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arXiv:2407.04371

Exploiting the equivalence between quantum neural networks and perceptrons

Chris Mingard, Jessica Pointing, London, Charles, Nam, Yoonsoo, Ard A. Louis

Published Jul 5, 2024• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum machine learning models based on parametrized quantum circuits, also called quantum neural networks (QNNs), are considered to be among the most promising candidates for applications on near-term quantum devices. Here we explore the expressivity and inductive bias of QNNs by exploiting an exact mapping from QNNs with inputs $x$ to classical perceptrons acting on $x \otimes x$ (generalised to complex inputs). The simplicity of the perceptron architecture allows us to provide clear examples of the shortcomings of current QNN models, and the many barriers they face to becoming useful general-purpose learning algorithms. For example, a QNN with amplitude encoding cannot express the Boolean parity function for $n\geq 3$, which is but one of an exponential number of data structures that such a QNN is unable to express. Mapping a QNN to a classical perceptron simplifies training, allowing us to systematically study the inductive biases of other, more expressive embeddings on Boolean data. Several popular embeddings primarily produce an inductive bias towards functions with low class balance, reducing their generalisation performance compared to deep neural network architectures which exhibit much richer inductive biases. We explore two alternate strategies that move beyond standard QNNs. In the first, we use a QNN to help generate a classical DNN-inspired kernel. In the second we draw an analogy to the hierarchical structure of deep neural networks and construct a layered non-linear QNN that is provably fully expressive on Boolean data, while also exhibiting a richer inductive bias than simple QNNs. Finally, we discuss characteristics of the QNN literature that may obscure how hard it is to achieve quantum advantage over deep learning algorithms on classical data.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2407.04371

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Quantum machine learning models based on parametrized quantum circuits, also called quantum neural networks (QNNs), are considered to be among the most promising candidates for applications on near-term quantum devices. Here we explore the expressivity and inductive bias of QNNs by exploiting an exact mapping from QNNs with inputs xxx to classical perceptrons acting on x⊗xx \otimes xx⊗x (generalised to complex inputs). The simplicity of the perceptron architecture allows us to provide clear examples of the shortcomings of current QNN models, and the many barriers they face to becoming useful general-purpose learning algorithms. For example, a QNN with amplitude encoding cannot express the Boolean parity function for n≥3n\geq 3n≥3, which is but one of an exponential number of data structures that such a QNN is unable to express. Mapping a QNN to a classical perceptron simplifies training, allowing us to systematically study the inductive biases of other, more expressive embeddings on Boolean data. Several popular embeddings primarily produce an inductive bias towards functions with low class balance, reducing their generalisation performance compared to deep neural network architectures which exhibit much richer inductive biases. We explore two alternate strategies that move beyond standard QNNs. In the first, we use a QNN to help generate a classical DNN-inspired kernel. In the second we draw an analogy to the hierarchical structure of deep neural networks and construct a layered non-linear QNN that is provably fully expressive on Boolean data, while also exhibiting a richer inductive bias than simple QNNs. Finally, we discuss characteristics of the QNN literature that may obscure how hard it is to achieve quantum advantage over deep learning algorithms on classical data.
One hypothesis for the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) is that they are highly expressive, which enables them to be applied to many problems, and they have a strong inductive bias towards solutions that are simple, known as simplicity bias, which allows them to generalise well on unseen data because most real-world data is structured (i.e. simple). In this work, we explore the inductive bias and expressivity of quantum neural networks (QNNs), which gives us a way to compare their performance to those of DNNs. Our results show that it is possible to have simplicity bias with certain QNNs, but we prove that this type of QNN limits the expressivity of the QNN. We also show that it is possible to have QNNs with high expressivity, but they either have no inductive bias or a poor inductive bias and result in a worse generalisation performance compared to DNNs. We demonstrate that an artificial (restricted) inductive bias can be produced by intentionally restricting the expressivity of a QNN. Our results suggest a bias-expressivity tradeoff. Our conclusion is that the QNNs we studied can not generally offer an advantage over DNNs, because these QNNs either have a poor inductive bias or poor expressivity compared to DNNs.
Near-term quantum devices can be used to build quantum machine learning models, such as quantum kernel methods and quantum neural networks (QNN) to perform classification tasks. There have been many proposals how to use variational quantum circuits as quantum perceptrons or as QNNs. The aim of this work is to systematically compare different QNN architectures and to evaluate their relative expressive power with a teacher-student scheme. Specifically, the teacher model generates the datasets mapping random inputs to outputs which then have to be learned by the student models. This way, we avoid training on arbitrary data sets and allow to compare the learning capacity of different models directly via the loss, the prediction map, the accuracy and the relative entropy between the prediction maps. We focus particularly on a quantum perceptron model inspired by the recent work of Tacchino et. al. \cite{Tacchino1} and compare it to the data re-uploading scheme that was originally introduced by Pérez-Salinas et. al. \cite{data_re-uploading}. We discuss alterations of the perceptron model and the formation of deep QNN to better understand the role of hidden units and non-linearities in these architectures.
Quantum neural networks (QNN) have been proposed as a promising architecture for quantum machine learning. There exist a number of different quantum circuit designs being branded as QNNs, however no clear candidate has presented itself as more suitable than the others. Rather, the search for a ``quantum perceptron" -- the fundamental building block of a QNN -- is still underway. One candidate is quantum perceptrons designed to emulate the nonlinear activation functions of classical perceptrons. Such sigmoid quantum perceptrons (SQPs) inherit the universal approximation property that guarantees that classical neural networks can approximate any function. However, this does not guarantee that QNNs built from SQPs will have any quantum advantage over their classical counterparts. Here we critically investigate both the capabilities and performance of SQP networks by computing their effective dimension and effective capacity, as well as examining their performance on real learning problems. The results are compared to those obtained for other candidate networks which lack activation functions. It is found that simpler, and apparently easier-to-implement parametric quantum circuits actually perform better than SQPs. This indicates that the universal approximation theorem, which a cornerstone of the theory of classical neural networks, is not a relevant criterion for QNNs.
Quantum computing is one of the most exciting research areas of the last decades. At the same time, methods of machine learning have started to dominate science, industry and our everyday life. In this thesis we combine these two essential research topics of the 21st century and introduce dissipative quantum neural networks (DQNNs), which are designed for fully quantum learning tasks, are capable of universal quantum computation and have low memory requirements while training. We start the discussion of this interdisciplinary topic by introducing artificial neural networks, which are a very common tool in classical machine learning. Next, we give an overview on quantum information. Here we focus on quantum algorithms and circuits, which are used to implement quantum neural networks. Moreover, we explain the opportunities and challenges arising with today's quantum computers. The discussion of the architecture and training algorithm of the DQNNs forms the core of this work. These networks are optimised with training data pairs in form of input and desired output states and therefore can be used for characterising unknown or untrusted quantum devices. We not only demonstrate the generalisation behaviour of these quantum neural networks using classical simulations, but also implement them successfully on actual quantum computers. To understand the ultimate limits for such quantum machine learning methods, we discuss the quantum no free lunch theorem, which describes a bound on the probability that a quantum device, which can be modelled as a unitary process and is optimised with quantum examples, gives an incorrect output for a random input. This gives us a tool to review the learning behaviour of quantum neural networks in general and the DQNNs in particular. Moreover we expand the area of applications of DQNNs in two directions. In the first case, we include additional information beyond just the training data pairs: since quantum devices are always structured, the resulting data is always structured as well. We modify the DQNN's training algorithm such that knowledge about the graph-structure of the training data pairs is included in the training process and show that this can lead to better generalisation behaviour. Both the original DQNN and the DQNN including graph structure are trained with data pairs in order to characterise an underlying relation. However, in the second extension of the algorithm we aim to learn characteristics of a set of quantum states in order to extend it to quantum states which have similar properties. Therefore we build a generative adversarial model where two DQNNs, called the generator and discriminator, are trained in a competitive way. Overall, we observe that DQNNs can not only be trained efficiently but also, similar to their classical counterparts, modified to suit different applications.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) based on parametrized quantum circuits are promising candidates for machine learning applications, yet many architectures lack clear connections to classical models, potentially limiting their ability to leverage established classical neural network techniques. We examine QNNs built from SWAP test circuits and discuss their equivalence to classical two-layer feedforward networks with quadratic activations under amplitude encoding. Evaluation on real-world and synthetic datasets shows that while this architecture learns many practical binary classification tasks, it has fundamental expressivity limitations: polynomial activation functions do not satisfy the universal approximation theorem, and we show analytically that the architecture cannot learn the parity check function beyond two dimensions, regardless of network size. To address this, we introduce generalized SWAP test circuits with multiple Fredkin gates sharing an ancilla, implementing product layers with polynomial activations of arbitrary even degree. This modification enables successful learning of parity check functions in arbitrary dimensions as well as binary n-spiral tasks, and we provide numerical evidence that the expressivity enhancement extends to alternative encoding schemes such as angle (Z) and ZZ feature maps. We validate the practical feasibility of our proposed architecture by implementing a classically pretrained instance on the IBM Torino quantum processor, achieving 84% classification accuracy on the three-dimensional parity check despite hardware noise. Our work establishes a framework for analyzing and enhancing QNN expressivity through correspondence with classical architectures, and demonstrates that SWAP test-based QNNs possess broad representational capacity relevant to both classical and potentially quantum learning tasks.
Quantum machine learning (QML) is promising for potential speedups and improvements in conventional machine learning (ML) tasks (e.g., classification/regression). The search for ideal QML models is an active research field. This includes identification of efficient classical-to-quantum data encoding scheme, construction of parametric quantum circuits (PQC) with optimal expressivity and entanglement capability, and efficient output decoding scheme to minimize the required number of measurements, to name a few. However, most of the empirical/numerical studies lack a clear path towards scalability. Any potential benefit observed in a simulated environment may diminish in practical applications due to the limitations of noisy quantum hardware (e.g., under decoherence, gate-errors, and crosstalk). We present a scalable quantum-classical hybrid deep neural network (DeepQMLP) architecture inspired by classical deep neural network architectures. In DeepQMLP, stacked shallow Quantum Neural Network (QNN) models mimic the hidden layers of a classical feed-forward multi-layer perceptron network. Each QNN layer produces a new and potentially rich representation of the input data for the next layer. This new representation can be tuned by the parameters of the circuit. Shallow QNN models experience less decoherence, gate errors, etc. which make them (and the network) more resilient to quantum noise. We present numerical studies on a variety of classification problems to show the trainability of DeepQMLP. We also show that DeepQMLP performs reasonably well on unseen data and exhibits greater resilience to noise over QNN models that use a deep quantum circuit. DeepQMLP provided up to 25.3% lower loss and 7.92% higher accuracy during inference under noise than QMLP.