Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2603.03318

Quantum-Inspired Self-Attention in a Large Language Model

Nikita Kuznetsov, Niyaz Ismagilov, Ernesto Campos

cs.CLcs.AIquant-phSubmitted Feb 9, 2026• Announced Feb 10, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing have been predominantly driven by transformer-based architectures, which rely heavily on self-attention mechanisms to model relationships between tokens in a sequence. Similarly, the field of Quantum Natural Language Processing, which seeks to leverage quantum principles to address challenges in language understanding and generation tasks, has seen the recent development of quantum self-attention mechanisms. We propose a classical quantum-inspired self-attention (QISA) mechanism and integrate it into the full autoregressive language modeling pipeline of GPT-1. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first integration of this kind, as previous quantum self-attention mechanisms have been primarily tested on text classification. In our experiments, QISA achieves better performance when compared to standard self-attention on the metrics character error rate ($15.5\times$ better), word error rate ($4.7 \times $) and cross-entropy loss ($13 \times$). This is achieved while only requiring a $ 2.6\times$ longer inference time.

Comments
8 pages, 7 figures

Related papers

Hybrid Encoding-based Quantum Self Attention for Financial Time Series Analysis

S Lokes, Suresh Reddy, Samuel Yen Chi Chen

Self-attention mechanisms, central to Transformer architectures, have become foundational in the development of large language models (LLMs) and various advanced machine learning systems. These mechanisms are pivotal for effectively capturing complex data dependencies and relationships, which is crucial for tasks such as natural language understanding and generation. However, as dimensionality increases, self-attention mechanisms face significant challenges related to computational efficiency and scalability. This paper introduces an encoding-based quantum self-attention mechanism designed to address these issues by embedding classical data into quantum states. This approach facilitates more efficient computation and reduces model complexity. To further enhance performance for real-world applications, particularly in financial time series forecasting, we propose a hybrid model that integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with quantum self-attention mechanism. Given the constraints of the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, this hybrid approach represents a plausible solution, leveraging the strengths of both classical and quantum methods and focusing on achieving faster convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach converges significantly quicker than traditional models, showcasing the advantages of integrating quantum techniques with classical machine learning for practical applications.

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW)•Apr 6, 2025•1 citation

A Hybrid Transformer Architecture with a Quantized Self-Attention Mechanism Applied to Molecular Generation

Anthony M. Smaldone, Yu Shee, Gregory W. Kyro +4 more

The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing the computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to calculate attention scores between all pairs of tokens in a sequence. These scores are then multiplied by a learnable value matrix to obtain the output self-attention matrix, enabling the model to effectively capture long-range dependencies within the input sequence. Here, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical self-attention mechanism as part of a transformer decoder, the architecture underlying large language models (LLMs). To demonstrate its utility in chemistry, we train this model on the QM9 dataset for conditional generation, using SMILES strings as input, each labeled with a set of physicochemical properties that serve as conditions during inference. Our theoretical analysis shows that the time complexity of the query-key dot product is reduced from O ( n 2 d ) in a classical model to O ( n 2 log ⁡ d ) in our quantum model, where n and d represent the sequence length and the embedding dimension, respectively. We perform simulations using NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform, which is designed for efficient GPU scalability. This work provides a promising avenue for quantum-enhanced natural language processing (NLP).

arXiv:2502.19214•Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation•May 7, 2025•16 citations

Quantum Mixed-State Self-Attention Network

Fu Chen, Qinglin Zhao, Feng Li +3 more

Attention mechanisms have revolutionized natural language processing. Combining them with quantum computing aims to further advance this technology. This paper introduces a novel Quantum Mixed-State Self-Attention Network (QMSAN) for natural language processing tasks. Our model leverages quantum computing principles to enhance the effectiveness of self-attention mechanisms. QMSAN uses a quantum attention mechanism based on mixed state, allowing for direct similarity estimation between queries and keys in the quantum domain. This approach leads to more effective attention coefficient calculations. We also propose an innovative quantum positional encoding scheme, implemented through fixed quantum gates within the circuit, improving the model's ability to capture sequence information without additional qubit resources. In numerical experiments of text classification tasks on public datasets, QMSAN outperforms Quantum Self-Attention Neural Network (QSANN). Furthermore, we demonstrate QMSAN's robustness in different quantum noise environments, highlighting its potential for near-term quantum devices.

arXiv:2403.02871•Mar 5, 2024•1 citation

Quantum-Inspired Transformers for Scalable Natural Language Processing Applications in Future AI

Priya Vij, Parmanand Yadav

Quantum-Inspired Transformers are a new class of approaches for natural language processing (NLP) that use principles inspired by physical quantum mechanics to encode and process linguistic information. Paper aims to improve both scalability and efficiency for large-scale NLP tasks in the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI). However, traditional transformers can struggle to encode complex semantic relationships across long sequences and can require high levels of compute resources, hence limiting scalability for large datasets and multilingual tasks. In addition, traditional embeddings do not represent multiple contextual meanings simultaneously, which decreases model expressiveness. To address these challenges and maximize the exploration of potential quantum effects in AI, this paper presents a Quantum State Embedding Attention (QSEA) framework that encodes tokens as quantum inspired states with complex-valued amplitudes. Attention, which is based on entangled states, is meant to efficiently capture long-range dependencies while reducing compute and increasing scalability, all without losing a rich understanding of context. Whereas multilingual translation needs to encode both the source similarity and the target language within a smaller semantic representation space. Our experimentation shows that QSEA consistently provides increased accuracy in decoding, measures attention across long sequences, and yields enduring scalability over large multilingual datasets. The evidence demonstrates the potential for QSEA to be the new layer in the future of AI systems, a layer that is scalable and a highperforming NLP application.

Procedia Computer Science•Jan 1, 2026•1 citation

Quantum-Enhanced Natural Language Generation: A Multi-Model Framework with Hybrid Quantum-Classical Architectures

Chi-Sheng Chen, En-Jui Kuo

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of quantum text generation models against traditional Transformer/MLP architectures, addressing the growing interest in quantum computing applications for natural language processing. We conduct systematic experiments comparing five distinct models: Transformer (baseline), Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Network (QKSAN), Quantum RWKV (QRWKV), and Quantum Attention Sequence Architecture (QASA) across five diverse datasets including simple sentences, short stories, quantum phrases, haiku poetry, and proverbs. Our evaluation employs multiple metrics including perplexity, BLEU scores, vocabulary diversity, repetition rates, and fluency measures to assess different aspects of text generation quality. The experimental results reveal that while traditional Transformer models maintain overall superiority with the lowest average perplexity (1.21) and highest BLEU-1 score (0.2895), quantum-inspired models demonstrate competitive performance in specific scenarios. Notably, QKSAN achieves a competitive BLEU-1 score of 0.2800 while maintaining zero repetition rates, and QRWKV demonstrates perfect vocabulary diversity (Distinct-1 = 1.000) in certain tasks.

arXiv:2508.21332•Aug 29, 2025•0 citations

A Survey of Classical and Quantum Sequence Models

I-Chi Chen, Harshdeep Singh, V L Anukruti +2 more

Our primary objective is to conduct a brief survey of various classical and quantum neural net sequence models, which includes self-attention and recurrent neural networks, with a focus on recent quantum approaches proposed to work with near-term quantum devices, while exploring some basic enhancements for these quantum models. We re-implement a key representative set of these existing methods, adapting an image classification approach using quantum self-attention to create a quantum hybrid transformer that works for text and image classification, and applying quantum self-attention and quantum recurrent neural networks to natural language processing tasks. We also explore different encoding techniques and introduce positional encoding into quantum self-attention neural networks leading to improved accuracy and faster convergence in text and image classification experiments. This paper also performs a comparative analysis of classical self-attention models and their quantum counterparts, helping shed light on the differences in these models and their performance.

arXiv:2312.10242•International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS)•Jan 3, 2024•5 citations
Recent advances in Natural Language Processing have been predominantly driven by transformer-based architectures, which rely heavily on self-attention mechanisms to model relationships between tokens in a sequence. Similarly, the field of Quantum Natural Language Processing, which seeks to leverage quantum principles to address challenges in language understanding and generation tasks, has seen the recent development of quantum self-attention mechanisms. We propose a classical quantum-inspired self-attention (QISA) mechanism and integrate it into the full autoregressive language modeling pipeline of GPT-1. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first integration of this kind, as previous quantum self-attention mechanisms have been primarily tested on text classification. In our experiments, QISA achieves better performance when compared to standard self-attention on the metrics character error rate (15.5×15.5\times15.5× better), word error rate (4.7×4.7 \times 4.7×) and cross-entropy loss (13×13 \times13×). This is achieved while only requiring a 2.6× 2.6\times2.6× longer inference time.
Self-attention mechanisms, central to Transformer architectures, have become foundational in the development of large language models (LLMs) and various advanced machine learning systems. These mechanisms are pivotal for effectively capturing complex data dependencies and relationships, which is crucial for tasks such as natural language understanding and generation. However, as dimensionality increases, self-attention mechanisms face significant challenges related to computational efficiency and scalability. This paper introduces an encoding-based quantum self-attention mechanism designed to address these issues by embedding classical data into quantum states. This approach facilitates more efficient computation and reduces model complexity. To further enhance performance for real-world applications, particularly in financial time series forecasting, we propose a hybrid model that integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with quantum self-attention mechanism. Given the constraints of the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, this hybrid approach represents a plausible solution, leveraging the strengths of both classical and quantum methods and focusing on achieving faster convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach converges significantly quicker than traditional models, showcasing the advantages of integrating quantum techniques with classical machine learning for practical applications.
The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing the computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to calculate attention scores between all pairs of tokens in a sequence. These scores are then multiplied by a learnable value matrix to obtain the output self-attention matrix, enabling the model to effectively capture long-range dependencies within the input sequence. Here, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical self-attention mechanism as part of a transformer decoder, the architecture underlying large language models (LLMs). To demonstrate its utility in chemistry, we train this model on the QM9 dataset for conditional generation, using SMILES strings as input, each labeled with a set of physicochemical properties that serve as conditions during inference. Our theoretical analysis shows that the time complexity of the query-key dot product is reduced from O ( n 2 d ) in a classical model to O ( n 2 log ⁡ d ) in our quantum model, where n and d represent the sequence length and the embedding dimension, respectively. We perform simulations using NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform, which is designed for efficient GPU scalability. This work provides a promising avenue for quantum-enhanced natural language processing (NLP).
Attention mechanisms have revolutionized natural language processing. Combining them with quantum computing aims to further advance this technology. This paper introduces a novel Quantum Mixed-State Self-Attention Network (QMSAN) for natural language processing tasks. Our model leverages quantum computing principles to enhance the effectiveness of self-attention mechanisms. QMSAN uses a quantum attention mechanism based on mixed state, allowing for direct similarity estimation between queries and keys in the quantum domain. This approach leads to more effective attention coefficient calculations. We also propose an innovative quantum positional encoding scheme, implemented through fixed quantum gates within the circuit, improving the model's ability to capture sequence information without additional qubit resources. In numerical experiments of text classification tasks on public datasets, QMSAN outperforms Quantum Self-Attention Neural Network (QSANN). Furthermore, we demonstrate QMSAN's robustness in different quantum noise environments, highlighting its potential for near-term quantum devices.
Quantum-Inspired Transformers are a new class of approaches for natural language processing (NLP) that use principles inspired by physical quantum mechanics to encode and process linguistic information. Paper aims to improve both scalability and efficiency for large-scale NLP tasks in the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI). However, traditional transformers can struggle to encode complex semantic relationships across long sequences and can require high levels of compute resources, hence limiting scalability for large datasets and multilingual tasks. In addition, traditional embeddings do not represent multiple contextual meanings simultaneously, which decreases model expressiveness. To address these challenges and maximize the exploration of potential quantum effects in AI, this paper presents a Quantum State Embedding Attention (QSEA) framework that encodes tokens as quantum inspired states with complex-valued amplitudes. Attention, which is based on entangled states, is meant to efficiently capture long-range dependencies while reducing compute and increasing scalability, all without losing a rich understanding of context. Whereas multilingual translation needs to encode both the source similarity and the target language within a smaller semantic representation space. Our experimentation shows that QSEA consistently provides increased accuracy in decoding, measures attention across long sequences, and yields enduring scalability over large multilingual datasets. The evidence demonstrates the potential for QSEA to be the new layer in the future of AI systems, a layer that is scalable and a highperforming NLP application.
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of quantum text generation models against traditional Transformer/MLP architectures, addressing the growing interest in quantum computing applications for natural language processing. We conduct systematic experiments comparing five distinct models: Transformer (baseline), Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Network (QKSAN), Quantum RWKV (QRWKV), and Quantum Attention Sequence Architecture (QASA) across five diverse datasets including simple sentences, short stories, quantum phrases, haiku poetry, and proverbs. Our evaluation employs multiple metrics including perplexity, BLEU scores, vocabulary diversity, repetition rates, and fluency measures to assess different aspects of text generation quality. The experimental results reveal that while traditional Transformer models maintain overall superiority with the lowest average perplexity (1.21) and highest BLEU-1 score (0.2895), quantum-inspired models demonstrate competitive performance in specific scenarios. Notably, QKSAN achieves a competitive BLEU-1 score of 0.2800 while maintaining zero repetition rates, and QRWKV demonstrates perfect vocabulary diversity (Distinct-1 = 1.000) in certain tasks.
Our primary objective is to conduct a brief survey of various classical and quantum neural net sequence models, which includes self-attention and recurrent neural networks, with a focus on recent quantum approaches proposed to work with near-term quantum devices, while exploring some basic enhancements for these quantum models. We re-implement a key representative set of these existing methods, adapting an image classification approach using quantum self-attention to create a quantum hybrid transformer that works for text and image classification, and applying quantum self-attention and quantum recurrent neural networks to natural language processing tasks. We also explore different encoding techniques and introduce positional encoding into quantum self-attention neural networks leading to improved accuracy and faster convergence in text and image classification experiments. This paper also performs a comparative analysis of classical self-attention models and their quantum counterparts, helping shed light on the differences in these models and their performance.