The suitability of a quantum reservoir computing (QRC) platform for a given time-series processing task is closely tied to the dynamical properties of its computational substrate and design. Information is injected into, processed by, and read from this substrate, and finally passed to a linear readout layer which is trained to perform a specific task. In this work we introduce a classical-quantum state derived from the process tensor representing the dynamical part of this process for typical QRC protocols found in the literature. Using this object, mutual informations between physical subsystems and subsets of past inputs can be written as Holevo quantities, which we then use to numerically investigate information saturation in the substrate, fading memory of past inputs, and the local accessibility of injected information for a commonly used QRC platform. We then extract two diagnostics that characterise the nonlocal scrambling of information within, and loss of information from the substrate, and compare these to QRC performance across Hamiltonian parameters and measurement strengths. Finally, we comment on future directions that the framework introduced here opens up for the study and extension of the QRC program.
The suitability of a quantum reservoir computing (QRC) platform for a given time-series processing task is closely tied to the dynamical properties of its computational substrate and design. Information is injected into, processed by, and read from this substrate, and finally passed to a linear readout layer which is trained to perform a specific task. In this work we introduce a classical-quantum state derived from the process tensor representing the dynamical part of this process for typical QRC protocols found in the literature. Using this object, mutual informations between physical subsystems and subsets of past inputs can be written as Holevo quantities, which we then use to numerically investigate information saturation in the substrate, fading memory of past inputs, and the local accessibility of injected information for a commonly used QRC platform. We then extract two diagnostics that characterise the nonlocal scrambling of information within, and loss of information from the substrate, and compare these to QRC performance across Hamiltonian parameters and measurement strengths. Finally, we comment on future directions that the framework introduced here opens up for the study and extension of the QRC program.
Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) offers potential advantages over classical reservoir computing, including inherent processing of quantum inputs and a vast Hilbert space for state exploration. Yet, the relation between the performance of reservoirs based on complex and many-body quantum systems and non-classical state features is not established. Through an extensive analysis of QRC based on a transverse-field Ising model we show how different quantum effects, such as quantum coherence and correlations, contribute to improving the performance in temporal tasks, as measured by the Information Processing Capacity. Additionally, we critically assess the impact of finite measurement resources and noise on the reservoir’s dynamics in different regimes, quantifying the limited ability to exploit quantum effects for increasing damping and noise strengths. Our results reveal a monotonic relationship between reservoir performance and coherence, along with the importance of quantum effects in the ergodic regime. Quantum Reservoir Computing leverages the quantum properties of physical systems for solving temporal tasks. This study shows the importance of quantum effects, such as coherence and superposition, in the reservoir’s performance for different dynamical regimes, while considering the impact of finite measurements and noisy environments.
For an open quantum reservoir, how the system forgets is part of how it computes. Quantum reservoir computing processes input streams with fixed quantum dynamics and trains only a linear readout. Dissipation can make old inputs fade, but prior studies commonly fix the environmental process and tune only its strength. Here we show numerically that the coupling pattern, meaning whether transitions connect to separate or shared environmental channels, changes which parts of the input history remain accessible. Paired simulations of finite spin reservoirs keep the Hamiltonian, inputs, measurements, and readout fixed. The tested patterns produce distinct task profiles, with no universal winner. Shared relaxation preserves more recent input history than independent local loss, and the retained memory changes when the qubits contribute with different relative phases to the shared decay channel. This ordering recurs across system sizes, Hamiltonians, input protocols, and targeted controls. Environmental coupling is therefore more than a damping parameter: it is a design layer that shapes not only how quickly information fades, but which input history remains available for computation.
Scrambling quantum systems have attracted attention as effective substrates for temporal information processing. Here we consider a quantum reservoir processing framework that captures a broad range of physical computing models with quantum systems. We examine the scalability and memory retention of the model with scrambling reservoirs modelled by high-order unitary designs in both noiseless and noisy settings. In the former regime, we show that measurement readouts become exponentially concentrated with increasing reservoir size, yet strikingly do not worsen with the reservoir iterations. Thus, while repeatedly reusing a small scrambling reservoir with quantum data might be viable, scaling up the problem size deteriorates generalization unless one can afford an exponential shot overhead. In contrast, the memory of early inputs and initial states decays exponentially in both reservoir size and reservoir iterations. In the noisy regime, we also prove that memory decays exponentially in time for local noisy channels. These results required us to introduce new proof techniques for bounding concentration in temporal quantum models. Beyond this extreme scrambling regime, we numerically demonstrate that exponential concentration can still exist even with a physical reservoir such as an Ising model whenever the reservoir operates in a quantum-chaotic phase. In contrast, physical reservoirs in a many-body localized phase and at the edge of chaos appear to not suffer from such phenomena
Numerical studies suggest that quantum reservoir computing performs optimally near the edge of chaos, a behavior commonly attributed to a balance between memory retention and nonlinear information processing. Here we develop an explicit quantum reservoir model and rigorously analyze its chaotic regime and integrable point. In the chaotic regime, we show that Gaussian-unitary-ensemble statistics lead to rapid memory loss: learning performance decays exponentially with the storage time required by a temporal task. This decay limits the ability of chaotic reservoirs to learn long-range temporal dependencies. At the integrable point, described by a free-fermion model, we prove that amplitude encoding and a linear readout of fermionic two-point correlations cannot learn a representative class of nonlinear tasks coupling present and past inputs. Introducing interactions alleviates this obstruction. By identifying distinct limitations on memory retention in the chaotic regime and nonlinear processing at the integrable point, our analysis provides a theoretical basis for the observed edge-of-chaos advantage and guides the design of quantum reservoirs for temporal learning.
Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) processes temporal data by retaining a memory of past inputs in the recurrent state of a quantum system, whereas a Quantum Extreme-Learning Machine (QELM) discards that memory, resetting the system at every step so that only the most recent input shapes the response. The two are usually treated as separate computational paradigms. We show that they are the two limits of a single architecture, connected by the input-encoding length, that is, the number of qubits overwritten with fresh data at each step. When a single qubit is re-encoded the system operates as a standard QRC, when the whole register is re-encoded it operates as a QELM, and intermediate lengths interpolate between them. The overwritten qubits hold the recent past in an explicit register, while the remaining qubits are never reset and carry older inputs forward in their evolving quantum state, so the encoding length redistributes memory between explicit and recurrent storage at fixed system size. Tuning the reservoir Hamiltonian and the evolution time with Bayesian optimization at each encoding length, we find that recurrent quantum memory is essential when a task must reach far into the past, and dispensable when the relevant history is short, where the memoryless reset limit already suffices. For every task the best reservoirs operate at the edge of chaos, where they perform as well as a densely connected reservoir with random all-to-all couplings of the same size, indicating that what temporal processing requires is the dynamical regime rather than the connectivity.
The intersection of quantum information processing and machine learning has recently at-tracted considerable interest within the physics and artificial intelligence communities. From a physical perspective, quantum computing offers fundamentally new modes of information processing, enabled by superposition, interference, and entanglement, which can lead to ad-vantages in computational speed and resource efficiency over classical approaches. These developments have motivated the exploration of machine learning paradigms that lever-age quantum dynamics as a computational resource. In parallel, reservoir computing—a non–von Neumann and neuromorphic computing framework—has gained attention due to its reliance on high-dimensional dynamical systems, in-memory computation, and low en-ergy consumption. Quantum reservoir computing extends this paradigm by exploiting the intrinsic dynamics of quantum many-body systems, such as spin networks, to process tem-poral information. Despite growing interest in quantum reservoir architectures, the role of genuinely quantum resources, in particular entanglement, in determining their information-processing capabilities remains incompletely understood. In this thesis, we study a distributed spin-network reservoir in which two independent time series are injected into separate qubits. Using short-term memory capacity as an opera-tional measure, we analyze how information introduced at distinct sites propagates through the network and how different entanglement structures contribute to storing and combining past inputs. Focusing on bilinear memory tasks, which require reconstructing the product of the two inputs at various delays, we probe temporal memory. Due to the computational cost associated with simulating open quantum many-body dynamics, the present study focuses on a minimal spin-network architecture consisting of four qubits, with two qubits serving as input nodes that receive independent time series. Even for such moderate system sizes, the numerical integration of the open-system dynamics are computationally demanding. Nevertheless, this minimal setting already captures the essential mechanisms of distributed information processing in quantum reservoirs. By computing the logarithmic negativity across different bipartitions of the reservoir, we investigate how memory performance relates to the underlying entanglement structure. We find that the short-term memory capacity is maximized at relatively weak coupling strengths, where entanglement is present but remains moderate. Among the various bipar-titions, the entanglement between the two input qubits consistently plays the most promi-nent role in learning performance. In this optimal regime, the reservoir exhibits long-lived memory, while a characteristic reduction in performance at zero delay, observed across all frequencies, reflects the finite time required for information to propagate through the sys-tem. Taken together, these results indicate that effective learning in distributed quantum reservoir computing is enabled by moderate, well-structured entanglement, rather than by maximal correlations.