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Natural Science

Empirical Analysis of Decision Making of an AI Agent on IBM’s 5Q Quantum Computer

Wei Hu

Published Jan 1, 2018• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A recent work has shown that using an ion trap quantum processor can speed up the decision making of a reinforcement learning agent. Its quantum advantage is observed when the external environment changes, and then agent needs to relearn again. One character of this quantum hardware system discovered in this study is that it tends to overestimate the values used to determine the actions the agent will take. IBM’s five qubit superconducting quantum processor is a popular quantum platform. The aims of our study are twofold. First we want to identify the hardware characteristic features of IBM’s 5Q quantum computer when running this learning agent, compared with the ion trap processor. Second, through careful analysis, we observe that the quantum circuit employed in the ion trap processor for this agent could be simplified. Furthermore, when tested on IBM’s 5Q quantum processor, our simplified circuit demonstrates its enhanced performance over the original circuit on one of the hard learning tasks investigated in the previous work. We also use IBM’s quantum simulator when a good baseline is needed to compare the performances. As more and more quantum hardware devices are moving out of the laboratory and becoming generally available to public use, our work emphasizes the fact that the features and constraints of the quantum hardware could take a toll on the performance of quantum algorithms.

DOI
10.4236/ns.2018.101004

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A recent work has shown that using an ion trap quantum processor can speed up the decision making of a reinforcement learning agent. Its quantum advantage is observed when the external environment changes, and then agent needs to relearn again. One character of this quantum hardware system discovered in this study is that it tends to overestimate the values used to determine the actions the agent will take. IBM’s five qubit superconducting quantum processor is a popular quantum platform. The aims of our study are twofold. First we want to identify the hardware characteristic features of IBM’s 5Q quantum computer when running this learning agent, compared with the ion trap processor. Second, through careful analysis, we observe that the quantum circuit employed in the ion trap processor for this agent could be simplified. Furthermore, when tested on IBM’s 5Q quantum processor, our simplified circuit demonstrates its enhanced performance over the original circuit on one of the hard learning tasks investigated in the previous work. We also use IBM’s quantum simulator when a good baseline is needed to compare the performances. As more and more quantum hardware devices are moving out of the laboratory and becoming generally available to public use, our work emphasizes the fact that the features and constraints of the quantum hardware could take a toll on the performance of quantum algorithms.
We report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of the quantum speed-up for learning agents utilizing a small-scale quantum information processor based on radiofrequency-driven trapped ions. The decision-making process of a quantum learning agent within the projective simulation paradigm for machine learning is implemented in a system of two qubits. The latter are realized using hyperfine states of two frequency-addressed atomic ions exposed to a static magnetic field gradient. We show that the deliberation time of this quantum learning agent is quadratically improved with respect to comparable classical learning agents. The performance of this quantum-enhanced learning agent highlights the potential of scalable quantum processors taking advantage of machine learning.
The development of artificial intelligence today is marked with increased computational power, new algorithms, and big data. One such milestone impressive achievement in this area is Google’s AlphaGo. However, this advancement is beginning to face increasing challenges and the major bottleneck of AI today is the lack of adequate computing power in the processing of big data. Quantum computing offers a new and viable solution to deal with these challenges. A recent work designed a quantum classifier that runs on IBM’s five qubit quantum computer and tested its performance on the Iris data set as well as a circles data set. As quantum machine learning is still an emerging discipline, it may be enlightening to conduct an empirical analysis of this quantum classifier on some artificial datasets to help learn its unique features and potentials. Our work on the quantum classifier can be summarized in three parts. The first is to run its original version as a binary classifier on some artificial datasets using visualization to reveal the quantum nature of this algorithm, and the second is to analyze the swap operation utilized in its original circuit due to the hardware constraint and investigate its impact on the performance of the classifier. The last part is to extend the original circuit for binary classification to a circuit for multiclass classification and test its performance. Our findings shed new light on how this quantum classifier works.
We report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of the quantum speed-up for learning agents utilizing a small-scale quantum information processor based on radiofrequency-driven trapped ions. The decision-making process of a quantum learning agent within the projective simulation paradigm for machine learning is implemented in a system of two qubits. The latter are realized using hyperfine states of two frequency-addressed atomic ions exposed to a static magnetic field gradient. We show that the deliberation time of this quantum learning agent is quadratically improved with respect to comparable classical learning agents. The performance of this quantum-enhanced learning agent highlights the potential of scalable quantum processors taking advantage of machine learning.
Recent demonstrations of superconducting quantum computers by Google and IBM and trapped-ion computers from IonQ fueled new research in quantum algorithms, compilation into quantum circuits, and empirical algorithmics. While online access to quantum hardware remains too limited to meet the demand, simulating quantum circuits on conventional computers satisfies many needs. We advance Schrödinger-style simulation of quantum circuits that is useful standalone and as a building block in layered simulation algorithms, both cases are illustrated in our results. Our algorithmic contributions show how to simulate multiple quantum gates at once, how to avoid floating-point multiplies, how to best use data-level and thread-level parallelism as well as CPU cache, and how to leverage these optimizations by reordering circuit gates. While not described previously, these techniques implemented by us supported published high-performance distributed simulations up to 64 qubits. To show additional impact, we benchmark our simulator against Microsoft, IBM and Google simulators on hard circuits from Google.
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Classical reinforcement learning (RL) has generated excellent results in different regions; however, its sample inefficiency remains a critical issue. In this paper, we provide concrete numerical evidence that the sample efficiency (the speed of convergence) of quantum RL could be better than that of classical RL, and for achieving comparable learning performance, quantum RL could use much (at least one order of magnitude) fewer trainable parameters than classical RL. Specifically, we employ the popular benchmarking environments of RL in the OpenAI Gym, and show that our quantum RL agent converges faster than classical fully-connected neural networks (FCNs) in the tasks of CartPole and Acrobot under the same optimization process. We also successfully train the first quantum RL agent that can complete the task of LunarLander in the OpenAI Gym. Our quantum RL agent only requires a single-qubit-based variational quantum circuit without entangling gates, followed by a classical neural network (NN) to post-process the measurement output. Finally, we could accomplish the aforementioned tasks on the real IBM quantum machines. To the best of our knowledge, none of the earlier quantum RL agents could do that.