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arXiv:2409.03350 · Quantum Information Processing

Enhancing the performance of variational quantum classifiers with hybrid autoencoders

Georgios Maragkopoulos, Aikaterini Mandilara, Antonia Tsili, Dimitris Syvridis

Published Jul 30, 2025• 11 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Variational quantum circuits (VQC) lie at the forefront of quantum machine learning research. Still, the use of quantum networks for real data processing remains challenging as the number of available qubits cannot accommodate a large dimensionality of data—if the usual angle encoding scenario is used. To achieve dimensionality reduction, Principal Component Analysis is routinely applied as a pre-processing method before the embedding of the classical features on qubits. In this work, we propose an alternative method which reduces the dimensionality of a given dataset by taking into account the specific quantum embedding that comes after. This method aspires to make quantum machine learning with VQCs more versatile and effective on datasets of high dimension. At a second step, we propose a quantum-inspired classical autoencoder model which can be used to encode information in low latent spaces. The power of our proposed models is exhibited via numerical tests. We show that our targeted dimensionality reduction method considerably boosts VQC’s performance, and we also identify cases for which the second model outperforms classical autoencoders in terms of reconstruction loss.

DOI
10.1007/s11128-025-04864-w

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Abstract Variational quantum circuits (VQC) lie at the forefront of quantum machine learning research. Still, the use of quantum networks for real data processing remains challenging as the number of available qubits cannot accommodate a large dimensionality of data—if the usual angle encoding scenario is used. To achieve dimensionality reduction, Principal Component Analysis is routinely applied as a pre-processing method before the embedding of the classical features on qubits. In this work, we propose an alternative method which reduces the dimensionality of a given dataset by taking into account the specific quantum embedding that comes after. This method aspires to make quantum machine learning with VQCs more versatile and effective on datasets of high dimension. At a second step, we propose a quantum-inspired classical autoencoder model which can be used to encode information in low latent spaces. The power of our proposed models is exhibited via numerical tests. We show that our targeted dimensionality reduction method considerably boosts VQC’s performance, and we also identify cases for which the second model outperforms classical autoencoders in terms of reconstruction loss.
Intrusion detection remains a critical challenge in cybersecurity, particularly when dealing with high-dimensional data. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum machine learning model that integrates a Quantum Autoencoder (QAE) for dimensionality reduction with a Quantum Neural Network (QNN) classifier. The QAE compresses input features into latent states without relying on classical methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), preserving quantum-relevant information. These latent states are then classified using a Variational Quantum Circuit implemented with Qiskit. We systematically evaluated different ansatz architectures and hyperparameters on the NSL-KDD dataset. The best configuration, an EstimatorQNN with EfficientSU2 ansatz (4 repetitions), achieved an F1-score of 0.767, with balanced recall (0.70) and precision (0.84). These results highlight the potential of quantum-enhanced models for addressing the scalability challenges of intrusion detection, representing a step toward applying High-Performance Computing principles to cybersecurity.
One key step in performing quantum machine learning (QML) on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices is the dimension reduction of the input data prior to their encoding. Traditional principle component analysis (PCA) and neural networks have been used to perform this task; however, the classical and quantum layers are usually trained separately. A framework that allows for a better integration of the two key components is thus highly desirable. Here we introduce a hybrid model combining the quantum-inspired tensor networks (TN) and the variational quantum circuits (VQC) to perform supervised learning tasks, which allows for an end-to-end training. We show that a matrix product state based TN with low bond dimensions performs better than PCA as a feature extractor to compress data for the input of VQCs in the binary classification of MNIST dataset. The architecture is highly adaptable and can easily incorporate extra quantum resource when available.
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We combine classical and quantum Machine Learning (ML) techniques to effectively analyze long time-series data acquired during experiments. Specifically, we demonstrate that replacing a deep classical neural network with a thoughtfully designed Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) in an ML pipeline for multiclass classification of time-series data yields the same classification performance, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. To achieve this, we use a VQC based on a single qudit, and encode the classical data into the VQC via a trainable hybrid autoencoder which has been recently proposed as embedding technique. Our results highlight the importance of tailored data pre-processing for the circuit and show the potential of qudit-based VQCs.
Embedding of n-dimensional data in quantum space is an essential component in quantum computing realm. This research area is quite challenging with limited computational resources and complex quantum architecture. To overcome these problems, quantum approaches have been integrated with classical neural network. This hybrid model encodes the features using both angle encoding and amplitude encoding over quantum hilbert space, which is then processed through a Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC). These embedded features are fed to the classical neural network that enhances the performance of the traditional methods. A synthetic barcode and stripes (BAS) dataset was created for the verification of the proposed model. The results show that classical optimization methods, specifically gradient descent with momentum, achieve an accuracy of 82.38% for 4×4 data which is a significant improvement over existing researches that are limited to lower-dimensional data embedding.