The potential impact of quantum machine learning algorithms on industrial applications remains an exciting open question. Conventional methods for encoding classical data into quantum computers are not only too costly for a potential quantum advantage in the algorithms but also severely limit the scale of feasible experiments on current hardware. Therefore, recent works, despite claiming the near-term suitability of their algorithms, do not provide experimental benchmarking on standard machine learning datasets. We attempt to solve the data encoding problem by improving a recently proposed variational algorithm [1] that approximately prepares the encoded data, using asymptotically shallow circuits that fit the native gate set and topology of currently available quantum computers. We apply the improved algorithm to encode the Fashion-MNIST dataset [2], which can be directly used in future empirical studies of quantum machine learning algorithms. We deploy simple quantum variational classifiers trained on the encoded dataset on a current quantum computer ibmq-kolkata [3] and achieve moderate accuracies, providing a proof of concept for the near-term usability of our data encoding method.
The potential impact of quantum machine learning algorithms on industrial applications remains an exciting open question. Conventional methods for encoding classical data into quantum computers are not only too costly for a potential quantum advantage in the algorithms but also severely limit the scale of feasible experiments on current hardware. Therefore, recent works, despite claiming the near-term suitability of their algorithms, do not provide experimental benchmarking on standard machine learning datasets. We attempt to solve the data encoding problem by improving a recently proposed variational algorithm [1] that approximately prepares the encoded data, using asymptotically shallow circuits that fit the native gate set and topology of currently available quantum computers. We apply the improved algorithm to encode the Fashion-MNIST dataset [2], which can be directly used in future empirical studies of quantum machine learning algorithms. We deploy simple quantum variational classifiers trained on the encoded dataset on a current quantum computer ibmq-kolkata [3] and achieve moderate accuracies, providing a proof of concept for the near-term usability of our data encoding method.
Abstract Quantum machine learning (QML) is an emerging field that investigates the capabilities of quantum computers for learning tasks. While QML models can theoretically offer advantages such as exponential speed-ups, challenges in data loading and the ability to scale to relevant problem sizes have prevented demonstrations of such advantages on practical problems. In particular, the encoding of arbitrary classical data into quantum states usually comes at a high computational cost, either in terms of qubits or gate count. However, real-world data typically exhibits some inherent structure (such as image data) which can be leveraged to load them with a much smaller cost on a quantum computer. This work further develops an efficient algorithm for finding low-depth quantum circuits to load classical image data as quantum states. To evaluate its effectiveness, we conduct systematic studies on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Imagenette datasets. The corresponding circuits for loading the full large-scale datasets are available publicly as PennyLane datasets and can be used by the community for their own benchmarks. We further analyze the performance of various quantum classifiers, such as quantum kernel methods, parameterized quantum circuits, and tensor-network classifiers, and we compare them to convolutional neural networks. In particular, we focus on the performance of the quantum classifiers as we introduce nonlinear functions of the input state, e.g. by letting the circuit parameters depend on the input state.
A central challenge in quantum machine learning is the state preparation bottleneck that describes the prohibitive computational cost of loading high-dimensional classical data into a quantum state. Although amplitude encoding can represent 2n-dimensional data using only n qubits in principle, preparing arbitrary states remains computationally expensive, typically requiring variational optimization of a parameterized quantum circuit for each individual data instance. In this work, we propose a method that avoids iterative optimization by training a classical neural network to map input data directly to the continuous parameters of a fixed quantum circuit. We demonstrate the generation of quantum image states with high fidelity on data not seen during training. Since all optimization is performed once during training, the resulting model encodes new inputs in a single inference step, providing a scalable pathway for data loading in near-term quantum algorithms. We validate our method on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, achieving fidelities up to 0.992 on unseen images and reducing the per-data-instance runtime by more than 5000-fold.
The advent of noisy-intermediate scale quantum computers has introduced the exciting possibility of achieving quantum speedups in machine learning tasks. These devices, however, are composed of a small number of qubits and can faithfully run only short circuits. This puts many proposed approaches for quantum machine learning beyond currently available devices. We address the problem of compressing classical data into efficient representations on quantum devices. Our proposed methods allow both the required number of qubits and depth of the quantum circuit to be tuned. We achieve this by using a correspondence between matrix-product states and quantum circuits and further propose a hardware-efficient quantum circuit approach, which we benchmark on the Fashion-MNIST dataset. Finally, we demonstrate that a quantum circuit-based classifier can achieve competitive accuracy with current tensor learning methods using only 11 qubits.
Quantum machine learning has the potential to computationally outperform classical machine learning, but it is not yet clear whether it will actually be valuable for practical problems. While some artificial scenarios have shown that certain quantum machine learning techniques may be advantageous compared to their classical counterpart, evidence does not yet suggest that quantum machine learning has surpassed conventional approaches in dealing with standard classical datasets, such as the MNIST dataset. In contrast, dealing with quantum data, such as quantum states or circuits, may be the task where we can benefit from quantum methods. Therefore, it is important to develop practically meaningful quantum datasets for which we expect quantum methods to be superior. In this paper, we propose a machine learning task that is likely to soon arise in the real world: clustering and classification of quantum circuits. We provide a dataset of quantum circuits optimized by the variational quantum eigensolver. We utilized six common types of Hamiltonians in condensed matter physics, with a range of 4–20 qubits, and applied ten different ansatz with varying depths (ranging from 3 to 32) to generate a quantum circuit dataset of six distinct classes, each containing 300 samples. We show that this dataset can be easily learned using quantum methods. In particular, we demonstrate a successful classification of our dataset using real four-qubit devices available through IBMQ. By providing a setting and an elementary dataset where quantum machine learning is expected to be beneficial, we hope to encourage and ease the advancement of the field.
Quantum machine learning is one of the most exciting new avenues in the world of artificial intelligence, especially because of the enormous computational power of quantum computers and the promise of the development of near error-free quantum computers in the not-so-distant future. For quantum algorithms to be used in real-life applications, quantum computers must be able to work with classical data. One of the key steps in quantum algorithms dealing with classical data is the encoding of classical data points to quantum states, which can then be processed by quantum gates. It is known that the type of encoding technique that works best for a particular network is dependent on the dataset being used. In this paper, a new parallel structure is proposed utilizing two encoding techniques, namely amplitude encoding and angle encoding, for effective classical data classification via quantum neural network. The paper further proposes a maximally expressible and entangled ansatz used to design a simple Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) with only 32 parameters, that is used in the latter stages of the network and is kept the same across all encoding instances so that a comparison between the different encoding methods is possible. Extensive experimentation is carried out on two publicly available image datasets, namely MNIST and Fashion MNIST. The results show that the proposed method achieves better results than any of the encoding techniques deployed alone for binary classification.
Abstract One-class classification (OCC) is a fundamental problem in pattern recognition with a wide range of applications. This work presents a semi-supervised quantum machine learning algorithm for such a problem, which we call a variational quantum one-class classifier (VQOCC). The algorithm is suitable for noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing because the VQOCC trains a fully-parameterized quantum autoencoder with a normal dataset and does not require decoding. The performance of the VQOCC is compared with that of the one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM), the kernel principal component analysis (PCA), and the deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) using handwritten digit and Fashion-MNIST datasets. The numerical experiment examined various structures of VQOCC by varying data encoding, the number of parameterized quantum circuit layers, and the size of the latent feature space. The benchmark shows that the classification performance of VQOCC is comparable to that of OC-SVM and PCA, although the number of model parameters grows only logarithmically with the data size. The quantum algorithm outperformed DCAE in most cases under similar training conditions. Therefore, our algorithm constitutes an extremely compact and effective machine learning model for OCC.