We use quantum machine learning techniques to develop a content-based media recommender system and evaluate its performance on TV programmes using textual descriptions from one week of BBC iPlayer data. Grounded in the Quantum Natural Language Processing framework (QNLP), programme synopses are mapped to variational quantum circuits using their semantic structure. The parameters of these circuits are trained via a supervised pairwise similarity learning task. We benchmark the quantum recommender against a classical BiLSTM baseline trained on the same dataset and objective. While both models achieve comparable performance on the similarity learning task, the quantum model requires significantly fewer parameters (47k vs. 17.8M). When the BiLSTM is constrained to a matching parameter budget, its performance degrades substantially (by 3.63 percentage points in Mean Average Precision (MAP)), indicating that the structured quantum representation provides a highly parameter-efficient alternative in this setting. We demonstrate the feasibility of executing the trained models on quantum hardware by deploying the circuits on Quantinuum's System Model H2 (and accompanying emulator) using a SWAP-test-based protocol. The results confirm that the similarity signal is preserved under realistic, noisy conditions. Taken together, these findings highlight the potential of variational quantum circuits for recommendation tasks and represent a practical step toward their real-world deployment.
We use quantum machine learning techniques to develop a content-based media recommender system and evaluate its performance on TV programmes using textual descriptions from one week of BBC iPlayer data. Grounded in the Quantum Natural Language Processing framework (QNLP), programme synopses are mapped to variational quantum circuits using their semantic structure. The parameters of these circuits are trained via a supervised pairwise similarity learning task. We benchmark the quantum recommender against a classical BiLSTM baseline trained on the same dataset and objective. While both models achieve comparable performance on the similarity learning task, the quantum model requires significantly fewer parameters (47k vs. 17.8M). When the BiLSTM is constrained to a matching parameter budget, its performance degrades substantially (by 3.63 percentage points in Mean Average Precision (MAP)), indicating that the structured quantum representation provides a highly parameter-efficient alternative in this setting. We demonstrate the feasibility of executing the trained models on quantum hardware by deploying the circuits on Quantinuum's System Model H2 (and accompanying emulator) using a SWAP-test-based protocol. The results confirm that the similarity signal is preserved under realistic, noisy conditions. Taken together, these findings highlight the potential of variational quantum circuits for recommendation tasks and represent a practical step toward their real-world deployment.
This thesis presents a comparative study of quantum machine learning and classical machine learning developed from first principles. It begins by establishing the foundations of the quantum circuit model, observables, and projective measurement, and then revisits the classical learning framework with an emphasis on risk minimisation, task-aligned metrics, and rigorous evaluation protocols. Building on this shared perspective, the thesis examines two central paradigms in quantum machine learning: quantum kernels and variational quantum circuits. A unifying theme is that quantum models must be assessed fairly against strong classical baselines and under realistic hardware constraints. The work therefore explicitly accounts for the limitations of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, including noise, restricted connectivity, compilation overhead, and finite-shot estimation. The empirical study instantiates both quantum pipelines on a controlled supervised benchmark adapted from IBM Quantum: classifying small synthetic images containing either a vertical or a horizontal line under bounded noise. Using the same dataset, identical splitting strategies, and matched budgets for shots and optimisation, the thesis compares quantum and classical models under a consistent evaluation protocol. The results show that both quantum kernel and variational approaches achieve meaningful accuracy in this regime, but do not demonstrate a decisive quantum advantage on the selected task. The thesis concludes by outlining limitations and directions for future work, including scaling to richer benchmarks, incorporating error mitigation, and strengthening assumption-explicit methodology for credible claims of quantum-enhanced learning.
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.
We propose an approach to generative quantum machine learning that overcomes the fundamental scaling issues of variational quantum circuits. The core idea is to use a class of generative models based on instantaneous quantum polynomial circuits, which we show can be trained efficiently on classical hardware. Although training is classically efficient, sampling from these circuits is widely believed to be classically hard, and so computational advantages are possible when sampling from the trained model on quantum hardware. By combining our approach with a data-dependent parameter initialisation strategy, we do not encounter issues of barren plateaus and successfully circumvent the poor scaling of gradient estimation that plagues traditional approaches to quantum circuit optimisation. We investigate and evaluate our approach on a number of real and synthetic datasets, training models with up to one thousand qubits and hundreds of thousands of parameters. We find that the quantum models can successfully learn from high dimensional data, and perform surprisingly well compared to simple energy-based classical generative models trained with a similar amount of hyperparameter optimisation. Overall, our work demonstrates that a path to scalable quantum generative machine learning exists and can be investigated today at large scales.
Quantum computing, with its ability to do exponentially faster computation compared to classical systems, has found novel applications in various fields such as machine learning and recommendation systems. Quantum Machine Learning (QML), which integrates quantum computing with machine learning techniques, presents powerful new tools for data processing and pattern recognition. This paper proposes a hybrid recommendation system that combines Quantum Hopfield Associative Memory (QHAM) with deep neural networks to improve the extraction and classification on the MovieLens 1M dataset. User archetypes are clustered into multiple unique groups using the K-Means algorithm and converted into polar patterns through the encoder's activation function. These polar patterns are then integrated into the variational QHAM-based hybrid recommendation model. The system was trained using the MSE loss over 35 epochs in an ideal environment, achieving an ROC value of 0.9795, an accuracy of 0.8841, and an F-1 Score of 0.8786. Trained with the same number of epochs in a noisy environment using a custom Qiskit AER noise model incorporating bit-flip and readout errors with the same probabilities as in real quantum hardware, it achieves an ROC of 0.9177, an accuracy of 0.8013, and an F-1 Score equal to 0.7866, demonstrating consistent performance. Additionally, we were able to optimize the qubit overhead present in previous QHAM architectures by efficiently updating only one random targeted qubit. This research presents a novel framework that combines variational quantum computing with deep learning, capable of dealing with real-world datasets with comparable performance compared to purely classical counterparts. Additionally, the model can perform similarly well in noisy configurations, showcasing a steady performance and proposing a promising direction for future usage in recommendation systems.
Purpose This study investigates the integration of quantum-enhanced machine learning (QML) into medical image analysis, focusing on classification and feature extraction tasks. It aims to evaluate whether hybrid quantum-classical models can overcome the limitations of traditional machine learning in handling high-dimensional, clinically relevant imaging data. Design/methodology/approach Hybrid architectures combining classical preprocessing with quantum components, specifically variational quantum circuits (VQCs) and quantum kernel methods, were developed and implemented in simulated quantum environments using Qiskit and PennyLane on Google Colab. Publicly available datasets (ChestX-ray14, Brain Tumor MRI and CT Hemorrhage) were preprocessed and encoded into quantum states. Model performance was evaluated against classical baselines (MLP and CNN) using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, convergence speed and trainable parameters. Findings Quantum-enhanced models achieved competitive or superior performance compared to classical models with significantly fewer trainable parameters and faster convergence. The Quantum Kernel SVM demonstrated the highest precision (89.1%) and F1-score (88.5%) using only 8 parameters, while VQC models converged up to 2× faster than classical baselines. These results highlight the potential of QML to improve efficiency, robustness and scalability in diagnostic imaging workflows, particularly in resource-constrained or data-limited settings. Research limitations/implications The study relies on simulated quantum environments, which do not capture hardware noise or qubit limitations. Future work will extend to real quantum devices, multimodal data integration and interpretability strategies. Practical implications Quantum kernel methods and lightweight VQC architectures enable faster, resource-efficient diagnostic modeling, making them suitable for clinical environments with limited computational capacity or time-sensitive decision-making needs. Social implications Improving the efficiency and accessibility of medical image analysis has the potential to support faster diagnosis and enhance healthcare delivery, particularly in underserved or resource-limited regions. Originality/value This study provides a practical evaluation of hybrid quantum-classical models applied to multiple real medical imaging datasets in a reproducible simulated environment. It offers an early-stage framework demonstrating how QML techniques can be integrated into existing machine learning pipelines for medical image analysis.
Multi-task learning (MTL) improves generalization and data efficiency by jointly learning related tasks through shared representations. In the widely used hard-parameter-sharing setting, a shared backbone is combined with task-specific prediction heads. However, task-specific parameters can grow rapidly with the number of tasks. Therefore, designing multi-task heads that preserve task specialization while improving parameter efficiency remains a key challenge. In Quantum Machine Learning (QML), variational quantum circuits (VQCs) provide a compact mechanism for mapping classical data to quantum states residing in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, enabling expressive representations within constrained parameter budgets. We propose a parameter-efficient quantum multi-task learning (QMTL) framework that replaces conventional task-specific linear heads with a fully quantum prediction head in a hybrid architecture. The model consists of a VQC with a shared, task-independent quantum encoding stage, followed by lightweight task-specific ansatz blocks enabling localized task adaptation while maintaining compact parameterization. Under a controlled and capacity-matched formulation where the shared representation dimension grows with the number of tasks, our parameter-scaling analysis demonstrates that a standard classical head exhibits quadratic growth, whereas the proposed quantum head parameter cost scales linearly. We evaluate QMTL on three multi-task benchmarks spanning natural language processing, medical imaging, and multimodal sarcasm detection, where we achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, classical hard-parameter-sharing baselines while consistently outperforming existing hybrid quantum MTL models with substantially fewer head parameters. We further demonstrate QMTL's executability on noisy simulators and real quantum hardware, illustrating its feasibility.