Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.
Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as a promising paradigm for scientific computing, particularly when combined with Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve partial differential equations. In this work, we introduce a Quantum Physics-Informed Neural Network (QPINN) framework to solve the Helmholtz equation in the context for scattered-wavefield. To overcome the numerical instabilities associated with point-source singularities commonly encountered in classical PINNs, we adopt the Lippmann–Schwinger integral formulation. The proposed hybrid architecture couples a classical neural-network encoder with a variational quantum circuit, enabling the learning of expressive, dynamically generated feature embeddings. Numerical experiments on a heterogeneous velocity model demonstrate that the proposed QPINN achieves high solution accuracy while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters than analogous classical neural network architectures. Our results highlight the potential of hybrid quantum-classical approaches as efficient and scalable alternatives for wavefield simulation and for solving wave-based inverse problems.
Seismic inversion-including post-stack, pre-stack, and full waveform inversion is compute and memory-intensive. Recently, several approaches, including physics-informed machine learning, have been developed to address some of these limitations. Motivated by the potential of quantum computing, we report on our attempt to map one such classical physics-informed algorithm to a quantum framework. The primary goal is to investigate the technical challenges of this mapping, given that quantum algorithms rely on computing principles fundamentally different from those in classical computing. Quantum computers operate using qubits, which exploit superposition and entanglement, offering the potential to solve classically intractable problems. While current quantum hardware is limited, hybrid quantum-classical algorithms-particularly in quantum machine learning (QML)-demonstrate potential for near-term applications and can be readily simulated. We apply QML to subsurface imaging through the development of a hybrid quantum physics-informed neural network (HQ-PINN) for post-stack and pre-stack seismic inversion. The HQ-PINN architecture adopts an encoder-decoder structure: a hybrid quantum neural network encoder estimates P- and S-impedances from seismic data, while the decoder reconstructs seismic responses using geophysical relationships. Training is guided by minimizing the misfit between the input and reconstructed seismic traces. We systematically assess the impact of quantum layer design, differentiation strategies, and simulator backends on inversion performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through the inversion of both synthetic and the Sleipner field datasets. The HQ-PINN framework consistently yields accurate results, showcasing quantum computing's promise for geosciences and paving the way for future quantum-enhanced geophysical workflows.
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) often struggle on nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with sharp gradients, stiff dynamics, high-frequency content, or multiscale structure. Such limitations, rooted in spectral bias, ill-conditioned optimization, and unstable convergence, restrict PINN accuracy in regimes where advanced solvers are most needed. In this work, we develop a hybrid quantum-classical physics-informed neural network (HQPINN) that integrates a classical neural-network backbone with a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) to enrich the solution representation. The framework is benchmarked against a classical PINN on three representative nonlinear PDEs: Burgers' equation, the Allen-Cahn equation, and the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. The framework is further examined through a systematic sensitivity analysis of qubit count, circuit depth, PQC placement, collocation density, and classical-network width. Across all benchmarks, HQPINNs exhibit smoother training dynamics, reduced loss oscillations, and improved final accuracy, with the largest gains occurring in stiff and multiscale regimes. Relative L2 error decreases by about fourfold for Burgers' equation and fivefold for the Allen-Cahn equation, while improvements for the KdV equation are more moderate. Overall, the results demonstrate that carefully co-designed hybrid quantum-classical architectures can mitigate key limitations of classical PINNs and provide practical design guidance for near-term quantum-enhanced PDE solvers.
We present QPINNACLE, an open-source computational framework for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) that integrates modern training strategies, multi-GPU acceleration, and hybrid quantum-classical architectures within a unified modular workflow. The framework enables systematic evaluation of PINN performance across benchmark problems including 1D hyperbolic conservation laws, incompressible flows, and electromagnetic wave propagation. It supports a range of architectural and training enhancements, including Fourier feature embeddings, random weight factorization, strict boundary condition enforcement, adaptive loss balancing, curriculum training, and second-order optimization strategies, with extensibility to additional methods. We provide a comprehensive benchmark study quantifying the impact of these methods on convergence, accuracy, and computational cost, and analyze distributed data parallel scaling in terms of runtime and memory efficiency. In addition, we extend the framework to hybrid quantum-classical PINNs and derive a formal estimate for circuit-evaluation complexity under parameter-shift differentiation. Results highlight the sensitivity of PINNs to architectural and training choices, confirm their high computational cost relative to classical solvers, and identify regimes where hybrid quantum models offer improved parameter efficiency. QPINNACLE provides a foundation for benchmarking physics-informed learning methods and guiding future developments through quantitative assessment of their trade-offs.
Recently, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have aroused an upsurge in the field of scientific computing including solving partial differential equations (PDEs), which convert the task of solving PDEs into an optimization challenge by adopting governing equations and definite conditions or observation data as loss functions. Essentially, the underlying logic of PINNs is based on the universal approximation and differentiability properties of classical neural networks (NNs). Recent research has revealed that quantum neural networks (QNNs), known as parameterized quantum circuits, also exhibit universal approximation and differentiability properties. This observation naturally suggests the application of PINNs to QNNs. In this work, we introduce a physics-informed quantum neural network (PI-QNN) by employing the QNN as the function approximator for solving forward and inverse problems of PDEs. The performance of the proposed PI-QNN is evaluated by various forward and inverse PDE problems. Numerical results indicate that PI-QNN demonstrates superior convergence over PINN when solving PDEs with exact solutions that are strongly correlated with trigonometric functions. Moreover, its accuracy surpasses that of PINN by two to three orders of magnitude, while requiring fewer trainable parameters. However, the computational time of PI-QNN exceeds that of PINN due to its operation on classical computers. This limitation may improve with the advent of commercial quantum computers in the future. Furthermore, we briefly investigate the impact of network architecture on PI-QNN performance by examining two different QNN architectures. The results suggest that increasing the number of trainable network layers can enhance the expressiveness of PI-QNN. However, an excessive number of data encoding layers significantly increases computational time, rendering the marginal gains in performance insufficient to compensate for the shortcomings in computational efficiency.
In this work, we introduce the Quantum-Classical Hybrid Physics-Informed Neural Network with Multiplicative and Additive Couplings (QPINN-MAC): a novel hybrid architecture that integrates the framework of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) with that of Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs). Specifically, we prove that through strategic couplings between classical and quantum components, the QPINN-MAC retains the universal approximation property, ensuring its theoretical capacity to represent complex solutions of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Simultaneously, we demonstrate that the hybrid QPINN-MAC architecture actively mitigates the barren plateau problem, regions in parameter space where cost-function gradients decay exponentially with circuit depth, a fundamental obstacle in QNNs that hinders optimization during training. Furthermore, we prove that these couplings prevent gradient collapse, ensuring trainability even in high-dimensional regimes. Thus, our results establish a new pathway for constructing quantum-classical hybrid models with theoretical convergence guarantees, which are essential for the practical application of QPINNs.