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arXiv:2605.27923

Do We Really Need Quantum Machine Learning?: A Multidimensional Empirical Study

Sudip Vhaduri, Ryan Gammon, Sayanton Dibbo

cs.CVcs.AIcs.LGquant-phSubmitted May 27, 2026• Announced May 28, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · May 27, 2026v2 · Jul 19, 2026
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Abstract

The rapid growth of computer vision and increasingly complex image recognition tasks has exposed fundamental computational limitations of classical machine learning models, motivating the exploration of quantum computing as an emerging new paradigm. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of classical and quantum machine learning models for image recognition on the MNIST handwritten digit dataset, evaluating both traditional models, a Classical Support Vector Machine (CSVM) and a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), and deep neural network models, a Classical Convolutional Neural Network (CCNN) and a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN), across four performance dimensions: classification accuracy, computational runtime, parameter count, and memory requirements. Experiments are conducted as functions of both feature dimensionality and sample size, and across CPU and GPU execution environments, providing a controlled, multidimensional comparison to address gaps in prior work. For the SVM-based models, QSVM consistently outperforms CSVM in accuracy, reaching $\sim$ 0.90 versus $\sim$ 0.85 at 1,000 samples, with a higher computational cost. A feature count of 10 qubits and a sample size in the range of 200 -- 500 emerge as practical operating points that balance accuracy and runtime. For the neural network models, CCNN and QCNN achieve comparable classification accuracy, both exceeding 0.96 at 64 features and 60,000 samples, yet QCNN offers substantially superior parameter and memory efficiency, requiring $\sim$ 94\% fewer parameters and $\sim$ 75\% less memory than CCNN at higher feature counts, while incurring higher runtime. Across both model families, quantum models consistently outperform classical models by greater margins in accuracy as feature dimensionality or sample size increases.

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The rapid growth of computer vision and increasingly complex image recognition tasks has exposed fundamental computational limitations of classical machine learning models, motivating the exploration of quantum computing as an emerging new paradigm. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of classical and quantum machine learning models for image recognition on the MNIST handwritten digit dataset, evaluating both traditional models, a Classical Support Vector Machine (CSVM) and a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), and deep neural network models, a Classical Convolutional Neural Network (CCNN) and a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN), across four performance dimensions: classification accuracy, computational runtime, parameter count, and memory requirements. Experiments are conducted as functions of both feature dimensionality and sample size, and across CPU and GPU execution environments, providing a controlled, multidimensional comparison to address gaps in prior work. For the SVM-based models, QSVM consistently outperforms CSVM in accuracy, reaching ∼\sim∼ 0.90 versus ∼\sim∼ 0.85 at 1,000 samples, with a higher computational cost. A feature count of 10 qubits and a sample size in the range of 200 -- 500 emerge as practical operating points that balance accuracy and runtime. For the neural network models, CCNN and QCNN achieve comparable classification accuracy, both exceeding 0.96 at 64 features and 60,000 samples, yet QCNN offers substantially superior parameter and memory efficiency, requiring ∼\sim∼ 94% fewer parameters and ∼\sim∼ 75% less memory than CCNN at higher feature counts, while incurring higher runtime. Across both model families, quantum models consistently outperform classical models by greater margins in accuracy as feature dimensionality or sample size increases.
This research explores quantum machine learning for image classification, comparing classical and quantum models. A classical convolutional neural network (CNN), based on the LeNet architecture, achieved 99.12% accuracy on MNIST, outperforming a quantum CNN, which attained 93.30%. Quantum encoders applied to Fashion-MNIST reached 85.60%, while quantum support vector machine (SVM), implemented for binary classification, obtained 71.34%. The study integrates hybrid quantum-classical models, leveraging quantum circuits for feature extraction. A quantum autoencoder-based classifier was introduced, demonstrating efficient data compression and classification without additional qubits. Feature encoding using RX gates mapped classical data into quantum states, and the impact of parameterized quantum circuit structures on classification accuracy was analyzed. Results indicate that specific ansatz structures yield superior accuracy, highlighting the significance of quantum circuit design. While classical models currently outperform quantum counterparts, quantum approaches reduce trainable parameters and computational complexity. Limitations in current quantum hardware, including noise and scalability, restrict performance. However, advancements in error mitigation, quantum gate efficiency, and scalable quantum architecture could bridge the gap with classical methods. These quantum techniques hold potential in aerospace applications, such as satellite image classification, anomaly detection in remote sensing, and real-time processing of high-dimensional image data. This study underscores the growing role of quantum circuits in machine learning, particularly in feature extraction and classification, suggesting that future quantum hardware could unlock new capabilities in end-to-end learning beyond hybrid approaches.
Quantum computing is an emerging computing field that is expected to make a huge impact on several scopes of science and technology. In this paper, we investigate the role of quantum computing in image classification, as an important branch of machine learning with widely used applications in healthcare, military, and IR4.0. In particular, we systemically compare the performance of two well-known classical image classification systems, i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutions Neural Network (CNN), with equivalent quantum image classification algorithms, i.e., Quantum Support Vector Machine (Q-SVM) and Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (Q-CNN). Both quantum and classical algorithms are implemented on available Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices using MNIST dataset. Performance of models were compared regarding accuracy and training time. The results show that classical algorithms outperform the quantum algorithms for the given tasks. However, we observe that large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing can effectively perform image classification tasks in the future.
This study presents a systematic comparison between hybrid quantum-classical neural networks and purely classical models across three benchmark datasets (MNIST, CIFAR100, and STL10) to evaluate their performance, efficiency, and robustness. The hybrid models integrate parameterized quantum circuits with classical deep learning architectures, while the classical counterparts use conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Experiments were conducted over 50 training epochs for each dataset, with evaluations on validation accuracy, test accuracy, training time, computational resource usage, and adversarial robustness (tested with ε=0.1ε=0.1ε=0.1 perturbations).Key findings demonstrate that hybrid models consistently outperform classical models in final accuracy, achieving {99.38\% (MNIST), 41.69\% (CIFAR100), and 74.05\% (STL10) validation accuracy, compared to classical benchmarks of 98.21\%, 32.25\%, and 63.76\%, respectively. Notably, the hybrid advantage scales with dataset complexity, showing the most significant gains on CIFAR100 (+9.44\%) and STL10 (+10.29\%). Hybrid models also train 5--12×\times× faster (e.g., 21.23s vs. 108.44s per epoch on MNIST) and use 6--32\% fewer parameters} while maintaining superior generalization to unseen test data.Adversarial robustness tests reveal that hybrid models are significantly more resilient on simpler datasets (e.g., 45.27\% robust accuracy on MNIST vs. 10.80\% for classical) but show comparable fragility on complex datasets like CIFAR100 ($\sim$1\% robustness for both). Resource efficiency analyses indicate that hybrid models consume less memory (4--5GB vs. 5--6GB for classical) and lower CPU utilization (9.5\% vs. 23.2\% on average).These results suggest that hybrid quantum-classical architectures offer compelling advantages in accuracy, training efficiency, and parameter scalability, particularly for complex vision tasks.
In order to leverage quantum computers for machine learning tasks such as image classification, careful consideration is required: NISQ-era quantum computers have limitations, which include noise, scalability, read-in and read-out times, and gate operation times. Therefore, strategies should be devised to mitigate the impact that complex datasets can have on the overall efficiency of a quantum machine learning pipeline. This may otherwise lead to excessive resource demands or increased noise. We apply a classical feature extraction method using a ResNet10-inspired convolutional autoencoder to both reduce the dimensionality of the dataset and extract abstract and meaningful features before feeding them into a quantum machine learning block. The quantum block of choice is a quantum-enhanced support vector machine (QSVM), as support vector machines typically do not require large sample sizes to identify patterns in data and have short-depth quantum circuits, which limits the impact of noise. The autoencoder is trained to extract meaningful features through image reconstruction, aiming to minimize the mean squared error across a training set. Three image datasets are used to illustrate the pipeline: HTRU-1, MNIST, and CIFAR-10. We also include a quantum-enhanced one-class support vector machine (QOCSVM) for the highly unbalanced HTRU-1 set, as well as classical machine learning results to serve as a benchmark. Finally, the HTRU-2 dataset is also included to serve as a benchmark for a dataset with well-correlated features. The autoencoder achieved near-perfect reconstruction and high classification accuracy for MNIST, while CIFAR-10 showed poorer performance due to image complexity, and HTRU-1 struggled because of dataset imbalance. This highlights the need for a balance between dimensionality reduction through classical feature extraction and prediction performance using quantum methods.
This paper evaluates the performance of two quantum machine learning algorithms: Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) and Quantum Principal Component Analysis (Q-PCA). The scalability of QSVM is analyzed across increasing dataset sizes and feature dimensions, revealing faster-than-linear growth in kernel evaluation and SVM training times. However, this computational overhead is accompanied by a notable decline in classification accuracy, highlighting challenges in applying QSVM to larger or more complex datasets. In contrast, Q-PCA demonstrates near-linear scalability with dataset size and qubit count, leveraging the independence of quantum circuit execution and structured operations to maintain efficiency. A QNN-based implementation of Q-PCA further validates its ability to align data with principal components, maximize variance, and enable effective dimensionality reduction. These findings emphasize the potential of Q-PCA for efficient quantum-enhanced data analysis while underscoring the need for optimization in QSVM and further exploration of Q-PCA’s capabilities for real-world quantum computing applications.
This study explores the performance of Quantum Support Vector Classifiers (QSVCs) and Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) in comparison to classical models for machine learning tasks. By evaluating these models on the Iris and MNIST-PCA datasets, we find that quantum models tend to outperform classical approaches as the problem complexity increases. While QSVCs generally provide more consistent results, QNNs exhibit superior performance in higher-complexity tasks due to their increased quantum load. Additionally, we analyze the impact of hyperparameter tuning, showing that feature maps and ansatz configurations significantly influence model accuracy. We also compare the PennyLane and Qiskit frameworks, concluding that Qiskit provides better optimization and efficiency for our implementation. These findings highlight the potential of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) for complex classification problems and provide insights into model selection and optimization strategies