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arXiv:2510.07195

Accelerating Inference for Multilayer Neural Networks with Quantum Computers

Arthur G. Rattew, Po‐Wei Huang, Naixu Guo, Lirandë Pira, Patrick Rebentrost

Published Oct 8, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Fault-tolerant Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) promise to deliver exponential speed-ups in select computational tasks, yet their integration into modern deep learning pipelines remains unclear. In this work, we take a step towards bridging this gap by presenting the first fully-coherent quantum implementation of a multilayer neural network with non-linear activation functions. Our constructions mirror widely used deep learning architectures based on ResNet, and consist of residual blocks with multi-filter 2D convolutions, sigmoid activations, skip-connections, and layer normalizations. We analyse the complexity of inference for networks under three quantum data access regimes. Without any assumptions, we establish a quadratic speedup over classical methods for shallow bilinear-style networks. With efficient quantum access to the weights, we obtain a quartic speedup over classical methods. With efficient quantum access to both the inputs and the network weights, we prove that a network with an $N$-dimensional vectorized input, $k$ residual block layers, and a final residual-linear-pooling layer can be implemented with an error of $ε$ with $O(\text{polylog}(N/ε)^k)$ inference cost.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2510.07195

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Achieving a practical quantum speedup for deep neural networks (DNNs) remains a central yet elusive goal, hindered by the dual challenges of constructing deep architectures and the prohibitive overhead of data loading and measurement. We introduce a framework to overcome these barriers, specifically targeting an asymptotic speedup with respect to the large input dimensions of modern DNNs (e.g., sequence length or image size). Our framework enables the design of multi-layer Quantum ResNet and Quantum Transformer models by strategically decomposing tasks: computationally intensive operations on the large input dimension are assigned to quantum linear algebra subroutines, while operations on the smaller, fixed feature dimension are handled by efficient quantum arithmetic. A cornerstone of our approach is a novel data transfer protocol, Discrete Chebyshev Decomposition (DCD), which facilitates this modularity. Numerical validation reveals a pivotal insight: the measurement cost required to maintain a target accuracy scales sublinearly with the input dimension. This sublinear scaling is the key to preserving the quantum advantage, ensuring that I/O overhead does not nullify the computational gains. A rigorous resource analysis further corroborates the superiority of our models in both efficiency and flexibility. Powered by this targeted acceleration strategy and the efficiency of DCD, our framework establishes a viable path toward scalable quantum deep learning.
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