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arXiv:2609.36702

Quantum Fidelity Landscape-Guided Prior Calibration for Single-Circuit QGAN Image Generation

Xue Yang, Rigui Zhou, Dax Enshan Koh, Siong Thye Goh, Yitao Tang, ShiZheng Jia, Young-Wook Cho, Hongyu Chen

quant-phcs.CVSubmitted Sep 29, 2026• Announced Sep 30, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs) have emerged as representative generative models in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era and have attracted increasing attention in quantum machine learning. However, most existing QGAN methods rely on patch-based decomposition strategies, which weaken the global consistency of generated images and increase quantum resource overhead. In this work, we investigate a simpler approach: pixel-level, end-to-end image generation using a single-quantum-circuit QGAN. By analyzing the structural matching relationship between the quantum prior and the target data distribution in Hilbert space, we provide a new theoretical perspective for understanding the training behavior of naive end-to-end QGANs. Specifically, we introduce the Quantum Fidelity Landscape (QFL), defined as the pairwise-fidelity structure induced by an ensemble of quantum states and preserved under shared unitary transformations of the quantum generation process. We show that, under a fixed Lipschitz readout, this invariant imposes a one-sided bound on decoded sample separation, motivating calibration of the prior-induced QFL before adversarial training. To validate this theoretical insight, we propose BasicQGAN, a QGAN framework incorporating quantum prior calibration. Before adversarial optimization, BasicQGAN aligns the prior-induced QFL with the data-induced QFL. Experimental results on small-scale grayscale image datasets show that BasicQGAN achieves stable and effective end-to-end pixel-level image generation while requiring fewer qubits and trainable parameters than representative patch-based quantum generators. Furthermore, experiments with different initial quantum-state ensembles show that QFL-calibrated ensembles achieve better generative performance.

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Abstract Quantum machine learning as a field has emerged rather quickly thanks to developments in quantum computing. Of these developments, the one of primary interest is the Quantum Generative Adversarial Network or QGAN which is an enhancement of the familiar GAN to use quantum computation necessary for producing synthetic images. To sum up, based on different types of experiments, QGANs outperformed classical GANs, especially in cases with images such as MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. Nevertheless, their capabilities are not fully comprehensible due to existing constraints in quantum systems technology, especially in the NISQ era. In this regard, the current study undertakes a proposed research direction that focuses on improving the resolution of grayscale images that have been produced from the “optdigits” dataset, which contains handwritten digit images. Our work then contrasts this with prior work in terms of FID scores, loss function values, runtime, and the resolution of the images. Further, we extend the work by carrying out the proposed methodology on the FMNIST dataset and provide results to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed technique, besides enabling comparison on the same platform with prior works.

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Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs) have emerged as representative generative models in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era and have attracted increasing attention in quantum machine learning. However, most existing QGAN methods rely on patch-based decomposition strategies, which weaken the global consistency of generated images and increase quantum resource overhead. In this work, we investigate a simpler approach: pixel-level, end-to-end image generation using a single-quantum-circuit QGAN. By analyzing the structural matching relationship between the quantum prior and the target data distribution in Hilbert space, we provide a new theoretical perspective for understanding the training behavior of naive end-to-end QGANs. Specifically, we introduce the Quantum Fidelity Landscape (QFL), defined as the pairwise-fidelity structure induced by an ensemble of quantum states and preserved under shared unitary transformations of the quantum generation process. We show that, under a fixed Lipschitz readout, this invariant imposes a one-sided bound on decoded sample separation, motivating calibration of the prior-induced QFL before adversarial training. To validate this theoretical insight, we propose BasicQGAN, a QGAN framework incorporating quantum prior calibration. Before adversarial optimization, BasicQGAN aligns the prior-induced QFL with the data-induced QFL. Experimental results on small-scale grayscale image datasets show that BasicQGAN achieves stable and effective end-to-end pixel-level image generation while requiring fewer qubits and trainable parameters than representative patch-based quantum generators. Furthermore, experiments with different initial quantum-state ensembles show that QFL-calibrated ensembles achieve better generative performance.
Quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) have attracted increasing attention for their potential to surpass classical generative models by leveraging the expressive power of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). However, in the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, the implementation of fully quantum algorithms is hindered by hardware limitations, restricting most existing approaches to low-resolution generated image. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical generative adversarial network for patch-based image generation. Our method employs dual PQC-based generators that decompose images into structured patches, while local and global classical discriminators jointly capture local details and preserve global structural coherence. This design addresses scalability limitations of existing QGANs and mitigates patch-boundary artifacts, thereby enabling high-resolution image generation on hardware with restricted qubit counts. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating improvements in image fidelity over existing baselines, and providing insights into the influence of qubit count on generative performance.
Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs) offer a promising path for learning data distributions on near-term quantum devices. However, existing QGANs for image synthesis avoid direct full-image generation, relying on classical post-processing or patch-based methods. These approaches dilute the quantum generator's role and struggle to capture global image semantics. To address this, we propose ReQGAN, an end-to-end framework that synthesizes an entire N=2^D-pixel image using a single D-qubit quantum circuit. ReQGAN overcomes two fundamental bottlenecks hindering direct pixel generation: (1) the rigid classical-to-quantum noise interface and (2) the output mismatch between normalized quantum statistics and the desired pixel-intensity space. We introduce a learnable Neural Noise Encoder for adaptive state preparation and a differentiable Intensity Calibration module to map measurements to a stable, visually meaningful pixel domain. Experiments on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST demonstrate that ReQGAN achieves stable training and effective image synthesis under stringent qubit budgets, with ablation studies verifying the contribution of each component.
Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs) represent a useful development in quantum machine learning, using the particular properties of quantum mechanics to solve the challenges of data analysis and modeling. This paper brings up a general analysis of five QGAN architectures, focusing on their evolution, strengths, weaknesses, and limitations in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Primary methods like Entangling Quantum GAN (EQ-GAN) and Quantum state fidelity (QuGAN) concentrate on stability, convergence, and robust performance on small-scale datasets such as 2 × 2 grayscale images. Intermediate models such as Image Quantum GAN (IQGAN) and Experimental Quantum GAN (EXQGAN) provide new ideas like trainable encoders and patch-based sub-generators that are scalable to 8 × 8 datasets with increasing noise resilience. The most advanced method is Parameterized Quantum Wasserstein GAN (PQWGAN), which uses a hybrid quantum-classical structure to obtain high-resolution image processing for 28 × 28 grayscale datasets while trying to maintain parameter efficiency. This study explores, analyzes, and summarizes critical problems of QGANs, including accuracy, convergence, parameter efficiency, image quality, performance metrics, and training stability under noisy conditions. In addition, developing QGANs can generate and train parameters in quantum approximation optimization algorithms. One of the useful applications of QGAN is generating medical datasets that can generate medical images from limited datasets to train specific medical models for the recognition of diseases.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has received increasing attention due to its potential to outperform classical machine learning methods in problems such as classification and identification tasks. A subclass of QML methods is quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) which have been studied as a quantum counterpart of classical GANs widely used in image manipulation and generation tasks. The existing work on QGANs is still limited to small-scale proof-of-concept examples based on images with significant down-scaling. Here we integrate classical and quantum techniques to propose a new hybrid quantum-classical GAN framework. We demonstrate its superior learning capabilities over existing quantum techniques by generating 28×28 pixels grey-scale images without dimensionality reduction or classical pre/post-processing on multiple classes of the standard MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets, which achieves comparable results to classical frameworks with three orders of magnitude less trainable generator parameters. To gain further insight into the working of our hybrid approach, we systematically explore the impact of its parameter space by varying the number of qubits, the size of image patches, the number of layers in the generator, the shape of the patches and the choice of prior distribution. Our results show that increasing the quantum generator size generally improves the learning capability of the network. The developed framework provides a foundation for future design of QGANs with optimal parameter set tailored for complex image generation tasks
Abstract Integration of quantum computing in generative machine learning models has the potential to offer benefits such as training speed-up and superior feature extraction. However, the existing quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) fail to generate high-quality images due to their patch-based, pixel-wise learning approaches. These methods capture only local details, ignoring the global structure and semantic information of images. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a quantum image generative learning (QIGL) approach for high-quality medical image generation. Our proposed quantum generator leverages variational quantum circuit approach addressing scalability issues by extracting principal components from the images instead of dividing them into patches. Additionally, we integrate the Wasserstein distance within the QIGL framework to generate a diverse set of medical samples. Through a systematic set of simulations on x-ray images from knee osteoarthritis and medical MNIST datasets, our model demonstrates superior performance, achieving the lowest Fréchet inception distance scores compared to its classical counterpart and advanced QGAN models reported in the literature.
Abstract Quantum machine learning as a field has emerged rather quickly thanks to developments in quantum computing. Of these developments, the one of primary interest is the Quantum Generative Adversarial Network or QGAN which is an enhancement of the familiar GAN to use quantum computation necessary for producing synthetic images. To sum up, based on different types of experiments, QGANs outperformed classical GANs, especially in cases with images such as MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. Nevertheless, their capabilities are not fully comprehensible due to existing constraints in quantum systems technology, especially in the NISQ era. In this regard, the current study undertakes a proposed research direction that focuses on improving the resolution of grayscale images that have been produced from the “optdigits” dataset, which contains handwritten digit images. Our work then contrasts this with prior work in terms of FID scores, loss function values, runtime, and the resolution of the images. Further, we extend the work by carrying out the proposed methodology on the FMNIST dataset and provide results to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed technique, besides enabling comparison on the same platform with prior works.