Near-term quantum machine learning must balance expressivity, optimization, and hardware constraints. We study quantum re-uploading units (QRUs) as compact circuits and compare them, at matched parameter count, to a standard mono-encoded variational quantum circuit (VQC) baseline. On a three-feature calorimetry classification task, we train a single-qubit QRU that outputs a scalar in $[-1,1]$ and map it to three classes via fixed thresholds. In this setting, QRUs obtain higher accuracy than the mono-encoded baseline. A controlled ablation over depth, input scaling, circuit template, optimizer, and gradient accumulation indicates that most gains occur at small depths, with diminishing returns as depth increases while training cost grows approximately linearly. To interpret these observations, we analyze reachable Fourier components and find that repeated data re-encoding expands the per-coordinate harmonic support relative to mono-encoding, consistent with a spectral activation study over random initializations. Finally, we report an end-to-end proof-of-execution of the trained model on a superconducting QPU via a cloud workflow, illustrating practical deployability under current constraints.
Near-term quantum machine learning must balance expressivity, optimization, and hardware constraints. We study quantum re-uploading units (QRUs) as compact circuits and compare them, at matched parameter count, to a standard mono-encoded variational quantum circuit (VQC) baseline. On a three-feature calorimetry classification task, we train a single-qubit QRU that outputs a scalar in [−1,1] and map it to three classes via fixed thresholds. In this setting, QRUs obtain higher accuracy than the mono-encoded baseline. A controlled ablation over depth, input scaling, circuit template, optimizer, and gradient accumulation indicates that most gains occur at small depths, with diminishing returns as depth increases while training cost grows approximately linearly. To interpret these observations, we analyze reachable Fourier components and find that repeated data re-encoding expands the per-coordinate harmonic support relative to mono-encoding, consistent with a spectral activation study over random initializations. Finally, we report an end-to-end proof-of-execution of the trained model on a superconducting QPU via a cloud workflow, illustrating practical deployability under current constraints.
We propose a single-qubit Quantum Machine Learning (QML) model for time series forecasting, built around the concept of a Quantum Reupload Unit (QRU), a hardwareefficient quantum circuit architecture with shallow depth. The proposed model demonstrates enhanced predictive power compared to variational methods such as quantum circuits (VQC), parameterized quantum circuits (PQC), and quantum residual blocks (QRB). The proposed QRU outperforms classical learning models such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) with the same number of parameters. The novelty of this approach is its ability to model temporal patterns without relying on an extensive memory state, which reduces resource demands while preserving forecast accuracy. The expressivity of the model is evaluated through Fourier spectral decomposition. We analyze the trainability of our model using the absorption witness metric. We benchmarked the proposed model on the Mackey-Glass chaotic time series and the real-world river level dataset from TAIAO. The proposed model consistently exhibits enhanced expressivity over both of the datasets. These results highlight the significance of QRUs as promising candidates for learning models that can be conveniently deployed on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware.
This thesis investigates the integration of quantum computing into machine learning, specifically focusing on reinforcement learning. The study focuses on the building of a code library to enable the exploration of the use of variational quantum circuits as function approximators within reinforcement learning algorithms, specifically policy gradient methods. A comprehensive framework is developed to analyze the performance and trainability of variational quantum circuit-based reinforcement learning models, supported by this library, to understand how different quantum circuit designs and data re-uploading techniques might affect the performance and trainability. To demonstrate the library’s capabilities, experiments were conducted in classic control environments like CartPole-v1 and Acrobot-v1, evaluating the performance (measured as average return) and trainability of three quantum models. These experiments examined the effects of data re-uploading, classical postprocessing, and inverse temperature parameter scheduling on both metrics. The empirical results show that variational quantum circuits are effective function approximators, with data re-uploading significantly enhancing model performance. Additionally, the globality of the measured observables plays a critical role, with higher globality values leading to better performance. Despite increasing circuit expressiveness, the gradient magnitudes and variances remain substantial throughout training. Furthermore, the tested inverse temperature schedules, used to adjust the policy’s level of exploration, did not show any significant advantage, indicating the challenge in finding optimal settings for these schedules. The study also introduces the universal quantum classifier adapted for reinforcement learning. Contrary to the barren plateau phenomenon, it has been empirically demonstrated that although increasing the number of qubits leads to performance drops in the Acrobot environment, it does not lead to vanishing gradients during the agents’ training process. Furthermore, under specific sets of hyperparameters, all three quantum models demonstrate strong and similar performance levels in both environments.
ABSTRACT Background Quantum machine learning is an emerging field that may offer unique advantages over classical machine learning but has not been extensively studied with real-world healthcare data of practical size. This study evaluates the performance of a recently proposed quantum machine learning algorithm—quantum circuits with data re-uploading—compared to classical machine learning and other common quantum algorithms, using both benchmarking data and real-world laboratory medicine data. Methods Four datasets containing between 2 and 30 features were selected for evaluation. The quantum re-uploading algorithm was compared against variational quantum classifiers, quantum neural networks and four, commonly used classical machine learning algorithms. Initial, baseline comparisons of classification performance (F1 score) were conducted using all algorithms across the four datasets. Configuration parameters were then optimized for the quantum data re-uploading algorithm using a previously published dataset of plasma amino acid profiles to determine the impact of optimization on classification performance, followed by a final comparison against classical ML algorithms. Results Baseline comparisons of quantum re-uploading showed superior classification performance on lower-dimensional datasets compared to quantum and linear ML algorithms. However, performance declined significantly as the number of input features increased. While optimization improved classification performance, marked variability was observed. Following optimization, the quantum re- uploading algorithm again performed comparably to linear algorithms but had lower classification performance on the plasma amino acid dataset compared to non-linear classical algorithms. Conclusion This study suggests that quantum data-reuploading algorithms can achieve classification performance comparable to some classical methods on lower-dimensional datasets, presenting opportunities for early research applications in laboratory medicine. However, while optimizing configuration parameters can improve classification performance, further advancements in quantum hardware and algorithm design will likely be necessary for quantum machine learning to become practically viable in laboratory medicine, and biomedical research more broadly.
While Quantum Machine Learning (QML) holds great potential, its practical realization on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware has been hindered by the limitations of variational quantum circuits (VQCs). Recent evidence suggests that VQCs suffer from severe trainability and noise-related issues, leading to growing skepticism about their long-term viability. However, the possibility of implementing learning models directly at the pulse-control level remains comparatively unexplored and could offer a promising alternative. In this work, we formulate a pulse-based variant of data re-uploading, embedding trainable parameters directly into the native system's dynamics. We benchmark our approach on a simulated superconducting transmon processor with realistic noise profiles. The pulse-based model consistently outperforms its gate-based counterpart, exhibiting higher test accuracy and improved generalization under equivalent noise conditions. Moreover, by systematically increasing noise strength, we show that pulse-level implementations retain higher fidelity for longer, demonstrating enhanced resilience to decoherence and control errors. These results suggest that pulse-native architectures, though less explored, may offer a viable and hardware-aligned path forward for practical QML in the NISQ era.
The remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) in code generation has transformed software development, with systems like Codex, CodeGen, and StarCoder demonstrating strong capabilities in synthesizing functional code from natural language descriptions. However, this progress comes at a steep computational cost. Modern code generation models require hundreds of millions to billions of parameters—GPT-3 contains 175 billion parameters, CodeGen-16B uses 16 billion, and the trend continues toward ever-larger models. This scale creates fundamental challenges in training cost, inference latency, memory consumption, and environmental impact. We present a quantum transfer learning framework as an alternative approach to classical model compression for code generation. By replacing selected MLP layers with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), we exploit the exponential representational capacity of quantum systems to achieve Θ(DlogD) parameter scaling instead of classical Θ(D2) . Our hybrid classical-quantum architecture balances three competing objectives: leveraging existing pre-trained knowledge, achieving parameter compression through quantum representation, and maintaining compatibility with near-term quantum hardware constraints. We demonstrate our approach on CodeGen-350M, a production-scale code generation model, adopting a bottleneck architecture that substantially reduces parameters compared to the original MLP layer. Through a fair comparison against a classical bottleneck baseline with near-identical parameter count, we show that the VQC achieves superior representational quality—lower perplexity and higher code generation accuracy—validating the quantum layer’s expressivity advantage in the compressed latent space. Our design employs data re-uploading, where classical input features are re-encoded at each variational layer via trainable RY gates, enhancing the circuit’s expressive power on near-term devices.
Angle-encoded variational quantum circuits implement truncated Fourier series. For one-dimensional inputs, a single-qubit re-uploading (serial) circuit represents every function that a multi-qubit circuit with the same encoding budget E can; we find that this exchange of width for depth is not free in first-order training. Because its state lives on the Bloch sphere, all parameters of the serial circuit move the state, at each input, along one complex direction, which we call \emph{phase-locking}. We prove that this costs no Fourier direction but leaves no direction to spare: however many parameters it has, the serial circuit has at most 2E+2 tangent directions, one more than its 2E+1 Fourier coefficients need, while a two-qubit control with the same encoding budget and model class generically has at least 6E+6. The cost in training is measured against this control, as the number of runs out of 100 that reach the optimum within a fixed step budget. On an exact loss with flat-spectrum targets the gap grows with E; at E=32 the serial circuit converges in 3, 53 and 83 runs under gradient descent, Adam and Levenberg--Marquardt, the control in 99, 100 and 100. On three real-world series, at matched parameter counts, the serial circuit reaches the least-squares optimum in at most 9 runs under Adam and in 32 to 93 under Levenberg--Marquardt, the control in at least 98 and in all 100; its held-out error is up to about 1.5 times that of the control under Adam, but no larger in the typical run under Levenberg--Marquardt.