Quantum Fast-Weight Programmers (QFWPs) store temporal information in dynamically programmed variational-circuit parameters rather than in nonlinear recurrent hidden states, offering a practical route to quantum sequence modeling. Self-Modulating QFWP improves this framework by using input-dependent gates for both new fast-weight updates and the accumulated fast-weight state, but its unbounded old-state multiplier can diverge in long-sequence regimes. We propose a bounded old-state modulation rule that applies a sign-preserving tanh gate only to the recurrent memory branch while leaving the additive update and new-update modulation unchanged. We evaluate standard QFWP, full Self-Modulating QFWP, Only-New, and Only-Old variants on two CUDA-Q quantum-dynamics forecasting tasks and on Milan SMS telecommunication activity prediction. The quantum-dynamics results show that old-state modulation is the most consistent source of improvement over Standard QFWP, and that bounding the old-state gate removes long-sequence divergence while improving aggregate robustness. On Milan SMS forecasting, the original unbounded Self-Modulating QFWP converges across the tested grid and shows its clearest gains at longer input windows, with behavior close to the Only-Old ablation. These findings identify accumulated-memory modulation as the key mechanism of Self-Modulating QFWP and bounded old-state gating as a targeted stabilization strategy.
Quantum Fast-Weight Programmers (QFWPs) store temporal information in dynamically programmed variational-circuit parameters rather than in nonlinear recurrent hidden states, offering a practical route to quantum sequence modeling. Self-Modulating QFWP improves this framework by using input-dependent gates for both new fast-weight updates and the accumulated fast-weight state, but its unbounded old-state multiplier can diverge in long-sequence regimes. We propose a bounded old-state modulation rule that applies a sign-preserving tanh gate only to the recurrent memory branch while leaving the additive update and new-update modulation unchanged. We evaluate standard QFWP, full Self-Modulating QFWP, Only-New, and Only-Old variants on two CUDA-Q quantum-dynamics forecasting tasks and on Milan SMS telecommunication activity prediction. The quantum-dynamics results show that old-state modulation is the most consistent source of improvement over Standard QFWP, and that bounding the old-state gate removes long-sequence divergence while improving aggregate robustness. On Milan SMS forecasting, the original unbounded Self-Modulating QFWP converges across the tested grid and shows its clearest gains at longer input windows, with behavior close to the Only-Old ablation. These findings identify accumulated-memory modulation as the key mechanism of Self-Modulating QFWP and bounded old-state gating as a targeted stabilization strategy.
Recent advances in quantum machine learning have motivated efficient models for sequential data processing. In this paper, we propose Self-Modulating Quantum Fast Weight Programmers, or Self-Modulating QFWP, which extends Quantum Fast Weight Programmers by introducing adaptive modulation over both newly generated fast-weight updates and historical fast-weight memory. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism improves convergence stability and prediction performance across varying model settings, including different numbers of qubits and input sequence lengths. We further provide theoretical arguments explaining how self-modulation balances new information injection with memory retention, thereby enhancing temporal information propagation. These results suggest that Self-Modulating QFWP is a compact and effective framework for quantum machine learning on time-series data.
Sequence models must decide what to write into memory and what to retain. In quantum and quantum-inspired sequence learning, nonlinear recurrent updates often require repeated circuit evaluations and sequential backpropagation through time, making long contexts costly. Gated fast-weight programmers (FWPs) based on quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (QKANs) alleviate this bottleneck by storing context in time-varying fast parameters. However, their scalar gate applies one retention-write balance to every fast-state coordinate, forcing all parameters to share a memory timescale. We introduce Self-Modulating QKAN-based FWPs, which replace this broadcast gate with low-rank-generated element-wise modulation of the new-proposal branch, a bounded old-state branch, or both. We further propose Complementary Matrix Gating (CMG), which uses one sigmoid matrix gate to retain the old state and its complement to write the new proposal. CMG provides coordinate-wise memory control while preserving the bounded convex update and affine prefix-scan structure of scalar gating, at the modulation-head cost of a single-branch rule. We compare four self-modulating rules with scalar gating across four FWP architectures combining classical and QKAN-based slow and fast programmers. Across seven single-step forecasting benchmarks and five sequence lengths, CMG gives the most consistent improvements for architectures whose fast programmer incorporates a QKAN-based module. In direct multi-step forecasting of Jaynes-Cummings and transmon-resonator dynamics simulated with CUDA-Q Dynamics, CMG models maintain mean-squared errors on the order of 0.001 or lower across forecasting horizons of 4, 8, and 16 steps, while improving on their scalar-gated counterparts by at least 91.2%. These results establish coordinate-wise complementary modulation as a stable and effective update for QKAN-based FWPs.
Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has surfaced as a pioneering framework addressing sequential control tasks and time-series modeling. It has demonstrated empirical quantum advantages notably within domains such as Reinforcement Learning (RL) and time-series prediction. A significant advancement lies in Quantum Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNNs), specifically tailored for memory-intensive tasks encompassing partially observable environments and non-linear time-series prediction. Nevertheless, QRNN-based models encounter challenges, notably prolonged training duration stemming from the necessity to compute quantum gradients using backpropagation-through-time (BPTT). This predicament exacerbates when executing the complete model on quantum devices, primarily due to the substantial demand for circuit evaluation arising from the parameter-shift rule. This paper introduces the Quantum Fast Weight Programmers (QFWP) as a solution to the temporal or sequential learning challenge. The QFWP leverages a classical neural network (referred to as the ’slow programmer’) functioning as a quantum programmer to swiftly modify the parameters of a variational quantum circuit (termed the ’fast programmer’). Instead of completely overwriting the fast programmer at each time-step, the slow programmer generates parameter changes or updates for the quantum circuit parameters. This approach enables the fast programmer to incorporate past observations or information. Notably, the proposed QFWP model achieves learning of temporal dependencies without necessitating the use of quantum recurrent neural networks. Numerical simulations conducted in this study showcase the efficacy of the proposed QFWP model in both time-series prediction and RL tasks. The model exhibits performance levels either comparable to or surpassing those achieved by QLSTM-based models.
Traffic matrices (TMs) capture network-wide origin-destination demand and are central to traffic engineering, yet accurate whole-matrix forecasting remains challenging when prediction must be performed under the memory, update, and training-budget constraints of online network control. This paper investigates whether compact quantum-inspired recurrent models can provide effective TM forecasts without relying on dedicated graph, transformer, or diffusion modules. We adapt gated quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold network fast-weight programmers (QKAN-FWPs) to direct multi-step Abilene TM forecasting, where each model predicts the next 20 five-minute frames of a 144-channel origin-destination (OD) matrix from a two-hour history. We benchmark three QKAN placement variants against a matched-size long short-term memory (LSTM) network, a larger LSTM, and a classical gated fast-weight programmer under a shared fixed-budget training protocol. Among the evaluated recurrent models, G-QKANFWP achieves the best pooled root-mean-square error (RMSE), while using only 22.4% of the larger LSTM. It also outperforms both the matched-size LSTM and the classical G-FWP baseline, indicating that the gain is not due to gated fast-weight framework alone. Convergence and channel-wise analyses further show that the quantum-inspired variants obtain lower validation-loss area under the learning curve (AULC) than matched-size recurrent baselines, while G-QKANFWP and GQKAN-FWP achieve substantially more OD-channel wins. These results identify a classical slow programmer with a quantum-inspired fast programmer as a promising accuracy-efficiency design for resource-conscious network traffic-matrix forecasting.
This study introduces the Quantum-Train Quantum Fast Weight Programmer (QT-QFWP) framework, enabling efficient and scalable programming of variational quantum circuits (VQCs) through quantum-driven parameter updates for the classical slow programmer controlling the fast programmer VQC. By optimizing quantum and classical parameter management, QT-QFWP significantly reduces parameters (by 70–90%) compared to Quantum Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) and Quantum Fast Weight Programmer (QFWP) while maintaining accuracy. Benchmarking on time-series tasks—including Damped Simple Harmonic Motion (SHM), NARMA5, and Simulated Gravitational Waves (GW)—demonstrates superior efficiency and predictive accuracy. QT-QFWP is particularly advantageous for near-term quantum systems, addressing qubit and gate fidelity constraints, enhancing VQC deployment in time-sensitive applications, and expanding quantum computing’s role in machine learning.