The rapid advancement of quantum computing has generated considerable anticipation for its transformative potential. However, harnessing its full potential relies on identifying "killer applications". In this regard, QuGeo emerges as a groundbreaking quantum learning framework, poised to become a key application in geoscience, particularly for Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI). This framework integrates variational quantum circuits with geoscience, representing a novel fusion of quantum computing and geophysical analysis. This synergy unlocks quantum computing's potential within geoscience. It addresses the critical need for physics-guided data scaling, ensuring high-performance geoscientific analyses aligned with core physical principles. Furthermore, QuGeo's introduction of a quantum circuit custom-designed for FWI highlights the critical importance of application-specific circuit design for quantum computing. In the OpenFWI's FlatVelA dataset experiments, the variational quantum circuit from QuGeo, with only 576 parameters, achieved significant improvement in performance. It reached a Structural Similarity Image Metric (SSIM) score of 0.905 between the ground truth and the output velocity map. This is a notable enhancement from the baseline design's SSIM score of 0.800, which was achieved without the incorporation of physics knowledge.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing has generated considerable anticipation for its transformative potential. However, harnessing its full potential relies on identifying "killer applications". In this regard, QuGeo emerges as a groundbreaking quantum learning framework, poised to become a key application in geoscience, particularly for Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI). This framework integrates variational quantum circuits with geoscience, representing a novel fusion of quantum computing and geophysical analysis. This synergy unlocks quantum computing's potential within geoscience. It addresses the critical need for physics-guided data scaling, ensuring high-performance geoscientific analyses aligned with core physical principles. Furthermore, QuGeo's introduction of a quantum circuit custom-designed for FWI highlights the critical importance of application-specific circuit design for quantum computing. In the OpenFWI's FlatVelA dataset experiments, the variational quantum circuit from QuGeo, with only 576 parameters, achieved significant improvement in performance. It reached a Structural Similarity Image Metric (SSIM) score of 0.905 between the ground truth and the output velocity map. This is a notable enhancement from the baseline design's SSIM score of 0.800, which was achieved without the incorporation of physics knowledge.
The computational demands of geoscientific workflows are rapidly increasing in both complexity and scale, pushing the limits of classical computing. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to address some of these challenges. This paper surveys the growing intersection between quantum computing and energy geosciences, highlighting recent developments and initiatives. To illustrate the practical relevance of this emerging field, we present a case study on seismic traveltime inversion using a variational quantum circuit. In this example, a hybrid quantum-classical workflow is used to reconstruct velocity models from noisy traveltime data, demonstrating how quantum circuits can solve geophysical inverse problems. While modest in scale, the study offers insights into the formulation and implementation of quantumassisted inversion. As quantum hardware advances and algorithmic frameworks mature, quantum computing is poised to become a transformative tool in the computational landscape of energy geosciences.
Seismic inversion-including post-stack, pre-stack, and full waveform inversion is compute and memory-intensive. Recently, several approaches, including physics-informed machine learning, have been developed to address some of these limitations. Motivated by the potential of quantum computing, we report on our attempt to map one such classical physics-informed algorithm to a quantum framework. The primary goal is to investigate the technical challenges of this mapping, given that quantum algorithms rely on computing principles fundamentally different from those in classical computing. Quantum computers operate using qubits, which exploit superposition and entanglement, offering the potential to solve classically intractable problems. While current quantum hardware is limited, hybrid quantum-classical algorithms-particularly in quantum machine learning (QML)-demonstrate potential for near-term applications and can be readily simulated. We apply QML to subsurface imaging through the development of a hybrid quantum physics-informed neural network (HQ-PINN) for post-stack and pre-stack seismic inversion. The HQ-PINN architecture adopts an encoder-decoder structure: a hybrid quantum neural network encoder estimates P- and S-impedances from seismic data, while the decoder reconstructs seismic responses using geophysical relationships. Training is guided by minimizing the misfit between the input and reconstructed seismic traces. We systematically assess the impact of quantum layer design, differentiation strategies, and simulator backends on inversion performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through the inversion of both synthetic and the Sleipner field datasets. The HQ-PINN framework consistently yields accurate results, showcasing quantum computing's promise for geosciences and paving the way for future quantum-enhanced geophysical workflows.
Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.
Machine Learning (ML) has been widely applied across numerous domains due to its ability to automatically identify informative patterns from data for various tasks. The availability of large-scale data and advanced computational power enables the development of sophisticated models and training strategies, leading to state-of-the-art performance, but it also introduces substantial challenges. Quantum Computing (QC), which exploits quantum mechanisms for computation, has attracted growing attention and significant global investment as it may address these challenges. Consequently, Quantum Machine Learning (QML), the integration of these two fields, has received increasing interest, with a notable rise in related studies in recent years. We are motivated to review these existing contributions regarding quantum circuit-based learning models for classical data analysis and highlight the identified potentials and challenges of this technique. Specifically, we focus not only on QML models, both kernel-based and neural network-based, but also on recent explorations of their integration with classical machine learning layers within hybrid frameworks. Moreover, we examine both theoretical analysis and empirical findings to better understand their capabilities, and we also discuss the efforts on noise-resilient and hardware-efficient QML that could enhance its practicality under current hardware limitations. In addition, we cover several emerging paradigms for advanced quantum circuit design and highlight the adaptability of QML across representative application domains. This study aims to provide an overview of the contributions made to bridge quantum computing and machine learning, offering insights and guidance to support its future development and pave the way for broader adoption in the coming years.
This research investigates a quantum enhanced cloud intelligence framework based on hybrid variational models that integrate Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs), Parameterized Quantum Circuits (PQCs), and classical machine learning optimization. The study aims to address the scalability and computational limitations of conventional cloud-based machine learning by leveraging the expressive power of quantum feature spaces and entanglement-driven representations. A structured methodology is presented, encompassing hybrid model design, dataset preparation, quantum circuit construction, and the implementation of a cloud-integrated training loop. Performance benchmarking across high-dimensional datasets demonstrates that the proposed hybrid approach can achieve faster training, improved model accuracy, and enhanced energy efficiency compared to classical baselines. The research further outlines the practical challenges posed by NISQ-era hardware, noise sensitivity, cloud latency, and hybrid optimization instability. Despite these limitations, the findings reveal strong potential for deploying quantum-assisted intelligence in real-time analytics, complex optimization problems, healthcare diagnostics, autonomous systems, and cybersecurity applications. This study contributes a unified integration framework, novel empirical benchmarks, and a practical roadmap for advancing quantum cloud synergy, positioning hybrid variational systems as a promising foundation for next-generation scalable machine learning.
Quantum machine learning (QML) is an emerging interdisciplinary field that employs quantum computing (QC) principles to address complex computational challenges. Traditional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models face major challenges in Earth observation (EO) due to the increasing volume and complexity of data. These challenges include computational intensity, energy consumption, and data management constraints. QML emerges as a promising paradigm for overcoming these barriers through quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement, and interference. This review aims at offering a detailed analysis of the state of the art and new trends in QML application to EO. This study methodically examines key advancements in QML for EO (QML4EO) through an exploration of the fundamental concepts of QML. The proposed review methodology involved systematic searches across prominent scientific databases, based on our extensive knowledge on the topic, using carefully formulated queries to ensure broad coverage and high relevance. In addition, this work addresses the changing institutional and geographic environment of QML4EO research, highlighting important centers of contribution and the important role of programs such as the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Quantum Earth Science and Technology (QUEST) Technical Committee. To transform QML from a specialized research area into a complementary and essential tool for advancing EO, this article critically analyzes current limitations and provides an outlook on future directions, highlighting the need for reliable hardware, improved algorithmic design, and standardized protocols.