We explore the interplay between two emerging paradigms: reservoir computing and quantum computing. We observe how quantum systems featuring beyond-classical correlations and vast computational spaces can serve as non-trivial, experimentally viable reservoirs for typical tasks in machine learning. With a focus on neutral atom quantum processing units, we describe and exemplify a novel quantum reservoir computing (QRC) workflow. We conclude exploratively discussing the main challenges ahead, whilst arguing how QRC can offer a natural candidate to push forward reservoir computing applications.
We explore the interplay between two emerging paradigms: reservoir computing and quantum computing. We observe how quantum systems featuring beyond-classical correlations and vast computational spaces can serve as non-trivial, experimentally viable reservoirs for typical tasks in machine learning. With a focus on neutral atom quantum processing units, we describe and exemplify a novel quantum reservoir computing (QRC) workflow. We conclude exploratively discussing the main challenges ahead, whilst arguing how QRC can offer a natural candidate to push forward reservoir computing applications.
We explore the interplay between two emerging paradigms: reservoir computing (RC) and quantum computing (QC). We observe how quantum systems featuring beyond-classical correlations and vast computational spaces can serve as non-trivial, experimentally viable reservoirs for typical tasks in machine learning. With a focus on neutral-atom quantum processing units, we describe and exemplify a novel quantum RC (QRC) workflow. We conclude by exploratively discussing the main challenges ahead, while arguing how QRC can offer a natural candidate to push forward RC applications. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Bits, neurons and qubits for sustainable AI'.
This paper investigates the application of quantum reservoir computing (QRC) to time series prediction. Classical reservoir computing (RC) utilizes a complex, high-dimensional system – the 'reservoir' – as a non-linear feature extractor, followed by a linear regression model for prediction. QRC extends this concept by leveraging the inherent dynamics of a quantum system as the reservoir. We hypothesize that quantum systems, due to their superposition and entanglement properties, can provide richer and more complex dynamics than classical reservoirs, potentially leading to improved prediction accuracy. This work outlines the theoretical framework for QRC, detailing the setup of a suitable quantum reservoir (e.g., a superconducting qubit array), the measurement process, and the training strategy involving a classical machine learning model. We demonstrate a conceptual approach, focusing on the potential advantages and challenges of employing quantum systems for this task. The core claim is that QRC can achieve superior time series prediction accuracy compared to classical RC methods. Key elements explored include the input signal's influence on the quantum reservoir, the selection of appropriate measurement schemes, and the choice of classical learning algorithms. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research directions and the potential impact of QRC on various time series prediction applications.
Neutral-atom quantum devices offer a natural and powerful platform for Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC), a non-variational approach to quantum-enhanced machine learning that is attracting growing interest in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this work, we implement a QRC-based learning model tailored to Pasqal neutral-atom hardware, where classical data are encoded into time-dependent detuning waveforms and processed through programmable many-body dynamics. Feature embeddings are extracted from single- and two-qubit Pauli-Z observables and used within a simple linear readout model. We systematically investigate both global and local detuning encoding strategies on a supervised image classification task, benchmarking performance against a purely classical linear baseline. Our results show that processing the data through the quantum reservoir yields a consistent $\sim$4\% improvement in accuracy, highlighting the system effectiveness as a nonlinear feature map. Both encoding strategies exhibit comparable performance, suggesting that QRC can leverage different control schemes while remaining compatible with near-term and emerging hardware capabilities. These findings provide concrete evidence that QRC can enhance classical machine learning pipelines by injecting non-classical correlations without the need for variational optimization, thereby avoiding issues such as barren plateaus and training instabilities. More broadly, this work establishes neutral-atom platforms as a promising and scalable setting for QRC, opening the way toward practical quantum-enhanced learning on near-term devices.
Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) is an emerging paradigm for harnessing the natural dynamics of quantum systems as computational resources that can be used for temporal machine learning tasks. In the current setup, QRC is difficult to deal with high-dimensional data and has a major drawback of scalability in physical implementations. We propose higher-order QRC, a hybrid quantum-classical framework consisting of multiple but small quantum systems that are mutually communicated via classical connections like linear feedback. By utilizing the advantages of both classical and quantum techniques, our framework enables an efficient implementation to boost the scalability and performance of QRC. Furthermore, higher-order settings allow us to implement a FORCE learning or an innate training scheme, which provides flexibility and high operability to harness high-dimensional quantum dynamics and significantly extends the application domain of QRC. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in emulating large-scale nonlinear dynamical systems, including complex spatiotemporal chaos, which outperforms many of the existing machine learning techniques in certain situations.
In this thesis we investigate Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) as a non-variational paradigm for quantum machine learning on near-term neutral-atom devices. Motivated by the limitations of NISQ hardware, we implement a QRC pipeline in Pasqal’s Pulser environment that encodes classical inputs into detuning waveforms and extracts embeddings from Pauli-Z and ZZ observables. We design two encoding strategies: a global detuning applied to all atoms and a local detuning. Their performance is benchmarked against a classical PCA baseline using logistic regression. We find that QRC embeddings consistently outperform the classical features, with peak test accuracies of 90.17% (global) and 89.61% (local) compared to ≃ 85% for PCA. The advantage is especially marked in low-data regimes, where quantum dynamics enrich the feature space accessible to linear classifiers. We also identify practical challenges, such as symmetry-induced redundancy in global encoding and the absence of per-qubit detuning in current hardware. This establishes QRC as a promising and experimentally grounded framework to exploit the dynamical richness of neutral-atom platforms for supervised learning in the NISQ era.
[eng] Quantum technologies are rapidly evolving toward regimes where controllable quantum dynamics can be exploited for information processing, simulation, and machine learning. Within this landscape, quantum reservoir computing (QRC) has emerged as an appealing paradigm: it harnesses the high-dimensional dynamics of quantum systems to perform temporal tasks with minimal training overhead, making it particularly well suited for current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. In parallel, modern perspectives on quantum many-body systems reveal that tools such as complex-network theory and spectral methods can uncover structures in quantum states and dynamics that remain hidden to conventional approaches. This thesis brings these threads together. It explores how quantum statistics, many-body correlations, chaoticity, and metastability shape information processing in QRC. Furthermore, we have also demonstrated how network-theoretic methods can reveal new features of strongly correlated phases. This thesis contributes to the emerging field of quantum reservoir computing by examining how different physical models shape the learning capabilities of quantum reservoirs. Each article investigates a distinct class of systems: simple hopping networks governed by particle statistics, interacting atomic lattices described by the Bose–Hubbard model, driven-dissipative oscillators exhibiting metastability. Through these diverse settings, a central goal is to identify which physical ingredients enhance the performance of QRC. To address these questions, we combine analytical insights with a broad range of numerical techniques, including exact diagonalization, tensor-network simulations, and open-system dynamics. Together, these approaches provide a unified framework for understanding how quantum dynamics can be exploited for computation. The main findings of the thesis on QRC and complex networks can be summarized as follows. (i) Particle statistics fundamentally shape computational power: fermions exhibit superior information spreading due to their algebra, while bosons can outperform all other substrates when input encoding is optimized. (ii) Metastability constitutes a computational resource: long-lived metastable states enhance memory capacity and allow a fast-injection protocol. (iii) In atomic lattices described by the Bose–Hubbard model, QRC performance is governed by the interplay between interactions and tunneling, with optimal regimes appearing both in the weakly interacting limit and near the onset of quantum chaos; importantly, disorder is not required to achieve high performance. (iv) Complex-network analysis reveals hidden features of the Kitaev chain: network observables sharply detect the topological transition in the Kitaev chain and uncover a previously unnoticed fully connected, perfectly clustered regime linked to ground-state factorization observed in the Ising spin chain.