Long-horizon prediction of a chaotic system is governed by fidelity to its invariant measure, and which parts of that measure a learned predictor needs is a physical question not known in advance. We establish a quantum statistical memory advantage for interrogating it. A quantum statistical prior (Q-Prior), trained once on classical data, stores an efficiently preparable $k$-point marginal in polynomially many circuit parameters against exponentially many for explicit tabulation. Collective Bell measurements on two copies then estimate any post hoc Pauli-expectation magnitude at a copy cost independent of register size, with a worst-case exponential separation from single-copy protocols. A single Bell dataset supports an entire family of candidate observables at a cost growing only logarithmically in the family size, so an exponentially large candidate space stays open for later analysis. We implement the protocol on IQM superconducting processors with two-copy registers of up to 54 physical-qubit chips. We apply this to turbulent channel flow and ERA5 forecasting, resolving invariant structure by statistical sector and order. Turbulent phase correlations persist through eighth order, while most predictive gains arise from low-order constraints; in ERA5, planetary-wave phase coherence complements covariance regularisation, identifying distinct low-order sectors with predictive value. Quantum statistical memory is therefore both a near-term computational resource and an instrument for identifying which invariant structures matter for prediction.
Long-horizon prediction of a chaotic system is governed by fidelity to its invariant measure, and which parts of that measure a learned predictor needs is a physical question not known in advance. We establish a quantum statistical memory advantage for interrogating it. A quantum statistical prior (Q-Prior), trained once on classical data, stores an efficiently preparable k-point marginal in polynomially many circuit parameters against exponentially many for explicit tabulation. Collective Bell measurements on two copies then estimate any post hoc Pauli-expectation magnitude at a copy cost independent of register size, with a worst-case exponential separation from single-copy protocols. A single Bell dataset supports an entire family of candidate observables at a cost growing only logarithmically in the family size, so an exponentially large candidate space stays open for later analysis. We implement the protocol on IQM superconducting processors with two-copy registers of up to 54 physical-qubit chips. We apply this to turbulent channel flow and ERA5 forecasting, resolving invariant structure by statistical sector and order. Turbulent phase correlations persist through eighth order, while most predictive gains arise from low-order constraints; in ERA5, planetary-wave phase coherence complements covariance regularisation, identifying distinct low-order sectors with predictive value. Quantum statistical memory is therefore both a near-term computational resource and an instrument for identifying which invariant structures matter for prediction.
Can measurements chosen adaptively, in response to earlier outcomes, be exponentially more informative than measurements fixed in advance? In many quantum settings, adaptivity helps at most polynomially; known exponential advantages require coherent measurements across copies or restricted measurements. We show an exponential advantage measuring one copy at a time, with no quantum memory kept between state copies, even when the nonadaptive learner may perform arbitrary global measurements on each copy. We construct explicit families of multi-qubit states in which a scalar parameter is encoded in one of exponentially many candidate observables, with an auxiliary marker indicating which one. An adaptive protocol identifies the relevant observable and then measures it using only single-qubit measurements and one round of adaptation. At fixed accuracy, it needs logarithmically many copies as the qubit count grows, whereas every nonadaptive protocol needs exponentially many. The same mechanism yields an exponential gap in local asymptotic minimax mean squared error constants, tight up to the exponential base. The states are separable and classical in label-dependent product bases; no entanglement or other nonclassical correlations are required. The gap comes from measurement incompatibility: the candidate observables cannot be measured jointly, so a fixed measurement must divide its information budget among them, while adaptivity selects the informative one. Accordingly, the separation disappears when the candidate observables commute, and cannot occur with fully observed classical samples. Measurement incompatibility thus emerges as a resource for quantum learning, distinct from entanglement and quantum memory, that classical feedback alone can exploit.
We introduce a quantum-informed machine learning (QIML) framework for modeling the long-term behavior of high-dimensional chaotic systems. QIML combines a one-time, offline-trained quantum generative model with a classical autoregressive predictor for spatiotemporal field generation. The quantum model learns a quantum prior (Q-Prior) that guides the representation of small-scale interactions and improves the modeling of fine-scale dynamics. We evaluate QIML on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, two-dimensional Kolmogorov flow, and the three-dimensional turbulent channel flow used as a realistic inflow condition. Across these systems, QIML improves predictive distribution accuracy by up to 17.25% and full-spectrum fidelity by up to 29.36% relative to classical baselines. For turbulent channel inflow, the Q-Prior is trained on a superconducting quantum processor and proves essential: without it, predictions become unstable, whereas QIML produces physically consistent long-term forecasts that outperform leading partial differential equation solvers. Beyond accuracy, QIML offers a memory advantage by compressing multimegabyte datasets into a kilobyte-scale Q-Prior, enabling scalable integration of quantum resources into scientific modeling.
Quantum process tomography, the task of learning an unknown quantum channel from black-box access, is a central problem in quantum information. In this setting, protocols with quantum memory can coherently store and jointly process quantum information obtained from multiple channel uses, whereas protocols without quantum memory must measure after each use and retain only a classical transcript of the measurement outcomes. A fundamental open question is whether quantum memory provides a query-complexity advantage even when protocols without quantum memory may adapt their experiments based on all previous outcomes with unbounded classical computational power. In this work, we show that it does. We determine the optimal query complexity of quantum process tomography without quantum memory up to a constant factor to be Θ(din3dout3/ε2), where din and dout are the channel input and output dimensions, respectively, and ε is the target diamond-norm accuracy. More precisely, we prove that any incoherent protocol for this task, including adaptive protocols, requires Ω(din3dout3/ε2) queries, even when each channel use may be assisted by arbitrary fresh ancilla, and we present a non-adaptive, ancilla-free incoherent protocol achieving the matching upper bound O(din3dout3/ε2). Our results thereby generalize the optimal sample-complexity bounds for single-copy state tomography, recovered as the special case din=1. By contrast, coherent protocols with quantum memory achieve query complexity Θ(din2dout2/ε2). Hence, our results establish a rigorous learning separation between quantum process tomography with and without quantum memory.
We study the power of quantum memory for learning properties of quantum systems and dynamics, which is of great importance in physics and chemistry. Many state-of-the-art learning algorithms require access to an additional external quantum memory. While such a quantum memory is not required a priori, in many cases, algorithms that do not utilize quantum memory require much more data than those which do. We show that this trade-off is inherent in a wide range of learning problems. Our results include the following: (1) We show that to perform shadow tomography on an n-qubit state rho with M observables, any algorithm without quantum memory requires Ω(min(M,2n)) samples of rho in the worst case. Up to logarithmic factors, this matches the upper bound of [HKP20] and completely resolves an open question in [Aar18, AR19]. (2) We establish exponential separations between algorithms with and without quantum memory for purity testing, distinguishing scrambling and depolarizing evolutions, as well as uncovering symmetry in physical dynamics. Our separations improve and generalize prior work of [ACQ21] by allowing for a broader class of algorithms without quantum memory. (3) We give the first tradeoff between quantum memory and sample complexity. We prove that to estimate absolute values of all n-qubit Pauli observables, algorithms with k<n qubits of quantum memory require at least Ω(2(n−k)/3) samples, but there is an algorithm using n-qubit quantum memory which only requires O(n) samples. The separations we show are sufficiently large and could already be evident, for instance, with tens of qubits. This provides a concrete path towards demonstrating real-world advantage for learning algorithms with quantum memory.
In chaotic dynamical systems, extreme events manifest in time series as unpredictable large-amplitude peaks. Although deterministic, extreme events appear seemingly randomly, which makes their forecasting difficult. By learning the dynamics from observables (data), reservoir computers can time accurately predict extreme events and chaotic dynamics, but they may require many degrees of freedom (large reservoirs). In this paper, by exploiting quantum-computer ansätze and entanglement, we design reservoir computers with compact reservoirs and accurate prediction capabilities. First, we propose the recurrence-free quantum reservoir computer (RF-QRC) architecture. By developing quantum feature maps and removing recurrent connections, the RF-QRC has quantum circuits with smaller depths. This allows the RF-QRC to scale well with higher-dimensional chaotic systems, which makes it suitable for hardware implementation. Second, we forecast the temporal chaotic dynamics and their long-term statistics of low- and higher-dimensional dynamical systems. We find that RF-QRC requires smaller reservoirs than classical reservoir computers for higher-dimensional systems and the same predictability. Third, we apply the RF-QRC to the time prediction of extreme events in a model of a turbulent shear flow with turbulent bursts. We find that the RF-QRC has longer predictability than the classical reservoir computer for extreme events forecasting. The results and analyses indicate that quantum-computer ansätze offers nonlinear expressivity and computational scalability, which are useful for forecasting chaotic dynamics and extreme events. This work opens new opportunities for using quantum machine learning on near-term quantum computers. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Calibrating a quantum processor means estimating gate-error parameters from data, and a hard-to-estimate parameter is usually assumed to leave a weak signature more repetitions will resolve. Coherent over-rotations break that premise. For commuting single- and two-qubit transverse over-rotations with known support on a computational-basis input, the passive histogram is exactly invariant under a sign group acting on the coherent angles, of order 2n+1 for the complete family with n≥2, so no estimator resolves the signs uniformly at any sample size. A calibration correction applied with the wrong sign doubles the rotation error it should remove. At zero angle the obstruction turns continuous, with a Fisher information singular along every coherent direction and an infinite Cramér-Rao bound. At generic angles the continuous defect clears for 5≤n≤8, the range we compute, while the sign degeneracy persists. Covering the support removes both, and a design resolves the signed angles uniformly exactly when it covers. On ∣ηR∣<π/2, 0≤pR<1/2 coverage is constructive, returning each angle in closed form from a ratio of two measured expectations without knowing the rates. A twirl-free code of ⌈log2(n+1)⌉ added product-Pauli settings covers, and for the complete family none uses fewer. Conditioning then sets the Cramér-Rao cost, and we give its floor explicitly. Exact computation matches the theory, the passive fit stays at chance on the signs at every budget while the closed-form inverse recovers them, and angle magnitudes on two IBM Heron processors follow the conditioning ordering.