Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has a theoretical advantage over classical algorithms for specific synthetic data that is computationally hard. However, it remains unclear whether such theoretical advantages play a meaningful role for realistic classical data, such as natural images. Quantum structural properties induced by unitary operations or entanglement introduce inductive biases that differ from those of classical models, potentially leading to distinct learning behavior on real-world data. In a fully quantum learning pipeline, classical real-world data are first encoded into quantum states via a quantum feature mapping, analogous to a classical feature extractor, and a quantum classifier then classifies the resulting states. Quantum feature mappings generate representations that are difficult to realize classically, while also inducing representation-level biases that do not necessarily match the structure of realistic data. To enable a fair comparison at the classifier level, we focus on the classifier and use classical feature extractors that already provide powerful representations for natural images. By controlling the data scale and supervision strength, we analyze how the unitary structure of quantum classifiers affects generalization, and show that their effectiveness depends strongly on the geometry of the input representations. These results indicate that quantum classifiers benefit from classical features that are aligned with quantum feature spaces. Our analysis shows that kernel alignment identifies representations compatible with quantum feature spaces, providing insights into translating classical models into quantum algorithms.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has a theoretical advantage over classical algorithms for specific synthetic data that is computationally hard. However, it remains unclear whether such theoretical advantages play a meaningful role for realistic classical data, such as natural images. Quantum structural properties induced by unitary operations or entanglement introduce inductive biases that differ from those of classical models, potentially leading to distinct learning behavior on real-world data. In a fully quantum learning pipeline, classical real-world data are first encoded into quantum states via a quantum feature mapping, analogous to a classical feature extractor, and a quantum classifier then classifies the resulting states. Quantum feature mappings generate representations that are difficult to realize classically, while also inducing representation-level biases that do not necessarily match the structure of realistic data. To enable a fair comparison at the classifier level, we focus on the classifier and use classical feature extractors that already provide powerful representations for natural images. By controlling the data scale and supervision strength, we analyze how the unitary structure of quantum classifiers affects generalization, and show that their effectiveness depends strongly on the geometry of the input representations. These results indicate that quantum classifiers benefit from classical features that are aligned with quantum feature spaces. Our analysis shows that kernel alignment identifies representations compatible with quantum feature spaces, providing insights into translating classical models into quantum algorithms.
The rapidly emerging paradigms of quantum machine learning (QML) and variational quantum computing (VQC) promise to combine quantum computational advantages with the powerful capabilities of machine learning and optimization. However, early attempts to naively translate classical machine learning techniques into the quantum domain have encountered severe scalability bottlenecks, both practical and theoretical. This dissertation posits that overcoming these limitations requires a fundamental shift in model and algorithm design: the deliberate integration of inductive bias. By embedding task-specific prior knowledge into quantum models and optimization strategies, this research demonstrates how to achieve the scalability required for near-term real-world applications and long-term success towards quantum advantage. This dissertation demonstrates the power of inductive bias across four methodological contributions. First, fast, gradient-free parameter and ansatz optimizers are developed to bypass costly gradient estimation on quantum computers. By explicitly embedding restriction and implicit biases into the quantum circuit ansatz and optimization method, these algorithms drastically improve resource efficiency, scaling variational quantum eigensolvers for molecular chemistry and quantum feature-map learning for classical data. Second, building on this scalable processing of high-dimensional classical data for discriminative tasks, the dissertation advances generative QML. To achieve high-quality, diverse real-world image generation, a quantum generator is designed with a strong, explicit inductive bias toward visual data, structurally reflecting both spatial image features and distribution characteristics. Third, complementary to learning from classical data, the dissertation advances QML for quantum data, processing inputs directly as quantum states rather than classical vectors. Here, a quantum Gaussian process paradigm is established, deriving a physics-informed inductive bias by encoding quantum information-theoretic assumptions. This bias guarantees provable model faithfulness and theoretical scalability. Finally, to ground this theoretical framework in physical reality, it is demonstrated on regression, classification, and optimization tasks, particularly for physical models. These physical applications close the loop to the initial quantum chemistry research, reinforcing both the overarching necessity and the natural presence of domain-specific inductive bias. Overall, the dissertation delivers timely and relevant findings that advance QML and VQC for near-term practical applications, while laying a foundation for the long-term perspective of quantum computing at scale.
Quantum machine learning is often motivated by the idea that quantum systems can expose useful high-dimensional structure that is difficult to access with classical models. We isolate one central component of this claim: the fixed data-encoding map. Amplitude, angle, and basis encoding are evaluated as deterministic feature maps for classical supervised learning under matched output dimensionality and strong classical controls. The benchmark compares these encodings against raw linear models, random Fourier features, polynomial features, PCA, RBF SVMs, and shallow neural networks across diverse classical datasets. Rather than treating performance as a single endpoint, we analyze the geometry of each representation through effective rank, condition number, centered kernel alignment, predictive performance, and practical overhead. The resulting picture is mechanistic: amplitude encoding can remove magnitude information through unit-sphere normalization, angle encoding can become geometrically redundant with raw linear features, and basis encoding can impose a binary Hamming geometry that is poorly aligned with smooth decision structure. These findings do not argue against quantum computation, however, they show that fixed quantum-inspired encoding geometry alone is not a reliable source of machine-learning advantage on classical data.
Quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising paradigm that leverages quantum computational principles to potentially outperform classical approaches on specific learning tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive empirical investigation comparing Quantum Machine Learning (QML), specifically Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) against Classical Machine Learning (CML) baselines including Logistic Regression, K Nearest Neighbors and classical SVMs. We implement quantum kernel methods using variational quantum circuits with angle embedding, IQP and ZZ feature maps on datasets exhibiting varying structural complexity. Our experiments on synthetic quantum generated datasets (Quantum Parity, Quantum Entanglement, Quantum Interference) demonstrate that QSVM achieves superior classification accuracy with improvements ranging from 2.9 % to 60 % over the best classical baselines achieving a 55.6 % overall win rate. Notably, on the Quantum Parity dataset, QSVM consistently outperformed all classical models across multiple configurations. On real-world benchmark datasets (Breast Cancer, Iris, Wine), QSVM Angle achieved 88% accuracy on Breast Cancer compared to 76% for classical SVM Linear a 15.8 % relative improvement while matching the best classical performance on Iris(100%)and Wine(92%). All experiments were conducted using quantum circuit simulation on classical hardware. These results provide empirical evidence that quantum kernel methods offer meaningful advantages over classical approaches on datasets with complex feature interactions. We discuss the theoretical foundations of these improvements including quantum feature space expressivity and kernel alignment.
Multispectral satellite imagery poses significant challenges for deep learning models due to the high dimensionality of spectral data and the presence of structured correlations across channels. Recent work in quantum machine learning suggests that unitary evolutions and Hilbert-space embeddings can introduce useful inductive biases for learning. In this work, we show that several empirical advantages often attributed to quantum feature maps can be more precisely understood as consequences of geometric structure induced by unitary group actions and the associated quotient symmetries. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a fully classical pooling mechanism that maps latent features to complex projective space via a fixed-reference unitary action. This construction effectively collapses non-identifiable degrees of freedom, leading to a reduction in the dimensionality of the learned representations. Empirical results on multispectral satellite imagery show that incorporating this quantum-inspired pooling operation into a convolutional neural network improves optimization stability, accelerates convergence, and substantially reduces variance compared to standard pooling baselines. These results clarify the role of geometric structure in quantum-inspired architectures and demonstrate that their benefits can be reproduced through principled geometric inductive biases implemented entirely within classical deep learning models.
Abstract Multispectral satellite imagery poses significant challenges for deep learning models due to the high dimensionality of spectral data and the presence of structured correlations across channels. Recent work in quantum machine learning suggests that unitary evolutions and Hilbert-space embeddings can introduce useful inductive biases for learning. In this work, we show that several empirical advantages often attributed to quantum feature maps can be more precisely understood as consequences of geometric structure induced by unitary group actions and the associated quotient symmetries. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a fully classical pooling mechanism that maps latent features to complex projective space via a fixed-reference unitary action. This construction effectively collapses non-identifiable degrees of freedom, leading to a reduction in the dimensionality of the learned representations. Empirical results on multispectral satellite imagery show that incorporating this quantum-inspired pooling operation into a convolutional neural network improves optimization stability and accelerates convergence, compared to standard pooling baselines. These results clarify the role of geometric structure in quantum-inspired architectures and demonstrate that their benefits can be reproduced through principled geometric inductive biases implemented entirely within classical deep learning models.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has emerged as a compelling research domain that unites quantum computing principles with classical learning theory to address computationally demanding classification problems.This paper investigates two principal QML architectures-Variational Quantum Classifiers (VQC) and Quantum Neural Networks (QNN)-within the context of binary classification.We present an end-to-end hybrid quantum-classical pipeline applied to the UCI Mushroom dataset, comprising 22 categorical attributes, and demonstrate that quantumenhanced models can achieve competitive classification performance under present-day hardware constraints.The pipeline integrates Quantum Random Access Code (QRAC) encoding for dimensionality reduction, ZZFeatureMapbased quantum feature mapping, RealAmplitudes parameterized ansatz, and classical optimizer-driven parameter updates using the COBYLA algorithm.The complete system is deployed through a Flask web interface and containerized with Docker for reproducibility.Experimental results on a quantum simulator indicate a classification accuracy of 87.4%, precision of 0.891, and recall of 0.863, establishing the practical viability of NISQ-era quantum classifiers for structured categorical data.The paper further analyzes convergence behavior, circuit depth effects, and comparative performance against classical baselines, providing insights into the strengths and limitations of current QML architectures for real-world classification deployment.