Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) emerged as a branch of reinforcement learning (RL) that uses quantum submodules in the architecture of the algorithm. One branch of QRL focuses on the replacement of neural networks (NN) by variational quantum circuits (VQC) as function approximators. Initial works have shown promising results on classical environments with discrete action spaces, but many of the proposed architectural design choices of the VQC lack a detailed investigation. Hence, in this work we investigate the impact of VQC design choices such as angle embedding, encoding block architecture and postprocessesing on the training capabilities of QRL agents. We show that VQC design greatly influences training performance and heuristically derive enhancements for the analyzed components. Additionally, we show how to design a QRL agent in order to solve classical environments with continuous action spaces and benchmark our agents against classical feed-forward NNs.
Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) emerged as a branch of reinforcement learning (RL) that uses quantum submodules in the architecture of the algorithm. One branch of QRL focuses on the replacement of neural networks (NN) by variational quantum circuits (VQC) as function approximators. Initial works have shown promising results on classical environments with discrete action spaces, but many of the proposed architectural design choices of the VQC lack a detailed investigation. Hence, in this work we investigate the impact of VQC design choices such as angle embedding, encoding block architecture and postprocessesing on the training capabilities of QRL agents. We show that VQC design greatly influences training performance and heuristically derive enhancements for the analyzed components. Additionally, we show how to design a QRL agent in order to solve classical environments with continuous action spaces and benchmark our agents against classical feed-forward NNs.
In recent years, quantum computing (QC) has been getting a lot of attention from industry and academia. Especially, among various QC research topics, variational quantum circuit (VQC) enables quantum deep reinforcement learning (QRL). Many studies of QRL have shown that the QRL is superior to the classical reinforcement learning (RL) methods under the constraints of the number of training parameters. This paper extends and demonstrates the QRL to quantum multi-agent RL (QMARL). However, the extension of QRL to QMARL is not straightforward due to the challenge of the noise intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) and the non-stationary properties in classical multi-agent RL (MARL). Therefore, this paper proposes the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) QMARL framework by designing novel VQCs for the framework to cope with these issues. To corroborate the QMARL framework, this paper conducts the QMARL demonstration in a single-hop environment where edge agents offload packets to clouds. The extensive demonstration shows that the proposed QMARL framework enhances 57.7% of total reward than classical frameworks.
The emergence of quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) is propelled by advancements in quantum computing (QC) and machine learning (ML), particularly through quantum neural networks (QNN) built on variational quantum circuits (VQC). These advancements have proven successful in addressing sequential decision-making tasks. However, constructing effective QRL models demands significant expertise due to challenges in designing quantum circuit architectures, including data encoding and parameterized circuits, which profoundly influence model performance. In this paper, we propose addressing this challenge with differentiable quantum architecture search (DiffQAS), enabling trainable circuit parameters and structure weights using gradient-based optimization. Furthermore, we enhance training efficiency through asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) methods facilitating parallel training. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that our proposed DiffQAS-QRL approach achieves performance comparable to manually-crafted circuit architectures across considered environments, showcasing stability across diverse scenarios. This methodology offers a pathway for designing QRL models without extensive quantum knowledge, ensuring robust performance and fostering broader application of QRL.
Exploring the convergence of quantum computing and machine learning, this paper delves into Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) with a specific focus on Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC). Alongside a comprehensive examination of the field, the study presents a concrete implementation of QRL tailored to foundational gym environments. Leveraging principles from Quantum Computing, experiments reveal QRL’s potential in enhancing reinforcement learning tasks within these environments, showcasing notable space optimization for RL models. Quantitative results indicate a reduction in the number of trainable parameters by up to 90% when compared to classical approaches, significantly improving efficiency, mainly due to quantum principles of superposition and entanglement. This highlights the promising implications of integrating quantum computing techniques to address challenges and advance capabilities in fundamental reinforcement learning scenarios. Furthermore, the study discusses the adaptability of QRL algorithms to diverse problem domains, suggesting their potential for scalability and applicability beyond simple environments. Such versatility underscores the robustness and practical relevance of QRL methodologies in real-world scenarios, positioning them as valuable tools for tackling complex reinforcement learning challenges.
Variational quantum circuits have recently gained popularity as quantum machine learning models. While considerable effort has been invested to train them in supervised and unsupervised learning settings, relatively little attention has been given to their potential use in reinforcement learning. In this work, we leverage the understanding of quantum policy gradient algorithms in a number of ways. First, we investigate how to construct and train reinforcement learning policies based on variational quantum circuits. We propose several designs for quantum policies, provide their learning algorithms, and test their performance on classical benchmarking environments. Second, we show the existence of task environments with a provable separation in performance between quantum learning agents and any polynomial-time classical learner, conditioned on the widely-believed classical hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. We also consider more natural settings, in which we show an empirical quantum advantage of our quantum policies over standard neural-network policies. Our results constitute a first step towards establishing a practical near-term quantum advantage in a reinforcement learning setting. Additionally, we believe that some of our design choices for variational quantum policies may also be beneficial to other models based on variational quantum circuits, such as quantum classifiers and quantum regression models.
One of the multiple facets of quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) is enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with quantum submodules, namely with variational quantum circuits (VQC) as function approx-imators. QRL solutions are empirically proven to require fewer training iterations or adjustable parameters than their classical counterparts, but are usually restricted to applications that have a discrete action space and thus limited industrial relevance. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical (HQC) deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) approach for a robot to navigate through a maze using continuous states, continuous actions and using local observations from the robot’s LiDAR sensors. We show that this HQC method can lead to models of comparable test results to the neural network (NN)-based DDPG algorithm, that need around 200 times fewer weights. We also study the scalability of our solution with respect to the number of VQC layers and qubits, and find that in general results improve as the layer and qubit counts increase. The best rewards among all similarly sized HQC and classical DDPG methods correspond to a VQC of 8 qubits and 5 layers with no other NN. This work is another step towards continuous QRL, where literature has been sparse.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has been identified as one of the key fields that could reap advantages from near-term quantum devices, next to optimization and quantum chemistry. Research in this area has focused primarily on variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), and several proposals to enhance supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with VQAs have been put forward. Out of the three, RL is the least studied and it is still an open question whether VQAs can be competitive with state-of-the-art classical algorithms based on neural networks (NNs) even on simple benchmark tasks. In this work, we introduce a training method for parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) that can be used to solve RL tasks for discrete and continuous state spaces based on the deep Q-learning algorithm. We investigate which architectural choices for quantum Q-learning agents are most important for successfully solving certain types of environments by performing ablation studies for a number of different data encoding and readout strategies. We provide insight into why the performance of a VQA-based Q-learning algorithm crucially depends on the observables of the quantum model and show how to choose suitable observables based on the learning task at hand. To compare our model against the classical DQN algorithm, we perform an extensive hyperparameter search of PQCs and NNs with varying numbers of parameters. We confirm that similar to results in classical literature, the architectural choices and hyperparameters contribute more to the agents' success in a RL setting than the number of parameters used in the model. Finally, we show when recent separation results between classical and quantum agents for policy gradient RL can be extended to inferring optimal Q-values in restricted families of environments.