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arXiv:2511.19160 · Machine Learning Science and Technology

Flexible Genetic Algorithm for Quantum Support Vector Machines

Nguyen Minh Duc, Vu Tuan Hai, Le Bin Ho, Tran Nguyen Lan

quant-phSubmitted Nov 24, 2025• Announced Nov 25, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) is one of the most promising frameworks in quantum machine learning, yet their performance depends on the design of the feature map. Conventional approaches rely on fixed quantum circuits, which often fail to generalize across datasets. To address this limitation, we propose GA-QSVM, a hybrid framework that employs Genetic Algorithms (GA) to automatically optimize feature maps. The proposed method introduces a configurable framework that flexibly defines the evolutionary parameters, enabling the construction of adaptive circuits. Experimental evaluation of datasets, including Digits, Fashion, Wine, and Breast Cancer, demonstrates that GA-QSVMs achieve a comparable accuracy compared to classical SVMs and standard QSVMs. Furthermore, transfer learning results indicate that GA-QSVM's circuits generalize effectively across datasets. These findings highlight the potential of evolutionary strategies to automate and enhance kernel design for future quantum machine learning applications.

Journal reference
Machine Learning: Science and Technology (2026)
DOI
10.1088/2632-2153/ae894c
Comments
14 pages, 7 figures

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•Jan 1, 2024•1 citation
Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) is one of the most promising frameworks in quantum machine learning, yet their performance depends on the design of the feature map. Conventional approaches rely on fixed quantum circuits, which often fail to generalize across datasets. To address this limitation, we propose GA-QSVM, a hybrid framework that employs Genetic Algorithms (GA) to automatically optimize feature maps. The proposed method introduces a configurable framework that flexibly defines the evolutionary parameters, enabling the construction of adaptive circuits. Experimental evaluation of datasets, including Digits, Fashion, Wine, and Breast Cancer, demonstrates that GA-QSVMs achieve a comparable accuracy compared to classical SVMs and standard QSVMs. Furthermore, transfer learning results indicate that GA-QSVM's circuits generalize effectively across datasets. These findings highlight the potential of evolutionary strategies to automate and enhance kernel design for future quantum machine learning applications.
The data encoding circuits used in quantum support vector machine (QSVM) kernels play a crucial role in their classification accuracy. However, manually designing these circuits poses significant challenges in terms of time and performance. To address this, we leverage the GASP (Genetic Algorithm for State Preparation) framework for gate sequence selection in QSVM kernel circuits. We explore supervised and unsupervised kernel loss functions' impact on encoding circuit optimisation and evaluate them on diverse datasets for binary and multiple-class scenarios. Benchmarking against classical and quantum kernels reveals GA-generated circuits matching or surpassing standard techniques. We analyse the relationship between test accuracy and quantum kernel entropy, with results indicating a positive correlation. Our automated framework reduces trial and error, and enables improved QSVM based machine learning performance for finance, healthcare, and materials science applications.
Quantum circuit compilation and qubit mapping represent critical challenges in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices due to limited qubit connectivity and the presence of hardware noise. Conventional heuristic mapping methods often generate suboptimal solutions under realistic noisy execution conditions. This paper proposes a hybrid learning-guided framework that integrates a quantum genetic algorithm (QGA) with a quantum support vector machine (QSVM) for noise-aware qubit mapping optimization in NISQ systems. In the proposed framework, QGA generates diverse candidate mappings, while QSVM-based supervised ranking identifies high-quality mappings using structural and execution-related features. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mapping selection strategy, a QROC/Q-AUC-based evaluation mechanism is introduced to quantify the decision reliability and ranking capability of the mapping selection process under noisy quantum execution conditions. Extensive experiments on benchmark quantum circuits using noisy simulation environments derived from IBM Quantum hardware models demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces SWAP overhead and circuit depth while improving execution fidelity and the reliability of selecting high-quality mappings compared with conventional heuristic and evolutionary approaches. The results indicate that the integration of evolutionary optimization and quantum machine learning provides an effective solution for noise-aware qubit mapping in NISQ-era quantum compilation.
Abstract Feature selection is critical in machine learning to reduce dimensionality and improve model accuracy and efficiency. The exponential growth in feature space dimensionality for modern datasets directly results in ambiguous samples and redundant features, which can severely degrade classification accuracy. Quantum machine learning offers potential advantages for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method, quantum support vector machine feature selection (QSVMF), integrating quantum support vector machines with multi-objective genetic algorithm. QSVMF optimizes multiple simultaneous objectives: maximizing classification accuracy, minimizing selected features and quantum circuit costs, and reducing feature covariance. We apply QSVMF for feature selection on a breast cancer dataset, comparing the performance of QSVMF against classical approaches with the selected features. Experimental results show that QSVMF achieves superior performance. Furthermore, the Pareto front solutions of QSVMF enable analysis of accuracy versus feature set size trade-offs, identifying extremely sparse yet accurate feature subsets. We contextualize the biological relevance of the selected features in terms of known breast cancer biomarkers. This work highlights the potential of quantum-based feature selection to enhance machine learning efficiency and performance on complex real-world data.
Abstract Kernel methods are an import class of techniques in machine learning. To be effective, good feature maps are crucial for mapping non-linearly separable input data into a higher dimensional (feature) space, thus allowing the data to be linearly separable in feature space. Previous work has shown that quantum feature map design can be automated for a given dataset using NSGA-II, a genetic algorithm, while both minimizing circuit size and maximizing classification accuracy. However, the evaluation of the accuracy achieved by a candidate feature map is costly. In this work, we demonstrate the suitability of kernel-target alignment as a substitute for accuracy in genetic algorithm-based quantum feature map design. Kernel-target alignment is faster to evaluate than accuracy and does not require some data points to be reserved for its evaluation. To further accelerate the evaluation of genetic fitness, we provide a method to approximate kernel-target alignment. To improve kernel-target alignment and root mean squared error, the final trainable parameters of the generated circuits are further trained using COBYLA to determine whether a hybrid approach applying conventional circuit parameter training can easily complement the genetic structure optimization approach. A total of eight new approaches are compared to the original across nine varied binary classification problems from the UCI machine learning repository, showing that kernel-target alignment and its approximation produce feature map circuits enabling comparable accuracy to the previous work but with larger margins on training data (in excess of 20% larger) that improve further with circuit parameter training.
Abstract The study proposes a mechanism to generate effective feature maps with optimal feature selection using the Tabu Search algorithm. It compares the performance of classical support vector machines (SVM), quantum support vector machines (QSVM) with only gate selection, and QSVM with both gate selection and feature selection (QSVM-FS) across various datasets. The results indicate that classical SVMs excel with several benchmark datasets, while QSVMs show superior performance on synthetic datasets with non-linear separability. Notably, QSVM-FS consistently outperforms QSVM without feature selection, highlighting the importance of feature selection in enhancing model accuracy. These findings suggest that while both quantum and classical SVMs have unique advantages, quantum methods offer particular benefits in specific scenarios. In the NISQ era, classical simulations are a primary tool for assessing quantum experiments, though they face challenges such as design impacts, limited scales, and biases. Ultimately, no definitive winner exists between quantum and classical methods, as both have their own strengths.
Good feature maps are crucial for machine learning kernel methods for effective mapping of non-linearly separable input data into a higher dimension feature space, thus allowing the data to be linearly separable in feature space. Recent works have proposed automating the task of quantum feature map circuit design with methods such as variational ansatz parameter optimization and genetic algorithms. A problem commonly faced by genetic algorithm methods is the high cost of computing the genetic cost function. To mitigate this, this work investigates the suitability of two metrics as alternatives to test set classification accuracy. Accuracy has been applied successfully as a genetic algorithm cost function for quantum feature map design in previous work. The first metric is kernel-target alignment, which has previously been used as a training metric in quantum feature map design by variational ansatz training. Kernel-target alignment is a faster metric to evaluate than test set accuracy and does not require any data points to be reserved from the training set for its evaluation. The second metric is an estimation of kernel-target alignment which further accelerates the genetic fitness evaluation by an adjustable constant factor. The second aim of this work is to address the issue of the limited gate parameter choice available to the genetic algorithm. This is done by training the parameters of the quantum feature map circuits output in the final generation of the genetic algorithm using COBYLA to improve either kernel-target alignment or root mean squared error. This hybrid approach is intended to complement the genetic algorithm structure optimization approach by improving the feature maps without increasing their size. Eight new approaches are compared to the accuracy optimization approach across nine varied binary classification problems from the UCI machine learning repository, demonstrating that kernel-target alignment and its approximation produce feature map circuits enabling comparable accuracy to the original approach, with larger margins on training data that improve further with variational training.