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arXiv:2509.00854

Assessing the Advantages and Limitations of Quantum Neural Networks in Regression Tasks

de Limaa, Gubio G., Tiago de Souza Farias, Alexandre C. Ricardo, Celso J. Villas-Bôas

Published Aug 31, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The development of quantum neural networks (QNNs) has attracted considerable attention due to their potential to surpass classical models in certain machine learning tasks. Nonetheless, it remains unclear under which conditions QNNs provide concrete benefits over classical neural networks (CNNs). This study addresses this question by performing both qualitative and quantitative analyses of classical and quantum models applied to regression problems, using two target functions with contrasting properties. Additionally, the work explores the methodological difficulties inherent in making fair comparisons between QNNs and CNNs. The findings reveal a distinct advantage of QNNs in a specific quantum machine learning context. In particular, QNNs excelled at approximating the sinusoidal function, achieving errors up to seven orders of magnitude lower than their classical counterparts. However, their performance was limited in other cases, emphasizing that QNNs are highly effective for certain tasks but not universally sPuperior. These results reinforce the principles of the ``No Free Lunch'' theorem, highlighting that no single model outperforms all others across every problem domain.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2509.00854

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The development of quantum neural networks (QNNs) has attracted considerable attention due to their potential to surpass classical models in certain machine learning tasks. Nonetheless, it remains unclear under which conditions QNNs provide concrete benefits over classical neural networks (CNNs). This study addresses this question by performing both qualitative and quantitative analyses of classical and quantum models applied to regression problems, using two target functions with contrasting properties. Additionally, the work explores the methodological difficulties inherent in making fair comparisons between QNNs and CNNs. The findings reveal a distinct advantage of QNNs in a specific quantum machine learning context. In particular, QNNs excelled at approximating the sinusoidal function, achieving errors up to seven orders of magnitude lower than their classical counterparts. However, their performance was limited in other cases, emphasizing that QNNs are highly effective for certain tasks but not universally sPuperior. These results reinforce the principles of the ``No Free Lunch'' theorem, highlighting that no single model outperforms all others across every problem domain.
The development of quantum neural networks (QNNs) has attracted considerable attention due to their potential to surpass classical models in certain machine learning tasks. Nonetheless, it remains unclear under which conditions QNNs provide concrete benefits over classical neural networks (CNNs). This study addresses this question by performing both qualitative and quantitative analyses of classical and quantum models applied to regression problems, using two target functions with contrasting properties. Additionally, the work explores the methodological difficulties inherent in making fair comparisons between QNNs and CNNs. The findings reveal a distinct advantage of QNNs in a specific quantum machine learning context. In particular, QNNs excelled at approximating the sinusoidal function, achieving errors up to seven orders of magnitude lower than their classical counterparts. However, their performance was limited in other cases, emphasizing that QNNs are highly effective for certain tasks but not universally superior. These results reinforce the principles of the “No Free Lunch” theorem, highlighting that no single model outperforms all others across every problem domain.
The core of quantum machine learning is to devise quantum models with good trainability and low generalization error bounds than their classical counterparts to ensure better reliability and interpretability. Recent studies confirmed that quantum neural networks (QNNs) have the ability to achieve this goal on specific datasets. In this regard, it is of great importance to understand whether these advantages are still preserved on real-world tasks. Through systematic numerical experiments, we empirically observe that current QNNs fail to provide any benefit over classical learning models. Concretely, our results deliver two key messages. First, QNNs suffer from the severely limited effective model capacity, which incurs poor generalization on real-world datasets. Second, the trainability of QNNs is insensitive to regularization techniques, which sharply contrasts with the classical scenario. These empirical results force us to rethink the role of current QNNs and to design novel protocols for solving real-world problems with quantum advantages.
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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.
The astounding acceleration in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing advances naturally gives rise to a line of research, which unrolls the potential advantages of quantum computing on classical Machine Learning tasks, known as Quantum Machine Learning or Quantum Machine Intelligence. The typical objectives are either (1) exploring the potential quantum advantages on classical learning tasks or (2) levering well-established classical ML algorithms to tackle quantum-related problems on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Along the second research direction, we study Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) to accomplish the purpose of Bayesian learning. By observing a wide range of studies on QNNs, in which the sole training method is based on frequentist training, we find that Bayesian learning benefits QNNs from two aspects. First, Bayesian-trained models enjoy a high level of generalization due to the prior and posterior distribution usage compared to frequentist training, which will be justified by this paper’s theoretical study of model capacity. Second, Bayesian Inference offers epistemic uncertainty estimation, which merits the decision-making process. It is worth mentioning that frequentist-trained QNNs generally lack this desirable property. Under the Bayesian training procedure, our derived models can be considered a new class of QNNs (called BayesianQNNs) which possesses both desirable properties of Bayesian Inference while maintaining comparable predictive performance as frequentist counterparts. The proposed Bayesian Quantum Neural Networks is justified by empirical evidence from numerical experiments.
This study explores the performance of Quantum Support Vector Classifiers (QSVCs) and Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) in comparison to classical models for machine learning tasks. By evaluating these models on the Iris and MNIST-PCA datasets, we find that quantum models tend to outperform classical approaches as the problem complexity increases. While QSVCs generally provide more consistent results, QNNs exhibit superior performance in higher-complexity tasks due to their increased quantum load. Additionally, we analyze the impact of hyperparameter tuning, showing that feature maps and ansatz configurations significantly influence model accuracy. We also compare the PennyLane and Qiskit frameworks, concluding that Qiskit provides better optimization and efficiency for our implementation. These findings highlight the potential of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) for complex classification problems and provide insights into model selection and optimization strategies