Quantum reservoir computing is a machine-learning framework that offers ease of training compared to other quantum neural networks, as it does not rely on gradient-based optimization. Learning is performed in a single step on the output features measured from the quantum system. Various implementations of quantum reservoir computing have been explored in simulations, with different measured features. Although simulations have shown that quantum reservoirs present advantages in performance compared to classical reservoirs, experimental implementations have remained scarce. This is due to the challenge of obtaining a large number of output features that are nonlinear transformations of the input data. In this work, we show that even with a circuit quantum electrodynamics system as simple as a single transmon coupled to a readout resonator, we can implement a proof-of-concept realization of quantum reservoir computing. We obtain a large number of nonlinear features from a single physical system by encoding the input data in the amplitude of a coherent drive and measuring the cavity state in the Fock basis. We demonstrate classification of two classical tasks with significantly smaller hardware resources and fewer measured features compared to classical neural networks. Our experimental results are supported by numerical simulations that show additional Kerr nonlinearity is beneficial to reservoir performance. Our work demonstrates a hardware-efficient quantum neural-network implementation that can be further scaled up and generalized to other quantum machine-learning models.
Quantum reservoir computing is a machine-learning framework that offers ease of training compared to other quantum neural networks, as it does not rely on gradient-based optimization. Learning is performed in a single step on the output features measured from the quantum system. Various implementations of quantum reservoir computing have been explored in simulations, with different measured features. Although simulations have shown that quantum reservoirs present advantages in performance compared to classical reservoirs, experimental implementations have remained scarce. This is due to the challenge of obtaining a large number of output features that are nonlinear transformations of the input data. In this work, we show that even with a circuit quantum electrodynamics system as simple as a single transmon coupled to a readout resonator, we can implement a proof-of-concept realization of quantum reservoir computing. We obtain a large number of nonlinear features from a single physical system by encoding the input data in the amplitude of a coherent drive and measuring the cavity state in the Fock basis. We demonstrate classification of two classical tasks with significantly smaller hardware resources and fewer measured features compared to classical neural networks. Our experimental results are supported by numerical simulations that show additional Kerr nonlinearity is beneficial to reservoir performance. Our work demonstrates a hardware-efficient quantum neural-network implementation that can be further scaled up and generalized to other quantum machine-learning models.
Quantum reservoir computing is a promising approach for quantum neural networks, capable of solving hard learning tasks on both classical and quantum input data. However, current approaches with qubits suffer from limited connectivity. We propose an implementation for quantum reservoir that obtains a large number of densely connected neurons by using parametrically coupled quantum oscillators instead of physically coupled qubits. We analyse a specific hardware implementation based on superconducting circuits: with just two coupled quantum oscillators, we create a quantum reservoir comprising up to 81 neurons. We obtain state-of-the-art accuracy of 99 % on benchmark tasks that otherwise require at least 24 classical oscillators to be solved. Our results give the coupling and dissipation requirements in the system and show how they affect the performance of the quantum reservoir. Beyond quantum reservoir computing, the use of parametrically coupled bosonic modes holds promise for realizing large quantum neural network architectures, with billions of neurons implemented with only 10 coupled quantum oscillators.
Recent developments in quantum computing and machine learning have propelled the interdisciplinary study of quantum machine learning. Sequential modeling is an important task with high scientific and commercial value. Existing VQC or QNN-based methods require significant computational resources to perform the gradient-based optimization of a larger number of quantum circuit parameters. The major drawback is that such quantum gradient calculation requires a large amount of circuit evaluation, posing challenges in current near-term quantum hardware and simulation software. In this work, we approach sequential modeling by applying a reservoir computing (RC) framework to quantum recurrent neural networks (QRNN-RC) that are based on classical RNN, LSTM and GRU. The main idea to this RC approach is that the QRNN with randomly initialized weights is treated as a dynamical system and only the final classical linear layer is trained. Our numerical simulations show that the QRNN-RC can reach results comparable to fully trained QRNN models for several function approximation and time series prediction tasks. Since the QRNN training complexity is significantly reduced, the proposed model trains notably faster. In this work we also compare to corresponding classical RNN-based RC implementations and show that the quantum version learns faster by requiring fewer training epochs in most cases. Our results demonstrate a new possibility to utilize quantum neural network for sequential modeling with greater quantum hardware efficiency, an important design consideration for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers.
Abstract Quantum reservoir computing is a promising approach for quantum neural networks, capable of solving hard learning tasks on both classical and quantum input data. However, current approaches with qubits suffer from limited connectivity. We propose an implementation for quantum reservoir that obtains a large number of densely connected neurons by using parametrically coupled quantum oscillators instead of physically coupled qubits. We analyze a specific hardware implementation based on superconducting circuits: with just two coupled quantum oscillators, we create a quantum reservoir comprising up to 81 neurons. We obtain state-of-the-art accuracy of 99% on benchmark tasks that otherwise require at least 24 classical oscillators to be solved. Our results give the coupling and dissipation requirements in the system and show how they affect the performance of the quantum reservoir. Beyond quantum reservoir computing, the use of parametrically coupled bosonic modes holds promise for realizing large quantum neural network architectures, with billions of neurons implemented with only 10 coupled quantum oscillators.
Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) uses the dynamics of a fixed or weakly tuned quantum system to transform temporal and sequential inputs into measured features, while training is typically confined to a classical readout. This separation reduces reliance on repeated quantum parameter updates and avoids the barren plateaus associated with variational circuit training. Its computational power is often attributed to the exponentially large Hilbert space of the quantum system. However, the memory, nonlinearity, and expressivity that determine what a reservoir can actually compute depend jointly on the input encoding, quantum evolution, observables, measurement, and readout, not on Hilbert space dimension alone. On hardware, these capabilities are further constrained by finite sampling, hardware noise, measurement backaction, and the cost of estimating observables, so a large state space alone does not guarantee useful computation. In this survey, we develop a common system model that connects these components and use it to organize QRC foundations, computational properties, reservoir architectures, operating protocols, and physical implementations. We examine spin, photonic, superconducting, bosonic, neutral atom, and other analog platforms, together with applications, software and high performance computing support, benchmarking, and reproducibility. The analysis distinguishes hardware demonstrations from simulations and identifies the assumptions and resources that govern comparisons across implementations. Current results do not establish a broad quantum advantage over well matched classical reservoirs. We therefore specify the resource accounting, benchmark standards, and theoretical criteria needed to evaluate claims of quantum advantage.
Quantum reservoir computing has emerged as a promising paradigm within the field of quantum machine learning, harnessing the inherent properties of quantum systems to optimise and enhance information processing capabilities. Here, we explore the potential of quantum-inspired machine learning methodologies by leveraging the complex dynamics of quantum reservoirs to address computationally challenging tasks with enhanced efficiency and accuracy. To this end, we employ an open quantum system model comprising two-level atomic ensembles coupled to Lorentzian photonic cavities to construct a quantum physical reservoir computer layer for a recurrent neural network. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach by applying it to a standard machine learning image-recognition problem and benchmarking its performance against a conventional neural network of similar architecture, but lacking the quantum physical reservoir computer layer. Remarkably, as the dataset size increases, the quantum physical reservoir computer outperforms the conventional neural network, requiring fewer training epochs and a smaller dataset to achieve comparable accuracy. Furthermore, we employ the quantum physical reservoir computing approach to model the dynamics of open quantum systems, focusing on atomic system ensembles interacting with a structured photonic reservoir associated with a photonic band-gap material. Our results reveal that the quantum reservoir computer provides equally powerful representations for quantum dynamical problems, maintaining effectiveness even under constraints of limited training data.
The paradigm of reservoir computing exploits the nonlinear dynamics of a physical reservoir to perform complex time-series processing tasks such as speech recognition and forecasting. Unlike other machine-learning approaches, reservoir computing relaxes the need for optimization of intra-network parameters, and is thus particularly attractive for near-term hardware-efficient quantum implementations. However, the complete description of practical quantum reservoir computers requires accounting for their placement in a quantum measurement chain, and its conditional evolution under measurement. Consequently, training and inference has to be performed using finite samples from obtained measurement records. Here we describe a framework for reservoir computing with nonlinear quantum reservoirs under continuous heterodyne measurement. Using an efficient truncated-cumulants representation of the complete measurement chain enables us to sample stochastic measurement trajectories from reservoirs of several coupled nonlinear bosonic modes under strong excitation. This description also offers a mathematical basis to directly compare the computational capabilities of a given physical reservoir operated across classical and quantum regimes. Applying this framework to the classification of quantum states of systems that are part of the same measurement chain as the quantum reservoir computer, we assess and explain measurement-contingent advantages and disadvantages of reservoir processing in quantum regimes. Our results also identify the vicinity of bifurcation points as presenting optimal nonlinear processing regimes of an oscillator-based quantum reservoir. The considered models are directly realizable in modern circuit QED experiments, while the framework is applicable to more general quantum nonlinear reservoirs.