connectivity between the qubits, still pose a barrier to wide-scale adoption. We propose the use of multiple software techniques such as dropout method, passive labeling, and parallelization techniques for addressing these hardware limitations. The study found that using these techniques along with quantum sampling showed comparable results to its classical counterparts in certain contexts, while in others the increased complexity of the sampling process hindered the performance of the trained models. This means that further research into the behavior of quantum sampling needs to be done to apply quantum annealing to training tasks of more complicated RBM models.
Quantum annealing (QA) is a hardware-based heuristic optimization and sampling method applicable to discrete undirected graphical models. While similar to simulated annealing, QA relies on quantum, rather than thermal, effects to explore complex search spaces. For many classes of problems, QA is known to offer computational advantages over simulated annealing. Here we report on the ability of recent QA hardware to accelerate training of fully visible Boltzmann machines. We characterize the sampling distribution of QA hardware, and show that in many cases, the quantum distributions differ significantly from classical Boltzmann distributions. In spite of this difference, training (which seeks to match data and model statistics) using standard classical gradient updates is still effective. We investigate the use of QA for seeding Markov chains as an alternative to contrastive divergence (CD) and persistent contrastive divergence (PCD). Using k=50 Gibbs steps, we show that for problems with high-energy barriers between modes, QA-based seeds can improve upon chains with CD and PCD initializations. For these hard problems, QA gradient estimates are more accurate, and allow for faster learning. Furthermore, and interestingly, even the case of raw QA samples (that is, k=0) achieved similar improvements. We argue that this relates to the fact that we are training a quantum rather than classical Boltzmann distribution in this case. The learned parameters give rise to hardware QA distributions closely approximating classical Boltzmann distributions that are hard to train with CD/PCD.
An increase in the efficiency of sampling from Boltzmann distributions would have a significant impact in deep learning and other machine learning applications. Recently, quantum annealers have been proposed as a potential candidate to speed up this task, but several limitations still bar these state-of-the-art technologies from being used effectively. One of the main limitations is that, while the device may indeed sample from a Boltzmann-like distribution, quantum dynamical arguments suggests it will do so with an instance-dependent effective temperature, different from the physical temperature of the device. Unless this unknown temperature can be unveiled, it might not be possible to effectively use a quantum annealer for Boltzmann sampling. In this talk, we present a strategy to overcome this challenge with a simple effective-temperature estimation algorithm. We provide a systematic study assessing the impact of the effective temperatures in the learning of a kind of restricted Boltzmann machine embedded on quantum hardware, which can serve as a building block for deep learning architectures. We also provide a comparison to k-step contrastive divergence (CD-k) with k up to 100. Although assuming a suitable fixed effective temperature also allows to outperform one step contrastive divergence (CD-1), only when using an instance-dependent effective temperature we find a performance close to that of CD-100 for the case studied here. We discuss generalizations of the algorithm to other more expressive generative models, beyond restricted Boltzmann machines.
κ-Parametrized Boltzmann Distribution Sampling on Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm
Generative models use training data to produce new samples that resemble the original, with applications in classification and recommendation systems. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are at the core of generative models but suffer from the computational intractability of training, which relies on sampling an unknown Boltzmann Distribution (BD). The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) can assist RBM training, potentially providing benefits over strictly classical strategies. One particular problem is determining the quantum circuit depth for an arbitrary problem size that yields the expected sampling results. In this study, we evaluate QAOA-assisted sampling of BDs using Qiskit's Aer Simulator by analysing the inverse effective temperature of the distribution, κ, for tractable problem sizes. The results provide numerical evidence, based on Qiskit Aer simulations, that parameterized annealing-scheduled QAOA (PAQ-QAOA) can approximate RBM Boltzmann sampling for the tractable instances considered, while hardware performance and scaling remain open questions.