Experimental differentiation and extremization with analog quantum circuits
Evan Philip, Julius de Hond, Vytautas Abramavičius, Kaonan Micadei, Mario Dagrada, Panagiotis Kl. Barkoutsos, Mourad Beji, Louis-Paul Henry, Vincent E. Elfving, Antonio A. Gentile, Savvas Varsamopoulos
Solving and optimizing differential equations (DEs) is ubiquitous in both engineering and fundamental science. The promise of quantum architectures to accelerate scientific computing thus naturally involved interest towards how efficiently quantum algorithms can solve DEs. Differentiable quantum circuits (DQC) offer a viable route to compute DE solutions using a variational approach amenable to existing quantum computers, by producing a machine-learnable surrogate of the solution. Quantum extremal learning (QEL) complements such approach by finding extreme points in the output of learnable models of unknown (implicit) functions, offering a powerful tool to bypass a full DE solution, in cases where the crux consists in retrieving solution extrema. In this work, we provide the results from the first experimental demonstration of both DQC and QEL, displaying their performance on a synthetic usecase. Whilst both DQC and QEL are expected to require digital quantum hardware, we successfully challenge this assumption by running a closed-loop instance on a commercial analog quantum computer, based upon neutral atom technology.
Solving and optimizing differential equations (DEs) is ubiquitous in both engineering and fundamental science. The promise of quantum architectures to accelerate scientific computing thus naturally involved interest towards how efficiently quantum algorithms can solve DEs. Differentiable quantum circuits (DQC) offer a viable route to compute DE solutions using a variational approach amenable to existing quantum computers, by producing a machine-learnable surrogate of the solution. Quantum extremal learning (QEL) complements such approach by finding extreme points in the output of learnable models of unknown (implicit) functions, offering a powerful tool to bypass a full DE solution, in cases where the crux consists in retrieving solution extrema. In this work, we provide the results from the first experimental demonstration of both DQC and QEL, displaying their performance on a synthetic usecase. Whilst both DQC and QEL are expected to require digital quantum hardware, we successfully challenge this assumption by running a closed-loop instance on a commercial analog quantum computer, based upon neutral atom technology.
Quantum computers have been proposed as a solution for efficiently solving non-linear differential equations (DEs), a fundamental task across diverse technological and scientific domains. However, a crucial milestone in this regard is to design protocols that are hardware-aware, making efficient use of limited available quantum resources. We focus here on promising variational methods derived from scientific machine learning: differentiable quantum circuits (DQC), addressing specifically their cost in number of circuit evaluations. Reducing the number of quantum circuit evaluations is particularly valuable in hybrid quantum/classical protocols, where the time required to interface and run quantum hardware at each cycle can impact the total wall-time much more than relatively inexpensive classical post-processing overhead. Here, we propose and test two sample-efficient protocols for solving non-linear DEs, achieving exponential savings in quantum circuit evaluations. These protocols are based on redesigning the extraction of information from DQC in a ``measure-first" approach, by introducing engineered cost operators similar to the randomized-measurement toolbox (i.e. classical shadows). In benchmark simulations on one and two-dimensional DEs, we report up to ∼ 100 fold reductions in circuit evaluations. Our protocols thus hold the promise to unlock larger and more challenging non-linear differential equation demonstrations with existing quantum hardware.
The role of differential equations (DEs) in science and engineering is of paramount importance, as they provide the mathematical framework for a multitude of natural phenomena. Since quantum computers promise significant advantages over classical computers, quantum algorithms for the solution of DEs have received a lot of attention. Particularly interesting are algorithms that offer advantages in the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, characterized by small and error-prone systems. We consider a framework of variational quantum algorithms, quantum circuit learning (QCL), in conjunction with derivation methods, in particular the parameter shift rule, to solve DEs. As these algorithms were specifically designed for NISQ computers, we analyze their applicability on NISQ devices by implementing QCL on an IBM quantum computer. Our analysis of QCL without the parameter shift rule shows that we can successfully learn different functions with three-qubit circuits. However, the hardware errors accumulate with increasing number of qubits, and thus, only a fraction of the qubits available on the current quantum systems can be effectively used. We further show that it is possible to determine derivatives of the learned functions using the parameter shift rule on the IBM hardware. The parameter shift rule results in higher errors, which limits its execution to low-order derivatives. Despite these limitations, we solve a first-order DE on the IBM quantum computer. We further explore the advantages of using multiple qubits in QCL by learning different functions simultaneously and demonstrate the solution of a coupled DE on a simulator.
Quantum computing promises to speed up some of the most challenging problems in science and engineering. Quantum algorithms have been proposed showing theoretical advantages in applications ranging from chemistry to logistics optimization. Many problems appearing in science and engineering can be rewritten as a set of differential equations. Quantum algorithms for solving differential equations have shown a provable advantage in the fault-tolerant quantum computing regime, where deep and wide quantum circuits can be used to solve large linear systems like partial differential equations (PDEs) efficiently. Recently, variational approaches to solving non-linear PDEs also with near-term quantum devices were proposed. One of the most promising general approaches is based on recent developments in the field of scientific machine learning for solving PDEs. We extend the applicability of near-term quantum computers to more general scientific machine learning tasks, including the discovery of differential equations from a dataset of measurements. We use differentiable quantum circuits (DQCs) to solve equations parameterized by a library of operators, and perform regression on a combination of data and equations. Our results show a promising path to Quantum Model Discovery (QMoD), on the interface between classical and quantum machine learning approaches. We demonstrate successful parameter inference and equation discovery using QMoD on different systems including a second-order, ordinary differential equation and a non-linear, partial differential equation.
Quantum machine learning promises to deliver near-term practical quantum computation applications using machine learning tools to optimize quantum hardware for scientific applications. Studies in this direction often propose using variational quantum circuits as the underlying hardware. However, these so-called VQCs exhibit flat landscapes with narrow and concentrated local minima, making their optimization inefficient and thwarting their advantage. This dissertation proposes using quantum many-body systems' dynamics for computation instead of circuits. This Analog quantum machine learning approach (AQML) uses tools from optimal control to deliver more manageable optimization landscapes and helps explain what types of computation are suitable for different hardware. Concretely, I show that arrays of Rydberg atoms can be leveraged to implement reservoir computers with enhanced memory storage and retrieval. I also show that two atom-species Rydberg arrays can reproduce the dynamics of the basic building blocks of artificial neural networks and be used for quantum-enhanced sensing and entanglement detection. This study shows that AQML algorithms are theoretically more expressive than their classical counterparts. Lastly, I show that while AQML algorithms can still exhibit problematic optimization landscapes, flatness can be mitigated, and local minima can be circumvented by co-designing the underlying hardware with the desired task. We exemplify this co-design in the context of quantum chemistry calculations. This dissertation shows that AQML algorithms can be used for various scientific and small-scale applications such as sensing, chemical design, entanglement witnessing, and time-series prediction. However, we still have a way to go before seeing full-scale applications. Instead, this dissertation focuses on theoretical studies and answers the question of what we can compute with quantum hardware's analog dynamics.
Quantum machine learning has gained considerable attention as quantum technology advances, presenting a promising approach for efficiently learning complex data patterns. Despite this promise, most contemporary quantum methods require significant resources for variational parameter optimization and face issues with vanishing gradients, leading to experiments that are either limited in scale or lack potential for quantum advantage. To address this, we develop a general-purpose, gradient-free, and scalable quantum reservoir learning algorithm that harnesses the quantum dynamics of neutral-atom analog quantum computers to process data. We experimentally implement the algorithm, achieving competitive performance across various categories of machine learning tasks, including binary and multi-class classification, as well as timeseries prediction. Effective and improving learning is observed with increasing system sizes of up to 108 qubits, demonstrating the largest quantum machine learning experiment to date. We further observe comparative quantum kernel advantage in learning tasks by constructing synthetic datasets based on the geometric differences between generated quantum and classical data kernels. Our findings demonstrate the potential of utilizing classically intractable quantum correlations for effective machine learning. We expect these results to stimulate further extensions to different quantum hardware and machine learning paradigms, including early fault-tolerant hardware and generative machine learning tasks.
We propose an approach for learning probability distributions as differentiable quantum circuits (DQC) that enable efficient quantum generative modeling (QGM) and synthetic data generation. Contrary to existing QGM approaches, we perform training of a DQC-based model, where data is encoded in a latent space with the proposed phase feature map of exponential capacity. This is followed by a trainable quantum circuit, forming the model. We then map the trained model to the bit basis using a fixed unitary transformation, in this case corresponding to a quantum Fourier transform circuit. It allows fast sampling from parametrized distributions using a single-shot readout. Importantly, latent space training provides models that are automatically differentiable, and we show how samples from solutions of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) can be accessed by solving stationary and time-dependent Fokker-Planck equations with a quantum protocol. Our approach opens a route to multidimensional generative modeling with qubit registers explicitly correlated via a (fixed) entangling layer. In this case quantum computers can offer advantage as efficient samplers, which perform complex inverse transform sampling enabled by the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. On a technical side the advances are multiple, as we introduce the phase feature map, analyze its properties, and develop frequency-taming techniques that include qubitwise training and feature map sparsification. Published by the American Physical Society 2024